The Jennifer McMahon E-Book Bundle (122 page)

“I did. And you know what—I remember seeing the old ad. I’m going to see if I can find a copy and we can frame it and put it right on your wall. Would you like that, Vera?”

Vera smiled.

“Now I’m going to go put all my stuff away and get settled while you finish up your dinner. Then I’ll come in and make sure you have all your medicine and maybe help you get ready for bed. That sound like a plan?”

Reggie’s mother gave a little nod and went back to picking at her pizza.

Tara turned toward Lorraine, adjusting the backpack on her shoulder. “Which room am I in?”

“Father’s old room,” Lorraine said, smiling. “I’ve fixed it up for you, put on clean bedding.”

Reggie stepped between them. “I’ll show you,” she said. Tara looked at her for the first time, a familiar mischievous sparkle in her eyes.

“Good idea,” said Lorraine, gathering the china plates they’d eaten on. “You go help her get settled.”

R
EGGIE’S HEAD WAS SPINNING.
“You’re a nurse? For real?” She sounded like an awkward thirteen-year-old. So much for the third degree she was planning to give Lorraine’s candidate.

“Yep. For the past fifteen years. I worked on the oncology floor at Hartford Hospital for a few years, then for a home health and hospice agency. I still do that some, but mostly it’s private duty these days. I like it. I’m on my own, no one breathing down my neck. You want to see my license?” Tara said. She’d laid her backpack out on the neatly made single bed and was unzipping it. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours,” she said with a teasing grin. “If architects even have licenses.”

“How’d you know what I do?”

Tara gave a barking laugh. “Shit, Reggie! You think that just because you move away and never come back that you’re off the radar completely? That you don’t exist anymore?” Tara took out a stack of neatly folded T-shirts and carried them to an open drawer. Reggie noticed an ornate tattoo on Tara’s right wrist—a black bird with a wing that was all wrong—bent and broken. It circled Tara’s wrist like a strangely macabre bracelet. Reggie imagined the sleeve of Tara’s hoodie pulling up, wondered if she’d still be able to see traces of the scars. Tara caught her looking and Reggie’s face flushed.

“No,” Reggie said, looking away. Then she faced Tara again, telling herself it was ridiculous to feel the same childish awe, the familiar sense of being undone and entirely at Tara’s mercy. “It’s just that—”

“You’re not just any architect, though, are you?” Tara cocked one eyebrow. “You’re one of the top green architects in the Northeast according to
Four Walls
.” There was a slight mocking tone to her voice.

“How did you—”

“Have you heard of the Internet? Google? Amazing the shit you can find on there.”

“Mmmm, very funny, Tara.”

Tara gave a little nod and a smirk—an acknowledgment—
yes, that was funny, thank you for noticing
.

“But believe it or not, I actually subscribe to
Four Walls
. I like to read, and I have this thing for magazines, especially all those glossy house mags. They help take my mind off the fact that I live in a hovel. They’re full of such promise, aren’t they? I mean, they’re selling you the actual magazine, but it’s more than that—it’s the fantasy of the ideal life you’ll have once you get a perfect kitchen with classic triangle work area and stainless steel appliances. It’s kind of sickening, but fascinating and addictive, too.”

Reggie smiled. “You haven’t changed at all.”

Tara took another pile of clothing from her bag and gave Reggie a sly grin from over the top of it. “Do any of us really?”

Reggie liked to think she’d changed, morphed into a new self-confident woman who was in charge of her own life. But standing there, she felt like she was thirteen again, and Tara was in control of whatever happened next.

“I still can’t believe you’re a nurse,” Reggie admitted.

“What, you don’t think I’m the
nurturing
type?” Tara laughed. “Yeah, it’s weird. But I love it. I can’t imagine doing anything else. I don’t know . . . probably a shrink would tell me I got into nursing because of what happened with Sid. Because part of me is still trying to save him, to fix what happened.” She looked at Reggie, who turned away. Reggie had locked so many memories away in boxes in the back of her mind; she couldn’t open them all at once.

“I still don’t understand. How did Lorraine come to hire you?”

“We ran into each other a few months back. I was taking care of a friend of hers from the Historical Society. She stopped by for a visit and I was there working. We talked a little then, mostly about you. Then, when she got the phone call about your mom this morning, she looked me up and asked if I was available. How could I refuse?”

