The Jennifer McMahon E-Book Bundle (134 page)

“You remember Charlie Berr?” Reggie said.

Lorraine eyed him suspiciously. “Yes. Of course. Nice to see you again, Charles.”

“You too, Miss Dufrane.” He gave her his warmest smile, but Lorraine’s face remained unchanged.

“How’s your father?” Lorraine asked.

“Fine, thanks. Busier than ever now that he’s retired. He went and bought a boat. Does a lot of fishing.”

Lorraine gave a stiff nod. “And your uncle Bo, how’s he?”

Charlie looked down at the floor. “Not so good. He’s got cancer.”

“Cancer?” Lorraine said, frowning hard.

“Yes, ma’am. Pancreatic.”

“I’m so sorry.” Her face softened. “How’s Frances holding up?”

“As well as can be expected.”

Lorraine nodded. “You give them my best, will you, Charles?” She ran water into the bowl in the sink and reached for a sponge and dish soap.

So much for cold and unyielding. Lorraine had softened in her old age. Maybe it was seeing her peers get old and sick. Or maybe, Reggie thought, Lorraine was only sympathetic to people who were dying.

“Lorraine,” Reggie said, “I found yesterday’s paper out in the trash can. Are you sure you didn’t put it there?”

Lorraine shook her head. “I told you, the last time I saw the paper was yesterday when you were looking at it. It was right here on the table.” She finished washing the bowl and put it in the dish drainer. Then she turned to face Reggie. “Maybe you put it out in the trash and just don’t remember.” Lorraine seemed flustered.

“Maybe,” Reggie said, thinking
No way in hell
.

“I got your mother some oatmeal, but she went back to sleep before she had much,” Lorraine said.

Reggie nodded. “We can try again later. If you need me for anything, we’ll be upstairs.”

Lorraine gave her a disapproving look that made Reggie feel like she was a teenager again, trying to sneak a boy up to her bedroom. Lorraine went back to looking at Charlie with suspicion. Then her eye caught on the newspaper and she unfolded it, saw the photos and headline, and immediately closed it.

“Is this yours?” Lorraine said, holding up the large screwdriver Reggie had left sitting on the table beside the paper.

Not wanting to admit to grabbing it as a weapon earlier, Reggie reached for it and said, “Yeah. The window in my room is stuck. I needed something to loosen it up a bit.”

Lorraine nodded.

“Come on upstairs,
Charles,
” Reggie drawled in her best impression of Lorraine. It was stupid and petty, making fun of her aunt, especially after she’d just watched Lorraine being so kind.
Grow the hell up,
she told herself.

Charlie grabbed his guitar and followed, giving a respectful nod to Lorraine. When they were climbing the stairs, he said, “I don’t think she’s too happy that I’m here.” His voice was a low hiss, air coming out of a punctured balloon.

“Lorraine’s never too happy about much of anything,” Reggie said.
Except when she learns someone’s dying. Then she’s all sweetness and sympathy.

They stopped at Vera’s doorway and looked in. She was sound asleep, head at an awkward angle, oatmeal covering her chin.

“Wow.” Charlie gasped, his breath rattling in his chest. “I can’t believe it’s her.”

“It’s crazy, isn’t it?” Reggie said. “Like she’s come back from the dead.”

Reggie gazed in at her mother’s pale, skeletal face. She looked like a visitor from the land of the dead but was clearly just passing through—she’d be returning soon.

“So where’d she turn up?” Charlie asked.

“A hospital in Worcester, Mass. Before that, she’d been staying in a homeless shelter there on and off for the past two years. I’m going to call the social worker at the hospital later and see if I can find out any more. There’s a woman at the shelter my mom keeps talking about—Sister Dolores. I’ll see if I can track her down.”

“Excellent,” Charlie said. “Maybe she can tell you something helpful.” It was silly, really, but Reggie appreciated the reassurance. It was good to have another semi-sane person on board.

“Come on,” Reggie said. “I’m in my old room.”

Charlie whistled when he walked in. “It’s like stepping into a time machine.” He gaped wide-eyed at the walls and bulletin board. “Nothing’s changed.”

“Wait,” Reggie said. “This is the best part.” She pulled open the closet door, revealing her old 1980s clothes, still on hangers. “Lorraine didn’t get rid of a thing. I doubt she ever even came in here after I left.”

