The Pretty Ones (16 page)

This was all Harriet Lamont's doing.

She
was the one to blame, telling Nell that she had to change her life for the better.

Nell couldn't sit still a minute longer. She let her fingers unfurl just shy of her typewriter before rising from her chair. She pivoted on the soles of her new sandals—shoes that she had considered cute less than a day before but that now made her feel stupid and out of place. With her head pounding to the rhythm of her heart, she caught sight of Lamont out of the corner of her eye. The boss looked about ready to tear out her hair as the phones rang off the hook, not a single call being answered. She waved her hands at the occasional girl.
Sit down, sit down, be calm.
Nobody wanted to be calm. The whirlwind of panic made it the perfect time to duck into the elevator and get back to the apartment. That steel box would sweep her down to street level without a single person noticing. It would unleash her on the world, let her get back to what was important: her brother.

She gathered herself up, pulled her sweater tight across her chest, and walked to the elevator. Jabbing her finger against the down button, she closed her eyes, steadied her breathing. But rather than being washed over with calm, the memory of Lamont dragging her into her office blazed bright against her eyelids. She would tell the police about Linnie Carter, about Nell's lie. Like a wolf hunting the weakest sheep, Harriet Lamont had singled her out before, and she'd do it again.

Lamont was the worst one of all.

Nell shot a look over her shoulder, her fingernails biting into the meat of her palms. There wasn't a single girl within a hundred feet of her. Lamont's door was less than a few steps away. She bit her bottom lip, cast another look about, and ducked into the office with Lamont's name stenciled in gold upon the door. She had to make things right with Barrett, and she knew exactly how to do it.

Less than a minute later, Nell snuck out of the boss's office in time to see a pair of detectives step out of the elevator.

“Nell?” Harriet Lamont gave Nell a curious glance as she rushed to meet the police. Why was Nell standing outside of her office door?

Nell swallowed hard and nodded. “Ms. Lamont, I have some information about Adriana and Mary Ann . . . ,” she said. Nell would be the first to grant those detectives an interview, the first to give them a lead. The girls had invited her to the Cabana Club, after all, an invitation Nell had passed on because she had some shopping to do. They had warned her about that creepy guy Dave, the one who frequented the bar. Dave was the guy the police needed to focus on. Maybe he was the guy who had killed Linnie Carter too.

.   .   .

Nell sat on the edge of Barrett's wingback chair, waiting for him to return home. Her attention was fixed on her favorite childhood photo of the both of them. It had been taken in the summer of '58, only a few weeks before Barrett stopped talking. And while Nell adored the photo of them standing together with their arms draped across each other's shoulders, Beary clutched to her chest, it never failed to bring up bitter memories of their father's funeral. Of the way their grandmother had whispered that she was going to take her away.

Their mother hadn't seemed the least bit sad about their father's death until they arrived at the cemetery. She had hissed at them in the car, craning her neck to glare at them from the front seat. “You keep your big mouths shut,” she had warned. “And don't talk to any of those people. You hear me?” She spit the word
people
out like it was tainted with something foul. As though their father's family wasn't good enough for her. As though they had never been good enough and she was relieved that she'd never have to see their faces again. “They never liked us, and they aren't going to start doing that now that your father is gone.”

Stone-faced, Faye Sullivan stepped out of Leigh's old car. She pulled the door open for Nell and Barrett and turned toward a small black-clad group that was already gathered on the cemetery's grass. It was only upon seeing Leigh's family standing together that Faye's emotions came flooding out. Nell and Barrett had been crying together in their room for what felt like weeks, while their mother hadn't shed a tear—not a single one until right then.

Clasping hands, Nell and Barrett decided that adults handled sadness in strange and confusing ways. Perhaps when they grew older, their sadness would come in fitful, manic bursts as well.

Now, thumbing the soft edge of the photo in her hand, Nell realized that, as a grown-up, emotions hit her in a similar way to how they had come over their mother. Faye Sullivan had always been erratic. She was happy one minute, screaming the next, collapsed in a fit of anguished tears moments after that. Nell remembered nights when their mom would weep while their dad held her tight in his arms.

