Blind Spot (25 page)

But it was Alexa on the other end. “I’m okay, Mom. Really, I’m fine.”

“You went to the hospital?” Suki asked again. “Saw a doctor?”

“Ms. Amato took me to Emerson. They tried to call you. Is your pager broken?”

“What did the doctor say?”

“She said it was just a sprain. That I’ll be fine.”

“What’s her name?” Suki demanded. “I’ll call her.”

“Relax, Mom.” Alexa’s voice reverberated with annoyed teenager, and Suki was relieved to hear her sound so normal. “You’re making way too big a deal out of this. It’s nothing. An accident. Really.”

“Are you sure?” Now that she knew Alexa was all right, Suki could wonder about causes. Had it just been an accident, or had Alexa been careless, distracted by her meeting with Lindsey, by all that was happening to her? Cold fingers squeezed Suki’s stomach. Could Alexa have hurt herself on purpose? Or could this be another spiteful act like the bottle through the window? “Tell me exactly what happened.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Alexa said in the tone she used when she was hiding something. “I’ll tell you later.”

“No,” Suki said. “I need you to tell me now.” Could McKinna be behind this, too? Even with all he had done, Suki found it hard to believe.

“I fell.”

Suki didn’t need to see Alexa to know the sulky pout on her lips, the defiant edge with which she was holding her shoulders. “And exactly
how
did you fall?” she asked, her fear biting into each word.

Alexa didn’t say anything for a long moment. “I was doing the horse.” Her voice was slow and plodding, as if she were speaking to a not-too-bright child. “And when I went to jump, the handle came off in my hand.”

“And then?”

“I fell.”

“Who was on the horse before you?” Suki asked. “Was there anyone hanging around the equipment?”

“What are you talking about?” Alexa was really annoyed now. “I don’t get what you mean.”

“Were you feeling okay?” Suki asked, switching tacks. “Did you have any residual effects from the test this morning? Dizziness? Nausea?”

Another long pause. “And if I did it would all be your fault.”

Suki had had enough. “You stay right where you are, young lady,” she ordered. “I’m on my way home—and when I get there you’re going to tell me exactly what went on this afternoon.” She punched the
END
button without saying good-bye and felt good about it.

•  •  •

Alexa was in a major snit when Suki got to the house. “You hung up on me,” she cried as soon as Suki walked into the family room. “You can’t treat me like that. I’m a person too!” She stood in front of Suki, her hands on her hips.

Suki eyed the Ace bandage wrapped around her daughter’s left wrist; it looked fairly innocuous. “Calm down,” she said, trying to control the edge in her voice as her concern for Alexa’s safety ebbed and her anger returned. “I’m sorry I hung up on you, but you can be a bit annoying, you know.”

“And so can you!” Alexa fired back as Kyle slipped from the room.

“Sit,” Suki ordered, pointing to the couch.

Alexa swept her arms outward and dropped into the couch with an exaggerated curtsy. “Yes, your majesty.”

The anger that had been building within Suki all day boiled over. “Don’t you dare talk to me like that!” she exploded. “Don’t you understand what’s going on here? What we’re contending with? Do you know that Chief Gasperini was at school today? That he was asking about you. About Jonah and a possible motive. Motive! Motive!” Suki had never spoken to either of her children like this, but she was beyond restraint. “And as soon as he gets someone to give him a motive, you’re arrested! In handcuffs. In jail!”

Alexa was not impressed. “Chief Gasperini’s an asshole,” she said as if her words negated Suki’s. “He’s stupid.”

“Don’t underestimate the man, young lady,” Suki advised. “He’s dangerous and he’s smart and he’s got a mission.”

“No one’s gonna talk to
him
,” Alexa said defiantly. “He’ll never find out anything.”

“Which anything?” Suki demanded. “The pregnancy? The abortion? Or the drugs you and Brendan and who knows who else have been doing or selling or whatever it is you little liars have been up to.”

“I haven’t been up to anything!” Alexa screamed and jumped up from the couch. “You don’t believe me. You believe some stupid cop and Brendan and Devin before you believe your own daughter! Well, fine! I’m done with you. I don’t want any more of your help. I don’t want any more of you!” She burst into tears and flew up the stairs to her room. The door slam shook the house.

