Tell Me You're Sorry (14 page)

“Oh, you're just itching to get at her, aren't you?” she said, with a laugh. “I feel the same way about Number One Son, especially since we almost had him the other night. Anyway, about this sister-in-law, have patience, my pet. We'll be in Seattle soon, and she'll be just three hours away. You'll get to scratch that itch in a little while. And our pretty lady in black, well, the next funeral she attends will be her own.”

Sitting in his car with the phone to his ear, the man didn't say anything.

But he was smiling.

 

 

“Don't be afraid,” Ryan Farrell told her. “C'mon in . . .”

Dressed in his dark blue blazer and the slightly crooked tie, he held open the crypt door for her.

“But I'm not really with the immediate family,” Stephanie whispered. She felt like she was intruding.

“It's okay,” he said. “You know you're welcome here.”

Shyly, Stephanie just nodded a thank-you. As she passed by him into the crypt, he bowed and whispered to her—like a maître d' in a restaurant: “The veal marsala is excellent tonight.”

All at once, she realized she was in Nelo's—with the red and white checkered tablecloths and the big map of Italy behind the bar. She knew her parents were sitting at one of the tables, but she couldn't find them. She hadn't realized there were so many hallways and hidden alcoves to the little restaurant. She searched and searched. It was all she could do to keep from crying out for them.

Pulling aside the curtain to another niche, she found her sister, Rebecca, sitting at the glass-top kitchen table from Rebecca and Scott's place in Portland. Stephanie sank down in the chair across from her. She was exhausted from the search for her parents, and it took her a while to catch her breath. “God, I've missed you so much, sis,” she said finally. “I thought you were dead. I thought you'd committed suicide . . .”

Rebecca laughed and shook her head. “I didn't commit suicide. That's crazy. I'd have left you a note or something.”

Stephanie looked down at the place setting in front of her: knife, spoon, fork, and napkin. Across the table, Rebecca had no place setting—just their grandfather's old straight razor. There was blood on it.

“Look at my other smile, Steffi,” she heard her sister say. “See it?”

She glanced up at Rebecca, whose eyes suddenly looked dead. Her mouth yawned open and then her head tipped back, revealing a crimson slit across her throat. The blood started running down her neck.

Stephanie screamed.

She bolted up, and found herself on top of a bed. Her heart pounded furiously. For a few moments, she didn't know where she was. Had she screamed out loud? She wasn't sure.

She felt cold, and realized she hadn't covered herself with a blanket or anything. She wore a T-shirt and sweatpants. She remembered putting them on to go work out at the hotel gym. But then she'd decided to lie down for just five minutes. Rubbing her eyes, Stephanie numbly stared at the swirly-patterned, brown bedspread, and then at the matching curtains, which were closed across the window. Finally, she looked at the digital clock on the nightstand. It was 6:47, and she was in her room at the Hilton Garden Inn in Lake Forest. She'd been asleep for over two hours.

She thought of the horrible dream, and a sad, aching emptiness swelled inside her. From time to time, she got depressed on the road, alone in some hotel room. It was especially rough since Rebecca's death last year. She really didn't feel connected to anyone—except in her dreams. Yes, there was Jim, but too often she couldn't depend on him.

Stephanie was trying to talk herself into getting up when her cell phone rang. She grabbed it off the nightstand and blinked a few times to focus on the caller ID:

She clicked on the phone. “Hello, Marlene?”

“Hi, Stephanie, I got your message,” said Scott's mother. “That name you gave me . . . Brent . . .”

“Brent Farrell,” she interjected.

“Yes, well, it doesn't ring a bell,” she said. “At least, I don't remember Scott mentioning him.”

“He didn't go to Chicago on business much, did he?”

“Not that I know of,” Marlene said with a sigh.

She could tell Scott's mother was getting a bit tired of her calling up every other week with some question or new theory about what had happened to Scott, Halle, and the kids. “I know Scott was born in Pittsburgh,” Stephanie continued. “You didn't live in the Chicago area at any time, did you?”

“Well, we lived in Green Bay, Wisconsin, for six years, and Scott was in high school during some of that time. He used to spend a month every summer in Winnetka. You know, in the north suburbs—along the lake? My best friend growing up, Gloria Ingalls—she was Scott's godmother. Her son, Dick, became pals with Scott. He used to stay with them . . .”

Stephanie grabbed a pen off the nightstand and scribbled on the Hilton notepad:

“About what year was this?” she asked.

“Well, it would have been between 1983 and '86. Scott used to love those visits. But he never went back after high school. Gloria invited him several times, but he was always too busy. I don't think he and Dick ever saw each other again.”

“Do you have any idea how I might be able to get ahold of this Dick Ingalls?” Stephanie asked.

“Oh, he passed away about three or four years ago,” Marlene said. “It was so sad. He lost his wife, and then remarried. Gloria said he and the kids were so happy. It was like a fresh start. But they were all killed while they were on vacation in Lake Geneva—a house fire. Dick, his new wife and the three kids, all gone. Such a tragedy . . .”

“You said he lost his first wife. How? She didn't kill herself, did she?”

“No.” She heard Mrs. Hamner click her tongue against her teeth. “No, Stephanie. She had some kind of stroke or aneurism. It was a sudden thing. The poor girl, she was only in her thirties. Gloria was heartbroken. She adored her. I don't think she ever got to meet the second wife. In fact, I remember her telling me in one of our last conversations. Gloria was living in Vero Beach at the time. It was about a year after the first wife died. She said Dick had a whirlwind romance with this woman. After they got married, Dick was going to fly Gloria up to Chicago to meet the new wife. They were living in Glencoe. I think. Anyway, it never happened. The family died in the fire a week or two before Gloria was supposed to visit.”

