Little Girl Lost
Addison Moore
Prologue
We were good people, my husband and I. We had everything you could ask for—successful careers, a stunning home with the requisite, yet clichéd, white picket fence, a precious daughter to call our own. We had secrets, my husband and I. Not many, so few, all of them lethal.
I watch as James clasps his hands around the girl’s bird-like neck, squeezing hard until her flesh goes white—so hard you can see his bones bulge severely, stretching thin the skin at his knuckles.
We were good people, James and I.
It was true until it wasn’t.
1
Allison
Three Months Before
* * *
“Your husband is having an affair with my wife!” Faulk Oden stands in my doorway, creating a shadow over me with his enormous German frame. His red hair coils around his neck the color of burnt leaves in the fall. His freckles are loosely masked from the slap of a Los Angeles summer still raging like a fire over his features. Faulk once said he received his coloring from his mother, an Irish woman who would no sooner incinerate in the sun if she ever saw daylight. I’m rather hoping the same fantastic fate would befall him at the moment. But here he stands, in his sopping wet swim shorts, his shirt sticking to his flesh creating an X-ray of the misshapen fat rolls draped over his belly. His toes press desperately into the porch, white as paper. The tops of his swollen feet are blotched pink as if they were embarrassed for him on some level. And yet here he is, drenched in water as if he had decided on the confrontation during his afternoon swim.
“Did you hear me?” His ears pique like flames. Faulk Oden is on fire, and all I can do is open my mouth wider as if expecting him to fill it with pearls. But these were no pearls—this is feces flung in my face, the excrement of my husband’s stupid, egregious mistake coming back to haunt me at three in the afternoon.
Strange thoughts fill your mind at horrific times like these. God waited until the cool of the day to walk with Adam—some believe that three in the afternoon was the accurate time of day for that. Jesus gave up his spirit at three, tore the veil in two, and opened the holy of holies to all who believed.
But the one pressing thought that congests my mind like a blood clot is that ridiculous sweater I wore time and time again. My sister warned me not to shop from the West Winder, a catalog that caters to menopausal women of an impressive economic standing, either of which I’m not. At thirty, I’m hardly menopausal and we are certainly not in any impressive economic standing. The sweater is white, crocheted in granny squares, thick and bulky, with scalloped edging that does nothing for my figure, but I wear it often and at this moment that depressing pile of acrylic is where I’ve chosen to finger the blame. It was too homely and by default so was I. My sister, Jane, promised me that a man like James Price would need to be wooed long after he was wedded and bedded. Too good looking, she said. Pretty boys are more trouble than they’re worth, she lamented. She should know. She’s in prison for dismembering one of her own.
My silent scream continues.
“I know this is difficult to hear.” He shifts from side to side as the pressure alleviates from his voice. “It’s a shit ride for the both of us, you know. Hailey isn’t home right now. I don’t really want you to bother her about it. She’s not well.”
My head ticks back as if he had struck me. I don’t need Faulk and his male-oriented prehistoric bullshit telling me what I can and cannot do. I haven’t cared for Hailey from the moment they moved in, with her thick wig-like hair, her dark olive skin set to a suntanned perfection, that Hollywood smile, the flash of destruction hiding behind it. She’s a perfect ten by anyone’s standards and certainly James is not impervious—but an affair? Perhaps his mistake was returning what he thought was kindness. A mild flirtation at best.
“Mommy!” Reagan calls from her bedroom. “I can’t find my bag!”
“Ballet.” I clear my throat. “I have to get her ready.” I begin to shut the door in the poor man’s face before pausing. “Keep that lying little bitch away from my husband. And if you’re smart, you’ll get out while you still have your head attached.” I glance to his sopping crotch to signify which head exactly before slamming the door between us.
My heart pounds in jagged spurts as the past comes back like a haunting refrain. James and I have been married for six years, the exact age of our daughter, Reagan. He and I had dated on and off before getting serious, but it was Reagan who cemented the bond between us. We had split for a time, and then just like that, we were back on. What had once been fragile as blown glass had become impenetrable steel. At least in the beginning.
I drive Reagan to ballet, ignoring the annoying mothers in their high school mommy cliques and pretend to bury my nose in a book for an hour, all the while trying to catch up with my reeling mind. Hailey had made no secret of the fact she wanted James for herself what with those wayward glances, batting those false hooker lashes at him, shaking anything that jiggled—and on her that wasn’t a lot. I couldn’t stand her from the moment we met. Other than her obviously falsified beauty there was an underlying cattiness about her, something only another woman can truly pick up on. Men are clueless when it comes to that kind of a thing. Hailey was a pornographic nightmare waiting to happen and I knew it. She’s eerie and nasty and you can practically smell the psychotic on her.
The Odens moved in six months ago, and the first thing she said to me was I don’t cook. Imagine that? Why in the hell I would care was beyond me, but James found her intro so charming he chortled right along with her own husband. It was then I saw that gleam in her eyes. James is a handsome man—beyond handsome actually. In comparison, Faulk was a cloven-hooved toad that had been sprinkled with warts. James is tall with broad shoulders that once ran a football across an anxious field, warm cerulean eyes that make you feel as if you’re the only soul he sees on the planet, but it’s his affable smile that hooks both men and women alike. He’s friendly and has a way of wrangling even the most uptight church mouse into spilling their life story at his feet. He should have been a therapist rather than a civil engineer. He should have been a lot of things, and he most likely would have if he didn’t have a trio of dead siblings dripping off his back, weighing him down with the rancid scent of the past. The one that he killed still gags him in his sleep.
Later that night I have dinner ready and waiting, macaroni and cheese for Reagan and a deep-dish lasagna I heated from frozen for James and me. I’m not Betty Crocker on a good day but on a day like today he’s lucky I didn’t season his portion with arsenic.
At exactly ten after six the door opens and Reagan does her doting daughter routine, latching onto his leg, singing his praises. James does his father of the year bit, picking her up, swinging her through the air and dancing a little jig before allowing her to scuttle off to the kitchen.