The One I Left Behind (14 page)

“It’s her daughter,” Charlie snapped. He was fingering a plastic tortoiseshell guitar pick he’d pulled from his pocket. “What’s she supposed to do?” He was wearing his most beat-up jeans with a hole in the knee. Reggie could see the tiny hairs on his leg poking through and wondered what it would feel like to touch them.

“I just don’t think they should have let her go on like that. It makes things seem . . . I don’t know, more out of control than they should. Like everyone knows the cops haven’t got a clue, so they’re hoping to appeal to whatever sad little scrap of humanity is left in this guy or something by having her beg for her daughter’s life. It just seems so . . . desperate.” Tara began flapping her left hand in the air, trying to dry her nails. She turned to Charlie. “And
anyways,
the dude’s obviously a psycho. Like he’s going to be turned from his evil ways by a crying old lady.”

“What do you mean, everybody knows the cops haven’t got a clue?” Charlie asked. “My dad’s practically living at the station! They’re gonna solve this. I know they will.”

Tara snorted. “The killer is taunting them. Leaving the hands on the steps of the police station like that . . . he’s pissing on their territory. No way the cops are going to solve this. They don’t even know where to get started.”

“Oh, and you do?” Charlie said, stuffing the pick back in the pocket of his jeans. “Why don’t you get your bad-ass psychic Nancy Drew self out there and catch the killer then, Tara?”

Tara scowled at him. “You’re just all pissed off at me because I said no to going to the stupid junior high dance with you tonight. I won’t hold your hand in the dark or pin an ugly-ass flower to my dress or dance to some cheesy Journey song with my head on your shoulder, so now you’re gonna be a total asshole? Way to win a girl’s heart, Romeo.”

Reggie sank back into the couch. She suddenly felt breathless.

Charlie’s face turned red, and he opened his mouth to say something, but then thought better of it and snapped it closed. He stomped out of the living room, slamming the front door.

Reggie wasn’t surprised that Charlie had asked Tara to the dance, and she was glad that Tara had refused. But still, she couldn’t help feeling this sort of sickly green resentment for Tara bubble up from the pit of her stomach.

“Jerkwad,” Tara mumbled, staring at the door Charlie had just slammed. She finished her nails, screwed the top on the bottle of polish, and dropped it into her purse. Then she blew on her fingertips, inspected her handiwork, and turned to Reggie and asked, “Any word from your mom yet?”

Reggie shook her head.

“I don’t like it. Your mom disappearing right now like this. Maybe we should go, like, look for her or something.”

“She’s down in New Haven,” Reggie said. “She’s probably hanging out with her theater friends.”

“Probably,” Tara said, fiddling with her hourglass necklace.

“Is it true?” Reggie asked. “Did Charlie really ask you to the dance?” She knew she should let it go, that hearing more about it would just add to the torture, but since she couldn’t stop herself from thinking about it, she figured asking wouldn’t make it much worse.

Tara gave a quick nod. “Can you believe it?” she asked.

Yes
, Reggie thought.
Yes, I can
. The dance was that night, and practically the whole school was going. They’d had their stupid graduation ceremony in the auditorium the day before, all of them lined up while parents clapped and fanned themselves with programs because there was no air-conditioning and it was airless and hot as hell. Reggie’s mom hadn’t shown, but Lorraine and George had been there, sitting in the front row, fidgeting like their clothes didn’t fit them right. George had brought Reggie a bouquet of really ugly carnations that had been dyed orange. Tara’s mom hadn’t shown up either. Charlie’s dad came at the last minute, once the ceremony was over, and gave Charlie a congratulatory thump on the back that nearly knocked Charlie off his feet.

“Are you gonna go?” Reggie asked. “Not with him, I mean, but at all?”

Tara shook her head. “No way. It’s for losers.”

“Yeah,” Reggie agreed. “I’m not going either.”

So that was it. She would never set foot in Brighton Falls Junior High again. Somehow she’d expected a more dramatic ending to that part of her life. She’d expected to feel different in some way, like the eighth-grade diploma that sat rolled on top of her desk actually symbolized something.

Stupid.

“Hey, can I tell you something?” Tara asked.

Reggie nodded.

Tara’s eyes looked big and owlish. “I went to her house.”

“Whose house?” Reggie asked.

“Andrea McFerlin’s,” she whispered excitedly. “His first victim.”

