It had felt good, though, letting go just for once. Terrifying and exhilarating, seductive despite the consequences.
God, she was walking a fine line with this case.
By the time she reached the diner, Charlotte had already arrived. The familiar strawberry hair was easy to spot even though it was mostly hidden under a faded gray baseball hat.
The woman had chosen her seat well, tucked as she was into the back-corner booth that was mostly obscured by the large neon jukebox right beside it.
She blended into the background that way. It was more than how she disappeared amid the garishness of her surroundings, though. It was how she sat, how she breathed, how she avoided anything to draw eyes in her direction.
Attention was fatal. Alice guessed she’d learned that lesson the hard way.
Charlotte’s shoulders were thin and collapsed into themselves, the knobs of her spine showing through her thin cotton T-shirt. She kept her chin tilted toward the wall and down so that there was only the faintest outline of her cheek visible to the majority of the patrons. Even her breath seemed shallow so as not to disrupt the air around her.
There was a sadness to her as well. One that kept eyes from lingering too long in case it was contagious.
Alice looked around, scoping out the place. Neon and Elvis were the main decor choices—perhaps the only decor choices. It wasn’t kitschy enough to draw the tourists, and it was too much for the locals. It was perfect.
In classic diner fashion, the cook, a small man with too much white hair, was visible through the causeway between the restaurant and the kitchen. Behind the counter, a middle-aged woman was wiping a frayed rag over and over on the same spot while she flipped through a comic book. She hadn’t looked up at the bell.
Besides the two workers, there were three shabby businessmen huddled into one of the booths closest to the doors. They’d glanced over in unison when she walked in, the light catching on the thick plastic rim of the blond’s glasses, before they hunched over their table once more.
She moved, as quietly as possible, toward the back and didn’t say anything as she slid onto the cracked vinyl bench across from Charlotte.
The woman’s eyes were wide, and she startled when she noticed Alice. Perhaps that was just her default expression now, with the world coming at her faster than she could process.
Charlotte’s fingers slid up to her eyebrow, plucking at the skin around a tiny bald spot, the fine strawberry hairs apparently victims to nervous hands.
“Hello,” Charlotte whispered, ducking even deeper into the shadows beneath her cap.
This was a mere ghost of the woman Alice had met a week earlier. Gone was the quiet confidence, the elegance in the way she moved replaced with jittery sorrow. Gone were the expensive dresses and flawless accessories; in their place were faded jeans and a cheap tee.
The waitress interrupted them before Alice could say anything. She handed over laminated menus with pictures of food and then walked away.
Once she was gone, Alice turned her attention back to Charlotte. “I know you can’t actually talk to me.”
“I can’t.” Charlotte touched fingertips to her throat as if she was surprised by her own voice. That it was working.
“I know,” Alice said, wrinkling her brow like she really understood. It was an act, but so were so many things. Her patience had already been devoured today by talking to Ben and talking to Nakamura and talking to Zeke. Fake sympathy was all she had left to offer. “I know. Your mother won’t find out.”
It fascinated Alice, always, how willing people were to trust where none had been earned. Trust in a uniform, trust in a person’s story, trust in promises that were empty and hollow but dressed in pretty clothes. She could see it on Charlotte’s face. She believed Alice for no other reason than that Alice said it was true.
There was power in that.
“Why are you helping me?” Charlotte asked, her fingers going for her eyebrow once again.
“Who says I am?” Alice answered, because sometimes honesty grounded lies in reality.
“Oh.” The woman dropped the leg she’d had pulled up against her chest back down to the floor. There was something disjointed in her movements, in the way she was processing information, the way she was watching Alice with just a sliver of iris visible beyond her dark pupils. It was as if she was a half step behind.
Maybe if Alice were Nakamura, she’d be suspicious. This was a woman in the middle of a breakdown. She was showing signs of emotion beyond grief. Like guilt. That’s what really ate at a person.
“You helped us, though,” Charlotte said, her words going soft at the pauses between them so that they blended into each other.
“Whatcha getting, hons?” The waitress was back, her pen and pad held at the ready.
“Tea, with honey,” Alice ordered for herself.
Charlotte merely shook her head, nudging the menu she hadn’t even looked at away from her elbow. The waitress rolled her eyes but then left them alone again.
They didn’t speak until Alice had her hands wrapped around a tiny, chipped white mug that had stains of drinks past smudged near the handle.
“You helped us,” Charlotte said again.
At the department store. “That doesn’t mean I’m helping you now.”
“You never told anyone.” It wasn’t a question. She was right, though. “You helped find Ruby that day at the mall. I was . . . I thought I’d lost her.”
Charlotte brought her knees back up against her chest and wrapped her arms around her shins. Where she’d been thin before, now she was just bones, and Alice wondered if that fragility had always been there, hidden under loose blouses and forgiving trousers. Here in the shivering fluorescent light of the diner, the sharp lines and juts were harder to ignore.
“You should order something to eat,” Alice said, surprising even herself. What did it matter if Charlotte wasted away? It wasn’t Alice’s responsibility. The woman would have to learn to force herself, learn to remember that food had purpose beyond pleasure. It let you get up another day. It let you find the prick who put you in that state in the first place. It gave you fuel to fight them.
