Standing in the Shadows (39 page)

The flush burned purplish spots into her pallid face. "Just a delay? You call the ruin of my entire life just a delay? You have the nerve to come into my house and say that to me, after what you did?"

"I did my job, ma'am. I did my duty," he said, with steely calm. "Which is more than I can say for your husband."

"Get out of my house." Her voice vibrated with fury.

"No, Mom," Erin said. "You can't throw him out without throwing me out, too. And you can't throw me out, because I won't let you."

Barbara's lips trembled with hurt and confusion. "What has come over you, honey? Are you punishing me for something?"

Erin grabbed her and hugged her tightly. "No. This is for me, Mom. Just me. For the first time, I am thinking only of myself, and you are going to have to swallow it. Because I've never called in a favor from you in my whole life."

"But you've always been such a good girl," Barbara whispered.

"Too good," Erin said. "I never misbehaved, I never made you wait up all night, I never put a foot wrong. I'm calling in all those points now, Mom. Remember those good behavior charts you made for us when we were kids? All those gold stars I got? This is my prize. And I picked it out all by myself."

Barbara's face convulsed. Her arms hung like sticks at her side in Erin's embrace. Slowly, they circled around her daughter's body.

Her eyes flicked up to Connor. He stoically endured it. It was no different than the way the respectable matrons of Endicott Falls had looked at him and his brothers in the old days whenever they came into town. A look that said,
Quick, lock up your daughters, here come Crazy Eamon's wild boys
. He'd gotten used to it. A person could get used to anything.

"Some prize," she said coldly. "Just how long have you been carrying on with my daughter behind my back?"

Connor thought about it, consulted his watch, and decided that those incendiary, mind-blowing kisses in the airport definitely counted. "Uh, forty-six hours and twenty-five minutes, ma'am."

Barbara closed her eyes and shook her head. "Dear God. Erin. Why didn't you tell me you were taking this man with you to the coast?"

"I didn't know at the time, Mom," she said gently. "It was a surprise. He came along to guard me, and this just… happened."

"Guard you?" Her eyes sharpened. "From what?"

Connor stared at Erin in disbelief. "You mean you didn't tell her? No wonder she thinks I'm the Antichrist."

"Tell me what?" Barbara's voice rose steadily in pitch. "What in God's name is going on here?"

"You better sit down," he told her. "We've got stuff to talk about."

"I'll make a pot of tea," Erin said.

The only good thing about heaping shocking revelations onto Barbara Riggs was that it diverted some of her horror and distress from his own miserable self. Two pots of tea later, after endless hashing over the details of Novak and Luksch's escape and Cindy's involvement with Billy Vega, Barbara's face was still pale but the glazed look was gone from her eyes.

"I remember her calling last week sometime," she said. "I'd just taken a Vicodin, and I barely remember what she said. But it certainly wasn't anything about exotic dancing, or being held against her will by a horrible man. God, my poor baby."

"Mom, do you remember Tonia's visit?" Erin asked.

Barbara frowned. "Vaguely. Your nurse friend, the pretty dark-haired girl, right? Yes, she did come by recently. That girl talks very loudly. And she should've noticed that it was a bad time."

"She told me about the TV" Erin said. "And the photos."

Barbara flinched at the mention of the TV Then she paused, and looked at Erin with blank puzzlement. "What photos, hon?"

"You don't remember?"

Barbara's brow knitted. "I remember having"—her eyes flicked to Connor's and quickly away—"a bad moment with the downstairs TV But that's all."

Erin got up and left the kitchen. Barbara and Connor stared at each other over the kitchen table as they listened to her light footsteps creaking on the stairs.

"My life is falling apart," she said, in a conversational tone.

"I know exactly how that feels," he said.

"You are the very last person I would have wanted to witness it."

He shrugged. "Don't know what to tell you, ma'am."

"Don't you 'ma'am' me." Her voice was frosty.

He wanted very badly to say that it wasn't his fault, but that was debatable from several different points of view, so he kept his big mouth shut for once. Erin came back into the kitchen and spread out a bunch of photographs on the table. Connor leaned over and took a look.

