“Let me talk to Allison.” Her voice peaks.
My body solidifies as I shake my head at him.
“She’s too distraught right now.”
“Put my daughter on the phone, dammit!”
James passes the phone my way and I reach over and press the small red button.
His eyes round out in horror. “What the hell did you do that for?”
“I’m sorry!” I bury my head in my hands a moment. “I don’t know. It was a gut reaction. You know I can’t speak to her. She’s degrading and belittling, and I don’t have time for that kind of bullshit in my life right now.”
My first memory of my mother was of her holding up a wooden spoon, one of her many choice weapons, and that smile she shed before it came crashing down over my tiny head. By the time I was eight, she graduated to pouring uncooked rice over the floor and having me kneel on it, bare skinned, facing the wall for hours. She once held my head under water in our family swimming pool until I blacked out because I had talked to a boy on my way home from school. I couldn’t get out from under her clutches fast enough, and when the day came for me to leave for college, I gifted her the finger once she left my dorm. I never looked back, but I maintain contact with her. We see one another during Thanksgiving and Christmas and she calls a few times a month. Bygones were bygones, and I had put her prehistoric parenting skills out of my mind. I was never going to be that kind of a mother, nor was I that kind of a mother. No. I was worse because I couldn’t keep track of my child.
The phone buzzes in his hand and I take it from him. “I’ll handle this.” I head to the guest bedroom, pick up, and hang up. Instead, I pull out my own phone and dial the correctional facility that holds my sister. Welders Correctional Facility in Northern California is about as anti-prison as you can get. It’s more Club Med meets Camp Lockdown, and Jane has never been happier. I know this because those were her exact words once she was transferred over from a state-run facility. Jane Greer never took her husband’s name, but she took his life. That was a part of the prosecution’s closing argument. I secretly thought it was a cute play on words—cute being the irony, of course.
“Jane Nicole Greer, please,” I say as the operator at the facility picks up the line. “This is her sister, Allison Leigh Price.” I’ve never understood the rationale of adding the middle name, but the correctional facility insists we use them as some sort of code to verify who we really are. Jane is my older sister by four years, same face, same dark head of hair, same general distrust of the world—a parting gift from our mother.
“Is this a family emergency?”
“Yes, it most certainly is.” I wait patiently as the operator cues my sister and moody rock music from the seventies fills my ear. James steps in and I mouth the words my sister before he heads back out. It feels like a relief when he’s gone. Like a weight lifted off my shoulders. I know that I haven’t been an angel in this legal contractual obligation of ours, but besides that, it has always felt as if James and I were warring with one another long before Reagan arrived on the scene.
The music stops abruptly. “Ally from the valley,” Jane chirps on the other end. She’s not worried for me in regards to the family emergency because it’s the same excuse I use to speak with her on a regular basis.
“Reagan is missing. She’s gone.” My voice hurtles before my thoughts like machine gunfire. The bullets hit you before you know what’s happening. That about sums up this nightmare. “She disappeared three days ago. I don’t know who’s taken her. There was a girl and she was evil. She was in on it and there was no house at the end of the damn street!”
A dizzying conversation ensues between the two of us with her volleying emotionally charged questions at me and with me adding more confusion to the situation by way of convulsive sobs.
“Did you tell Mom?”
Ironically, it’s the mention of my mother that quells me enough for me to regain my composure. “Yes. She knows the facts.”
“Shit.” Jane’s voice is huskier than my own, hardened like tires on gravel as if she were a longtime smoker, but it couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s just her way. Life has always made her a little rougher around the edges than it did me. As much as I put up a front that everything was fine and dandy at home, Jane took my mother’s abuses and wore them like a badge with pride. She rode around with the bad boys as soon as she was old enough—as soon as she figured out how much it pissed off our monster of a mother.
It wasn’t poor Jane’s fault. My mother had carved her existence out in stone with each crash of the wooden spoon. In Jane’s mind, danger had linked itself to excitement and she sought after men who would treat her ten times worse than our mother ever did. But finally, her patience wore thin and so did her twice broken arm. The third break was the charm—her attorney coined the phrase—and she snapped. Jane pulled a butcher knife from the kitchen and slit her husband’s throat in bed. The prosecution argued he was asleep, but Jane insisted he was watching television, a show about an Alaskan family who lived in the wild. Poor Donny wanted to live in the wild far away from civilization and his stark raving mad wife. But he was an abuser, and in the end, he suffered the ultimate abuse. Jane later told me he really was sleeping, but that was the only way she knew for sure she could pull it off. He was stronger than she was by over a hundred pounds. And now she gets three hots and a cot for the rest of her life. Her words, not mine.
“I need my baby.” I moan as I rock myself over the floor. “Help me, Janey. Help me, please.”
“You better believe I’m going to help you.” The line goes silent, and I can practically see my sister’s wheels spinning. “You don’t think this has anything to do with the Cronelle family, do you?”
“No.” I’m emphatic about it. Martha Cronelle was our neighbor back on Walker Avenue when we lived in Woodcrest. Jane and I were in elementary school when we witnessed Graham Cronelle bash his wife’s head into their built-in barbeque. Jane and I were prone to spy on any and everyone, and this was one time it bit us in the ass. Once Martha Cronelle turned up mysteriously dead, we confessed to our father the heinous thing we had seen and he marched us right down to the police department and had us relay every grizzly detail. He was not tolerant to men who beat their wives, just wives who beat their children. “I don’t think so. It would be weird.”
“No, it wouldn’t. His boys tortured me for years in school. Garret and Ginger.”
I blink to the ceiling, suddenly regretful I ever called my sister. “I don’t think his name was Ginger. That’s just what you called him.”
“He was a shit. They both were. And they’ve always been bitter that we took away their father.”
“I know.” It’s true. They cornered us one day and told us off. Their aunt had to raise them. She denied them the video game trance they were accustomed to and cut off their supply of dirty magazines that their father kept them fresh in. “They were shits, but they didn’t do this.”
“How about that idiot that made your life miserable?”
My blood runs cold. She doesn’t even have to say her name. I don’t want her to. I don’t want to think it. She’s like a demon, easily conjured to life and hard as hell to get rid of.
I clear my throat as another painful knot begins to build.
“Heather Evans,” she whispers.
A jolt of electrocution runs up my spine at the sound of her name.
“Shut up.” I pull the phone back and eye that little red dot that can end this conversation in its dizzying tracks.