“No,” he said, his jaw clenched. He no longer met her gaze.
“Three days,” she said softly, moving her body so he had to look at her. “That’s how long I spent with him and his knife. How long do you think you would have lasted?”
He did not answer.
“That’s what I thought.” She backed off infinitesimally and glanced down with disdain at his congealed dinner. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m leaving now. It smells in here.”
She drove home, still stinging, and trudged to her front door. Upon opening it, she nearly turned around and left again. Ashley and Tula were playing keep-away with Bump’s tennis ball while he raced back and forth between them, barking vociferously. At her arrival, he broke free and came bounding over to meet her, skidding to a halt on the hardwood floor and immediately flopping at her feet, his tail thumping all the while. She sank down and buried her face in his fur. “Hey there, good boy.”
Reed appeared from the kitchen, a dish towel in his hands. “Hi. I saved a plate of chicken Marsala for you. Also a big glass of wine.”
“I need to shower first.” She could pretend it was the sticky summer heat and not the men’s words that left her feeling dirty.
“Any word on Wintour?”
“No change.”
Reed put his hands on his trim hips for a moment, assessing her. “All right,” he said to the girls, “who wants to go down to the park with me to exercise the hound?”
“Me, me!” Tula greeted the idea with enthusiasm, but Ashley hung back.
“Not me, thanks.”
“Ellery? Can I bring you anything?”
She shook her head. The steady stream of hot water rushing over her was all she wanted. That, plus a little peace and quiet.
“Come on, Sir Sheds-a-lot,” Reed said with a sigh as he took up Bump’s leash. “Let’s go ogle the neighborhood poodles.” Bump woofed his approval and began heading for the door.
Ellery stood under the shower until the hard shell of the day melted away at her feet. She got out and dried herself without looking at herself in the mirror, as was her custom. She wished she could lock herself alone in the bedroom, but she knew Ashley was out there, waiting for her. Her stomach’s feeble rumble reminded her she hadn’t eaten much all day. She dressed in leggings and an old T-shirt of Reed’s and went in search of the dinner he had left for her.
“Hey,” Ashley said, brightening at the sight of her. She had a water glass and a line of pill bottles in front of her.
“Hey,” Ellery said as she eyed the orange prescription bottles. “What’s all that for? Aren’t you in remission?”
“Yeah, but I still have to take this stuff to keep it that way. My body could reject your cells at any time.”
“Oh.” She felt deflated. The battle, it seemed, was never fully won. “I’d just have to give you more then,” she assured the girl.
Ashley gave her a sad smile. “It doesn’t work like that. You get one shot. If my body rejects your DNA, then there’s no rebooting it. Maybe I could find a new donor…” She trailed off and Ellery got the grim picture of how likely this would be.
“Then you’d better take those,” she told the girl.
“I did already.” Ashley began tucking them into her bag. “I did some laundry earlier. I hope that’s okay.”
“It’s fine.” Ellery ate a bite of chicken, which was tender and flavorful. Reed knew his way around a kitchen. “But, uh, we’re going to have to have your dad come get you pretty soon.”
Ashley regarded her with gray eyes so like her own. “He’s your dad, too.”
Ellery laid down her fork. “No,” she said. “He’s not.” A dad helped you with your homework when you got stuck. He taught you how to drive a stick shift. He brought you comic books when you were sick and put a cold cloth on your forehead. Ellery hadn’t had a dad since she was around Tula’s age, when John Hathaway walked out the door and into his new life.
“He is,” Ashley insisted with sudden tears in her eyes. “We’re—we’re sisters.”
Ellery didn’t feel that part, either. She barely knew this girl. “Look,” she said, “I think it’s great that he pulled his act together for you. He learned from his mistakes. He did better the second time around.”
“Who’s to say he won’t do it again?” Ashely swiped at her eyes with her fingers.
“He won’t.”
“You don’t know that.”
Ellery sighed. She suspected if John Hathaway was going to wimp out and disappear again, he wouldn’t have stuck it out through Ashley’s cancer. “It’s true. I don’t know it. We don’t always know what any of the people in our lives are capable of. I doubt your parents figured you’d run off here to Boston.”