It was predictable that Charlotte shook her head. Alice shrugged off her own concerns, let them fall to the dirty floor to take up residence with the Coke and salt that coated the tiles. It wasn’t her problem.
If she told herself enough times, she might actually believe it.
“Why didn’t you tell anyone?” Charlotte asked, turning her cheek so that it rested on her upturned knee. Her gaze was surprisingly steady.
“It would have looked bad for you,” Alice said, taking a sip of the tea. Redirecting attention to Charlotte would keep her worried, would keep her from thinking about coincidences.
“And you care?”
“Not about you,” Alice said. Again, honestly. It was possible no one would have blinked if Alice had disclosed that she’d had a prior run-in with Charlotte and Ruby before taking the case. Maybe, though—maybe it would have been an excuse to kick her off it. “But I want the right person to be punished. That’s not you.”
“Isn’t that against”—Charlotte paused, her eyes fluttering closed, perhaps struggling to find the right word—“ethics?”
Alice lifted a shoulder. “Ethics are relative.”
“You believe that?”
“Of course.” Alice pushed the mug away. The tea was tepid anyway, and clumps of honey stuck waxy to the rim. “But justice. Justice is immutable.”
Charlotte blinked, that slow sweep. “I used to think I had ethics or some sort of moral compass, at least.”
Alice used to as well. “And then Ruby . . .”
Charlotte nodded. “Now I have none.”
“I know,” Alice said. Because she did.
There was a thin string of understanding pulsing between them like a live wire. They both knew how one second, one heartbeat, could shatter years of living a life as a good person.
For
Alice it hadn’t been the heartbeat when Lila had slipped from her grasp. No, it had come later.
“Life in prison.” The news was delivered like a Band-Aid being pulled off skin. Quick, efficient, painful.
Alice curled tighter into the fetal position, wrapped around Lila’s favorite stuffed animal. It was soft and warm and still smelled of her even though it probably didn’t. The fur, matted now from tears she’d been unable to stop, brushed against her cheek.
Alice hadn’t been able to force herself to the court for the sentencing. Instead, she’d asked Jimmy Barstow, an old friend of her mother’s and one of the few people she could stand being around these days, to go for her.
“I’m sorry, Alice,” he said now in his radio-smooth voice. “I know you wanted . . . Well, I know you wanted it to turn out differently.”
The death sentence. It was what he deserved; it was what she’d expected. How was he allowed to remain in the world, breathing and laughing and crying and living, when Lila had been so cruelly ripped out of it?
“Alice . . .”
“No,” she said, then hung up.
She didn’t shatter despite the fact that this sentencing had felt like the only thing holding her together for months. Instead, all the softness that had been left in the nooks of her body turned hard. The grief, the sadness, the memories, the love—it tightened into a jagged rock that sat heavy in her chest. It had taken only a moment.
Gone was the pain. Gone was the helplessness. Gone was the pounding injustice that had held her paralyzed only seconds ago.
Gone was Alice. The person she used to be who thought there was right and there was wrong, and that somehow it was a worthwhile pursuit to strive for the light.
What was left was a darkness she knew had only one purpose.
“What answers do you need?” Charlotte asked now, and Alice focused her attention back on the woman.
“Tell me about Sterling.”
Charlotte tensed, her shoulders going rigid under her soft cotton fabric, her knuckles white where her hands were clasped around her knees. “Why do you want to know about my father?”
“I think you know the answer to that,” Alice said.
Charlotte plucked at that bald spot again. “We wanted to get Ruby away.”
“We?”
Alice watched the muscles pull tight in the woman’s face, at the corners of her lips, across her otherwise-smooth forehead.
“Trudy.”
“Ah,” Alice said, and then glanced around the diner once more. An old man had situated himself at the counter and was working over a bowl of soup, but no one else had come in. “I’m going to need the details.”
“She’d been planning it for some time,” Charlotte said. “We actually were going to do it later in the week, but we found out that both Sterling and Hollis would be out of the house that day.”
Four days. Ruby had been held for four days. A reaction to a plan that had been altered.
“We set up the beach trip,” Charlotte continued. “Trudy, actually . . . She came up with the idea. A little girl gone missing at the beach? It was believable enough.”
“Why the ruse?” Alice pressed. “Why not just take her? Leave the state.”
Charlotte’s lips turned down at the corners, those patchy eyebrows rose. “You don’t know my mother.”
“But if Trudy was gone with Ruby, wouldn’t Hollis immediately know you two were behind this staged kidnapping?” Alice asked. It had been so foolish of them, two young, naive girls plotting schemes that were so much bigger than themselves.
Charlotte swallowed, the lines of her neck working to adjust to the saliva. “That’s why I couldn’t . . . go. They would be watching me, not Trudy.” It was said like she was repeating well-rehearsed lines, and Alice could picture Trudy coaching her aunt, persuading her that this was the only way. And for someone who had never learned to question or say no, Charlotte would have been an easy mark.
