The Jennifer McMahon E-Book Bundle (118 page)

In the beginning, Lorraine had invited Reggie back for Thanksgiving and Christmas (never going so far as to say anything like “It would be so nice to see you” but instead with a comment like, “George and I will have more than enough food—it’s a waste to have to throw things away”), but Reggie always made excuses: homework, projects, trips abroad. Eventually Lorraine stopped asking.

Reggie had turned off the GPS shortly after getting her mother into the truck back in Worcester. Vera was very suspicious of the device. “Who’s that talking? How does it know where we are? Who, exactly, is monitoring our whereabouts?”

Finally, Reggie pulled the plug, sure she could get back to Monique’s Wish from memory. She’d done fine until she hit the Airport Road exit; then it was as if she’d been dropped into a hall of mirrors.

“It’s the same Walmart,” her mother said in a sage voice.

“It can’t be the same,” Reggie said. “Because that would mean we’ve just gone in one big circle.” She wanted to cry.

Reggie took a deep breath, reminded herself that just months ago, she’d gone to build houses in Haiti during a cholera outbreak, for God’s sake—surely she could handle Brighton Falls, Connecticut.

Vera chuckled, wheezing. She whispered a word Reggie couldn’t quite hear. It might have been
cocksucking
.

Neck tense and head beginning to pound, Reggie scanned the four lanes of traffic along what she was sure had once been Main Street. If it hadn’t been for the welcome to brighton falls sign they’d passed a mile back, she would have doubted they were even in the right town, never mind on the right street. Thickets of glossy signs sprouted from shopping plaza after shopping plaza:
STARBUCKS, KFC, DICK’S SPORTING GOODS, CHILI’S, OLIVE GARDEN, HOME DEPOT
.

“I mean really, it doesn’t even seem like the same town, does it? I feel like we could be anywhere.”

Vera nodded. “Anywhere,” she said. “Say, did you remember to pack my clock?”

“Clock? What clock? I didn’t see any clock.”

“The grandfather clock in the front hall.”

Reggie knew just the one she meant; it was at Monique’s Wish. “You’ll see it soon, Mom.”

“Runs slow,” Vera said.

“You’re right, Mom,” Reggie said, remembering how once a day, they’d need to push it forward about fifteen minutes.

“We just have to find West Street, right?” Reggie said, more to herself than her mother. She’d ended up in a left-turn-only lane again somehow, and had to cut in front of a silver minivan to avoid being forced to turn into the parking lot dominated by an enormous liquor store. The driver threw up her hands, blasted the horn. Reggie waved in what she hoped was an apologetic manner.

Then Reggie’s eye caught on one of the signs up ahead: berr ford. The dealership run by Charlie’s uncle Bo. It was still there and had, in fact, grown to nearly three times its original size. There was a letterboard out front that said:
No tricks, just treats. Let us put you in a new truck by Halloween.

“Look, Mom! Bo Berr’s Ford dealership. Do you remember Bo?”

Vera’s eyes glazed over. “Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep and doesn’t know where to find them.”

“Um, you went to high school with him? Bo Berr?”

Vera didn’t respond.

Down the street from Berr Ford was First Avenue—the little turnoff that led to the police station. Reggie could see it there, set back from Main Street—an imposing gray granite building that had a new addition tacked onto the left side. The new part of building was covered in windows and had a roofline that was all wrong. Instead of blending with the original roof, it sort of
collided
with it. Reggie’s eye went from the offending addition to the original front steps, where the milk cartons had been left. The milk cartons and their gruesome contents.

“Okay, there’s West Street,” Reggie said, taking the sharp right turn a little too hard and fast. The railroad tracks that had once run alongside West Street had been paved over as a rails-to-trails bike path—the only development Reggie had seen yet that didn’t make her want to scream.

There were many more houses than Reggie remembered, and the once open field across from Millers’ Farm was now condos, each building holding identical rows of black front doors, vinyl-clad windows, and balconies with Weber grills. Reggie wondered how its occupants found their way into the right home each night.

At last they turned onto Stony Field Drive. The house on the corner had a fake graveyard on the front lawn. A green hand reached up, clawing its way out of its grave.

Reggie’s chest felt tight.