“I don't know what's wrong with me, Leigh!” she'd cried. “It's like I'm two people. It's like I have no control over the things I do!”

That had been back when Faye was still herself. But the longer her emotional highs and lows continued, the less she thought there was something wrong with
her
and the more she was sure the problem lay with everyone else. That's when she started smelling like booze and sleeping until three in the afternoon. Those were the days when Nell and Barrett would listen to the television through paper-thin walls at all hours of the night. Their mom had no regard for the fact that it was bedtime, that they had to get up for school, that the TV was keeping them up.

Those mornings were tough. Sometimes, when Nell dozed off in class, she'd get a ruler across the tops of her hands. Once, when she had fallen asleep, her third-grade math teacher, Mrs. Brannigan, had shoved her awake. The bitch made Nell put on a rubber pig nose and stand on top of a desk like a flamingo for the rest of the hour. Ten minutes before the bell, old No Shenanigans Brannigan had to take a call in the front office. She left the classroom after warning Nell that if she moved a muscle, she'd be in even bigger trouble than she already was. As soon as she was gone, Nell's classmates pelted her with spitballs and oinked with glee.
Hey, pig!
Nell moved all her muscles. She ran out of the room sobbing, only to crash chest-first into Brannigan's trunk-like legs. That prompted Brannigan to call Faye Sullivan, complaining about Nell's inability to focus and follow instructions. Brannigan had even revealed her tactics for keeping Nell awake, as if satisfied that she'd humiliated Nell with her unorthodox punishment. But instead of Faye Sullivan raging at the instructor for disgracing her daughter, she had grabbed Nell by the arm and dragged her out to the car. In the parking lot, she slapped her across the face before shoving her into the backseat.

“They all saw up your dress,” she yelled on the way home. “You stood there like a dunce while all those boys were looking at your panties. You probably liked it, didn't you? Filthy.”

Filthy.

Filthy pig.

Faye's mood swings had been swift and terrifying. Sometimes Nell felt that she was falling into the same pattern as her mother, and that's exactly why Barrett kept her close, why he had done all those terrible things. He was protecting her from what at times seemed like an inevitable destiny. Perhaps Nell had been born to repeat history. To become a carbon copy of the monster that had spit her out wet and naked unto the world. It was no coincidence that Faye was a single letter shy of
fate
.

Nell frowned at the photo, wishing that, by some sort of magic, she and Barrett had remained in that marginally happier time. At least back then she had someone to talk to, someone who would answer back. Barrett had been funny. Every other sentence that came out of his mouth was a joke, something to amuse his kid sister. Even during the hard times, he knew how to make her smile. But Barrett had recently grown into his own kind of monster—one sculpted by anger and a need for vindication. He wanted reprisal, fantasized about squaring accounts with a woman he cared nothing for. His was a blood feud, and if he couldn't have it with their mother, he'd settle on the blood of someone else, even if it cost Nell her sanity.

Barrett appeared in the apartment as silently as always, having climbed up the fire escape just outside his bedroom window. Nell found herself looking into the eyes of her stern and looming brother. Her only friend and confidante. For half a second, she wanted to scream at him, wanted to demand an explanation for Adriana and Mary Ann. She had begged him not to repeat what he'd done to Linnie, had implored him to trust her, to let her make things better for the both of them. He'd purposefully ignored her wishes. She had every right to be enraged. And yet, rather than waiting for a scribbled apology, she murmured “I'm sorry” before he ever reached for that small yellow pad.

She looked down at the photograph balanced on her knee. No explanation was necessary. She knew why he had done it. She knew it was partly her fault.

“I guess I should have seen this coming,” she murmured. “I should have talked to you at the club, told you why I was there.” She peeked up at him. He appeared unmoved, his arms rigid at his sides. “I saw you. I know you followed me there. I was angry for a minute. I felt betrayed that you'd do that, that you'd tail me like some . . .” Her words trailed off. She didn't want to finish her sentence, didn't want to call it the way she saw it, no matter how true it was.

