“You started without me,” Trudy accused, digging her thumb into the bowl.
“Whose fault is that?” Ruby sassed back in a perfect imitation of Mellie.
Trudy had no shame in resorting to kindergarten tactics, as she was fighting a kindergartner, so she stuck out her tongue, blowing a raspberry at the girl.
Ruby dissolved into giggles and then darted off the stool when they heard footsteps in the hallways. They were both laughing as they crouched behind the laundry so as to avoid the wrath of Mrs. Blake for ruining dessert.
So maybe there was such a thing as innocence. Maybe it was little girls with untied shoes and scrapes on their knees who went on careless adventures on warm summer nights and stole pink icing out of bowls and laughed with their whole bodies.
Maybe Trudy had been that girl once upon a time.
That didn’t matter anymore, though. What mattered now was protecting Ruby.
CHAPTER NINE
ALICE
August 2, 2018
Four days after the kidnapping
“What did Charlotte do with the four days? If she did kill Ruby.” Nakamura’s fingers curled around the black-and-yellow bumblebee stress ball. Its happy, smiling face smooshed into something unrecognizable, and Alice had never related more to an inanimate object.
Every minute she kept breathing during this case she counted as a victory. Her very cells felt stretched and contorted to fit some narrow image she had to portray lest she get yanked from the investigation. Shoving her trembling hands in her pockets to hide the telltale signs of wear would last only so long.
“Exactly,” Alice said, adjusting her head so she could better watch him from where she was sprawled on the old, musty couch that was more stained than clean fabric. Nakamura perched a couple of feet away on a stack of evidence boxes.
They’d sought refuge in the basement of the station, needing to get away from the ringing phones and the baleful stares. Few others dared venture into the damp space, so Alice often used it as her escape. Nakamura had asked a few weeks ago where she was always sneaking off to, so she felt she had to tell him about it.
“She was being watched almost continuously,” Nakamura said, his eyes fixed on some distant location she doubted he was even seeing.
“We still don’t have time of death,” Alice said. “Goddamn lazy coroner.”
Four days, though. In some ways it almost didn’t matter what the coroner reported. There was a gap to be explained to the jury. Would they buy that the girl had been held for that long? Or would a quick death go over better? There was a story to be told. Alice just had to find the right hook.
“So.” Nakamura stood up and began pacing. His dress shoes left tracks in the dust on the floor. “Charlotte Burke, what? Takes her daughter to the beach for a spontaneous girls’ day.”
“We only have two eyewitnesses who even place Ruby there,” Alice said. Nakamura’s jagged movements were too much for her exhausted brain. Instead, she shifted so her eyes were tracing the cracks in the ceiling once more. “And that was earlier in the day.”
“The hot dog vendor guy.” Nakamura’s voice came from somewhere over her left shoulder. “And that brunette woman.”
Witnesses were notoriously unreliable. People thought memory worked like a video recording, something they could play back and pick apart. But it was more like a puzzle with missing sections. Even the suggestion that a little girl had been there could become reality for someone trying desperately to make the pieces fit.
“Do we put it past her to stage the whole thing?” Nakamura asked, and she could tell he had stopped moving. “The witnesses were just susceptible to what we suggested. They couldn’t even remember what she’d been wearing.”
“I can hardly remember what I was wearing yesterday, let alone a random child whom I barely interacted with,” Alice pointed out. There was a spiderweb in one of the corners, its silver strands catching the light at certain angles. A bug had flown into the sticky threads, its wings fluttering uselessly against the trap. It was strange how that worked—how a spider could just lie in wait, knowing the fly would ensnare itself.
“Fair point,” Nakamura said. “But what if—”
“What if she’d already hid Ruby’s body at some other location, then went to the beach and faked a disappearance? Is that what you’re saying?” Alice sat up to find Nakamura watching her. He blinked and looked away, almost guilty. But she knew the feeling of eyes settling on her, judging her. Emotional. Erratic.
“I’m not ruling it out,” he said, continuing his pacing. He tossed the ball in the air and caught it with the easy grace of an oft-repeated action. Stress was becoming their not-so-friendly companion.
“That seems elaborate,” Alice said, tucking her feet beneath her. “And psychotic.”
“Or she was desperate,” Nakamura countered, his voice low.
Desperation was a powerful force. It was an animal backed into a corner, snapping its frothy jaw at every hand, even the ones that wanted to help. It was a snarling mindlessness that lacked logic.
“Let me get this straight,” Alice said, her fingers tangling together. “In this scenario, the killing was an accident. Charlotte then hides the body—”
“Could have just been in her car,” Nakamura cut in. “Doesn’t necessarily mean it was a separate, planned-out location.”
“Shit,” Alice said, holding up a hand to stop him. “Let me call Bridget before we go down this route.”
Bridget Mullaney was the best crime-scene tech Alice had ever worked with. She was Irish, with all the pale skin and temper and drinking ability that entailed, and most people lived in fear of her. But for some unknown reason, she liked Alice. Since it earned her preferential treatment, Alice didn’t question it.
Nakamura rolled his eyes, but mostly because he was jealous that Bridget made him go through proper channels to get his reports.
