The Forgetting (24 page)

I eased away from Nate and peeked through the slice of open door. They were right next to us, separated by half the doorway. I was at such an angle that I couldn't see their faces; all I could see were their hands. Jules's manicured nails were unmistakable as he handed the other man a thick envelope. I caught a glimpse of the thick wad of bills at one corner where the envelope wasn't fully closed.

The other man took the envelope and tucked the money in his pocket. “Nice doing business with you.” As he shook Jules's hand, a flash of silver winked. A claddagh ring set with a green stone inside the center heart.
A
Christmas
gift
from
his
daughter…

Lowell.

Detective Curt Lowell, whom my father had clapped on the back, who had been eating cupcakes at our house just days ago, who had toasted me along with the rest of our friends. I doubled over, panting, my whole body aching. Michelle's father. I didn't like her…but I didn't want her to have a monster for a father either.
Why, why, why?
The question tumbled around my brain as I fought for breath. Had Annabel reported Jules to him? Had he warned Jules to clean the place before the police got there? And had he then eliminated the threat?

I straightened. It all made sense. Detective Lowell…had killed Annabel.

“Georgie. Georgie? Are you okay?”

I straightened. No, I was not okay. Our beloved neighborhood cop, a man my family had been friends with for years, was helping Jules. He was protecting an illegal sex club that exploited underage girls. He might as well have been inside, raping them himself. I gripped Nate's arm. “We have to get out of here.”

Nate raised the door another inch. From the other side of the basement, the sound of the sprinklers stopped. “They're gone. Let's go,” Nate said. I pushed the girls ahead of me and followed them up the stairs. The cold slapped me when I emerged onto the sidewalk behind Char, freezing my skin.

The silver Porsche still idled at the end of the alley. We pressed ourselves against the wall and inched down the opposite way. My breath stuck in my throat. This was the way Jules and Lowell had gone. I swallowed, bile stuck to the back of my throat. Every time I thought of Lowell, a fresh wave of nausea passed over me.

Nate peered around the corner and darted back. “He's out there.”

“Who?”

“Jules.” But it wasn't Nate that spoke. It was Char. Her body shook against me, her face a grotesque mask of fear. “He's everywhere,” she breathed.

Nate took off his coat and put it around Char's bare shoulders. I peeked around the corner. Lowell was nowhere to be seen, but Jules was halfway down the block, talking on his cell. Far enough that he couldn't hear us, but close enough that if we tried to make a break for it, he would definitely see us. I glanced at the other end of the alley. The Porsche was still there and, presumably, so was the guard at that door. I leaned back against the wall, the bricks pricking me through my damp sweater, and pulled out my phone.

The dispatcher made me repeat my request three times. Whether it was because I was talking so low or because she couldn't believe where I was, I wasn't sure. But ten minutes later, a gleam of headlights swept over the desolate street and turned into the alley.

“What the fuck?” Jules's voice shattered the quiet. I shoved the girls into the cab as his footsteps came running. Nate and I dove in at the same time and slammed the doors.

“He's gonna kill us!” the other girl shrieked.

“Where the hell am I going?” Manny yelled.

“Just
go!
” Nate shouted and pulled the girl close to him to calm her down. The tires squealed as Manny peeled away. He swerved around the Porsche as the other guard darted toward us, but we were already barreling down the street before he could stop us.

I scrambled upright in the seat and watched through the rear windshield as Jules emerged from the alley, his face twisted with rage as he kept running after us. A street lamp lit up the window with a bright yellow glow. I only had time to see Jules's eyes widen before Manny stepped on the gas and we were out of sight.

I twisted forward and slid down the seat.

“It's okay,” Nate said. “We're okay.”

I closed my eyes and tried to breathe. “No, we're not. He saw me.”

• • •

We took the girls to Susan's halfway house. As we climbed the steps to the door, my phone buzzed. “Where are you?” my mom demanded.

Good thing she hadn't called me fifteen minutes before. “I'm out with Nate,” I told her.

“Georgie—”

“I'll be home by eleven.” I cut her off and barely had time to hear her reluctant acquiescence before I hung up. When Nate and I were back in the cab, I turned to him. “It was Lowell.”

“Who?”

“Lowell. The cop who was at our Valentine's Day party. He's the one Jules was paying off.”

Nate's eyes widened. “How do you—”

“His ring. I saw his ring. He had it on at the party…said it was a Christmas present from his daughter…” I bent over. “God, I'm going to be sick again.”