“Almost there, Mom,” she said, white-knuckling the steering wheel as she eased the Escape down the street, passing the ranch and Colonial houses that were just as she remembered. Neighbors whose lawns she and Charlie had mowed, who’d bought lemonade from her when she’d set up a stand, given her popcorns balls and Hershey bars on Halloween. Plastic bats and bedsheet ghosts hung from the trees, put up by a new generation of parents—perhaps the kids Reggie had gone to school with, now with little goblins of their own.

“Where?” Vera asked.

“Home,” Reggie said, the word catching in her throat as she signaled to turn up the gravel driveway, passing the old black metal mailbox. It still leaned to the left, never righted after Reggie sideswiped it when she was first learning to drive.

dufrane.

M
ONIQUE’S
W
ISH WAS SMALLER
than Reggie remembered, more like the woodsman’s cottage in a fairy tale than the castle a princess might live in.

When she was growing up, it had felt large and sprawling—too big and dark to ever get warm. The stone walls sucked in light and sound and were always ever so slightly damp.

Glancing through the dusty windshield now, she guessed it to be about thirty-five feet long and maybe twenty wide—a big rectangle of dull gray cement and stone. The corners weren’t square or true, making the house list this way, then that. The cement was crumbling in places. Some of the stones had fallen out, leaving gaps like missing teeth. The white paint on the sills and eaves was peeling, hanging off in places like dead skin. The roof was in sad shape, bowing in the middle, the slate shingles cracked and loose.

The house was laid out west to east, all wrong for a hilltop that got such great southern exposure. If Andre had studied the landscape, worked with it a little, faced the building to the south, put in more windows, considered the placement of trees more carefully—it could have been a warmer, brighter place. The density of the stone might even have worked in their favor, acting as thermal storage. As it was, the house was in shade most of the year, and the walls and roof were spotted with moss. The building looked as gray and damp as a poisonous toadstool.

“Do you remember what you used to say?” Reggie asked her mother as she squinted out at the crooked walls. “How Monique’s Wish sounded more like the name of a racehorse than a house?”

Vera grinned and bobbed her head, but seemed to be studying something in the sky. Reggie had no idea if she had heard or understood the question.

“Lousy odds,” Reggie mumbled, thinking that if the building were a horse, it was old and lame, ready for the glue factory.

Just then the heavy wooden front door slammed open and a cloud of smoke came pouring out. From behind the screen of black smoke came a woman in a faded housedress and fishing vest. Reggie blinked, thinking she was an apparition at first, a body born of smoke and dust and ruin. But then she came into focus. It was Lorraine, walking down the steps, her right hand held up in a strange, forced-looking wave that could have also been a warning to stop, don’t come any closer.

Reggie opened the door of the truck as Lorraine came closer. Her body was stiff and gangly, puppetlike as she jerk-walked to them.

“I’m afraid we’re on fire,” Lorraine said, stinking of fish, eyes streaming, hair wild and singed.

Chapter 10

June 7, 1985

Brighton Falls, Connecticut

“M
Y MOM TOTALLY KNOWS
her,” Reggie said when she met up with Charlie and Tara at the Silver Spoon that evening. “She brought me here one time and introduced us.”

“No way!” Tara said. “What was she like? How’s your mom know her?”

Going to the diner had been Tara’s idea. As soon as she heard about the missing waitress, she said they had to go—just
had
to.

“Imagine it,” Tara said dreamily, “touching saltshakers she’s filled, sitting in her section, in the very seat the killer might have sat in when he was stalking her.”

“We don’t even know he’s got her,” Charlie said.

“Of course he does,” Tara said. “I can feel it.”

“How convenient that you all of a sudden have these newfound psychic abilities,” Charlie snapped. “I mean, dead people are talking through you, giving you messages . . .”

“There’s more to this world than meets the eye, Chuckles.”

Charlie teased her, rolled his eyes, and said going to the diner was a little twisted, but he went. It turned out they weren’t the only ones with the idea: the place was packed, and they had to wait for a table. And as soon as they walked in, they heard the buzz of customers anxiously talking about the missing waitress and saying maybe she’d been taken by the same man who’d killed Andrea McFerlin. There was this strange electricity in the air. Maybe it was danger, and they all wanted to be close to it.