“’Lo,” Bridget answered on the third ring.
“Hey, it’s Alice. Have your boys finished with the prelim on the beach?”
Bridget snapped her gum on the other end of the line. “Yup. Whoever it was, was a clean mother-effer.”
Alice’s lips tipped up. “So there’s nothing?”
“There’s always something, yeah?” There was some shuffling, and all of a sudden, the background noise was gone. “Sorry, little bastards are so loud.”
Anyone meeting Bridget for the first time would think she hated everyone. She mostly did, but she was protective of her crew. When she called someone a bastard, it usually meant she liked them.
“We’re going over the cars again now,” Bridget said. She must have stepped into her office, and Alice glanced up to the ceiling as if she could see her working through the cement.
“Thought you did a full sweep before,” Alice said.
“Did,” Bridget confirmed. “Want to find something.”
“Your lips to God’s ears, yeah?” Alice said, amused when she found herself slipping into Bridget’s abrupt speech patterns. “So you have no presents for me?”
“No goodies for now,” Bridget said. Her voice turned stubborn. “We’ll find something.”
“Know you will,” Alice soothed. “Let me know when you do?”
“Course,” Bridget said and then hung up.
Nakamura was watching her, eyebrows raised. “Let me guess. She was delightful, as always.”
“I don’t know why you aren’t nicer to her,” Alice said, slipping the phone back in her jeans. “You wouldn’t have to rely on me to get you all your info.”
“Why would I put myself through the pain when you two have that charming rapport?” Nakamura said. “She’s working on the cars?”
Alice wrinkled her nose. “Yeah. I don’t think she’ll find anything, though. She doesn’t, either.”
“She said that?”
“Of course not.” Alice shot him a look. “Nothing from the beach, either. Maybe the coroner will have something for us.”
�
�You mean the goddamn lazy coroner?” Nakamura asked, deadpan.
“I’ll call him by his name when he starts doing work.” Alice shrugged. “All right, so Charlotte kills her daughter, puts her in the trunk of some secret car, drives to St. Pete Beach, a place she’s not known to frequent. Spends an hour there, grabs a hot dog, apologizes to the brunette lady for the errant Frisbee—which she’s, what? Tossing to herself?—then alerts the Coast Guard that her daughter’s gone missing.”
There was a beat of silence. “I’ve seen stranger things,” Nakamura said slowly.
“So then, with her daughter still in the trunk, she waits around for hours, goes through questioning with the police, is generally distraught.”
“Some people can act their ass off, Garner. You know that.”
“Point to you. Then, she gets a ride home with an officer and has near-constant supervision from then on until this morning.”
“How’d they get to the beach?”
“She said she took a taxi.”
Nakamura was watching her. “Which makes no sense. It’s unnecessarily expensive, when they have cars they could have used.”
“God, who the hell cares?” Alice surged to her feet, her pulse racing for no logical reason. “Maybe she took a bus instead and forgot.”
“Charlotte Burke on a bus?” Nakamura prodded, gentle enough to annoy her.
“Christ, come on.” Alice started pacing. “You know it doesn’t . . .”
“It doesn’t what?” Nakamura asked when she trailed off.
“Fit.”
Alice sank back down to the couch, her head in her hands. She pressed the heels of her palms into her eyes. The headache that had started as a low thrum had worked its way up to miniature elves Riverdancing on her frontal lobe. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“Because things like this so often make sense?” Nakamura countered. Despite the sarcastic lilt to the words, there was something softer beneath them. An understanding that maybe she didn’t deserve.
She couldn’t deny his words, either.
When had anything made sense? Lila’s murder hadn’t made sense. That had been random, all the wrong moments in time aligning. The weak sentence for her killer that stopped far short of what was fair hadn’t made sense. Sometimes even Lila hadn’t made sense.
Lila, her wild girl who had no fear, who was always chasing adventures in a world that should have been scary. Lila, who cried over shoelaces that weren’t tied right but giggled as she balanced atop monkey bars and laughed at an ocean that shouted back with rogue waves that could so easily sweep a little girl away. “You’ll be the death of me,” Alice had whispered time and again into soft baby hair as Lila’s body wiggled against her tight grip.
No, Lila hadn’t made sense, but, paradoxically, in the way all things with children were, Alice also thought she may have been the only thing in the world that had.
Alice blinked back to the present. Her throat was dry, so she didn’t say anything, just sat and watched Nakamura pace.
They were both in their natural environments of guarded thoughts and contemplation they kept tucked behind pressed lips. And the silence beat in time with the pulse beneath her wrist.
“What does make sense?” Nakamura finally asked.
Alice shook her head. “I can’t see it yet.”
“There was no ransom note,” Nakamura reminded her.
“That means it wasn’t financially motivated,” Alice said. There were clichés and predictable behaviors that cops relied on. But that didn’t mean they were the truth. “Nothing more.”
“It means it was probably one of the family members, and you know it. You’re too good of a cop to ignore this shit, Garner,” Nakamura said. It was a rare show of agitation.
She stood up so she wasn’t at a disadvantage. Feeling small and weak and vulnerable tended to make her lash out.