Manny jerked around but Nate waved him off. “She's fine. You're fine,” he told me. “Just breathe. Are you sure?”

“Yes. I recognized his voice too.” I straightened. “Jesus, Nate, I went right to him. I told him I thought Annabel had been murdered, and he's probably the one who killed her.”

“We don't know that. It could've been Jules.” The cab slowed at a red light.

“How long before he and Jules put two and two together and come after me?”

Nate hugged me close to him. “We don't know that they will. But…” He didn't have to finish the sentence; I knew how it ended.
Not
long.

I curled into him, breathing in his warm, safe scent. “I want to come home with you.”

Nate closed his eyes. “Georgie…” His voice was hoarse, low. “You know I want that,” he muttered into my hair. “God, how I want that.” He kissed my forehead. “But you should go home. You'll be safer there.”

I didn't feel safe anywhere, except the circle of his arms. He held me tighter as the car trudged up the hill toward my house. We stopped at the curb and Nate walked me to the front door. “Stay put until you hear from me,” he said as we climbed the stoop. “I mean it, Georgie. Don't go anywhere tomorrow until I come get you.”

I tilted my head up to him. “Are you seriously telling me what to do? What are we, married in the fifties?”

“Geor—gie.” Nate drew my name out with a sigh. “I just want you to be safe.”

“I can't sit around and do nothing.”

Nate pulled me hard against him, buried his face in my hair. “And I can't lose your heart. Not twice.”

I turned my head so that my lips met the side of his neck. I covered his face with kisses until he cupped my cheeks in his hands and brought my mouth to his. All the fear and tension balled up inside me flowed away, as though its only cure was Nate. I clung to him, more alive in his arms than I'd ever felt in my life. His hands on me were strong and sweetly possessive. I could read the same thing I had in me, that it could so easily have been me in that room, that as long as these monsters roamed free, no girl was safe, that we could've died in the Warehouse tonight. But we didn't. We were here, alive…and together.

With a groan, Nate drew back. “You should go inside. It's cold and your hair is still damp.” He ran his hand over my head, down the side of my throat.

“I could never be cold with you,” I whispered. His eyes deepened until they were the darkest of blues, and he kissed me for a long moment that still ended too soon.

“I'll call you in the morning,” he said as I unlocked the door. “Get some sleep.”

I smiled at him and watched as he jogged back to the cab. My smile faded as they drove away. There was no way I would get any sleep tonight.

Mom sat in the living room, waiting up for me with an open book in her lap. “Did you have a good time tonight?”

I slid to a stop in the hallway and stared at her. “What?”

“With Nate. Did you two have a good time?”

“Oh. Um, yes.” I backed up a couple of steps. “I'm tired, though. Good night.”

Upstairs, I stood in the middle of my darkened room, my fingers itching for action, for time to pass quicker, for a resolution to this story that I had been written into against my will. Without Nate, I felt rudderless, unmoored. The air felt close and tight; with one small gust, it would drown me.

I crossed to the window and pushed it open. Cold tumbled in, and the distant salt sea tinged my nose. Another snowfall sat right on the edge of the night, waiting. The brass music stand against the wall gleamed orange as a streak of street light fell on it. I did have a tether, an anchor, one that had sustained me long before I ever met Nate. I grabbed my oboe and curled up on my window seat, cradling the three pieces of the instrument in my arms. What I had seen tonight had filled me with a chill that I wasn't sure would ever leave me, and my oboe was the only thing besides Nate that could keep me warm.

About two in the morning, the snow finally spilled from the sky. I watched it pile up around the tree trunks and fire hydrants and mailboxes. The light from the street lamp grew dim as the veil of snow thickened around it. My vision blurred, but it was hard to know whether it was my own eyes or the snow was smudging the world. For a moment, my eyelids shuttered…and when I blinked them open again, the scene before me was not the street outside my house.

Snow
covers
the
wrought-iron balcony, the metal slippery beneath my feet… Hands grope at me, pushing me against the bars over and over… I try to fight them off, but they counter every blow. They come at me faster and harder…a voice repeating “Youcan'tyoucan'tyoucan't” over and over… The iron creaks, the rusted bars soft beneath my body weight. I cling to the rail, fingers grappling to hang on, to stay alive, but it gives way and then there is nothing but cold air against my face, nothing but my own scream in my ears…

I jerked upright. The cold, snowy night before me was my own. But Annabel's memory blurred with my own, the edges of our boundaries so frayed and overlapped by now that I didn't know where hers ended and mine began. What I did know was that I'd just seen the night of her death.

