Finding Claire Fletcher (23 page)

The three of us sat together at the dinner table, as we did on the nights when I was free to roam the house. A perverse family. I said nothing, as usual, while she chattered to him incessantly about shows she had seen on television and things she wanted. Her wish list grew endlessly long. He smiled, beamed and grinned at her, making small sounds of acknowledgement and occasionally closing his eyes as if he were listening to a fine symphony.

I only noticed that she had changed the subject when the pitch of her voice went up. I looked up from my plate to her scowl.

“She was saying mean things about you today. She said you were a pervert and a child molester. Then she said you kidnapped her, and that she wants to go back to her real family.”

He shifted in his chair, looking decidedly uncomfortable. He looked at me. “Is this true, Lynn?”

I stared back at him, my face a blank slate.

“I don’t know why you would say such hurtful things,” he said, looking wounded.

Tiffany’s body lurched upward. “I wouldn’t say those things,” she said. “I didn’t believe them either when she told me.”

He turned back to her. She put a hand on his arm. “I love you,” she said. “She doesn’t care about all the things you do for us but I do.”

“Thank you, Tiffany,” he said.

Her eyes brightened with his attention. “I would never want to leave you. You’re my family now. I just want to make you happy.”

She pulled his hand to her and kissed it. “Do you want me to make you happy?”

His voice croaked. “Y-yes.”

She stood up, tugging him along with her hand. “I want to make you happy right now,” she said.

She led him away, turning back toward me once to smile. What I saw in her eyes was almost as frightening as the look in Sarah’s eyes as she asphyxiated. In Tiffany’s eyes I saw pride and smug satisfaction, coupled with ambition. She enjoyed it. She embraced it for reasons that may have been equally as sick as his were in pursuing her affections.

I shuddered. In four years I had never once felt anything remotely kind toward him. Even when he starved and deprived me and then showered me with bare essentials that seemed like priceless gifts at the time, I could not muster enough gratitude to thank him. I hated him.

If I had spent one hundred years in his house, I don’t believe I would ever succumb to him. I could never feel anything resembling affection toward him. Had I resigned myself to this fate, I might have turned into Tiffany. The only thing that made us different was my resistance to the life she embraced.

There was still something left of Claire Fletcher after all.

It was eight thirty in the evening when Connor arrived home, his stomach full and his mind racing. As he pulled into his driveway, he saw Brianna Fletcher sitting on his front stoop. She sat with her back curved, her arms curled around her drawn up knees. She stood as Connor pulled in, glaring at the car with a look that could have broken the windshield.

She was dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, her short hair styled and giving her a more feminine look, although it did not soften the angry lines of her face as she crossed her arms and regarded Connor. As he approached, he took a scan around the immediate area.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said.

“Why not?” She thrust her chin toward him. Compared to her tiny mother, Brianna was a giant. The Fletcher children must have gotten their height from their father’s side.

“It’s not safe,” he said, brushing past her and unlocking his door.

She turned. “Well, I’m not leaving.”

He sighed and extended a hand into the open doorway. “Come on in then.”

Wordlessly, she moved past him into the house, one shoulder brushing against the doorway so she would avoid touching him.

“Straight ahead,” he said, indicating the living room. “There’s a switch on your left.”

Connor locked and dead bolted the door. He followed her into the living room and motioned to the couch. “Sit,” he said.

Narrowing her eyes at him, Brianna took a seat in the living room. Connor tossed his jacket on the empty chair beside Brianna and settled onto the couch. She glowered at him, arms still crossed tightly across her middle. Connor waited for her to speak which didn’t take long.

“Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?” she said.

“You’ll have to be more specific,” Connor said.

She rolled her eyes. “You know damn well what I mean, Detective.” She spit out the word detective, as if it were a dirty word. “Why are you carrying on with this—this,” she waved a hand in the air angrily. “With Claire’s case? I know my mother came to see you. What are you trying to do?”

Connor held her eyes, kept his voice calm and even, as if he were talking about the weather. “I’m trying to bring Claire home.”

Brianna made a
puh
sound of contempt. “You really think the woman you met was my sister?”

“I know she was.”

“Fingerprints?” Brianna said dismissively. “Hardly reliable.”

Connor smiled. “Well, if the criminal justice system has been relying on them for the last fifty years or so, I’m gonna go ahead and make the leap that fingerprints are a pretty sure thing.”

“The computer could be wrong,” Brianna pointed out.

Connor nodded slowly. “Yeah, it could,” he agreed. “But I don’t think it is.”

“Why are you doing this?” she asked, seeing that she would get nowhere arguing with him over fingerprints.

“It’s my job,” Connor said simply.

“Your job is torturing my family? Giving my mother false hope? Starting this whole ordeal over again? In ten years, no one has even come close to finding out what happened to my sister. What makes you think you can find out the truth? Who do you think you are? How dare you come into our lives and disrupt everything again. We’ve had enough.”

Connor leaned forward. “We’ve had enough?” he asked. “Or you’ve had enough?”

Brianna looked shocked, as if he’d just slapped her across the face. “You have no idea what it’s like,” she said.

“No, I don’t,” Connor agreed calmly. “So why don’t you tell me? I know it wasn’t easy.”

“Easy?” she said, the word lodged in her throat. “Easy? It wasn’t. You know, maybe I’m a selfish bitch for feeling this way, but when that bastard took my sister, it ruined my life. It ruined everything. My whole family may as well have been abducted that day because they were gone.