“Do you know my daughter was found covered in a sheet?” Alice said. The words were knives to her throat, their serrated edges slicing the pink tissue there until it bled down her esophagus into her belly. “Do you know what that means? In copspeak?”
Nakamura was frozen on the spot, the bumblebee stress ball forgotten and dangling from the fingers of one hand.
“It means that whoever killed the victim felt guilt and remorse for their actions,” Alice said. “And that they wanted to treat the body with respect.”
They stared at each other. They both knew this.
“Which means a family member or loved one,” Alice continued when Nakamura didn’t fill in the blanks. “Which meant me.”
“You were the exception,” Nakamura said, almost without voice. She still heard him.
“Was I?”
What she was accomplishing, she didn’t know. And it was time to end the confrontation.
She shook her head, the curtain of short, choppy hair falling into her eyes. “I’ve got to go. Cover for me?”
“Cover for you to who? Me?” Nakamura tried to joke. It fell flat on the floor between them. “Go.”
For the second time that day, she walked out of the room.
“You’re doing all the wrong things,” Alice said as she closed the distance between herself and the woman standing at the edge of the ocean.
Charlotte Burke didn’t look at her, didn’t even startle. She just kept her eyes on the gentle waves as they crested into white foam and then died along the shoreline. “Isn’t it funny, that?”
Alice’s heels sank into the damp sand as she rocked back. She’d been raw from the back-and-forth with Nakamura and had been seeking escape when the text came in.
At the beach, it had said. An invite, an escape, a mistake.
Now they were shoulder to shoulder but not touching. “What’s funny?”
“How we’re always doing the wrong things,” Charlotte breathed out. The wind had died completely, and the woman’s long, messy locks hung around her face, shielding it. “Nothing we do is ever right.”
“Who is ‘we’?” Alice asked, not sure she wanted the answer. It hurt to look at her, this woman who was balanced on some precarious, unknown ledge. Alice swallowed the saliva that gathered in the back of her mouth, the way it did just before she had to throw up.
Charlotte finally looked over, a small smile at the corners of her lips, her eyes sad and clear. “Mothers.”
Alice closed her eyes against the truth of it.
The judgment—the cuts—happened with a frequency that was almost not even worth noting.
“She wouldn’t do this if you didn’t feed her goldfish.”
It was some random passerby, a woman with her own toddler who was watching Lila with wide eyes. Alice’s daughter was sprawled, legs akimbo, in the middle of the grocery store, her face pinched and red and covered in crocodile tears. The words she howled from deep in her belly could barely be called words, more just absolute discontent made into sound. Sound that reverberated against the low ceilings. Damn the bad acoustics.
The woman who had stopped was preening. Her child might be sucking his thumb, but at least he wasn’t on the floor screaming.
It was more than just one incident. It was a lifetime of them that clung like burrs, just waiting to cut into sensitive skin.
The barbs had become especially sharp after Ricky had left. Before, the jabs had been subtler and had often revolved around her decision to not let her husband be the primary breadwinner so she could stay home with Lila. After Ricky had taken off to wherever less than a year after Lila’s birth, the insults had turned cruel. The ladies who sent their children to the same preschool as Lila couched their criticisms in gentle concern, well aware they didn’t have a leg to stand on when it came to leaving their children with strangers. But there was plenty else to correct. What Lila ate. How she behaved. How Alice punished her. The scrutiny was constant, and that was from women she knew.
Out in the real world, the one full of grandmother wannabes and veteran know-it-alls and well-meaning newbies with just one month more ex
perience that lent credence to their slight arrogance, it was far worse.
The ways Alice had ruined Lila’s future had been endless. If only they’d known there would be no future to ruin, maybe they would have left Alice in peace. To enjoy the years she’d had.
There was no peace. There never would be.
“Why did you take your eyes off her?”
“Why were you distracted?”
Even after all the questions, even after she’d been cleared of any suspicion, even if they didn’t know there was a time she had been blamed for killing her child, there was a shadow that appeared behind their eyes. One that blamed and judged and wondered.
“Why couldn’t you keep her safe?”
The sun was suddenly too hot on her upturned face, the air too thin for her greedy lungs. Her pelvis throbbed, like a missing limb. She fought with everything inside herself to remain upright, not to crouch into the fetal position and rock at the feet of this woman who’d just lost her only daughter. The woman who was watching her.
“So what am I doing wrong now?” Charlotte asked, gathering her hair into a bun at the top of her head.
Alice glanced past her, down the strip of beach that had been so ominous and deserted that morning. Where they stood now, on the public part, they couldn’t even see the turquoise house that had been the most tragic of landmarks.
“Returning to the scene of the crime,” Alice said, knowing she shouldn’t. Knowing that even talking to Charlotte here, with Alice’s careful defenses scattered around her in pieces, wasn’t the best course of action. “It doesn’t exactly scream innocence.”
Charlotte’s eyes slid over the lines and contours of Alice’s face, searching. She relaxed at what she must have seen there, turning back to the water that stretched out before them. There was nothing to break the horizon, so the ocean simply became the sky, which dipped right back into the ocean so that they blended into their own reality where borders didn’t exist.
“I guess it will be our little secret, then, won’t it?”
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