Down the Darkest Road (17 page)

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Authors: Tami Hoag

BOOK: Down the Darkest Road
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“No, really, don’t.”
“Well, I’m coming over there soon. I want to see my little Leah. I’ll take her someplace special. We’ll have a day, just her and I.”
Bump had been almost as despondent over Leslie’s disappearance as Lance and Lauren. He had sat in their family room and sobbed like a baby the day they found out Leslie’s bike and shoe had been found.
He had doted on Leah in the years since, which had been nice for her, especially after Lance had died. He had stepped in as a surrogate father.
“Her birthday is coming up,” he said, as if Lauren needed reminding. “We’ve got to do something special.”
“She’ll like that.”
They would all celebrate Leah’s birthday and pretend to be normal for a few hours.
Sissy’s belief was that there could be no real normalcy without closure. Lauren didn’t know that there could be normalcy with closure, either.
What did
closure
even mean at this point?
Getting Leslie back? She still held out some hope that could happen, but it wouldn’t mean closure. One door would close, and another would open. There would be a long, long journey of healing ahead for Leslie—for all of them.
Did closure mean finding Leslie’s remains? One question would be answered, but the grief would be overwhelming and never ending.
Did it mean bringing Roland Ballencoa to justice?
What was justice?
She thought of her hour spent at the shooting range.
Body, body, head shot, breathe . . .
She had wished him dead a thousand times. Ten thousand times. She had imagined torturing him to death as he may have done to her daughter. She had imagined a dozen different ways to do it. Two dozen. But would she have closure after?
The stark, depressing truth was there was no such thing as closure. Tragedy was a heavy stone dropped in an ocean as still as glass. The effects rippled out and kept going and going and going . . .
Exhausted by the conundrum, Lauren walked out of the office. Too restless to go to bed, she wandered the house.
She had told Anne she would be fine to stay alone. After all, Leslie had not been taken from their home. No one had violated that space. But this house, on the end of a dead-end road, seemed even bigger at night. It was at night that she noticed all the large windows on the first floor and wondered why she hadn’t pushed Sissy to put in plantation shutters or drapes or something.
At night the views the windows had framed in daylight became gaping black holes. What was inside the house became the view to whatever eyes looked in from outside.
Chilled by the idea, Lauren pulled Lance’s old black cardigan sweater around her slender frame, imagining that it was Lance’s embrace wrapping around her, reassuring her. She hadn’t washed it in two years. She liked to believe it still smelled like him.
Even as she surrounded herself with the memory of him, she cursed him for leaving her, for leaving Leah. Now Leah had left her—if only for the night—and she was truly alone.
Like a cat in the night, Lauren prowled the first floor of the house in the dark. Beyond the house, a huge fat moon hung like a Chinese lantern in the sky, its quicksilver glow spilling over the countryside and in through the windows.
It was after two in the morning.
She turned the lights on in the kitchen/great room and hit the Play button on the answering machine as she poured a glass of wine. After Bump’s call early in the evening she had left the phone to answer itself. One telemarketer and a solicitation from the conservation league, then a voice that made her cringe despite the rough sexiness of the tone.
“Lauren, it’s Greg Hewitt. I’m just checking in on you. Call me.”
As if
, Lauren thought, erasing the message.
She went to the faded blue antique console table she had situated behind the oversized sofa. She had placed it there with the idea that Sissy would come inside and toss her handbag on it, and her grandkids would come in and throw their book bags on it. It was where both she and Leah usually discarded their purses when they came in—except hers wasn’t there.
Strange. She was sure she had put it there. She always put it there.
She stepped back from the table, eyeing it with suspicion, as if perhaps she suspected the table itself of devouring the bag.
She always put her bag on this table.
Outside, the wind picked up like a sudden exhalation from the night sky, and the trees rattled and shook. Lauren jumped and pulled Lance’s sweater tighter around her thin frame.
She always put her bag on this table.
She thought back on the day, mentally retracing her steps. She had come home from the gun range, her first priority to get her gear bag from the trunk and bring it inside. She wanted the Walther where she could get at it if she needed it. It was of no use left in the car.
She had brought the bag in and taken it directly to her bedroom. Then Sissy had called from her hotel in San Francisco, where she was attending an antiques show, and they must have talked for an hour. And then . . . She had poured a glass of white wine and run a bath.
Maybe she hadn’t brought the purse in after all. She had gotten distracted. She had thought at one point of possibly going back into town to pick up something for dinner. Instead she had grazed on some pistachios and almonds, and gone to work.
She didn’t like the idea that she’d left her bag in the car. Like most women, her purse was like a security blanket to a two-year-old. Half her life was in it. Her wallet was in it. Her last picture of Leslie was in it.
Taken by Kent Westin, it showed Leslie pouting but pretty at the birthday dinner the night before she went missing. Kent had given it to Lauren the following week along with his regrets for what he had said that night as they had left the restaurant—that Leslie needed to be taught a lesson.
One of the casualties of the investigation into Leslie’s disappearance had been the Lawtons’ relationship with the Westins. Kent had been questioned several times, and had taken—and passed—a polygraph. But the Westins had then pulled back, and everything had become awkward and uncomfortable between them. There had never been another annual joint birthday dinner, or any other kind of dinner.
Lauren had never entirely forgiven Kent the remarks he had taken back or the fact that the police had looked so closely at him. Until Roland Ballencoa had emerged as the likely suspect, Leslie’s objections to that last dinner had kept whispering in the back of her mind. She didn’t like the Westins. She thought Dr. Westin was creepy.
But still Lauren had carried that snapshot taken by Kent Westin in her bag for four years. She began to feel panicky that it was out in the car, that she couldn’t just pull it out and look at it. It was important to her that she looked at it before she went to sleep. She worried irrationally that if she didn’t, she would forget what her daughter looked like. And if she forgot what her daughter looked like, it would almost be like conceding that Leslie was dead and gone.
Lauren went to the door but stopped short of reaching for the knob. An uneasy feeling crept over her. Outside, the wind chattered through the trees. The black windows seemed to grow even larger than they were, inviting the world to look through them.
She knew what it felt like to be watched. It felt like a cold breath going down the back of her shirt. She shivered.
The property is gated
, she told herself.
Fences could be climbed.
She thought of the photograph in her purse, and already in her mind the image of her daughter’s face was beginning to fade. A lump the size of a fist came into her throat.
She had to go out to the car and get the bag.
Decision made, Lauren hurried through the house, up the stairs to her bedroom. Her black duffel bag sat on the floor beside the dresser. She tossed it on the bed, unzipped it, and took out the Walther and a loaded clip. She shoved the clip into the gun, pulled back the slide, and chambered a round.
When she returned to the kitchen she stood before the door, took a big, deep breath, and turned the knob.
She had left the car in the driveway rather than putting it in the garage because her plan when she had come home had been to go out again. It looked vaguely sinister sitting there, like a big, sleek black panther. And it looked farther away than she wanted it to be.
Holding the Walther close to her shoulder, finger on the trigger, she stepped outside. Her heart was pounding as she moved toward the BMW, looking to one side and then the other. She went to the passenger door and looked in, relieved to see the shape of her bag on the seat.
No one had taken it. She was just paranoid and neurotic.
She grabbed the purse, but before she could pull back from the car, something caught her eye, something on the windshield on the driver’s side.
Lauren stepped back, slinging the strap of her bag over her shoulder. A piece of paper fluttered against the windshield, beneath the wiper blade. She looked around, adjusting her grip on the Walther. The wind seemed to slip inside her clothes and down her back.
She went around the hood of the BMW and snatched the paper off the windshield.
In the amber light from the sconces that flanked the garage doors she could tell it was a photograph. Black and white. Someone had come onto the property without her knowing and pinned a photograph beneath the wiper of her car.
She felt violated without even knowing what the subject of the photograph might be. She imagined she could feel someone’s eyes on her as she backed toward the garage, closer to the light. The shadows in the yard moved with the wind.
Lauren’s heart fluttered in her chest like a frightened bird. She didn’t dare to take her eyes off her surroundings and look at the photograph for more than a few seconds at a time.
A person. A person standing behind a car. Dark clothes. A dark cap.
Me.
Panic-stricken now, she walked backward as quickly as she could.
Hurry, hurry, hurry
. She felt as if a thousand eyes were chasing her as she went.
She fumbled with the doorknob, trying to turn it with the hand that held the photograph as she clutched the gun to her with the other. Tears blurred her vision. She was hyperventilating.
The knob turned and the door pushed in and Lauren almost tripped and fell in her haste to get inside and lock the door behind her. She banged into the console table, set the gun aside, and nearly upended a lamp in the attempt to turn it on.
Her hands were shaking like a palsy victim’s. She looked at the photograph again. It was her standing behind her car in the parking lot of the gun range.
Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God . . .
She turned around, looked out the windows, expecting to see a face staring in at her. There was no one there—not to be seen—but Lauren felt their eyes on her. She felt naked and exposed.
Hiking the strap of her bag up on her shoulder, she grabbed the Walther and hurried through the house and up the stairs. In her room she put the gun down, emptied the contents of her purse onto the bed, and sifted through them impatiently, sorting out the one thing she was looking for—a business card.
Detective Anthony Mendez.
19
 
