Girls of Glass

by Brianna Labuskes

  “Moved down to St. Petersburg, that one did,” Judith said. And with that, everything in Trudy sharpened. St. Petersburg. That was too much of a coincidence.

  “Isn’t that where you said Sterling Burke is now?” Trudy asked as if she couldn’t quite remember what the woman had said earlier.

  “Yes,” Judith said. “And come to think of it . . .”

  She trailed off, and Trudy dug her fingers into the soft flesh of her thighs to keep from shaking those frail shoulders. This was all for show, the dramatics. Judith had a story she wanted to tell, and she was relishing the attention.

  So Trudy played her part. “Did they cross paths down there?”

  A spark of appreciation gleamed in Judith’s eyes. “Nathan got into trouble. The kind he shouldn’t have been able to talk himself out of.”

  The pieces were there; they just wouldn’t fit.

  It didn’t matter, because now Judith was into it. She’d uncrossed her legs so she could lean forward. Waiting for Trudy to say her lines.

  “What kind of trouble?” Trudy said.

  Judith’s eyebrows shot up, her lips pursed. “Killed a young woman,” she said, her voice dropping as if someone was around to hear. The words were harsh in the quiet of her small sitting room. “It was nasty business. But it was only a blip in the news.”

  “Why’s that?” Trudy’s tongue was thick and heavy in her mouth, and she felt like she was just on the edge of something.

  “The girl was just a maid,” Judith said. “No one important.”

  It still should have mattered. People still should have cared. But Trudy knew better than to argue that point and derail Judith.

  “It was in St. Petersburg?” she asked instead. Because that was one of the pieces. It had to be.

  “Oh yes.” Judith had all but slid out of her chair at this point, eyes locked on Trudy’s face. Neither of them had looked toward Zeke since the conversation started. “Guess who his judge was?”

  Trudy dragged in a deep breath. There it was. “Sterling Burke.”

  Everything around her shifted, and she tried to hold on to the pieces as they skittered away from her. Sterling Burke. St. Petersburg. Nathan Beckett. Where did she know that name?

  Judith was nodding. “He let him off.”

  “How?” Zeke finally asked, and both she and Judith jumped at the reminder it wasn’t just the two of them in the conversation.

  The other woman recovered first. “Anything’s possible with the right influence. A young handsome white boy from his hometown? And the woman was Latina and from a bad neighborhood, from what I heard. Sterling dismissed it on a technicality.”

  Trudy closed her eyes. It wasn’t the first time she’d heard a rumor like that about her grandfather. He played with power, not justice, and he knew the rules of the game well. One rich boy wouldn’t have mattered to him. But the optics of it would have. They would have mattered to the men he was trying to woo at the time.

  She might have even written it off as unimportant. Just one more way her grandfather had proven himself as scum.

  But—Nathan Beckett. Her whole world had narrowed down to that name.

  Trust me.

  Everything slowed, like time was three steps ahead of her. Zeke was talking, and then Judith. The words, though, were drawn out and coming from a distance. And that’s when she realized she hadn’t heard the name. She’d read it.

  “Shit,” she whispered. And the world snapped back into focus. The lights were too bright in the corners of her eyes, the smell of dying flowers in the vase by the windowsill too potent.

  She pushed to her feet. “Bathroom,” she managed to force out before she stumbled from the room. Bracing a hand against the hallway wall, she fumbled for her phone. Her fingers couldn’t get it to work as she careened into the tiny kitchen in the back of the house.

  Standing in the middle of the room, she focused until she could open the in-box.

  She’d always thought of the person as N.

  There were heavy footsteps behind her, and she knew without turning who it was.

  “Zeke.” Even she could hear the desperation, the fear in her voice. “Zeke.”

  He was in front of her, crouching a bit so he could see her face beyond the curtain of hair that fell over her shoulders.

  “What is it?”

  “Nathan Beckett,” she breathed like it would mean anything to him. She stared at the message. One email. The sender: nbeckett. Nathan. Fucking. Beckett.