Baby pictures, family shots, graduation portraits. All with the eyes and mouths gouged out.

Barbara lifted her hand to her mouth. She leaped to her feet and scrambled for the door that led off the kitchen. He glimpsed a utility sink, the corner of a washing machine, and heard a toilet lid flip up. Retching sounds came from the room. Erin moved to follow her, but Connor held up his hand.

"Give her a minute," he said quietly.

The toilet flushed. Water ran in the sink. Barbara Riggs appeared in the doorway a few minutes later, dabbing at her face with a hand towel. "Not me," she said. Her eyes darted wildly between Connor and Erin. "I did not do that. There are no circumstances under which I would deface a picture of my own children. I don't know what is going on here, but it was not me. I swear it."

Erin picked up a photograph of herself in elementary school, holding the toddler Cindy on her lap. Her hands were trembling. "Well, Mom. If you aren't doing it, someone else is. Any ideas?"

Seconds ticked by, stretched into minutes of awful silence. Barbara Riggs covered her mouth with the towel and shook her head.

Erin shoved her chair back. "I organized our negatives by year in the filing cabinet upstairs," she said. "I'm getting the negatives of these photos, and we'll get reprints made today. Every damn one of them."

"That's not going to solve our problem," Connor said.

"I don't care. It's something to do, and I'll make me feel better. Excuse me, please. I'll be right back."

And she left him all alone with her mother. Again. Dear God, what had he done to deserve this? It was like being roasted on a spit.

They eyed each other like boxers circling in the ring. "You've, uh, noticed no signs of forced entry?" he asked her.

She shook her head.

"And the alarm works? You always set it? You test it regularly?"

She nodded. "Of course. I always check the locks and set the alarm. Religiously. Sometimes I check them over and over."

"Who else knows the code?"

"My daughters and myself," Barbara said. "I had the codes changed after Eddie… left. And the locks, as well."

"Hmm."

"You must think I'm
crazy
." she said.

It was a statement, not a question, but he took it at face value and slipped into net-and-fish mode to consider it. He cast out the net and threw everything that was happening to the whole family into it.

Barbara's face swam in his gaze while he tried to feel the shape of the ugly pattern that was forming. There was something shifty and corrupt, but the source of it was not the woman sitting across the table from him. The words came out with total conviction. "No, I don't."

She looked almost offended. "Pardon?"

"I don't think you're
crazy"
he said.

There was a flash in her eyes, almost like hope. Her throat bobbed several times. "You don't?" she asked warily.

"No," he said. "I've dealt with crazy people before. I don't get that feeling from you. You strike me as stressed out, depressed, and afraid. At the end of your rope, maybe. But not crazy."

"Not yet, anyway," she said.

His mouth twitched. "Not yet," he agreed. "But if you're not, that means that somebody with a lot of resources is messing with you."

She pressed her hand against her mouth. "Novak?"

"He's my first choice," Connor said.

"But he was incarcerated until just a few days ago!"

"He's still my first choice. He has an obscene amount of money, a very long reach, a grudge against your husband. And he's crazy. This thing stinks of crazy."

"So somebody is trying to make me think that I'm insane?"

He shook his head. "No. I think somebody is trying to drive you genuinely insane. Like the porno video trick. That could be rigged, and controlled from the outside. It's crazy and improbable, but it's possible."

Her mouth tightened. "So Erin told you about that?"

"I'm not a techie, so I can't take apart your TV and tell you what they did to it," he went on. "But my friend Seth is an expert. I'll have him take a look, if you like."

"But it sounds so bizarre. Like aliens from outer space, or who killed JFK. Like a big… paranoid conspiracy theory."

"Yeah," he said. "I think that's the whole point."

She hesitated, eyes narrowed. "You must be paranoid yourself to even entertain these notions."

It sounded like an accusation.

He shoved down his anger and thought about the nightmare phone call in the hotel. Georg appearing out of nowhere in the phantom SUV The coma. Jesse's death. Ed's betrayal.

"I was a cop, Mrs. Riggs. And you know exactly how that turned out for me," he said. "Can you blame me for being paranoid?"

She looked down into her teacup.

