Girls of Glass

by Brianna Labuskes

  “So was it a kidnapping or a murder?”

  “Revenge,” Alice said, the word slipping past her chapped lips again almost without her permission. It all came back to revenge. “There are only so many reasons someone would commit murder, right?”

  “Money,” Nakamura began, always game to follow her down the conversational rabbit hole.

  “Which we ruled out because of the lack of a ransom note,” she said. “Humiliation. I think the violence would have been more direct and personal, though, if that were the motive. They would take out Hollis. Or Sterling. Why go after Ruby?”

  “Jealousy,” Nakamura said. “A crime of passion, then.”

  She shook her head. “That motive falls under the umbrella of humiliation.”

  And that still didn’t feel right.

  “To protect a secret,” she said quietly.

  “Ah.” Nakamura shuffled a bit behind her, settling into the seat. “Tell me a different story.”

  She plucked at another thread. Patterns. Connections. Just waiting to be made.

  “So maybe it is a crime of passion, but not inspired by jealousy or an affair,” Alice said circling back to that, still focused on Sterling. “Rage.”

  “This doesn’t look like rage, though,” Nakamura said. “Nothing about it looks sloppy.”

  “Exactly,” Alice said. “It looks like control.”

  “Rage and control.”

  “Who does that sound like?” Alice asked, moving closer to the wall now. “Rage,” she said, answering her own question and pointing to Sterling. Then she tapped the marker against Hollis’s face. “Control.”

  “So tell me the story,” Nakamura repeated.

  “Sterling Burke, esteemed member of St. Petersburg society, bases all of his self-worth on being respected. He and Hollis run their family with an iron fist. The daughters are adults and still live in the house—”

  “But they also both have children out of wedlock,” Nakamura interrupted.

  “Which must have been quite a blow to good ol’ Sterling and Hollis,” Alice murmured.

  The father. Ruby’s. That had been the first path they’d run down when Ruby was first reported missing. Statistically, it was the obvious choice.

  But Charlotte had been adamant it had been a one-night stand that had left her with a souvenir. She’d never even told him that Ruby existed, didn’t even know his full name. With only a vague description of a middle-aged man with brown hair and an average build, they’d had nothing left to go on.

  “Do you think she’s lying about it?” Nakamura had asked her after the interview.

  “Yes,” Alice had answered.

  Now, Nakamura was back to pitching the ball from hand to hand. “But Ruby was five.”

  “If Sterling was going to snap over them getting pregnant, he would have done it when it happened.” Alice followed his train of thought.

  “Yeah, I could see one of them”—Nakamura waved a hand at Hollis and Sterling—“going after the girls when they were first told. But now it feels like old news.”

  Alice nodded. “What if they found something out?”

  “And that would be?”

  She shrugged. “Who the real father was?”

  There was a beat of silence, and then: “Shit,” Nakamura said.

  She turned around. “See the power of a good story?”

  An hour later they were parked outside the closest fast-food joint.

  There was a long to-do list for the day, but they’d gotten to the point where they were no longer functioning human beings, so they’d dragged themselves off to get food.

  It was becoming their pattern for the case, one they settled into with the familiar ease of working countless other investigations. Work, eat, drink coffee, don’t sleep. Rinse and repeat.

  “There’s a flaw in your theory,” Nakamura said as if no time had passed.

  “Only one? Aces,” Alice said around the massive bite of burger she’d just taken. “And it’s not my theory.”

  “What?” Nakamura smudged at the bit of ketchup that clung to his lips.

  “I never said it was my theory on what’s going on.” Alice handed him a napkin. “You asked me to tell you a story. I did.”

  Nakamura waved that away. “Okay, in that scenario, there’s a flaw.”

  “Edge of my seat here, Joe.”

  He polished off the rest of the bun he’d been holding. “Charlotte would have had to play along.”

  She hummed in agreement while digging into the white paper bag that sat in the space between them for some now-lukewarm fries. Better than nothing. The salt sent a pulse of pleasure through her, and her brain immediately craved more. Anything to fight the fatigue that was settling, camouflaged as numbness, in her bones.