“Anyway, I talked to the police . . . at the office, I mean. Because Lamont had sent for them and nobody was allowed to leave until they gave a statement. I don't think they'll come here, but we should leave regardless.”

Barrett's expression flickered between blank and dissatisfied. Nell wasn't surprised. She had predicted his response.

“But I know that if we leave without you finishing what you started, things will get worse rather than better,” she told him. “I know that you have to do this, that this is your way of working through the hurt. But I know how to fix it, Barrett. I know how to make it right for you.”

Barrett stood by, waiting for Nell's big reveal. She rose from the chair, moved across the apartment to her purse, and brought out a folded rectangle of pale yellow paper. She unfolded it and narrowed her eyes at the name in the top left-hand corner:
HARRIET LAMONT
. It was a blank check. They could make it out for a hundred thousand dollars if they wanted. But Nell hadn't stolen it to hack into Lamont's finances. It was for the few lines that followed Lamont's name. There, printed in crisp black ink, was her boss's home address.

“This is what you want,” she said, extending her arm for him to take the check from her fingers. “She's the source of all of this, the seed of everything you hate.”

Because if Barrett wanted to kill a mother figure, there was no better surrogate than the one who sat behind a shiny oak desk.

.   .   .

Harriet Lamont lived in a turn-of-the-century colonial on a tree-lined street in Sheepshead Bay. Nell and Barrett took a cab rather than the train to avoid being spotted, the both of them staring out the window like a pair of wide-eyed kids. Nell gave the cabbie an address a few numbers away from Lamont's place to keep him from stopping in front of the house. That, and it would be better he not have Lamont's exact address in his log book. The last thing they needed was to be fingered by some washed-up taxi driver looking for his fifteen minutes of fame.

The cab rolled to a stop a little after nine p.m. Nell paid the driver without so much as a thank-you, then slid out of the backseat behind Barrett. The street was darker than it should have been, a handful of streetlights burnt out overhead. The one across the street from Lamont's house looked as though it was on its last leg, shining a pale yellow circle onto the pavement, not bright enough to illuminate much of anything beyond its sad saffron glow. Barrett motioned for Nell to follow him. Across the street and a couple of houses down from Lamont's place, they took up a hiding spot in the middle of a thicket of pines in someone's front yard.

Lamont's house looked nothing like the one Nell and Barrett had grown up in, but there was something about the pitch of the roof, about the way the interior light filtered through sheer curtains in the front windows that reminded them both of the dark closet they'd spent so much time in as kids. It wasn't their home, but sometimes stand-ins were unavoidable. Sometimes the significance of an act was more important than the person or thing being acted upon.

They had been halfway to Sheepshead Bay when Nell started to understand what she had set in motion. This particular crime wouldn't be another senseless alleyway killing. This victim wouldn't be just another pretty face. Harriet Lamont was a successful businesswoman, an executive working for a prestigious Manhattan firm. Adriana and Mary Ann were already plastered across the front page of the papers, and Linnie didn't go without mention in those articles. They were calling it a triple homicide, a hit on Rambert & Bertram, a series of murders that had office girls across the city in a panic. Because if a place like R & B could be targeted, that meant every other office was just as vulnerable. But Lamont? Her death would be splashed across the news cycle as inevitably as her blood would fan all over the interior walls of her home. The police would question every R & B girl again, this time far more thoroughly. They'd interview every girl's boyfriend and husband and family member in their frantic search for leads. And Nell wasn't sure if she was quite as good of an actress as she had thought.

And then there was the fact that Nell had somehow been transported to the scene of this future crime. Barrett had become a whirlwind of movement after Nell had handed him Lamont's address and somehow she had ended up in the cab right next to her brother. It may have been that, without handing over Lamont's address, scribbled on a scrap piece of gold paper, Barrett wouldn't have been able to communicate where it was he wanted to go; and that scrawled address would have been evidence.