“No.” She mustered a smile. “I usually do what I’m told.”
“Good,” Ellery said as she took up her fork again. “You should keep doing that.”
“You don’t,” Ashley said, taking the seat next to her. “Reed said you answer to no one but yourself.”
“That’s a character flaw,” Ellery told her, trying to sound convincing. She waved her fork around. “I’m working on fixing it.”
Ashley snorted with disbelief. “Yeah, I’ll just bet.” She rubbed one blue-painted nail along the granite counter. “Reed is your boyfriend, right?”
Ellery coughed and nearly choked. “I guess,” she said as she reached for her water. At the last second, she grabbed the wine instead. This definitely felt like a conversation that required alcohol.
“I’ve never had a boyfriend. I’ve never even been kissed. That’s pathetic, right? I’m sixteen.”
“It’s not pathetic. You’re young. You’ve been busy kicking cancer’s ass. Now you can concentrate on, um, other pursuits.” God, she hoped like hell that Ashley’s parents had already given her The Talk. There wasn’t enough wine in the world for that conversation.
“No one is going to want me,” Ashley mumbled to her lap. “They think of me as the sick girl. After my first round of treatment, I went back for a few weeks and no one would sit near me. I found out someone had started a rumor that I was radioactive. They even put one of those hazard stickers on my locker.”
“Are you radioactive?”
Ashley scoffed. “No.”
“Then it doesn’t matter what they think.”
“It does if you want someone to take you to prom. Or sit with you at lunch. I’m supposed to be so happy I got to survive, right? But I don’t want to go back to that hellhole. All the other girls, they’ve been going to parties and wearing the right clothes and makeup and it’s like they speak a different language. My hair is, like, two inches long.” She held out a few strands to illustrate.
Ellery tried to remember being sixteen. She’d been the freak at her school, too. She hadn’t cared. She did recall the feeling of being trapped in her tiny apartment with her damaged body, how hopeless it felt, how doomed. Your reality at sixteen was the only one you’d ever known. “It gets better,” she told Ashley.
“Yeah, that’s what they all say. Trust me. No boy is ever going to want to kiss me. I’m the lamest girl who ever lived.” She put her head down on the counter, and Ellery frowned at her, debating internally whether to say anything more. She took a breath.
“Reed is my first boyfriend,” she muttered.
Ashley whipped her head up. “What?”
Ellery’s ears grew hot. She’d never even used the word before, let alone had an actual male companion to fill the role. “So, there you go. You’re not even the lamest one at this counter, okay?”
“Oh my God. You mean you never had sex with anyone before? You’re, like, thirty.”
No need for The Talk then, Ellery thought with relief. “I didn’t say that. I said I’d never had a boyfriend.”
“Oh.” Ashley contemplated this for a moment. “How is it?” she asked finally.
“Hello, we’re back!” There was a burst of noise at the door, and Reed came in with Tula skipping beside him.
Bump smiled the grin of a dog who’d gotten his own cone. “I know you said you didn’t want anything,” he said to Ellery. “But this double chocolate fudge brownie from the bakery seemed to be calling your name.” He kissed the top of her head and placed the wrapped dessert next to her plate.
Ellery smiled in spite of everything. “You know what?” she said to Ashley. “It’s pretty great.”
* * *
That night in bed, she lay awake but exhausted. Her brain hummed even as her bones felt like they could sink into the mattress. Her apartment felt too people-y. Tula had the couch. Ashley slept on an air mattress on the living room floor, and Reed lay next to Ellery, giving off heat and an air of concern. “We could turn on some music,” he said as she shifted restlessly under the sheets again.
“No.” Her brain told her she should be at work, looking for Chloe. Her body couldn’t get out of bed. She wished Reed would hold her, but she didn’t know how to ask for this. She’d trained him to give her space and she didn’t want to take it all back because she had a single night of weakness. “I’m surprised you haven’t said, ‘I told you so,’” she grumbled into the pillow. “You were right that we shouldn’t have sent Lockhart into Wintour’s house.”
He rose up behind her. “I’m in no position to gloat. You caught a predator. Just maybe not the one who took Chloe.”