"You've got to trust your senses, and your instincts," he said, but he knew he was trying to convince himself as much as her. "They're all you've got. If you can't rely on them, then you're lost in the void."

Barbara's shoulders sagged. She nodded. "Yes, exactly. That's where I've been for the last few weeks," she said. "Lost in the void."

"Welcome back to the real world, Mrs. Riggs," he said.

She blinked, as if she had just woken up. "Ah… thank you."

The atmosphere was measurably less hostile than before, but he pushed on at the risk of ruining it. "How long ago was the first porno video joke played on you?"

She pursed her lips and thought. "A little over two months ago. Maybe two and a half, because at first I thought I was dreaming."

"Which would have been about the same time that Cindy started hanging out with this Billy Vega, according to her band members."

Barbara gulped. "You mean, you think it's all connected?"

He gave her a brief, tight smile. "You know us conspiracy theorists. We think everything's connected."

"You think Novak could have assigned this Billy to control Cindy, like he assigned Georg to Erin at Crystal Mountain?"

"Maybe. Although Billy Vega's rap sheet is nothing like Georg's. He's just a small-time thief, pimp, and con artist. Not a seasoned killer."

Barbara shuddered. "So… shouldn't we call the police?"

He thought about his latest conversation with Nick. "You know how it is with cops. They don't have the time or manpower to get worked up about things that might or could happen. They're too busy dealing with things that are happening or have already happened. Cindy's not a minor. Billy Vega hasn't done anything wrong yet that we know of, other than be an asshole. As far as the cops are concerned, we're talking about a girl having trouble with a no-good boyfriend."

Erin's light footsteps sounded over their heads as she bustled around, trying to tidy up chaos and madness, trying to make sense of a brutal nightmare. It pissed him off, to see her jerked around like that.

In fact, the whole thing was making him fucking furious.

"There's a down side to not being crazy, you know." His voice came out harder than he'd planned.

She looked puzzled. "What are you talking about?"

"If you're not crazy, then you've got no excuse for lying around in your bathrobe eating Vicodin and letting your daughter do everything for you."

She shot to her feet. Her chair pitched over and crashed to the floor. "How dare you speak to me like that?"

What the hell. Ingratiating himself with this woman was a lost cause anyway. It needed to be said, and nobody else was around to say it. He met her outraged eyes straight on, and let his statement stand.

"Mom? What's the matter? What's going on?"

Barbara's eyes shifted to Erin, who stood in the doorway clutching a manila folder. "Nothing, honey. I'm fine," she said crisply. "Excuse me for a moment. I'm going to run upstairs and get dressed."

She stalked out of the kitchen, head high. Erin stared after her, bewildered. "What happened? What did you say to her?"

Connor shrugged. "Nothing in particular. I guess some problems are just too scary to deal with in your bathrobe, that's all."

He paid through the nose for his snotty remark, all afternoon long. Barbara Riggs turned him into her combined slave, gofer, and whipping boy, and before he knew what hit him, he was taking out her garbage, fixing the drip in her upstairs bathroom, chauffeuring them to the phone center to get the phone turned back on. Then it was the grocery store, the photo shop, and the antique place, where he strained a muscle in his bum leg hauling that goddamn grandfather clock. But he didn't complain. It was all part of his martyrdom.

Back at the house, they argued about the dead TV She wanted him to haul it away to the trash, and he wanted to leave it for Seth to dismantle. He won that dispute, but was forced to carry the damn thing out onto the back porch so she wouldn't have to look at it. Worst of all, she forced him to call Sean at ridiculously frequent intervals to check on his progress. Which meant that his wiseass little brother got to witness all this humiliation first hand.

"Mrs. Riggs," he protested wearily. "Please. He'll call us. He knows what to do if he gets news. Try to relax."

"Don't you dare tell me to relax! That's my baby we're talking about! Call him again!"

Sean picked up on the first ring. "Hey," he snapped. "Miles and I have not discovered anything in the three minutes that have elapsed since your last call. Would you please just take a pill?"

"It's not my fault," he muttered. "She made me call you."

"Mother-in-law's got you pussy-whipped, huh?"

He winced. "Jesus, Sean. Watch what you say."