I pressed the pieces of my oboe to my chest, and the smooth rosewood calmed my heart. Why was the memory so frustratingly vague? All the other ones had been so vivid, so clear. This one was fuzzy, like a faded photograph. Was it because it was the last? Was Annabel reluctant to relinquish her hold on me, her last tenuous thread to life?

Wind gusted in through the window and blew a stack of papers off my desk. I set my oboe down with gentle tenderness and slid off the window seat. Pages torn from notebooks and articles clipped from newspapers for my current events class danced in the air. I circled the room after them, the papers as busy as my brain. What more did Annabel want from me? What did I need to do to get her final memory?

I settled all the papers back on the desk. Before I could weigh them down, one escaped. It fluttered to the floor and landed at my foot. I stepped on it to keep it still. In the slanted light from street lamps, Kitty's face smiled up at me. My blood froze. I picked the paper up and held it in front of my face. On one side was the article I had cut out, but I had never noticed what was on the reverse side—a quarter-page notice that jumped off the page.

Below it was the picture of Kitty. Her eyes bored into me. She looked younger, fatter, healthier…happier. Before she'd met Jules. Before she'd met Annabel. As I stared at the notice, the image of Kitty chained to the wall in the Warehouse slowly fed itself into my vision, blacking out the paper.

This
had been Annabel's choice, the one that had haunted her the night she'd seen Tommy at All Saints. Knowing that girls like Kitty were being bought and sold on the street, could she live her life with blinders on and not do anything about it? Or could she take the blinders off and help the girls, even if that meant risking her life?

I knew what Annabel's answer had been, because it had cost her her life. She'd escaped the Warehouse with the knowledge of what went on there, and she'd been killed for it.

But who had killed her? Was it Jules, or someone else? Why wouldn't she give me the missing piece?

The answer came as a swift punch to my gut. I dropped to the floor, the paper gripped in my hand. How could I not have known this? How could I have felt everything else in her heart except this?

Annabel didn't care about justice for herself. Figuring out who killed her wasn't what she wanted me to do. She wanted me to stop what was happening in the Warehouse. She wanted me to finish what she'd started.

God, even dead, she was a better person than me.

All I cared about was getting my life back. And all Annabel cared about was getting back someone else's life, a life she would never have.

I didn't wait for Nate to call me. I didn't wait for my parents to wake up. As soon as the sun was up, I was at the curb, waiting for Manny to pick me up. I told him I was sorry that he'd become my personal chauffeur, sort of. He said it was okay because if it was his own daughter who kept going on these crazy escapades, he'd want her to have someone like him looking after her. I sank low in the backseat and stared out the window. My brain had stopped working, stopped weighing each choice and each step. I was moving on instinct now, following the heart, guided by what I knew Annabel needed me to do.

Save the girls. And to do that, I had to recover the memory of her death.

Something deep inside me knew what that would cost me, but I couldn't face that. I had to believe that she would accept something else as my sacrifice. I had to believe that she wasn't cruel, like Nate said, and that once I did what she asked, she would reward me.

Manny said nothing when we rolled to a stop outside 826 Emiline Way once again. He just raised an eyebrow. I patted his shoulder. “Wait for me.”

“You got it, sweetheart.”

The front door gaped open. I took that as a sign and slipped inside. Snow drifted into the entryway behind me. I needed to be on the balcony again. I had recovered all the memories leading up to this; surely being in the place where she died would give me the last one. My footsteps echoed in the dark stairwell. When I finally got to Annabel's apartment, I pushed the door open. The darkness inside the apartment was tangible. I could still feel her in here, the air thick with her presence. She was no longer an echo. She had become a ghost.

Bits of police tape still stuck out from the snow on the balcony. The metal creaked with my weight. The fearlessness that I'd felt the last time I'd been out here was gone. In its place was terror, but whether it was mine or hers, I didn't know.

My knees buckled and I sank down, the cold, snowy iron bleeding through my jeans. I could feel her struggle in my heart, how she had fought for her life here, how in those last moments she had wanted—
so
much
—to live. In those moments, nothing else mattered. It wrapped me like a cloak, her fierce will to survive. That will was all that had kept her alive during those long hours of lying in the snow on the ground so far below. Long enough for someone to find her so that she could give me her heart.