“Wait, what?” Reggie stammered. “Why would you go to her house?”

Tara’s eyes glistened. She licked her lips. “I don’t know, Reg. After that day with the Ouija board, in the tree house? I just couldn’t stop thinking about her, you know? So I looked her up in the phone book. She lived over on Kemp, way out at the end. A little yellow house with a kiddie pool in the yard. I rode my bike. I knocked on the door, but no one answered. So I went around back. And I peeked in the windows.”

“Jesus, Tara! If anyone had seen you, they would have called the cops.”

She shook her head dismissively. “But they didn’t. Anyway, I looked in, and you know what I saw? This big old dollhouse. One of those Barbie Dream Townhouse things with the elevator and shit? Right in the middle of the living room. And I was thinking about those poor little kids losing their mama, and how cool the Dream Townhouse was, but how it didn’t really matter anymore because they’d lost the most important thing and their little lives were pretty much changed forever. Then the next thing I knew—” She stopped, looked at Reggie, said, “You gotta swear not to tell anyone this. Not even Charlie.”

Reggie nodded.

“The next thing I knew, I was in Andrea’s house. The freaking back door was unlocked. So I walked right in.” Tara eyed Reggie cautiously, like she was wondering if she should be telling her all this.

“You broke in?” Reggie gasped.

“I
said,
the door was open,” she snapped. Then she seemed to relax, brushing a strand of hair out of her eyes. “And it didn’t feel like trespassing,” she said almost dreamily. “It felt like . . . like the place was familiar. It was like I wasn’t me. Like I was her and I was coming home.” She gave a shy smile.

“Tara,” Reggie said, “I don’t think —”

“Just let me finish, Reg,” Tara said, holding up her hand with its freshly painted nails. “I got inside and I sat down at the dollhouse. All the furniture was in the wrong place—there was a bed in the kitchen and the bathtub was up on the roof. It was like Cyclone Barbie had hit—clothes everywhere, naked dolls on the floor.” She reached into the pocket of her torn jeans and pulled something out, holding it clasped tightly in her fist.

“I found this there,” she said. Then, like a magician producing a rabbit from the air, she opened her hand in a dramatic, tah-dah way. And there in her palm was a tiny pink doll’s shoe with a high heel.

“You took that? A Barbie shoe?” Reggie said, squinting in disbelief at the shoe. “Why?”

Tara shrugged, clearly disappointed by Reggie’s reaction, and tucked the tiny shoe back into her pocket. “I just wanted something from her. From Andrea. A little piece of them. Something solid and real. Something they’d never miss. Do you understand?”

Reggie just stared. She did not understand.

“Swear you won’t tell anyone, Reg. Please.”

C
HARLIE SPENT THE NEXT
few days avoiding Tara and keeping himself busy with his lawn-mowing business. Reggie hated not seeing him, so she offered to help him do lawns. Charlie put her in charge of the Weedwacker and gave her a third of whatever he earned. On Wednesday morning, when they were in front of Charlie’s house, gassing up for the first lawn of the day, Reggie finally brought up Tara.

“You really like her, huh?”

Charlie didn’t respond. He poured gas into the Lawn-Boy, then screwed the cap on.

“I just miss us all hanging out together,” Reggie said. “Summer vacation is gonna suck if you two don’t start talking again.” She didn’t say what she really wanted to—that she was actually kind of worried about Tara. The thing with the Barbie shoe seemed . . . well, it seemed more than a little eccentric; it seemed possibly certifiably crazy.

“You don’t get it,” Charlie said.

“What? What don’t I get?”

“How impossible it is for me to be around her.”

Reggie bit her lip. “I do get it,” she said.

Charlie shook his head dismissively, like she was a kid who didn’t understand anything. He stood up and started pushing the mower down the street. Their first lawn was the widow Mrs. Larraby, who lived five houses down from Charlie. Reggie finished putting gas in the string trimmer and joined him. They worked together, both engines screaming, the smell of cut grass and gasoline following them. Reggie did around the house and along the rock wall at the back edge of Mrs. Larraby’s yard. Charlie walked back and forth in neat rows.