“Trudy would have left a note saying she was running off,” Alice guessed. “Ruby would be enough of a distraction that she could get far enough, lose herself, before Hollis started paying attention again.”
They didn’t know Hollis as well as they thought they did. A woman like that, she wouldn’t let Trudy out of her control any more than she was willing to let Charlotte. Girls playing dress-up in adult clothing.
There was hopelessness in Charlotte’s eyes as she nodded. “We had a plan.”
It was a whisper that cracked along the edges.
“What happened, Charlotte?”
The woman’s chapped lips turned in on themselves, the skin around her mouth going white.
“What happened, Charlotte?”
“I don’t—” Charlotte paused, dragged in a shaky breath. “I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know?” This was different from the careful answers the woman had given before. In the days after Ruby’s kidnapping, Charlotte had given them a complete timeline for the day. Had she lied about it?
Charlotte shook her head. “I don’t remember. I just . . . I don’t know. I don’t know what happened to Ruby.”
The name came out on a sob, and Alice glanced around. They’d drawn a few eyes, but none that were anything more than curious.
Alice’s pulse notched up. Charlotte shouldn’t be telling her this. If she’d been in a different frame of mind, she wouldn’t be.
“What’s the last thing you remember from that day, Charlotte?”
If possible, the woman collapsed even further into herself. “I remember sitting on the porch in the middle of the night. I was thinking about Ruby. I don’t . . . Nothing else.”
“That morning? Getting to the beach? Anything?” There hadn’t been very many solid details in the timeline Charlotte had provided them, but she had described the morning.
Charlotte paused, but then: “No. I told you and the other officers what we had planned. But I don’t remember getting there. I don’t even remember getting in the car.”
It happened. In traumatic situations, the brain, desperate to protect, erased memories. Full hours, full days. Moments in time that would be lost forever.
But it looked bad. It looked like Charlotte had either had a psychotic break and killed Ruby or she was covering for someone else.
“You should have told us this, Charlotte,” Alice said, but she knew why the woman hadn’t.
Charlotte’s eyes were more shadows than anything else. “You would have thought . . .”
They sat in the heavy silence, both knowing what the cops would have thought.
“It all fell apart,” Charlotte finally said, so quietly. A young girl confused at how reality interfered with her carefully constructed fantasy.
The waitress was watching them now, and Alice didn’t like the interest on her face.
“I’m going to leave,” Alice said, and Charlotte merely nodded at the abrupt declaration. “You won’t follow for another ten minutes. Order a sandwich.” Alice knew she wouldn’t. Perhaps trying anyway was her weak attempt at penance.
“You asked about my father,” Charlotte said, stopping Alice from shifting from the bench. “Does that mean, do you think . . . Did he have something . . . ?”
“Just”—Alice paused, counting the seconds so it would seem just long enough to appear hesitant—“let me know if you remember anything that could be relevant about his behavior.”
Charlotte nodded, her expression blank and her attention turned inward.
Alice paused, her hip bumping into the laminate tabletop. “You wanted to know why I’m doing this?”
She waited until Charlotte’s eyes met hers so Alice could see there was still a person in there, not just some empty shell. Then she pulled a small photo from her pocket where she always carried one. She had plenty, so after tracing the pad of her fingertip over the girl’s cherub face, she placed it on the table, right in front of Charlotte.
It was a stupid and careless thing, on top of already stupid and car
eless things, but she wanted Charlotte to understand. To know. If this was her only chance to try to make her understand, Alice couldn’t pass it up.
She tapped her hand over the picture, just once. “That’s why.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHARLOTTE
July 29, 2018
The day of the kidnapping
The white rectangular pill nestled into Charlotte’s palm. It sat along her life line, which she knew because three years ago she’d dipped into a dank little tarot shop and paid all of five dollars to have her future told to her through her hand.
The woman’s purple, bedazzled turban had been knocked askew so that wispy raven-blue hair had peeked out from underneath, and the thick plastic rims of her Coke-bottle glasses had all but obscured her eyes. When she’d taken Charlotte’s hand, her own had been warm and dry, not slick with sweat as Charlotte had feared. There was no urge to recoil even as they sat in silence in a room that was draped in black velvet and smelled of incense used to cover the sour tang of pot.
Madame Clara tut-tutted at whatever she’d seen, her thick tongue clicking against her palate. “You are going to have a tragic life, my dear.”
Weren’t they supposed to lie to you? Take your money and tell you pretty things, soft things, happy things?
“I know,” Charlotte said, tapping a French-manicured nail on the dark cherry wood of the table that separated them.
“Very tragic” was all the woman said again.
And then she’d shooed Charlotte out of the shop.
Charlotte looked down at the pill now, unfocusing her eyes so that the X’s and the A’s and the N smudged into each other. Then she tossed it back into her throat and chased it with the pinot grigio that had lost most of its chill. The glass was slippery under her fingers, the condensation collecting into beads of sweat that dripped down the expensive crystal.
It was late or early or whatever that middle part was where people still thought it was yesterday even while living in today. She was curled into her favorite chair on their back porch now that the rest of the household had gone to bed and she could be left alone. Left alone to sink into the scary places in a brain she no longer trusted.
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