All the Little Liars (16 page)

“So there are possible scenarios that would account for one or the other of the kids being taken, but not one that would account for all of them,” I said. “This is just crazy.”

Trumble nodded. “It is. But we're working on it. Had you ever considered that Phillip might have left you voluntarily?”

“No, of course not. Why would he?”

“He left his parents' house without telling them where he was going,” she reminded me. “Why wouldn't he do that again?”

This was not the first time Phillip's adventure had led someone down the wrong path. “But he had a
reason
to leave,” I said. “There were big problems in that household, and a lot of marital discord.” That was the nicest way I could think of to put it.

“He's been happy here?” Trumble said. She sounded skeptical, but I thought it was a reflex.

“He was,” Robin said, unexpectedly. “He likes being in a calm household. He likes making new friends. He likes being away from the drama.”

“Did he tell you anything about his father's problems?” the detective asked.

“Not in any detail,” Robin said, to my surprise. He caught my look.

“Sorry, Roe, Phillip asked me not to tell you this because he knew it would upset you,” Robin said. He looked a little guilty.

“Well, he was right. I'm upset.”

“He knew you already didn't think much of your father, and he knew his mother hadn't acted very reliable.”

“You mean when she vanished?” Trumble leaned forward. If she'd been a dog, I would have said she was on point.

“Phillip caught my father cheating on Phillip's mother,” I said. “Phillip got so freaked out by the resultant quarrel, he felt he had to leave. He got here, and I called Betty Jo and Dad to tell them where he was. Betty Jo was so angry that a few days later she left my dad for another man … unless he was lying about that too, lest I get
upset.
Do you know anything about that that I don't know, Robin?”

Robin looked at me unhappily, but he didn't say anything besides, “No.”

We would discuss this later. For sure.

“Have you talked to Betty Jo?” Trumble asked.

“Not since I called them to tell them Phillip was here,” I said. “Before Thanksgiving.”

“Her son is living with you. Wouldn't you expect to hear from his mother, from time to time?”

“I didn't think anything about it until now,” I said honestly. “I figured Betty Jo just couldn't take any more of my dad, and I don't blame her for that. I thought maybe she was so depressed or upset that she needed some alone time. And if she's got a new man friend, maybe she'd be preoccupied with him. It's not like Phillip was a baby, right? And she knew he was safe with me.” Which was kind of ironic, now.

“And she hasn't called your brother, since? Her only child?”

When you put it like that.…
“Okay, so that does seem unusual,” I said. “At least, she hasn't called him that I know of. But Phillip didn't tell me everything.”

“Did your father ever tell you the name of the man, or where they were living?”

“Well … no.” For the first time, I wondered if my father had been telling the truth. Suddenly, Betty Jo leaving with another man didn't seem likely.

“All right,” Trumble said. “We'll talk to him. We'll see.”

I wasn't sure what that meant.

But next, I did something morally ambiguous. I'd been sitting on the news of Clayton's supposed abduction ever since his mother had told me about it. I'd made up my mind I wouldn't tell. And I'd already resisted temptation to tell the detective. But I'd reached the end of my rope. My brother's life might depend on it. I gave Trumble a big clue. “You really need to go talk to Clayton's girlfriend, Connie Bell.” I'd been thinking about Katy Bell's face when she'd seen me in Walmart. She didn't think we were all in this terrible situation together. She knew something, and that something could only have come from Connie.

I believed Connie Bell had left the note on my car. I did not think she'd come home right after school was out. I believed she'd stayed in the car with Clayton. I was sure she knew exactly what had happened that afternoon.

“Why?” Trumble said. She looked at me quizzically. “What does Connie Bell have to do with the situation?”

I glanced at Robin, but I couldn't tell if his face was disapproving or not. Suddenly, it seemed clear to me that I should have spoken up earlier, that I should not have kept the secret, no matter what Karina Harrison had said. It was not only Clayton who was at risk. The more I considered it, the fishier it was that only Clayton had been held for ransom. Why not Phillip? My father might be beset by loan sharks or whatever, but I had a substantial amount of money I'd inherited, and Robin had a substantial amount that he had earned. The Finstermeyers weren't hurting, either, and they had two children to ransom. Aubrey and Emily were on a tight budget, I was sure, but it was reasonable to suppose they would mortgage their house to redeem their daughter.