“God, is that sweatshirt with shoulder pads? You could probably make some good money on eBay with this stuff,” Charlie said.

“You’re funny. Give me a hand with this, will you?” Reggie said, shoving the screwdriver between the sash and windowsill and prying. She could practically hear George’s voice in her head:
There’s a right tool for every job.
Shut up, George.

Charlie pushed up on the window while Reggie pried it from below, and at last it gave and opened for them.

“Air!” Reggie said, delighted, taking a deep whiff of autumn.

Leaving the window open a crack, Reggie plunked herself down on the bed and started pouring over the contents of the memory box she’d left on top of the rumpled quilt. “I saved all this stuff after my mom disappeared. Nothing all that useful, really. Matchbooks she’d brought me from restaurants and bars, little notes she left, a copy of Vera as the Aphrodite Cold Cream girl . . .”

“Nice bird,” Charlie said, picking up the small carved wooden swan.

“Uncle George made it for my mom. He gave it to her just before she disappeared.”

“What’s this?” Charlie said, picking up the cutout picture of Ganesh, the elephant-headed god.

“Nothing,” Reggie said. “It’s silly, really. I cut it out when I was a kid. It reminded me of my father.”

“Your father?”

“Or who I imagined my father might be. My mom called him Tusks. It was kind of a family joke, but it was all I had to go on.”

Reggie reached into the cigar box and pulled out the ring she’d tucked there last night, and showed it to Charlie. “A wedding ring, I think. My mother had it in her coat pocket when I picked her up in Worcester. Check out the inscription.”

Charlie held the ring up so that he could read it. “Wait. Isn’t that—”

“The day Vera’s hand showed up on the steps of the police station.”

Charlie blew out a breath. “But what does it mean?” he asked.

He may have looked like his dad, but he sure didn’t have old Yogi’s powers of deduction.

“Probably what we’ve always suspected—that if we can find the guy my mom was going to marry, we’ve got our killer.”

“So did you find any new leads about who Mr. Right might be?”

“Not a new lead, exactly,” Reggie admitted. “More like taking a new look at an old one.”

Charlie nodded. “Tell me.”

Reggie reached under her mattress and pulled out Tara’s copy of
Neptune’s Hands
.

“Look, Tara underlined a few passages with a purple pen. I found a purple pen on her bedside table in the room she was staying in, which makes me think she just did it. Anyway . . . one of the things she underlined was a passage about one of the suspects, this guy named James Jacovich. The name didn’t ring a bell with me, but listen to this.” She looked down at the passage and read aloud, “ ‘Jacovich was reportedly one of Vera Dufrane’s on-again, off-again boyfriends. He was a small-time coke dealer who went by the name Rabbit.’ ”

“Okay,” Charlie said, raising his eyebrows in a questioning way.

“My mom talked about him a lot. She told me he was a director, that he had all these connections. She’d been involved with him for years. She said he was a genius, but half crazy with a bad temper.”

“Did you ever meet him?”

Reggie shook her head, then looked back down at the book. “It says here that they picked him up and arrested him for DUI two days after her hand was found. You know why the cops stopped him to begin with?” Reggie asked, hearing the excitement in her voice.

“Why?”

“For a busted taillight. He had a tan Impala with a bashed-in left taillight, just like the car I saw my mom get into at the bowling alley!”

“Wait, he’s involved with her, has a temper, and has a car that matches the one Vera got into the night before her hand showed up. Why’d they let him go?”

Reggie shook her head. “It turned out he had a great alibi—the night my mom went missing, he was at his court-appointed NA meeting, then ended up spending the night on his sponsor’s couch. The sponsor was a reliable member of the community, according to the cops, so Jacovich was off the hook. And it also says the police couldn’t find any evidence or connect him with the other murder victims either.”

“But God, Reggie, there’s the broken taillight!”

“There’s that. But then last night, I remembered something. You know Candace Jacques, the waitress?”

Charlie nodded. “Neptune’s second victim.”

“Well, remember how I said my mom took me to meet her once? You know what one of the first things she said was? She asked my mom if she’d heard from Rabbit lately.”

“So?”

“So, the way Candace said it like Rabbit was this mutual friend. So he’s connected to not just one, but at least two of Neptune’s victims!”

“You think he’s still around?” Charlie asked.