“What are the odds?” She rolled onto her back and looked at the slowly rotating ceiling fan. The question was rhetorical. They both knew how many sex offenders walked the streets every day. “Lockhart’s in jail while they figure out what all they want to charge him with.”
“Not much, I would expect.”
“For his sake, I hope Wintour lives.” She faced him, tucking one arm beneath her head. “Are you ever going to tell me what the deal is with Houston?”
“There isn’t much to tell. Sarit is apparently thinking of moving there, and she would of course be taking Tula with her.”
“Can she do that?”
“She would need to file for full physical custody. Kimmy thinks she has a reasonable shot at getting it because some of her grievances are grounded in reality.”
“Such as?”
“My work. Travel. It keeps me away, as you know.”
“And now me.” She knew Sarit was not her biggest fan.
Reed took her hand and kissed it. “Don’t worry about it. This is my problem, not yours. I will find an answer.”
Then why did his kiss feel so much like regret? She touched his face in the semi-darkness, stroking the sandpapery stubble along his jaw. “Your family has to come first,” she whispered to him. “I know that.”
“You are that,” he answered gruffly, gathering her against him.
She wriggled in his embrace, relishing the feel of his lean body against hers. She lived all her life on borrowed time, but none was as sweet as this. When they were alone together, she and Reed made sense. Out in the world, they were a curiosity, a freak show, and no one would forget their origin story. She knew Reed’s family thought he hung around her out of obligation or pity, and on her darkest days she thought it as well. In her dreams, when the closet door opened she only saw two faces on the other side. With Reed in her bed, Coben would always be there, too.
Gingerly, she laid her ear against Reed’s chest, the place where his own scars lay. She could never guess from its strong, reassuring rhythm that Reed’s heart had nearly ceased for good. Tonight, she didn’t need to hide behind the noise of the television or radio. She listened to the steady drumming of his heartbeat and imagined she could hear it say her name.
21
Reed rolled over in the morning, expecting to find Ellery weighing down her side of the bed, but instead, a sixty-pound barrel-chested, hound-scented mound of fur stared back at him. Reed squinted and plopped his head back down on the pillow. “Good morning,” he said to Bump with a sigh. The dog wagged and slurped Reed’s elbow in return. Reed ran his palm down the sheets where Ellery wasn’t, figuring she must have gone out for an early run. Unlike his previous lovers, Ellery did not linger in bed.
He’d been naïve, he supposed, a romantic sop who figured his love and tenderness could erase her years of PTSD. She’d survived Coben by divorcing herself from all physical sensation, by pretending it was some other body he’d tortured with his farm tools. Sex had always been mechanical, she had explained to Reed, whenever she’d bothered to attempt it at all. She never allowed herself to feel anything—not even, she’d confessed to him once in the darkness, when it was just herself alone in the privacy of her bedroom. It was hard not to feel fury when she said these things. He fantasized about walking into Coben’s cell on death row with a gun and ending him forever. The knowledge that this wouldn’t fix anything—that the damage was unending—only made Reed angrier somehow, and anger wasn’t what she needed from him.
Figuring out what to do instead wasn’t always easy. Ellery was playful and generous in bed as long as he was on the receiving end; when it was her turn, she had difficulty permitting him to take the lead, relaxing, and letting him make her body feel things. He’d learned to ease into lovemaking with her, gently retreating and advancing like the overlapping waves of a slowly rising tide. The tsunami of her pleasure when he got it right made his patience worth it every time. He stroked the bed again, missing her and the intimacy he’d hoped to be sharing with her on this trip.
Bump repositioned himself under Reed’s hand, stretching his legs luxuriously as he settled in for a massage. “You are no substitute at all,” Reed informed him, offering a last scratch or two before rising from the bed. He checked his messages and found two key developments. First, the Philadelphia PD had answered his inquiry about the gun recovered from the shed at the old Stone house. It was registered to someone named Dale Goodwin, who lived on East Lombard Street in Baltimore. They’d followed up at that address and found Dale’s widow, who said she hadn’t known the gun was missing. Her husband had kept it in a shoe box in the closet.