Stephanie was still scribbling on the pad:

It seemed part of the same pattern.

Stephanie got up from the bed and started pacing around the hotel room. “Marlene, would it be all right if I called your friend?”

Mrs. Hamner hesitated. “Oh, well, you can't. She passed away about two years ago. That last time we talked was several months before she died. I didn't even know she was sick. It was cancer.”

“Is Mr. Ingalls still alive?”

“No, he passed away about twenty years ago.”

Stephanie frowned. “Listen, are you certain Scott and—and this Dick Ingalls never met up again?”

“Well, I'm not absolutely positive. But when I telephoned Scott to tell him about Dick and his family getting killed in the fire, he—ah, well, he seemed to feel bad. But he wasn't exactly devastated. I remember him mentioning he hadn't seen Dick Ingalls in twenty-five years. Then when I suggested he send some flowers or a note to Gloria, he seemed reluctant. He said something like, ‘I'm not good at that. Rebecca handles that kind of thing' . . .”

“It sounds like he and Dick Ingalls had some sort of falling-out,” Stephanie said.

“I always suspected as much,” Mrs. Hamner replied. “And before you ask, I have no idea what it was about. Considering how old they were, they probably fought over a football game or some girl. Anyway—in answer to your question earlier, I'm pretty certain those two were finished with each other before they even finished high school . . .”

Stephanie wondered if there was any connection to Brent Farrell.

“Is this any help to you?” Scott's mother asked.

“It might be,” Stephanie replied. “I'm not sure yet. But either way, I appreciate it, Marlene. I know you must be pretty fed up with my calling every week or so.”

“I'm not ‘fed up' with you, dear,” she said quietly. “It just hurts to keep dwelling on this. You've been picking at a scab. After six months, I think it's time you leave it alone and let it heal.”

“I'm sorry, Marlene,” she murmured.

Scott's mother sighed. “So—I guess I'll probably be talking to you in a week or two.”

“Probably,” Stephanie admitted. “Thanks, Marlene.”

 

 

Twenty minutes after hanging up with Scott's mother, Stephanie was taking advantage of her room's free Wi-Fi. She found an article in the
Chicago Tribune
's online archives, dated August 9, 2009:

According to the article, everyone died in their beds—the children of smoke inhalation. As for the two adults, they were burned beyond recognition. Authorities were still investigating the cause of the fire. They suspected it was faulty wiring in the old house.

Accompanying the piece was a photo of the Ingalls family, which included the new wife and stepmother, Vanessa. They were posed in front of someone's yacht at a marina. Squinting in the sun, the two teenagers looked a bit bored, but the younger boy was smiling gleefully. Behind them was Dick, looking handsome in his Izod sport shirt and baseball cap. His bride was beside him, clinging to his arm. Her hair was blowing in the wind. She was laughing—and quite hard to recognize in those big sunglasses.

But she didn't look anything like Halle—or Lacee Farrell—in that wedding photo.

There was frustratingly little in the article about Vanessa Black Ingalls, except that she was from Toledo, and she'd been married to Richard for only three weeks. Stephanie tried to find images of her on Google. But she kept coming up with photos of an actress, Vanessa Hudgens, and people on Facebook who didn't resemble Dick Ingalls's wife at all.

Her cell phone rang, startling her. Stephanie snatched it off the desktop and checked the caller ID:

She clicked on the phone. “Hello?”

“Stephanie Coburn?”

“Speaking. Is this Ryan?”

“Yeah, hi. My friend, Billy, said you came all the way from Portland to talk to me. So I figured I owed you a phone call at least.”

“Well, that's very nice of you. I'm sorry I bothered you today. I know my timing was terrible, but I wasn't sure if I'd have another chance to see you.”

“That's okay,” he said. “So—listen, I checked out the link you wrote down in your note. And I'm—well, first off, I'm very sorry about your sister and her family. I guess there are some similarities, but I really don't think what happened there has anything to do with me or my family. Plus I checked online for any follow-up stories to that link. And I'm sure you already know—a couple of guys have already confessed to those murders.”

“Yes,” Stephanie said. “But I think the police forced a confession out of them, because those two teenagers were responsible for a bunch of other robberies in the area.”

“Even so, what happened to my family was totally different.”

“Not if you look at the whole picture,” Stephanie pointed out. With the phone to her ear, she got up from the hotel desk and walked over to the window. She could see the traffic on the Tri-State Tollway below. “First, there was my sister's suicide. Then in less than half a year, my brother-in-law was married again—to some stranger. I didn't even get a chance to meet her. No one did. Just weeks after the wedding, my sister's family was killed, wiped out—”

“I know,” Ryan said quietly. “Like I told you, I read the article.”

“I'm sorry if this seems—tactless, but when your mother . . .” Stephanie hesitated. “Well, did she leave any kind of note?”

There was silence on the other end of the line.

“The reason I'm asking is because my sister and I were very close. She would have told me if she had a problem so serious that she'd take her own life. This was a total shock. The only kind of note she left behind was a couple of words scribbled on the bathroom mirror to my brother-in-law. It just never made sense to me. And then this woman took her place, and in short order, she went through my brother-in-law's money—all of it. No one knows where it went.”

“I don't get what you're saying.”

“The three hundred and fifty thousand your father supposedly embezzled, that disappeared, too.” Stephanie sighed. “Don't you see? It's almost too much of a coincidence. Your mother's suicide, the hasty remarriage . . .”

“If you think the woman who married your brother-in-law is the same woman who married my dad, then you're wrong. I already told you that today. The lady in that picture you showed me wasn't Lacee. And as for my mom's suicide . . .” His voice trembled a bit. “She didn't leave any note. But if my father made her anywhere near as miserable as he made me, then I kind of understand why she hung herself . . .”