  She flipped her wrist, then held the phone so he could see it, too.

  “I was played,” she whispered. She didn’t want to actually say the words, but she forced them out through chapped lips. Her fault. This was all her fault.

  “Who is it?” Zeke asked.

  She thumbed in the name to the Google search bar. The page spun—the service was shit in Judith’s house. “Come on. Come on.”

  Her fingers hurt from where she was clutching at the screen, but she couldn’t relax her grip. She knew. She just knew this was it.

  When the results loaded, she sank to her knees.

  “What the hell?” Zeke hovered over her. She glanced up, and his eyes were wide, panicked. Hers had to be the same.

  “Nathan Beckett,” she whispered, clicking through to the first article that came up. “Sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Lila Garner.”

  “Lila Garner,” Zeke repeated slowly.

  She looked up at him once more. “Detective Alice Garner’s daughter.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  ALICE

  August 5, 2018

  Seven days after the kidnapping

  The phone woke Alice from a deep alcohol-induced sleep. She fumbled for the thing, flinching away from the flare of the screen in the darkness of her bedroom and the jangled notes playing on repeat.

  She glanced at the digital clock on the floor next to her bed before she answered. Two thirty in the morning.

  “What?” Her head was pounding, her lips were drying and cracked, her stomach rolled with its desire to be empty.

  “Consider this your heads-up,” the voice on the other end said. It took a few moments to place it, and during that time her hand had already come to curl around the gun she kept tucked beneath her pillow.

  “The hell, Ben?” Her brain was still slow, still laden with the vapors of alcohol. This wasn’t making sense yet.

  “Look, I like you, I do,” Ben continued, and she sat up while flipping the light on beside her. The glow sent her stomach clenching again. She licked out, trying to wet her lips, but her tongue was equally dry. In just her underwear, she stumbled to her feet toward the bathroom.

  “I don’t like you very much right now,” she said as she flipped on the water from the sink. It took a bit of angling to get her mouth under the tap, but it was worth it. She held the phone away, not needing to hear his laughter, while she gulped at the cool liquid.

  “Yeah, and that’s not going to get any better,” he said, tinny and distant. She brought the phone back to her ear.

  “That’s right.” Her brain seemed to finally be skipping along with a semblance of normalcy. “You’re giving me a heads-up for something. It’s not going to be that I won a pretty prize, is it? A million dollars? A different life than the shitty one I currently have?”

  “See, this is why I like you,” Ben said. “Finding humor in the darkest hours.”

  “Ben.”

  “I have credible sources and pictures that place you talking to Charlotte Burke in an unofficial capacity,” he said, finally dropping the anvil. “We’re going with it. It will be up at five in the morning.”

  She squeezed one eye closed. “It’s almost three.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Ben?”

  “Uh-huh?” There was a smirk in his voice, but she didn’t have time for him.

  “You suck at heads-ups,” she said. And then hung up the phone to his laughter.

  Shit.

  She dunked her fac
e into the stream of water, hoping the jolt of it would sort her out. Nothing was ready. Goddamn Ben Wilson could rot in hell.

  The mirror reflected the panic that crept along her skin, but she couldn’t let it grab hold. Her pupils were dilated, her hands were trembling, and the rise and fall of her chest was far from steady. She turned away, pushing her short hair back into a stubby ponytail.

  Her closet was the first stop. There was a bag at the back with everything she needed. The rough fabric beneath her fingers was an anchor. A reminder.

  She pulled it down, letting it bump against her hip, before dropping it to the floor. Then she slipped on a pair of jeans and a simple black T-shirt.

  The pants were different from the ones she’d been wearing the other day when they’d interrogated Enrique. Those were slung over the chair in front of the simple desk she kept out of the way in the far corner of the room. She crossed over to it, her fingers digging into the fabric.

  It took three tries before she got the right pocket, the one with the slip of paper that had the number written on it. The one they’d pretended was for his alibi but was actually his burner phone.