Suki got up early the next morning to work on the Kern evaluation. Politely worded second notices—“if your check has been mailed, please disregard with our apologies”—had arrived yesterday from both the telephone company and the plumber, and Mike had asked when he could expect the next installment of the evaluation. It was Saturday. The kids were asleep. The house was quiet. But instead of being able to escape into work, as she had hoped, Suki was consumed with worry. With each passing day her worries shifted and changed, but never diminished. Sometimes the huge and hulking concerns of morning became removed by afternoon, nothing, in light of new, more terrible revelations. Yet, the earlier worries still persisted, always hovering, always there.

Suki stared at the materials spread on her desk—the social, medical and legal debris of Lindsey Kern’s life—and she realized why she was unable to escape within them. This case wasn’t just a job she had taken, a means to an end, a check, a mortgage payment, an entree into another job; this case was about her daughter, her mother, and about Suki herself. About what was possible—and what wasn’t.

Suki stared through the small window over her desk. And now she had drug abuse to add to her list of worries. Alexa. It was as if the girl who had been a piece of her, a part of her heart, her being, for seventeen years, had vanished, a new, unknown girl left in her place. Suki threw down her pen and stood up. She needed to look at Alexa, to see that she was indeed the same girl she had always been.

Suki climbed the stairs and slowly pushed Alexa’s door open a crack. She peered into the darkness. Then she threw the door open wide and flipped on the light. “Alexa?” she called into the room she saw did not contain her daughter. She went to the window overlooking the carport. The car was gone. And so was Alexa.

Suki raced down to the kitchen to see if Alexa had left a note, but there was none. She whirled around, stared at the colorful poster board still pasted in the window, turned back to the table. Where had Alexa gone? Suki’s mind flew to every possible disaster from an overdose of drugs, to a psychotic break, to depression-induced suicide.

Suki thought of Jen’s walking wounded, the haunted kids who sat, staring at nothing, as they waited for their appointments. She thought of all the teenagers she had seen when she worked in Roxbury, all their fear, anger, hopelessness. All their suicide attempts. Cut it out, she scolded herself. Yesterday’s fall had just been a fall. Alexa had probably gone for a ride. Just in case, she would call the police to find out if there had been any accidents. But when Suki looked at the boarded-up window, she knew the police were not the answer. Maybe Alexa was at Kendra’s. She reached for the phone book.

Alexa walked in just as Suki was dialing Kendra’s number.

Suki slammed down the phone. “Where have you been?”

“I went for a drive.” Alexa pulled a leaf from the bottom of her jeans and threw it in the trash. She didn’t meet her mother’s eye. “To Hayden Park. I walked in the woods. I needed to be outside. To breathe.”

“Did it ever occur to you to write a note? To let me know where you’d gone?” Suki asked, her voice rising with each word. “To think about someone beside yourself?” she added before she could stop herself. She braced for an explosion.

Instead, Alexa dropped into a chair at the kitchen table. “Sorry, Mom,” she said softly. There were twigs caught in her curls. “It was thoughtless, I know, really thoughtless. I won’t do it again. I promise.”

Suki’s anger dissipated in the face of Alexa’s apology and distress. She sat down next to her daughter. “I guess we’re all a little stressed-out, huh? I’m sorry I’ve been yelling so much.”

Alexa twisted the silver ring on her thumb.

“So you went for a walk?”

Alexa twisted the silver ring on her forefinger.

“Was it nice?” Suki turned so she could see out the dining room window. “It’s a nice morning. Good time to be out.”

“I had a really bad nightmare.”

Suki could see a vein pulsing at the right side of Alexa’s forehead. “Is that why you left?”

Alexa nodded.

“Do you want to tell me about it?”

“No,” Alexa said, shaking her head. “Yes.”

Suki reached out and pressed her daughter’s cold hand between her two warm ones. Alexa’s fingernails were dirty.

“It was like I was awake and asleep at the same time,” Alexa finally told her. “Like I was dreaming and not-dreaming.”

Suki didn’t say anything. She held Alexa’s hand.

“Lindsey was in my room.”

Suki jerked back in surprise.

Alexa looked at her mother with frightened eyes, and Suki gave her hand a quick squeeze. Alexa sighed a shuddering sigh, then continued. “She was there and not-there. Kind of see-through. Floating, hovering like a ghost. She motioned to me, and even though she didn’t say anything, I could hear her. She told me to come with her.”