I gave her a direct look. “Didn't Sarah Washington tell you she thought she saw Clayton's car? Didn't Jessamyn tell you Joss mentioned Clayton in their phone conversation? And where you see Clayton, you see Connie. Have you actually talked to Clayton? Face to face?”

“All right, I'll play along about Connie,” Trumble said, getting up. Robin and I rose, too. “I'll go by her house. And I'll ask to talk to Clayton. Though the older Harrisons, the grandparents, are usually gone at Christmas. Colorado, I think. And Karina and her husband often go with them. So the boy may be there.”

“Karina says her daughter is in Savannah with her other grandmother,” I said.

Trumble looked at me with narrowed eyes. “Meaning?”

“Just saying,” I said.

When Trumble had left, there was a long silence. I wasn't going to defend myself to Robin. I felt both justified and guilty. “I might as well have gone ahead and out-and-out told her I thought Connie knew what had happened. Rather than beat around the bush like that. It's dumb to cling to the illusion that I haven't spilled the ransom beans.” I felt unhappy. Trying to have things both ways almost never worked out.

“I'm not going to say you were wrong,” Robin said. “You did what you had to do. It's not just Clayton's safety that's at stake, not just his parents who are desperate for an answer.” He hugged me. “No good choices, here. I wondered if you might not call the police the minute Clayton's mom told you they'd had a ransom demand. I thought about doing it so you wouldn't have to.”

I sagged against him. “Thanks, Robin.” It would have been devastating if he'd condemned me. And I didn't think I could take much more devastation. “In retrospect,” I said, “it seems amazing that I didn't question Betty Jo's absence earlier. Did she really run away with another man? Did loan sharks take her to make my dad pay up? I just didn't ask enough questions. Of course, I didn't know that you knew some of this already.”

“I'm sorry, honey,” Robin said, his voice muffled in my hair. “Phillip was so worried about what you would think. He knows how angry you are at your father. But Phillip still loves his dad. So I kept his secret.”

My irritation collapsed in the face of his reasons, and in the overwhelming issue of more important things. “None of this makes sense,” I said. “None of it.”

“We must be looking at it wrong.”

“I just can't think of any fresh or new way to look at it.” It made me feel helpless and stupid.

“Here, let's just sit.” Robin and I sat on the couch, and he put his arm around me, and I savored the peace of the moment. But my mind would not let me simply enjoy it. Instead, my thoughts ran around like a hamster on a wheel, and the repetition was surely just as boring.

All those kids missing. Phillip, Joss, Josh, Liza, Clayton. Only a ransom demand for Clayton. The dead Tammy … whose funeral was today. We would have to go, though I hated the idea of all those eyes on me, picking at how I looked, guessing how I felt.

Running a far second behind was the revelation that my father was actually a worse man than I'd thought. I'd been giving him some slack. Lots of men were unfaithful, and though that was despicable, it was also fairly common. I could give him a grudging pass on that, since it really wasn't any of my business, now that he wasn't married to my mother.

Or was it? Didn't that effect the whole family?

It had certainly impacted Phillip.

For the first time, I wondered what my life would have been like if my father had not cheated on my mother. Aida Brattle Teagarden Queensland was not going to put up with that for one minute, and she'd divorced my dad as quickly as the lawyer could file. If my dad hadn't foreseen that, he didn't know her at all. My mother had brought me up by herself. Her own mother had been living, then; I remembered my grandmother Brattle vividly. My father's parents had been dead before he married my mother. Or at least, that was what he'd said. For the first time ever, I wondered if that had been the case.

“Wait a minute,” I muttered out loud. “I don't want to make this more than it is.”

“Mmmmm?” Robin sounded abstracted.

I explained my thought train.

Robin said, “You think his whole life might be a lie? That would be on a grand scale.”

