“Sort of.”
“Ah. Then I have the solution.” He reached for the bag of marshmallows. “We can’t argue when our mouths are full of marshmallows. Come on. Join me in delicious goodness.”
She giggled.
“You have the most incredible laugh.”
She reached into the bag, and they ate marshmallows and watched the day’s light dissolve into darkness.
The hurt was always there, like a round pebble she couldn’t un-swallow. When Kate was a little girl, the world felt safe and welcoming, because it was limited to her house and her dolls and her parents and her pesky kid sister. It was popcorn and play dates and her dad singing “Whip It” by Devo in a goofy voice. But Kate had been forced to accept that life wasn’t warm and fuzzy. At the tender age of sixteen, everything had turned darkly sinister. She stopped trusting people. She stopped believing in her father’s infallibility. She no longer moved fluidly into her bright future without expecting to get hurt. Sometimes, it hurt badly.
On the day of her mother’s funeral, twenty-two years ago, it rained heavily. Kate was a skinny ten-year-old, and the church doors wouldn’t open. She shoved hard on the right-hand door, but it wouldn’t budge. Was the church locked? She and Savannah pushed hard on the left-hand door, but it wouldn’t open either. The girls panicked and shook both doors. “Let us in! Let us in!” Then their father demonstrated how to open it. Pull, don’t push. Maybe that was a metaphor for life?
Inside the packed church, they sat next to each other in the front pew. Their father was so stripped of life, he could’ve been a corpse. Kate remembered thinking that her mother was more alive in death than their father was just then. And afterwards at the cemetery, when they lowered Julia’s casket into the ground, Savannah had collapsed into Kate’s arms. But years later, at Savannah’s funeral, Kate had nobody’s arms to fall into.
Now she had James.
She snuggled deeper into his embrace and closed her eyes.
18
ON SATURDAY MORNING, KATE woke up and squinted at the alarm clock. “Oh my God. I overslept!”
James was standing in front of the mirror, freshly shaved, showered, and ready for work. “Relax. You’ve got time.”
“But the funeral’s at ten!”
“I thought you said noon?”
“Oh shit. I was going to write something over coffee this morning.” She leapt out of bed. “Nikki’s mother asked me to say a few words.”
“Okay, so? Plan B.”
“That was Plan B.”
He put on his tie, expertly shimmying the knot up to his neck. “How can I help?”
“I don’t know. I’ve got writer’s block. My head keeps filling up with clichés.”
“Just express how you feel. Clichéd or not. Write what’s in your heart.”
She focused on his face. “Oh wow. I never thought of that.”
He grinned. “Shut up.”
“Can I quote you? ‘Let yourself feel. Express what’s in your heart.’”
“Yeah, I get it. I’m a pompous ass.”
“Well, you got your PA from Harvard, didn’t you?”
“Pompous Ass? Don’t be absurd. Yale.” He kissed her goodbye. “Relax. You’ll do great, like always.”
After he was gone, Kate ran around getting ready and wasted precious time debating with herself—gray, black or navy blue? What did people wear to funerals nowadays? She accidentally ripped her pantyhose and spent the next five minutes looking for a pair that didn’t have any runs in it. She settled on a dove-gray suit. She didn’t have time to make a cup of coffee.
As Kate drove out of the city she tried to shape a speech inside her head, but yesterday’s conversation with Nelly kept crowding everything else out. She felt a stark churning in her stomach. What if James was wrong? What if Nelly was telling the truth? She’d let James reassure her, because he was her rock and she wanted to believe him. She didn’t want to think Savannah’s killer was still out there, abducting little girls. There had been a couple of slightly similar cases in Blunt River County over the past decade or so, and they’d both happened while Henry Blackwood was on death row. Still, that didn’t mean much; teenage girls were often the target of predators.
She tapped the steering wheel, trying to remember the cases. Ten years ago, a hiker stumbled across the remains of a murdered teenager in The Balsams, a densely wooded area west of town. Fourteen-year-old Hannah Lloyd had been found strangled to death. The sensational murder trial dominated the news at the time. The defendant, a convicted pedophile and Hannah’s next-door neighbor, had ultimately gone free when the trial ended in a hung jury. Before the DA could mount a second trial, the suspect shot himself in the head.
Then, about a year ago, fifteen-year-old Makayla Brayden went missing, and she had never been found. A $15,000 reward had been posted for information leading to an arrest. There was no reason to connect the two cases—Hannah Lloyd’s killer was known, and according to the papers, Makayla Brayden took drugs and ran away from home, putting her at high risk for predation.
This line of thought wasn’t getting her anywhere. Kate spotted a Dunkin’ Donuts and pulled over. She hurried inside and bought a donut and a large coffee. Back inside the car, she opened her spiral notebook, dug a pen out of her bag, and stared at the blank page. Write from the heart.
Loss. Grief. Kate understood what it was like to lose a loved one. You shut down, you broke down, sometimes you screamed. You got angry with yourself and you got angry with God. You threatened to stop believing in Him, even though you were on the fence. You cursed Him out, you pleaded, you seriously lost your shit. You lost your appetite. You felt sorry for yourself. You felt sorry for the world. Why—this word rang out inside your head like a cathedral bell. Why why why? Why was this beautiful person gone? Why did the universe allow it? You hated this hollow feeling. You hated the sun for rising. Sunsets made you cry. Nights were hard. Weeks passed and the hurt didn’t get any better.
She checked her dashboard clock. Time to go. She’d written two barely legible pages, which she jammed into her bag. She hadn’t touched the donut. She capped her coffee and took off.
Ten minutes later, she heard church bells ringing in the pricey Boston suburb where the McCormacks lived. It was a gorgeous February morning, sunny and breezy. Gas-guzzlers competed for space with hybrids in the church parking lot. A large crowd had gathered in front of the church—Nikki’s family and friends, her neighbors and classmates, many holding one another for comfort. Kate found a parking space and joined the crowd, worried what they would think of her once she’d introduced herself. Oh, you’re the shrink who couldn’t save Nikki.
Savannah’s funeral had been crammed with strangers— reporters and camera crews straining at the barricades, volunteers and well-wishers from all over. The Blunt River Police had done their very best to protect Kate and her father from media scrutiny, but a good story was hard to ignore. Their dumbstruck faces were plastered all over the nightly news, shots taken as they scurried up the church steps or led the funeral procession. In those grainy images, Kate looked like a child experiencing adult pain for the very first time.
Now her nerves were frayed. The notes she’d made for her speech were crumpled up in the bottom of her bag. Nikki’s biological father stepped out of the crowd and greeted her warmly.