Suki nodded.

“Then I started floating, too. Out of my room, out of the house.” Alexa shook her head and her hair fell in clumps around her face. “But it didn’t feel like a dream—and I don’t remember it like a dream. It seems more like something that really happened. Like a memory.” Alexa’s description matched the report of precognitive dreams in the parapsychology textbook.

Suki pushed her chair closer to Alexa’s and wrapped her arms around her as she remembered Lindsey talking about how she enhanced her powers of precognition and clairvoyance through astral projection, how astral projecting was her way of “getting out of prison.” Suki pressed Alexa closer. “Dreams come in all types,” she said. “Some are fragmented. Some are clear.”

“That’s not the bad part,” Alexa whispered.

Suki played with a limp curl on Alexa’s forehead. Her hair used to be so springy, shiny with youth and life. Now it was dull, sluggish. Just like Alexa. She let go of the curl.

“We went to the cemetery. The one where … where …” Alexa took a large gulp of air and then hiccuped.

“I know,” Suki said soothingly. “I know.”

“There was a funeral going on. It was, it was—” Alexa buried her head in Suki’s breasts. “I can’t tell you, I can’t,” she wailed. “I don’t want to say it.”

“It’s okay, baby. It’s okay. You don’t have to say anything you don’t want to say.”

Alexa cried quietly for a long time. Then she raised her tear-streaked face to Suki. “It was Chief Gasperini’s funeral,” she said. “His wife and daughters were crying. They were each carrying a white rose.”

Not another precognitive vision, Suki thought. Not another death. Not another person whom Alexa had reason to want dead. “Just because you dreamed it,” she said, “doesn’t mean it’s going to come true.”

But that afternoon, when Kenneth phoned to tell her Charlie had been killed in an early-morning boating accident, Suki wasn’t all that surprised.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

S
uki didn’t know how to tell Alexa. Or what to tell Alexa. She knew she was going to have to tell her that Charlie was dead, that there had been an explosion on his boat involving gas fumes and a great deal of fire, that there
would
be a funeral at which his wife and daughters cried and carried white roses. It was how to tell it so Alexa suffered the least. But even as she worried about her phrasing, Suki recognized the problem wasn’t in the words she used to recount the incident—it was in the part of the story she didn’t have to tell. In the underlying truth implied by the events: that once again, Alexa had foreseen the future. A future that held death.

Suki raised her eyes to the ceiling of her study. Alexa was upstairs in her room with Kendra; Suki could hear their muted words, the pounding bass on the CD they were playing. Just a few feet away. A lifetime away. For, as was true with Jonah’s death, after Alexa heard about Charlie’s, her life would never be the same. From that moment on, Alexa would live in a world in which all the rules were changed. Where nothing was for certain. A world Suki had entered when she picked up the phone and heard Kenneth’s voice.

Kenneth had been distraught. “I can’t believe it,” he kept repeating. “How can it be true? I can’t believe Charlie’s really dead.” Despite his disagreements with his boss over how Jonah’s case was being handled, Kenneth was genuinely fond of Charlie—
had been
genuinely fond of Charlie. So had Suki, for that matter. Before Jonah, Charlie had been a family friend, a colleague at the library, a fishing buddy of Stan’s—and Alexa’s.

Alexa and Stan had gone fishing with Charlie almost every Saturday morning between March and December. Kyle had never shown any interest in the sport, but Alexa had loved these adventures. She had been fascinated by the speed and agility of
The Chief
, Charlie’s sleek powerboat, and Charlie, whom she had idolized, had taught her everything about his craft—from the mechanics of the engine to the best way to tow a water skier. Charlie. Another entry on the growing list of men who had betrayed and abandoned Alexa.

At yet, Suki realized it was quite possible that Charlie’s death was going to be good for Alexa. What were the chances the new chief would be a friend of Ellery McKinna’s? That he would be as easily intimidated by the DA’s office? It seemed quite possible that another chief, a different man, unburdened by friends and political obligations, would see that Alexa hadn’t killed Jonah. Maybe this new chief would even begin looking for the real murderer.

The bass above her head gave a powerful beat, and Suki pushed herself from her chair. She walked slowly up the stairs and knocked on Alexa’s door. No response. She knocked again. Louder. Harder.