Reggie shook her head. “I’m sorry. I guess I’m still in shock. I didn’t expect that you’d still be in town, much less that you’d be the nurse Lorraine hired to look after my mother.”

Tara grinned. “Funny how things work out, isn’t it?” There was that mischievous little sparkle in her eyes, giving Reggie the absurd idea that Tara had been expecting this all along, planning for it, maybe. Reggie pushed the thought away—there was no way Tara could have predicted Vera’s return. But wasn’t it a little odd that Tara didn’t seem at all surprised by this new turn of events? Here she was unpacking, settling into Monique’s Wish like it was the most normal thing in the world.

Reggie, for the first time in years, thought about her mother’s theory about everyone on earth being connected by threads, making this great big spiderweb. Maybe some connections were stronger than others and pulled people back into one another’s lives when they least expected.

“So, do you have a family?” Reggie asked. “Husband? Kids?”

Tara shook her head. “Are you kidding? Who would I find to put up with me?”

Reggie laughed a little too loud.

“How about Charlie?” Reggie asked. “Have you heard anything about him?”

Tara nodded. “He’s still in town. Sells real estate. He has an office downtown, near the green. You should stop in and say hi.” Tara looked directly into Reggie’s eyes, gauging her reaction to this news.

Reggie gave a careful poker-faced nod, thinking how bizarre it would be to pop into Charlie’s office. She tried to imagine what he might look like now: Charlie the Realtor. Had he gotten married? Did he have a house full of little Charlie Juniors with a tree house in the back? Did he ever sit with them there in the afternoon, feeling the tree sway, and tell them,
I used to have a friend with a tree house. . .

Tara continued unpacking. Reggie felt like she was spinning through time: here one minute, then back to her thirteen-year-old self the next. And there was Tara: the sun Reggie orbited around.

“What’s that?” Reggie said, her eye catching on the paperback that was clearly visible now that Tara had unpacked the last of her clothing. She felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise.

“What?” Tara said, looking down into the bag. Her face reddened. “Oh, this,” she said, pulling out a dog-eared copy of
Neptune’s Hands: The True Story of the Unsolved Brighton Falls Slayings
.

“What are you doing with it?” Reggie snapped. It felt like another one of Tara’s tests, one of her games. The book was there in plain sight—she was just waiting for Reggie to notice, waiting to see what Reggie would do next.

“Like I said, I read.” Tara held the book out and Reggie leaned away from it, as if it were a venomous snake.

This was bullshit. Bringing that book into Monique’s Wish was a completely fucked-up thing to do.

“But that woman . . . the things she said about my mother . . .”

“I know,” Tara said. “She crossed the line.”

“Why do you even have it? And what were you thinking, bringing it here?”

Tara looked down at the old paperback, running her fingers over the cover—a raised shiny silver trident dripping blood.

“When your aunt called, told me about your mom, and offered me the job, I didn’t hesitate. You remember how things were with my own mom—working all the time, drinking, hardly even noticing if I was living or dead. Your family was like my second family, my real family, the one that mattered. The one that cared if I ate dinner or how much I swore. Remember that? The way Lorraine would always get so flustered and offended when I even said the word
damn
?”

Reggie nodded, feeling like she was being manipulated, like Tara was doing what Tara did best. There was a familiar comfort in being pulled along, told just what she wanted to hear.

“Anyway, when I got off the phone with Lorraine, I remembered the book. I bought it when it came out, haven’t read it since. But I thought I might reread it now. I know it’s shitty, the way she wrote about your mom, but this Martha Paquette lady did her research. She got a lot of the facts of the case right. There are police reports and interviews in here. Dates, times, facts about the victims. It’s full of clues, Reg.” Tara’s eyes were all lit up and she was rocking on the balls of her feet. Then suddenly, as if realizing that Reggie noticed her building excitement, she toned it down a notch. “Anyway,” she said, clearing her throat, “I was thinking that I should brush up. You know, in case your mom says anything. Or remembers anything.”

“So what, you’re hoping to crack the case by rereading the book and listening to my mom’s morphine-addled paranoid fantasies?”

Tara shrugged.