“He left this on the windshield of my car in my driveway.”
Mendez carefully took the photograph by one corner and frowned as he studied it. Black and white, and slightly grainy in quality, it was a curled eight-by-ten print on the kind of paper used by photographers in their own darkrooms, not something developed at a drugstore or photo shop. In the background he recognized the front porch of the Canyon Gun Range. Lauren Lawton stood behind her black BMW. She appeared to be staring straight at the photographer.
“You didn’t see him?” he asked.
“No. I had no idea anyone was there.”
“What were you doing at the gun range?”
“Shooting a gun.” A defensive edge crept into her voice.
They stood in the great room of the house she was renting on Old Mission Road. The place was like something out of a magazine—a big stone fireplace, a high vaulted ceiling, blue and white furniture that looked like no one had ever sat in it. All of the pillows on the couches were just so, with knife creases chopped into the tops of them.
“You own a firearm?” he asked.
“Yes. It was my husband’s.”
He didn’t like that idea. Not that he was against citizens owning guns per se. But Lauren Lawton was a woman who had been through a tremendous amount of stress and was by all accounts living on edge. She claimed Roland Ballencoa had stalked her in Santa Barbara. A handgun and a paranoid woman with nerves strung tight was not a combination destined for a good outcome.
“Is your paperwork in order?” he asked.
Her blue eyes flashed like light hitting steel. “Who the fuck cares?” she snapped. “I didn’t call you out here to see if I’ve dotted all my
i
’s on my gun permit. Roland Ballencoa came onto my property and put that photograph on my car.”

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