“It does seem unlikely. But if you'd asked me a few days ago, all of this would have seemed unlikely, in the extreme.”

“True,” he said. He scooted down in his seat a little, his arm still around me, and he closed his eyes. I closed mine, too, but I couldn't relax quite enough to take a little nap. Instead, I had a waking dream, the kind where your thoughts pinwheel away and come up with strange situations. I was running on a treadmill that wouldn't slow down. (That was easy to interpret.) I was searching for something in my bedroom, under the bed, up on a shelf in the closet … well, that one was not so difficult either.

We sat with each other for half an hour, which was refreshing. What if I had married a man like my father? I was lucky to be with Robin and lucky to be carrying his baby. And I told him so.

“I think we both got very lucky,” he said, with a smile. “And some day this will be over, and we can enjoy our lives again.”

 

Chapter Twelve

Funerals. I've been to more than my share, I feel. But nothing is as sad as the funeral of a young person who had a whole life yet to live. Since I'd been to the visitation at the funeral home the night before, I tried to persuade myself we didn't need to go to the funeral. But I couldn't quite make myself believe that.

At the funeral home the night before, I'd paused to look at the picture of Tammy set up by her closed coffin. Tammy had been blond, athletic, a star student; her hair was still long in the picture. She hadn't even had a chance to have her picture taken with her new short haircut. She'd had two brothers, both younger, who looked so lost and out of place at a funeral home that my heart ached.

The Finstermeyers, too, were there, looking just as bad as I was sure I did. But Beth told me, “If Joss loved Tammy, I have to represent her at this.”

I admired her very much for looking at the situation that way, and I admired the way she hugged Tammy's mother. Both of them cried, and the dads shook hands in an awkward but sincere expression of commiseration. Joss was missing temporarily, we all hoped. Tammy was missing forever.

The funeral wouldn't be any better. After Trumble's visit to collect the anonymous letter, I had a hard time climbing into my funeral clothes. The promise of rain had been fulfilled. The blustering wet wind made it feel very cold, at least for Georgia; the temperature dipped into the low thirties.

To cap off the morning, the phone rang as we were going out the door. Robin answered, and he looked stricken after a moment. He covered the mouthpiece. “I have a phone conference I'd completely forgotten about. It's with Louise and Gerald.” His American agent and his UK agent. I tried not to look tragic as I waved good-bye. I believed he'd really forgotten. He'd put on a suit for the funeral, which he would never have done if he'd planned on dodging it.

So I went by myself in a dark gray dress with a navy and yellow scarf at the neck. I just needed to see some color that day. I belted my lined black raincoat a little more loosely to accommodate my thickening waistline.

The funeral was at the First Presbyterian Church, which had been built in the thirties and added to ever since. It was a lovely old place, with a ceiling so high that the eye was led upward. The simple large wooden cross hanging behind the altar led me to think of what I should be contemplating: making my own soul right to meet with my maker. I had a lot to offer up as I waited for the service to start. I was seated toward the rear of the church, and I'd scooted into the middle of a pew to make room for people to pack in on either side.

I watched the people entering the church. The one I wanted to see most came down the middle aisle: Connie Bell. She was only seventeen but today she looked much older. Her mother was with her, and Katy looked even worse than Connie. She was carrying a burden, clearly, and I didn't think that burden was solely Clayton's abduction. I wondered if Trumble had visited Connie yesterday as she'd said she would. I wondered if she'd learned anything from the girl. Most of all, I wondered why Connie was at this funeral when she was so obviously emotionally drained.

I was vaguely aware that someone had come in from my left.

“Roe,” said a familiar voice, in the hushed tone people use in church. “Hey, how are you?”

“Perry,” I said. “Good to see you.” I leaned forward to peer over him. “Hi, Keith.” Keith Winslow, a financial adviser, raised his hand in a tiny wave. Perry and Keith had been dating only a short time, but they seemed well suited. Perry had had emotional issues for a while, and I'd been a little scared of him, but his therapy had worked, and his admitting to himself that he was a gay man had been a huge breakthrough. “How's your mom, Perry?”