“Just don’t let Lorraine catch you with that,” Reggie said, nodding at the book. “She’ll fire you on the spot.”

Tara nodded, looking around the room. She walked over to the bookcase full of heavy bound classics and tucked
Neptune’s Hands
behind
Gulliver’s Travels
and
War and Peace
.

“Our secret,” Tara said, and just then, she pulled up the sleeve of her sweatshirt, exposing just the faintest edge of the pale skin of her forearm, and Reggie made herself look away, not wanting to see.

“I’m going to go do some unpacking myself,” Reggie said, turning to go.

“Reg,” Tara called. Reggie stopped and turned back to face her. “It looks like you’re bleeding.”

Reggie looked down at her arm and saw her cut had reopened and blood was seeping through her sloppy Band-Aid work.

“Let me see,” Tara said, reaching for Reggie’s arm. Tara’s touch gave Reggie a little electric jolt. “Do you remember?” Tara asked quietly, peeling back the Band-Aid to inspect the cut.

“I had a little accident with window glass,” Reggie said, cutting Tara off before she could go any further. Tara let it go, turned away, grabbed a kit from her backpack, and pulled out gauze and tape. She cleaned the area with an antiseptic towelette, then put a fresh pad of gauze over it.

“Reg, I’m sorry,” she said as she ripped off medical tape. “About everything.”

And Reggie nodded, though she wasn’t sure if Tara was talking about Vera, or about all that had transpired years ago between the two of them.

Tara’s next words answered her question. “It wasn’t your fault, you know. I’m the one who made him do it. And it was my idea to run away after.” She kept her eyes on the work she was doing, carefully applying tape around the edges of the gauze.

Reggie breathed out a long, slow breath. “There’s this thing. It’s called free will.”

Reggie had never told a soul what had happened that night. Lorraine had asked her after, why it was that Tara and Charlie didn’t come around anymore. Reggie would look away, make up some story about new friends, people changing, moving on. Lorraine imagined that it had something to do with what had happened to Vera: that it was all just too much for Tara and Charlie somehow.

There were times, over the years, when Reggie ached to tell someone the truth. To confess.

Me and my friends, we did this terrible thing.

Tara finished with the tape. She smiled, shook her head, and looked at Reggie, then away. “Sometimes we’re at the mercy of other people. We don’t even understand the power they have over us until it’s too late.”

“But Charlie—”

“I’m not just talking about me and Charlie. I’m talking about me and you.”

Chapter 14

June 15, 1985

Brighton Falls, Connecticut

“H
O-LY SHIT!”
T
ARA SAID
, smacking the latest edition of the
Hartford Examiner
with her open palm. They were in the garage, and Tara was sprawled across the old, patched leather couch in the corner while Reggie searched her aunt’s workbench. The garage was dark and airless; the only light came from a small, dusty window and a metal lamp clamped onto the wall over Lorraine’s workbench. So far, all Reggie had found was fly-fishing junk—vises, clamps, scissors, wire cutters along with endless quantities of hooks, feathers, beads, and fake fur.

“Candace Jacques had eaten lobster, too!” Tara squealed. “He cut off her hand, kept her alive for four freaking days, fed her boiled lobster, and strangled her—just like Andrea McFerlin! And listen to this—the son of a bitch has a name now!

“ ‘An anonymous source at the Brighton Falls Police Department reports that after Candace Jacques’s stomach contents were discovered, the detectives working the case nicknamed the killer Neptune.’ ” Tara looked up from the paper, eyes glittering. “That must have been Charlie’s dad. How cool is that? His dad gets to name a serial killer! God, this reporter is awesome. What’s her name . . . Martha! Whose name is really Martha? Anyways, sounds like she’s got some secret inside source. She’s getting stuff the TV news people don’t have a clue about.” Reggie could practically feel the electric hum of excitement pulsing off Tara’s body.

Tara went back to the paper and read aloud, “ ‘The official statement from chief of police Vern Samson is that they are following leads and actively looking for a connection between these two women.’ ” Tara scowled. “No shit!” she yelped. “I wonder how much they really know. Maybe Charlie’s heard something. His dad can’t be totally secretive about every little detail.”

Charlie and Tara hadn’t spoken in a week, since the day of the eighth-grade dance, and work on the tree house was at a standstill.