  “Say Sterling snaps and kills Ruby,” Nakamura said, ripping into another ketchup packet. He squeezed out a portion directly onto a fry and devoured it before repeating the process. “And then Hollis goes into damage-control mode. That requires Charlotte to pretend she’d taken Ruby to the beach that day and lie about her being kidnapped.”

  “It was always weird, the kidnapping, though,” Alice argued for the sake of arguing. “It’s a lot harder than people think to just walk off with a kid that’s not yours.”

  He shot her a look that she decided to ignore. Yes, it was harder than people imagined, but it wasn’t impossible. She was living proof. “Don’t start.”

  “Was I starting?” Nakamura held up his hands in mock innocence even though his eyes shifted away in guilt.

  “I’m really okay,” she said, despite not wanting this conversation. “It’s not like I’ve never dealt with a missing-child case before.”

  “But have there ever been quite so many similarities?” he asked, gentle and soft. It was off-putting when he did that, when he stripped away that ever-present friendliness for this. This kindness.

  “I’m fine,” she repeated, and she wondered if those words would ever hold meaning again. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d said them and it hadn’t been a lie.

  “I’m fine,” Alice said to the chief. The woman’s eyes were deep brown and sad.

  “You’re not fine, Alice.” Chief Hughes didn’t even bother to soften the words. She had a policy against calling female detectives by their names, claiming it created an unprofessional intimacy that didn’t exist with the men on the squad. But she’d called her Alice.

  Hughes was right, though. The words were empty. She wasn’t fine. She would never be fine again.

  “I think you should take a break, Alice,” Hughes said. Gentle, but firm. There would be no arguing here.

  Alice rolled her shoulders, the tips of her fingers finding her gun. “No.”

  Hughes sighed and settled deeper into her chair. “Alice. You’ve physically assaulted two suspects in the past thirty days. If you were anyone else, you’d be off the team. But you’re one of my best detectives. And . . .”

  And you just lost a child. It wasn’t spoken out loud, but it dropped into the silence anyway. Of course you’ve gone crazy. What mother wouldn’t?

  She licked at her lips. “I’m not crazy.”

  “We’ve never said you were,” Hughes said, but she had that look. The one that people wore when talking someone off a ledge. “I just think a break might do you good. And appointments with the shrink.”

  The fucking shrink. Hated and ridiculed at large by the detectives, yet she was supposed to go spill her guts to this person. “No.”

  “The shrink or the suspension becomes permanent,” Hughes said. “I’m sorry, Alice. But it’s your choice.”

  “Okay, so Charlotte makes up the kidnapping,” Nakamura continued, jolting her out of her memories. “But you don’t think she’s guilty.”

  “I didn’t say that,” Alice said, snatching the last of the fries before Nakamura could, a victory despite the fact that he simply let her do it. Pity was a powerful force no one should underestimate. Even if it was employed just to g
et a cold french fry. “I said I don’t think she killed Ruby.”

  That stopped him. “What?”

  “Abusive relationships are complicated.” She shrugged. “If Hollis told her to, I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d go along with it.”

  “You think she’d lie about her own child’s murder to placate her mother?”

  “Don’t act like you haven’t been a cop for more than a decade and a half, Nakamura,” Alice said, turning a bit in her seat. Nakamura raised his brows in question.

  “Those relationships follow a logic that outsiders can’t understand,” she continued. “How many times have you seen the wife drop charges while still sporting the bruises?”

  “You think Hollis hits her?” Nakamura asked. “That’s a serious accusation.”

  “‘Abusive’ isn’t limited to the physical,” Alice said. “You need to be around that family for thirty seconds to realize there is some sort of control and emotional manipulation happening. It doesn’t seem like a stretch to me that Charlotte would do what needs to be done.”

  “You know I’m a fairly capable detective,” Nakamura grumbled as he crumpled up his trash, stuffing it back in the now-empty bag. He shoved the key in the ignition, glancing in the rearview mirror.