“Baltimore,” Reed mused to himself. The deceased housekeeper, Carol Frick, had lived in Baltimore before moving to Philadelphia. He wondered about the timeline and whether there could be a connection.
The second message he had was from Sarit:
TULA NEEDS NEW SHOES FOR THE START OF SCHOOL. DO YOU THINK YOU COULD TAKE HER? THEY NEED TO HAVE STURDY RUBBER SOLES—SOMETHING BASIC LIKE GRAY OR NAVY THAT WILL GO WITH HER UNIFORM. BUCKLE PREFERRED OVER VELCRO, AND NOTHING THAT ROLLS, LIGHTS UP, OR MAKES NOISE.
He was aware, dimly, that Tula like most growing children had already burned through eleventy-billion pairs of shoes, but not one pair of these had been purchased by Reed. Sarit simply cared more, as evidenced by the detailed instructions in her email. This request then, he decided, must be a trap, a test designed for him to fail so Sarit could score points in the coming custody war. Your Honor, her father can’t even manage her a single pair of shoes for school. It’s clear she should be in Houston with me.
This was how he found himself later that morning, not at the station with Ellery mucking through Stephen Wintour’s child pornography, but at the local mall with Tula and Ashley. Ashley had tagged along only when it became clear Tula wouldn’t go without her. It was perfect, really—the girl kept Tula engaged picking out shoes while Reed sat in a chair with his laptop, trying to make a timeline of the events he’d uncovered so far:
The gun was stolen in Baltimore, exact date unknown.
One month prior to the murders of Trevor Stone and Carol Frick, someone set Ethan Stone’s car on fire at the university where he works.
Trevor Stone and Carol Frick were murdered in the Stone home in Philly seventeen years ago.
Two years later, Teresa Stone married Martin Lockhart. Two years after that, Chloe was born.
Chloe was kidnapped not far from what would have been the anniversary of the murders at the Stone household.
Reed frowned at the bullet points on his list. Carol had a third child, he remembered. There was Lisa
and Bobby and a teenage daughter who died in a car accident some weeks before Carol herself was killed. Reed made a note to find out the precise date.
“Daddy, look at these.” Tula crashed into his lap, forcing him to put aside the computer. “Aren’t they awesome?”
He regarded the pink sneakers on her feet. The had blue flames on the sides and blinking lights around the edges. “They are spectacular.”
“Show him what they do,” Ashley prompted.
Tula stomped her foot and a rocket noise came out of the shoe. “Blast off!” she cried, leaping into the air.
“Those are impressive,” Reed said. “I don’t think they will work for school.” Sarit would have his head.
“Aw, I don’t want boring old stupid shoes,” Tula complained, kicking at the floor.
“Maybe we can find some in between,” Ashley told her. “I’ll help you look.”
Reed opened his mouth to thank her when he noticed Ashley’s ancient pair of Chuck Taylors. They were worn and dirty, and the sole had started to separate on the left one. “Why don’t you find a pair for yourself?” he said, nodding at her feet. “You have school starting soon, too.”
Ashley’s face flushed the same shade as Ellery’s did when she was embarrassed. “Thanks, but I didn’t bring the money.”
Didn’t have the money, Reed guessed. He knew that cancer treatment sent many families into bankruptcy. “It’s my treat.”
The girl cast a longing glance at the rows of shiny sandals and bright white sneakers. “No, that’s okay. The ones I have are still good.”
“It’s a thank-you,” Reed clarified. “For looking after Tula.”
Tula grabbed her hand and tugged. “Come on. I’ll help you look,” she said, and Ashley relented with a grin. Reed took out his computer again and began to search for any information on Carol Frick’s daughter. What he found instead surprised him: Carol’s husband, Vincent, had not been killed in an accident as described by Lisa. He had been shot to death in a mugging attempt on the streets of Baltimore several years prior to the murders at the Stone household. Reed added this to his timeline. He didn’t know yet what to make of the disparate events, but the Frick family’s recurring tragedy seemed like it had to be deeper than a run of bad luck. Dead father, dead mother, dead daughter. Trevor Stone was the odd one out in this pattern. Maybe Carol the housekeeper had been the target all along.
Every Waking Hour Page 19