  She fumbled in her blankets for where she’d tossed her cell after hanging up on Ben. Once she found it, she sat down on the edge of the mattress and smoothed out the paper on her thigh.

  Despite the hour, the phone rang only once before the person on the other end picked up.

  “Now,” she said.

  “All right.”

  There was a click, and she realized the call had ended. At least one thing seemed to be going right.

  On impulse, she crossed back to the bathroom, sank to her knees in front of the sink’s cabinets, and rummaged through the cleaning supplies and tampons until she found the small bottle of painkillers. She popped two, swallowed them dry, and then tossed the rest back into the dark recesses from where they’d come.

  She propped her shoulder against the doorjamb, studying the bedroom, wasting precious seconds on being thorough. As much as she might want to, rushing right now could be disastrous. Meticulousness was the only thing that could combat panic, and she held tight to it.

  At least everything in the apartment was ready for this. She’d kept it that way. Sparse and impersonal. There was nothing left to destroy.

  Once Alice was satisfied that the room was set, she grabbed the duffel again, hauling it up onto her shoulder.

  It was finally time.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHARLOTTE

  August 4, 2018

  Six days after the kidnapping

  It was just before midnight, but there was no one else in the bar’s parking lot. Most of the patrons were already where they wanted to be.

  Sneaking out of the house unnoticed wasn’t even a hardship anymore, either. Hollis had started taking sleeping pills she’d discreetly obtained from their family physician, and Mellie hadn’t been sober since they’d found Ruby’s body. It was deciding where she wanted to go once she was out that was the problem.

  Nothing felt like the right decision anymore. Her skin itched with all the places she shouldn’t go. Back to the beach. To a hotel. To the police station.

  What happened, Charlotte?

  With the windows cracked to let in the fresh air, she drove the not-quite-empty streets. The corner of her eye twitched, the exhausted, delicate muscle straining to focus on the road. Her exhausted, delicate soul trying not to shatter into so many pieces.

  She hadn’t left the mansion yesterday, after the police had completed their search. Instead, she’d straightened and tidied behind them. Something about the way their fingers had touched all the surfaces of the house had become a smudge against her own brain that she needed to wipe clean.

  There was so much about her brain these days she wanted to wipe clean. She could barely live with herself long enough to function, to eat, to walk and breathe like everyone else. The cracks that had always been there were splintering into a thousand more thin lines so that everything within her was broken.

  That moment in front of the restaurant still scared her. Because she’d wanted it so much, wanted to put a bullet through her father’s head, watch the light blink out of his eyes, watch the evil that was Sterling Burke leave this world. She’d never wanted anything more in her life. Other than to have Ruby back.

  She couldn’t think about it. Couldn’t think about anything. Instead, she let muscle memory take over, going through the simple motions of navigating the streets of St. Petersburg.

  Charlotte had been driving for an hour by the time her headlights fell across a familiar car. Detective Nakamura’s car. It was parked outside the police bar around the corner from the station, and for the second time in a handful of days, she wondered if she’d ended up someplace through a purpose she hadn’t wanted to acknowledge.

  She pulled up to the curb on the opposite side of the street from the bar and tugged the key out of the ignition. And then she waited.

  It didn’t take long for both Nakamura and Alice to spill out of the door. Alice seemed on the wrong side of tipsy, her narrow hips swaying just a bit too much, a reflection of the drunken cadence of her feet. Nakamura was grinning, amused by the spectacle, it seemed, and he waved down a passing cab.

  After pushing Alice inside it with a wad of cash, Nakamura straightened, stretching his arms up high over his head. He was watching the disappearing taillights of the car and turned away only when the taxi took a sharp left onto First Street.

  Charlotte glanced around to make sure the area was still empty, save for the two of them, and then slid out of the Range Rover.

  “Detective,” she called as soft as she could, not wanting to scare the man. He jumped anyway, his hand going to where his holster rested along his ribs. “I’m sorry.”