Reggie explained that she had met Candy Jacques only once, when her mother took her to the Silver Spoon for ice cream when she was seven or eight. The waitress was a woman with fried blond hair and a tired face who wore thick blue eye shadow and had candy cane earrings and a candy cane sticker on her name tag even though it was only October. She was finishing a cheeseburger when they arrived.

“Hey, Vera,” she said when they first sat down, side by side at the counter, on spinning stools once again. “Long time no see. How are you, hon?”

“Good,” Vera said.

“See much of Rabbit lately?” Candy asked.

“Now and then,” Vera said, looking away.

“You tell him I said hello, huh?” Candy said. Then, her eyes moved to Reggie. “Who’s the little lady?”

“My daughter,” Vera said. “Regina.”

”No kidding?” Candy dabbed at her lips with a paper napkin.

She looked at Reggie and said, “Yeah, I can see the resemblance. Around the eyes. You’ve got your mamma’s beautiful eyes. And just look at those lashes! You’re gonna be a heartbreaker, little Regina, just like your mama.” She reached out and brushed the unkempt hair away from Reggie’s face.

“How about a little sugar for Candy?”

Reggie looked up at her mother, who said, “Go ahead, Regina, give her a little peck on the cheek.”

Reggie stood up and the waitress leaned down, offering her cheek. Reggie gave her the tiniest kiss, her lips barely touching the waitress’s warm, sticky skin. She could smell cooked meat and onions on Candy’s breath.

“Just like a butterfly,” Candy said. “Hardly a kiss at all. I hope you do a little better than that when you get around to kissing the boys.” She chuckled.

Reggie spun on her stool and buried her face in her mother’s coat, smelled the cold air, perfume, and Winstons. Vera laughed, too.

“I bet I know what you’d like, little lady,” the candy cane waitress said. “How about one of my magical mystery sundaes? I only make them for my most special customers.”

Reggie pulled her face from her mother’s coat and nodded, and when the waitress returned, she carried a sundae with three different ice creams and every topping imaginable.

“This is a real treat I’m giving you,” she promised. “It’s not even on the menu.”

Later, when they were on their way home, Reggie asked her mom how she knew Candy. “Is she an actress, too?”

“Once,” Vera said, lighting a cigarette, then fiddling with the radio, searching for a song she liked. “She was once.”

“J
UST THINK OF IT,”
Tara said now, sipping a cup of black coffee once they were seated in a booth. Reggie and Charlie had milk shakes and were sitting across from Tara. Reggie had moved her knee so that it was touching Charlie’s. They were all splitting an order of fries and onion rings. “We might have our very own serial killer. Hell, he could be here, in this restaurant, right this minute.”

“If he was here, wouldn’t you be able to tell?” Charlie asked. “Aren’t you supposed to be psychic now? Wouldn’t you go all rigid and start speaking in tongues if he was nearby?”

Reggie knew his teasing was just his own stupid way of trying to flirt with Tara. But she also knew it wasn’t working—it was just pissing Tara off.

“It doesn’t work like that,” Tara hissed. She shot Reggie a look like
Can you believe how ignorant some people are?
Reggie smiled back and shook her head empathetically.

Reggie scanned the crowd: truckers, tables of high school students in letter jackets, families with kids who were kicking each other under the table and fighting over packets of sugar.

Charlie frowned and stirred his milk shake. “For all we know, this waitress has just shacked up with her boyfriend.”

“But she hasn’t called her mother. And on the news, they said she was scheduled to work today. If she wasn’t missing, she’d probably be waiting on us
right now,
” Tara said.

Reggie, making up her mind to ignore the bickering, had pulled a pen from her pocket and was doodling on the backside of her menu. She drew the ketchup bottle, capturing the faint and distorted reflection of Tara on its left side.

Charlie shook his head. “But if she wasn’t gone, we wouldn’t even be here, Sherlock.”

Tara turned away in disgust, not bothering to reply.

As she drew, Reggie thought of how, just an hour ago, riding her bike to the diner, she’d seen pictures of Candy plastered all over town, like the lost kids on the back of milk cartons: have you seen me?

The photo showed her heavy eye shadow and candy cane earrings, though they looked more like fishhooks in the blurred image. She smiled out from telephone poles and bulletin boards in her greasy Silver Spoon uniform, and Reggie could still smell the charred meat and onions on her breath.