“One way to find out,” Reggie said. “I used my phone to do a search online and didn’t come up with anything. But I thought it couldn’t hurt to visit some of the places out on Airport Road. I was thinking of heading out there later on, seeing what I can find out.”

Charlie nodded. “A lot of them are closed down now, but Runway 36 is still going strong. I’ve got some appointments, but I can be here by six to pick you up.”

“Are you sure?”

“Hell yes.”

“Six o’clock, then,” Reggie said. She knew they were both remembering what searching the bars twenty-five years ago had led to.

She could see it so clearly: Sid crumpled on the pavement, Tara reaching down for him, her hand coming away bloody.

Reggie’s cell phone rang and she jumped. Jesus. Maybe she hadn’t needed all that caffeine. Reggie looked at the display on her phone: Len.

“You need to get that?” Charlie asked, standing. “I can show myself out.”

“No,” Reggie said, turning the ringer off her phone and slipping it back into her pocket. “I’ll walk you out.”

They passed Vera’s room and saw she was awake.

“Hey, Mom, do you remember my old friend Charlie Berr?”

Vera peered at Reggie in the doorway. Then slowly her eyes moved to Charlie, who was a step behind her.

He moved through the door. “A real pleasure to see you again, Miss Dufrane,” he said in a jovial, real-estate guy voice. Reggie saw something change in Vera’s eyes, like a shade being pulled down. Then there was nothing but pure panic as Vera opened her mouth and began to scream.

Chapter 30

June 21, 1985

Brighton Falls, Connecticut

A
IRPORT
E
FFICIENCIES WAS A
single-story row of cinder block units, painted a blotchy and peeling Pepto-Bismol pink; the walls were stained from years of car exhaust, drunken urination, God only knew what else. It glowed hideously bright in the security lights around the parking lot.

“Cozy,” Tara said.

“By the week or by the hour,” Sid said, winking at her.

Charlie was in the backseat beside Reggie, sulking.

“Do you think your mom really has a room here?” Tara asked, turning to look at Reggie.

Reggie couldn’t bring herself to answer.

“I think it’s pretty fucked up if she does,” Tara said, leaning forward and twisting a chunk of hair into a more pointed spike, angling it down over her left eye. It looked like a horn.

The three of them piled out of the Mustang and went into the motel’s office, where they pushed a buzzer and waited for a grizzled old man to emerge from the doorway behind the desk. He eyed them suspiciously.

“Yes?” He was wearing brown polyester pants and a pea-green sweater covered in stains. His false teeth slid and clacked as he spoke. Reggie detected the faint odor of urine coming from his general direction.

“I’m looking for my mother. She’s a resident here. Vera Dufrane?”

The old man was silent, gazing dully at each of them in turn. He played with his teeth, pushing them forward with his tongue, out past his lips, then sucking them back into place.

“These are my cousins,” Reggie continued. “It’s urgent we find her. There’s been a death in the family.”

Dentures reached under the counter and produced a key, which he slapped down on the Formica desk.

“You can go ahead and clean out her stuff. What you don’t take goes in the Dumpster tomorrow. She’s two weeks behind. Been here on and off for five years now and never missed a week’s rent.

“Called last week, all apologies, said she’d be coming by to square up and clean the place out, but she never showed. A detective showed up yesterday, demanding to be let into her room. That’s the last thing I need is the cops snooping around—it’s bad for business.” He pushed his teeth out, then sucked them in—his own punctuation mark to show he was all done talking.

Reggie took the key, attached to an orange tag with the number 8. The tag had something like petroleum jelly on it, and Reggie realized it must have come from the old man’s hands. She wiped the orange tag on her jeans, thanked the man, and led the way out of the office. Stopping in the doorway, she turned back to ask one final question.

“She’s getting married, you know. My mom. Did you ever meet the guy?”

The teeth were pushed forward, out past his cracked, yellow lips as the old man laughed. Reggie’s face reddened, her left ear burning, and she looked down at the floor.

“There are lots of men,” he wheezed, trying to catch his breath. “Hard to keep track, if you know what I mean. And we got lots of residents. I don’t keep up with all the comings and goings. I can’t even say for sure when Vera was here last.”

“But in the last few weeks? Anyone special around since then?”

Dentures seemed to consider this.

“Nope. Last few times I saw her, she was alone. There was a light-colored car parked outside of her door a few times. That’s all I can tell you.”