  He relaxed, immediately coming out of fight or flight with the ease of someone used to being startled. “Ms. Burke. No problem.”

  “Charlotte,” she murmured out of habit.

  Nakamura smiled at that but didn’t correct himself. “What’s wrong? Can I help you?”

  Why had she stopped him? She didn’t even know. “No, I . . .”

  He stepped closer but kept his hands open and by his side. “You can talk to me, Charlotte.”

  What happened, Charlotte?

  She shook her head. There was nothing to say. No confession.

  She wondered if that’s what he thought. That she was finally going to let the terrible things he guessed she’d done tumble from her lips, unable to hold them within herself any longer.

  “I hate him.” The words were out of her mouth before she even fully thought them. Maybe this was why she’d gotten out of the car. She wanted the detective to stop her before she became the monster they all thought she was.

  He didn’t falter at the conversational pivot. “Who, Charlotte? Who do you hate?”

  What was she doing? He was all blurry at the edges, and she realized her eyes were damp with unshed tears.

  Her phone vibrated in her back pocket, and she reached for it. He tensed at the sudden movement but sighed when she showed him what she pulled out.

  She glanced at the name on the screen. Trudy.

  “I’m sorry, I have to take this.”

  “Charlotte.” His voice had taken on an edge. Perhaps he heard the fragility of her control just in those few seconds that she’d spoken. “Here, wait. Take my number. If you need me.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said again, but she blindly reached for the card he was holding out. She shoved it in her pocket as she turned away from him. Her strides were long as she hurried to the car, and she climbed in without looking back. The Range Rover roared to life just as the call died. Panic clawed at her chest, and she pulled out, doing a quick U-turn on the deserted street. She could feel Nakamura’s eyes on her as she called Trudy back.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  ALICE

  August 5, 2018

  Seven days after the kidnapping

  “Would you lik
e me to tell you a story?”

  Alice whispered the words into Sterling Burke’s ear, dragging the tip of the gun along his jaw as she did.

  His eyes darted toward her, and she watched, satisfied, as he tried to work open his mouth, make his tongue form words. She let him struggle for a minute, coming around to perch on his desk.

  Sterling’s study was dark, with just the moonlight filtering in through the curtains.

  It had been easy to slip the needle into his vein as the man slept, harder to carry him down the stairs as deadweight. But she’d brought Enrique along for just that purpose, and he’d barely grunted when he’d dropped Sterling in the study.

  Now Sterling was bound, pinned to the chair. Helpless.

  Alice tsk-tsked. “That’s right. Silly me. You can’t answer.”

  She pushed herself back until she was fully seated on the desk, her legs swinging lightly against one of the drawers. It was insolent. “Ricky here gave you a nice little cocktail of drugs to take care of that.”

  Ricky shifted against the wall, disturbing the shadows that had settled around his shoulders. But he made no other move to step toward them. This was her show.

  “See, the thing is, dear Sterling, I don’t want to hear a thing you have to say,” she said, tapping the gun against his cheek. “You’ve said enough in your life. More words than you should ever have been allowed. You don’t get to beg, or plead, or tell your sob story. You don’t get to call me a cunt or spit on my face. Do you understand me?”

  She pushed off the desk and leaned close so that their eyes were locked. “You’re going to die without any last words to be remembered.”

  He didn’t react, of course—he was paralyzed—and she almost, almost, wished he could. He didn’t deserve a stage, though. He deserved silent screaming in his own head and a helpless knowledge that no one would hear it.

  The desire to be known. It was so human. So painful.

  “Ah, so my story.” She grinned without humor, more a baring of teeth than anything else. Then she walked back around the desk to settle in the chair across from him. “Once upon a time.” She paused. “That’s how these always start, you know? Once upon a time, there was a boy. He was not a nice boy. He was a little shit of a boy, actually. His name was Nathan, and he grew into a little shit of a man. See, Nathan was never told no in his life. Kind of like you, I would guess.”