I pulled my gloves off and pressed my bare hands to my chest. No matter how messed up everything else was, at the root of it all was the fact that she had given me her life. She had died so I could live. I lowered my head until it touched my knees. The truth shuddered through me. She had sacrificed everything. All she was asking for was an even trade.

“No,” I whispered, hugging myself tight. “Anything but that. It's not fair.”

But
it
is
, the Catch answered, threading through my veins. Tears froze on my cheeks. “Just tell me,” I begged. “Just tell me, and I'll finish it. But don't take
that
from me. Please.”

Wind whipped over the balcony. A spare bit of police tape broke away and spiraled into the air, drifting down to the ground below, to where Annabel had lain for hours, her life draining away. “If you take this from me, I'll die too,” I told her. The Catch crescendoed, louder than a symphony. “Fine,” I said, getting to my feet. “Forget it. I'm done. I'm not giving that up, and you can't make me.”

Snow drifted down from the floor above, dappling my shoulders. I paused at the door back into the apartment. Why wasn't she making me? Why wasn't she just giving me the memory and taking what she wanted in return? Why was this one different?

As if in answer, the image of Tommy flooded into my mind. I clutched the flimsy door frame. Of course. She had made a choice too, her Sophie's Choice. And that was what she was asking of me. She wanted me to choose, to want this, to know what was right in my heart and give myself up willingly. I sagged back down to the balcony. What the hell kind of choice was this, though? Keep the most important part of myself, and let Annabel's killer go free. Let the Warehouse keep running. Let the girls be forever enslaved to Jules.

Or sacrifice that part of me that kept me Georgie, and it would all come to an end.

Well, fuck
.

I almost laughed out loud. It was absurd. Only a complete asshole would choose the former. And yet…I put my fist to my mouth. A month ago, before all this had happened, I probably would've made that choice. I'd lived my life with blinders on, Juilliard or bust, safe inside my Brookline bubble. Having Annabel's heart had removed those blinders and opened my eyes to the world around me.

Yes, there was ugliness, but there was also beauty. There was giving a bag of food to the homeless woman on the corner, even though you were starving yourself. There was sharing your precious strawberries with a lonely, lost girl who had nothing else to look forward to. There was being friends with another survivor like you who told it to you like it was.
If
you
think
you're gonna go on to do great things, then your own life,
Tommy had said.
But
if
you
think
you're gonna spend the rest of your days turning tricks on the street, then the greater good
.

And there was Nate.

Playing for the New York Phil wasn't exactly turning tricks on the street, but I'd realized there was good that was greater than that dream. I straightened, my back pressed up against the door frame. I wanted to make a different mark on the world now. Something that reverberated through many people, not just me.

I got to my feet again, this time sure and steady, and went back into the apartment. “Okay,” I said to the empty room. “Okay, I'm ready.”

My body shook; I wasn't ready, not really, to lose that part of myself. What would my life look like without it? What would tether me to myself in its absence? I took one deep breath, two, three, four, trying to make myself willing. “It's okay,” I said to Annabel, for I could feel her inside me and all around in the air in the room. “I accept it.”

But still the memory of who killed her did not come.

I put my hands flat over my heart and moved them in slow circles.
Sukha
. Sweetness. With each breath, I called up Annabel's memories, in reverse order. The balcony.
Breathe
. The Warehouse.
Breathe.
The Sutton house.
Breathe.
Strawberry shortcake… My jaw clenched, the breath caught in my teeth. All the other memories were signposts along the path to find her killer. What the hell did strawberries have to do with anything?

And with one devastating click, the very first piece of the puzzle that I'd gotten fell into place.

• • •

I made Manny drop me off around the corner from Nate's. I didn't want him to be responsible if anything happened in his cab, and I didn't want Nate to see me pull up. I paid Manny and sent him on his way.

I rang Nate's buzzer and listened to his footsteps in the hall. When he opened the door, his face crumpled with relief. “Jesus, where have you been? Why do you have a phone if you don't answer it?”

My heart twisted. I was about to make him a thousand times more worried, but there was nothing I could do about it. His brows scrunched together at the empty container I held up in front of him. I hadn't cheaped out. If I was going down, I was going whole hog. Organic strawberries from Whole Foods, imported from California, $8.99 for a pint. God, they were good. In seventeen years, I'd never known what I was missing. It was like summer on my tongue, like endless days at the beach and long nights spent gazing up at the stars.

In my other hand, I held up the EpiPen I always carried in my backpack.

“Straight into my thigh and push hard,” I told Nate just before my throat started to close up.