  She patted his forearm in a deliberately patronizing manner. “Sure, you are. You were just distracted by Mellie’s cleavage.”

  He shook his head but was smiling. “People are cagey, aren’t they?”

  Shrugging again, she shifted so she was facing forward once more. The station was only a few minutes away. “Maybe. But they’re obvious, too, you know?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Find what makes them fragile, what makes them vulnerable. What lengths they would go to in order to keep the world from discovering their secrets,” she said. “That’s where you find the cracks in the foundations behind the pretty facades. That’s where you’ll find motivation.”

  She glanced at him. “That’s where you’ll find your story.”

  “And what’s that for Charlotte?”

  Alice thought for a moment.

  “That she’s just as weak as her mother has made her believe she is.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHARLOTTE

  July 28, 2018

  One day before the kidnapping

  If Charlotte didn’t force herself to move, she’d be late for dinner. It was a Saturday-night ritual in the Burke residence that only Sterling and Ruby were allowed to miss. Sterling, because he was Sterling, and Ruby, because Hollis didn’t tolerate children at the table.

  Ruby swung her little legs against the bed now, watching Charlotte with wide eyes. “You look pretty, Mama,” she said.

  Everything in Charlotte went soft at that, even the part that was tightly coiled in a fist and slamming against her rib cage. She sat beside her daughter, taking her chubby face in her hands. “Thank you, baby,” she whispered into cheeks as she pressed a kiss to each one.

  “You’re crying,” Ruby said in that matter-of-fact way of children.

  Charlotte swiped at the moisture and then widened her eyes at the girl. “Are you ready for our adventure tomorrow?”

  Ruby threw herself backward on the bed, sprawling out on the thick comforter and punching her tiny fists in the air. “Yes,” she cried out to the ceiling. Charlotte resisted the urge to shush her, even knowing Hollis would be downstairs already, unable to hear the disruption.

  “And remember, it’s our secret.” Charlotte bent closer to her so she was whispering. Ruby was terrible at keeping anything quiet, but it was unlikely she’d see any of the rest of the family for the remainder of the night. And then they would leave before anyone was up.

  “Shhh.” Ruby pursed her lips, holding a finger up to them. “Like I have with Grandpapa.”

  Charlotte’s stomach clenched, quick and violent, and she swallowed against the bile that rose in her throat. She tried to keep her face neutral.

  “Not quite, baby,” she whispered, a bit dizzy with the attempt to keep herself from giving over to the sick wave that crashed into her. She breathed deep, in through her nostrils and out through her mouth. Ruby tilted her head, still watching her.

  “All right, my little petal, bath time with Isla and then bedtime, yes?”

  There was a mutiny brewing in the squint of her eyes, but it wasn’t Charlotte’s problem, because the knock on the door came just as she was expecting it.

  Isla popped her head in. “Sorry to interrupt, but Mrs. Burke is requesting your presence at the dining table.”

  “Yes, of course.” Charlotte stood up, smoothing a hand over the cotton of her patterned dress. It was a simple sheath that ended at her knees and was fancy enough to fit Hollis’s strict dress code. Ruby hopped off the bed and skipped her way across the room. “Actually, hold on. Rubes, where’s my good night?”

  Her daughter paused midstride, stumbling a bit as she caught herself to swing around back toward where Charlotte crouched, ready for her.

  Her little body crashed into Charlotte’s, and only years of practice wearing stilettos stopped her from tumbling onto the floor. She held tight to her little girl, though, burying her face in her soft curls. They still smelled of strawberry even though her bath from last night was a distant memory. She wondered if it was still there, the scent. Or maybe it was one of those ingrained things, where Ruby would always smell like strawberries and always be a baby and always fit in her arms just like this.

  “Good night, Mama.” Ruby pulled back a bit, and Charlotte had to let her go.

  “Good night, petal,” Charlotte said, and pressed the back of her hand to her lips to keep anything else from pouring out.