“My mom forgot about my senior prom because there was some lead on Claire’s case. During my high school graduation, my parents spent more time looking at their watches than the ceremony because they couldn’t wait to get home to man the phones in case a detective called with news about her. Tom had to move me into college my freshman year because my parents were too busy or too upset. Nothing was ever happy again. Nothing was ever the same. Then my parents split up. It was horrible. Nothing that happened to any of us after that meant anything. Nothing could compare to the loss of Claire. Nothing could compete with the possibility that she might still be alive somewhere and might still come home.”

She was no longer looking at him, her eyes drawn to the floor. Tears streamed down her face. With each revelation, her tight posture loosened a bit until her shoulders slumped forward and her hands rested loosely in her lap. Connor let her go on, wondering if she’d ever really talked to anyone about Claire’s abduction before.

“When my sister disappeared, it tore my family apart. My mother is like a different person. The not knowing was the hardest those first two years. Every time the phone rang or there was a knock on the door, we hoped it would be news of Claire. My father and I, we couldn’t live like that, in limbo all the time. Never moving forward, always waiting for a day that would never come. We had to believe that Claire was dead.”

“Why?”

She shrugged and wiped the tears from her cheeks. Her voice squeaked. “It’s just easier. I know that sounds horrible but you don’t understand. You can’t understand. I mean how likely was it that Claire was really still out there somewhere, alive? It’s extremely rare. And if she was—,” Brianna paused, sucking in air, holding down a sob. “What was he doing to her? What has he been doing to her all this time? If she came back, she wouldn’t be my sister. She wouldn’t be Claire.”

“Ms. Fletcher, there are all kinds of things in life that change us, that change who we are, how we act, how we conduct our lives. Whatever Claire has been through, she will be changed by it, she will be different. But she is still your sister,” Connor said.

Brianna hugged herself tightly again. “Look,” she said. “All I’m asking is for you to not put my family through this again. Every so often something turns up, like those other men, and it gets my mother all caught up in it again. When nothing happens, it’s like watching her die. The disappointment is too much, and every time it gets worse. She doesn’t come out of her room. Doesn’t eat, doesn’t talk to anyone.

“My father and I have moved on, but my mother is stuck. Every time something like this happens, she gets further and further away from living a normal life. What if this woman is a hoax? What if it is Claire but you can’t find her? I can’t watch my mother be destroyed again.”

Connor took in her words and let them hang between them for several minutes while he formulated a response. Contrary to her words, Connor didn’t think Brianna had moved on at all. Had she, she wouldn’t be sitting across from him this very minute asking him to back off the case.

He did understand her position regarding her mother, however, and if he had not had any solid leads, he might have agreed to back down. But he had a name, a suspect who fit the profile—a man who had the means and the deeply twisted motive to have kidnapped Claire. As he discussed with Mitch, they could very well be barking up the wrong tree, but Connor felt in his gut that he was on the right track. And if he was, he was closer to finding Claire than anyone had been in ten years.

But most of all, he simply could not walk away.

He didn’t want to.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry that this is difficult for you, but I can’t leave it alone. I think the girl I met is your sister. I think she’s in trouble. I think that if I were to walk away from this whole thing and pretend that I never heard of Claire Fletcher, I wouldn’t be able to look at myself in the mirror every day. I think it would be an insult to her, to you, and especially to your mother. I think I have a fair chance of bringing her in and I am going to try to do just that. You’re just going to have to find a way to deal with that.”

Brianna sighed and squeezed her eyes shut. When she opened them, she smiled wanly at him, her energy depleted. Her tone was sarcastic. “You want to be a hero?”

“No,” Connor said. The image of a dead rapist bleeding out on the floor of a broken-down bedroom in a broken-down house that had seen more than its share of violence burst over the screen of his mind. “I just want to do the right thing. That’s all.”

He must have sounded as weary as he felt because Brianna had no biting response. She stared at him for a long moment as silence descended between them. Her fingers worried an imaginary piece of lint on her pants. Finally, she stood to go.

“I guess there is nothing left to say,” she muttered.

Wordlessly, Connor walked her to the door. He unlocked it and held it open for her. She stepped out onto his front stoop and turned back toward him, her voice heavy with unshed tears. “I just hope you’re right. For the sake of my family, I hope you can do this.”

“Me too,” Connor said.

I dreamt of Connor, his musky male scent filling my senses so that when I woke, I thought I could still smell him. I gathered my blankets tightly around my body and smiled without opening my eyes. In the nowhere place between sleeping and waking, it was easy to imagine that I was lying in his bed, at his house. That he had gotten up to use the bathroom and would return to bed at any moment and wrap me in his arms, as he had done the night I met him.

I remembered the feel of his long, lean body against my own, his breath in my hair, tickling my neck. Never had I fantasized about a man in such a way. There remained a small ache inside me—desire. Curled in my tiny trailer bed, I sighed and imagined spending a whole day with Connor. I drifted back to sleep with his smile languishing in my head.

A series of loud, angry bangs woke me moments later, reminding me of my reality. I opened my eyes. Fear crept into my thoughts of Connor. An image of my captor beating a prone Connor flashed in my mind and I pushed it back.

With a blanket wrapped around my shoulders, I took my time answering the door. Tiffany stood outside, her shiny, emaciated face crumpled, as if she smelled a very foul odor. I didn’t invite her in.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“I need milk,” she said.

“Are you kidding me?”

Her sigh was exaggerated. One hand found its place on her hip. “No, I’m not kidding you. You have milk. Give me some.”

In the doorway, I stood a foot taller than her. I studied her skeptically. She had not graced my door in two years, and she had never turned up for something as benign as milk. “What’s going on?” I asked.