I give a quick glance in the rearview mirror as the crowd behind me swells—as shouting stems from the bloody scene.
“Ota.” I roll down my window and lean over, but she’s gone, vanished into thin air just like Reagan.
My foot hits the pedal and I make it home by sheer muscle memory. The sight of a bludgeoned Heather Evans has my body and mind wound tight, fragile as glass and ready to snap at my next breath.
I park crooked in the driveway and bolt to the door, out of breath and lightheaded, my body clammy, my vision blurred.
“Is she still here?” I shout as I let myself in, my feet skidding out from beneath me in the foyer. “Is she here?” I run screaming into James who materializes from nowhere. “I thought I saw her. Out there. God, is she here?”
“Yes.” James pulls me in, smothering my face in his chest, his heart slamming over my cheek like a punishment. “She’s in the dining room. We waited for you.” He gives my shoulders a hard pinch as if to say snap out of it and I come to long enough to see McCafferty glowering my way from over her glasses.
“Good.” I give Heather’s phone a strangulating squeeze before rushing to the kitchen and shoving it deep into the junk drawer along with the keys. “I’m here.” I take a seat opposite James. “I was afraid I would miss this.” I swallow down the tension and taste blood in the back of my throat. It makes me want to vomit, but I swallow the first bitter spring of that down, too. “I’m sorry. I just stepped out for some air.”
“So James tells me.” Her lips twist, annoyed. “It’s nice to have you with us.” There’s a slight drawl in her voice I don’t remember hearing before. I’m so exhausted that any moment now I expect her to sprout another head and I’d be fine with it so long as one of them offered up some good news.
“Is there something new?” I claw at the table, desperate for a morsel. The truth. A lie. It makes no difference. I’ll take it any way she wants to give it to me so long as it gives me hope. Hope is a dangerous word when your world collapses on itself. A four-letter word—I glance to James—just like love.
“Something new to me.” She folds her hands over the table. “You can imagine the hundreds of tips my team has had to navigate these past few weeks.” Her eyes drag from mine to his. “Remember that little pact we made in the beginning? No secrets between us? Every little detail could help bring home your daughter. Now—which one of you would like to go first?”
James and I appraise one another, each of us trying mightily to disguise the worried look we long to don like a mask. Secrets. James and I seem to be rife with them these days.
McCafferty draws in a long slow breath. “I see where this is headed. How about I say a name and one of you tells me what they know?” Her bird-like features harden as she looks to me. “Monica Percale.”
“That would be his ex.” I point a mock gun at James.
“I know that,” she sears. “But, tell me, James. What else should I know?”
He looks to me a moment as if asking permission. “I paid her a visit the other night. I practically ransacked the house looking for Reagan.” He bows his head in his hands before coming up for air. “She wasn’t there, of course.”
“What made you think she was there?” McCafferty bleeds her wicked smile as if laying the groundwork for a bear trap.
“Something my father said,” he mumbles the sentence into one long word. Charles. Charles who has been MIA for the last week and a half. Charles, who much like my mother, is out there shaking up the town. I think the two of us could learn a lesson from them. Stop sitting on our sorry asses and get up and do something. Accuse someone of something for God’s sake.
Heather’s head with its freshly embedded hatchet bounces through my mind and a shiver runs through me. That was the end—her abrupt ending. How terrible. No matter what, she didn’t deserve that. Nobody deserves any of this. If it weren’t for Reagan missing, she wouldn’t have been here. If it weren’t for James…
“Your father implicated her”—McCafferty doesn’t look amused—“and you thought enough of it to pursue it.”
“My daughter is missing. If he implied that you had taken her, I would be turning over tables at your home, too.” He gruffs it out a little too hostile. The lack of sleep is brutal. We’ve both morphed into monsters right before our own eyes. “Anyway, I didn’t turn over any tables. I didn’t see anything until I hit the attic. I found some things my father was getting rid of—personal things. She claims to have found them by the side of the road, the curb in front of his house, and was keeping them for me. It was odd. It’s as if she’s been obsessed with me, only I didn’t realize it.”
I offer a peaceable smile and take up his hand in a show of support. It seems James has another hobby, turning women into obsessive lunatics. Although, Hailey seems to have a rather valid reason for tracking him down.
“She contacted me yesterday.” McCafferty purses her lips and the hard lines around her mouth look as if someone carved them deep with a razor. “She said she was being stalked. Imagine that.” She slaps her hand over the table, barks out a short-lived laugh and it startles me. “On top of everything else, she claims someone in this town has been lurking in her bushes.”
“That’s shocking.” I swallow the Heather Evans’ sized lump down my throat—that hatchet makes for a painful ride.
She scoffs at the idea. “What’s shocking is that she caught the girl.”
“Who was it?” James barks. He wants blood. He wants to strangle whoever it is that was snapping those photos of him and sending them to me in an effort to make us both suffer. As sorry as James may be for his wayward ways, he’s equally sorry he got caught.
A vision of Monica driving that hatchet into Heather’s skull makes me unsettled. She’s too self-centered, probably too afraid of icky blood, wouldn’t want to soil her shoes. It was too violent for a woman to have pulled off, wasn’t it?
McCafferty takes a moment to glare at me. “A woman by the name of Denise Riley.”
“Who?” Both James and I chant in unison. A part of me was hoping it was Heather, so that when they seek out her murderer—all roads would point to that high-pitched, real live bouncing Betty Boop doll, Monica. I’m so sick of my husband’s girlfriends mucking up the water in my life. For once I’d like to see one sent to visit my sister permanently.
“Denise Riley is a parolee from Saginaw County. It turns out she’s been summoned to Concordia for work.”
My mind stagnates on the word parolee. Dear God, Janey has finally come through.
“What kind of work you ask?” McCafferty initiates all the sarcasm she can muster. Not her strongest suit. “She belongs to an internet of women who run something akin to a gang network that spans in and out of prison. The ones that get out vow to take care of the needs of their new prison family, and very often they do.” Her lids lower a notch. Originally this would strike me as sexual, but in McCafferty’s case it’s clear she’s letting us know she has the upper hand. “Do you know anyone on the inside who might need a few things done for you?”
“Oh my shit,” I say it out loud, so stunned I can hardly breathe. “Jane would never do that.” It’s a lie, but one I’d best perpetuate. My God. Heather. Jane has some madwoman running around town with an ax to the grind—literally.
“It’s okay.” James brings my hand to his lips for a kiss like a good husband as a wave of nausea takes over.
This can’t be happening. Jane said Heather, Monica and Hailey needed to go. And James—she wanted to save him for herself. But knowing my sister, she would be willing to settle for a close knife-wielding second.
My eyes widen as I look at my husband’s gorgeous face. Those high-cut cheekbones, that straight beautiful nose, they could so easily be rearranged by a hatchet. Dear God, whatever happened to simply telling someone off? Did she need to bury an oversized razor into the poor woman’s skull?