  “Ma’am.” Isla had let Ruby run by her and was watching Charlotte attempt to gather herself.

  “I’m fine.” Charlotte smiled as brightly as possible. Come tomorrow, it wouldn’t do for staff to be talking about how she had fallen apart in her room the night before. “Just getting sappy, you know her birthday’s coming up and all.” She waved a hand. Silly. She was being silly, she tried to convey.

  Isla hesitated but then offered up her own small smile. “She’s getting so old.”

  “No,” Charlotte said, and realized how harsh the denial rang in the room only when Isla flinched. She forced herself to chuckle again. “See. Look at me. I can’t stand to see her grow up.”

  “It’s normal, ma’am,” Isla said. “I’ll just . . .”

  And with that, she disappeared again, presumably to follow Ruby to wherever she’d run. It certainly wasn’t the bath.

  Charlotte made her way downstairs and took the last minutes of freedom to pull herself together. This was not the time to fall apart. This was a time for masks. The ones she’d spent years, decades, crafting.

  Everything would be easier if she could trust herself. But she’d never learned to. When other girls were testing their confidence, hers had been continually undercut.

  “You’re mistaken,” Hollis said. “My daughter’s not smart enough to be in that class.”

  “You think you can live on your own? But you don’t know how to do anything.”

  “Raise a child? As if you can even take care of yourself.”

  Countless moments could be called up with ease, each one defining Charlotte in a way she wished she was strong enough to combat.

  What she was left with was smoke and mirrors. Deflect, hide. Survive. It was what she knew.

  Hollis’s eyes skimmed over her when she stepped into the dining room, cataloging every way in which Charlotte was wrong.

  The air was already thick with tension, as was normally the case for this farce of a happy family dinner. Trudy was watching her own plate, while Mellie gestured toward Charlotte with a wineglass that was already mostly empty.

  Hollis was at the head of the table, swallowing whatever scolding words she had for Charlotte arriving late. Sterling was absent. Relief slammed into Charlotte, almost bringing her to her knees.

  As she sat down,
she realized they were all waiting for Hollis’s reaction. The woman was at war with herself: desperate, always, to scold Charlotte like a child, but at the same time loath to make a scene.

  At this point, Charlotte didn’t even care. She just had to make it through the next hour without breaking down, and there was only so much Hollis would do with Mellie and Trudy present.

  “Trudy, tell us how your tutoring is going,” Hollis said finally, and the muscles in Charlotte’s neck relaxed.

  Charlotte’s fingertips inched toward the stem of her wineglass, the cool white liquid a siren’s song.

  “Are you getting tutored, peaches?” Mellie slurred.

  Hollis tut-tutted but didn’t issue the harsh slap-down Charlotte would have received. “Trudy is tutoring an underprivileged boy.”

  “You are?” Charlotte asked, surprised. It was out of character for Trudy. Or maybe she just didn’t know her niece as well as she thought she did.

  Trudy snorted, an unattractive expulsion that Charlotte leaned away from on instinct.

  “He’s not, like, some illiterate kid without shoes, despite what Hollis would like you to think,” she said, her disgust for them, all of them, dripping from her tongue.

  Hollis’s mouth tightened. But there would be no scene.

  Two people, in the same circumstances. And yet Trudy handled Hollis with all the fire and confidence Charlotte had always wanted to have. The girl was a diamond, sharp and hard and beautiful and flawed. It was so easy to forget how young Trudy was; it had been so long since Charlotte had thought of her as anything other than grown.

  Charlotte sipped at the wine and wondered if she would ever have even a little bit of the girl’s courage.

  Maybe. Maybe that’s what tomorrow was about. Finally pushing back, finally tearing at the velvet restraints that had held her paralyzed her entire life. An act of rebellion twenty years too late for herself. But maybe it was just in time. Just in time to save Ruby.

  “What are you tutoring him in?” Charlotte asked. Even in situations like these, she was looking to ease the tension, play the diplomat. Appease, soothe. Take the hit and thank them for it.