When Reggie was done, she sat and watched him finish up. The morning was hot and Charlie’s back was soaked with sweat. She could see it running down the back of his neck, which was already tan. She imagined herself touching him there, how warm and moist it would be, how if her fingers circled around, they’d be at the front of his neck, touching his Adam’s apple, moving down to the hollow beneath it. She longed to put her fingers there, in this soft indentation above his collarbone.

Mrs. Larraby came outside with two glasses of cold lemonade and Charlie stopped the mower.

“Have you heard?” she asked as she handed Reggie a heavy glass wet with condensation. “That waitress from the Silver Spoon was found this morning. Strangled, poor thing, just like that other girl. She was on the front lawn of the town library, naked except for the bandages. Her body was laid out right next to the statue there.” Mrs. Larraby shuddered.

Reggie could picture it clearly—the granite statue of a stack of books, the word
Knowledge
engraved beneath. And there, in its early morning shadow, was Candy’s body.

How about a little sugar for Candy?

W
HEN
R
EGGIE GOT HOME
to Monique’s Wish, she headed down the hallway to the kitchen. Lorraine was talking in the living room, and she sounded pissed off. Was she on the phone? And then, Reggie heard her mother’s voice. The relief flooded through her, a physical sensation. She stayed in the kitchen, out of sight, and listened.

“I won’t have it,” Lorraine hissed. “Not in this house. If Father were here—”

“Don’t you dare start in about what Daddy would say,” Vera warned. “And if you want to go down that road, may I remind you that you of all people are in no position to judge me.”

“I don’t know what—”

“Oh you know exactly what I mean. Call me whatever names you want. You’re no saint, Lorraine. Don’t think I don’t know what goes on in that garage of yours.”

Then Reggie heard the unmistakable sound of a hand slapping a face and little grunting noise.

Footsteps came toward her. Reggie looked around the kitchen frantically—could she hide somewhere? But then Lorraine was in the kitchen.

“Regina,” she said, voice shaking. Lorraine’s face was pale. She had on the old fishing vest and hat. Reggie froze, waiting to see what might happen next. Lorraine looked at Reggie a moment, then continued through the kitchen, down the hall, and out the front door. Reggie looked out the window and watched Lorraine cross the driveway and enter the garage.

What did Lorraine do in the garage other than tie flies for trout fishing?

Reggie went into the living room and found her mother sitting on the couch, hand on her cheek. She was wearing a shiny blue dress Reggie had never seen before.

“Hey,” Reggie said. “You okay?”

“Fine,” Vera told her. “Just fine.” She pulled her hand away from her cheek and Reggie saw that it was bright red.

Reggie looked away, down at her sneakers covered in grass clippings, and fiddled self-consciously with the new ear.

Reggie had always been a quiet kid, even with her own family, and part of the reason for this was that she never knew the right thing to say. Words didn’t come easily to her, they were stumbling blocks rather than lines of connection. And only later, after the fact, when she was replaying conversations in her head late at night, did the right words come—a cruel joke, too little, too late.

Now, as she watched her mother move her ruined hand up to her reddened cheek again, Reggie had to say something that would break the spell. But even as she opened her mouth and felt the words tumbling out, she realized once again she was saying the wrong thing.

“Candace Jacques is dead,” Reggie told her.

“What?” her mother asked, moving her scarred hand away from her face, putting it carefully in her lap, under her left hand.

“They found her body in front of the library this morning. Strangled. Just like Andrea McFerlin.”

As soon as she saw her mother’s face, it hit harder than ever: this was real life, and Candace Jacques had been a real person—a woman who ate burgers with onions and took the time to wrap up a slice of pie for her mother at the end of a long shift. She wasn’t just a news story but an actual, physical person. Reggie suddenly understood why Tara had ridden out to Andrea McFerlin’s house; why she carried that little pink Barbie shoe everywhere. It was proof. Proof that this woman existed beyond the full-color photo on the front page of the
Hartford Examiner.

“My
God,
” was all Vera said, the tears starting. Then she turned and left the room, climbing the dark wooden steps of their failed castle.

Chapter 13

October 16, 2010

Brighton Falls, Connecticut

“I
DON’T REALLY CARE
for pizza,” Lorraine said for the third time as she frowned at what remained of the slice on her plate.

“Well, we had to eat, didn’t we?” Reggie snapped, honestly a little relieved that Lorraine had set fire to the fish that would have peered up from their plates with gruesome little eyeballs. “And Mom seems to be enjoying it.”