She flips past a few more darkened shots of the home, the woman suspiciously missing from the front. The next shot is the two of them making their way down the porch. The picture is clearer, closer. Heather must have changed positions. Then the heartstopper. Her hand on his face. The next one with her arms wrapped around his waist.
“Whoever she is, he’s not into this.” I can tell by his body language. But still it looks rather incriminating.
She lets out an ear-piercing tsk. “That’s because she tuckered him out. They were in there for over an hour. I timed it.” Her eyes grow hauntingly larger as she suffocates me with her acidic leftover coffee breath. “If you don’t believe me, we can probably get the data off the pictures.”
“I believe you.” I gently push her away until she’s at a solid arm’s length. “Let me see those again.” I pull her phone forward and scroll through the next few. “She looks familiar.”
“Her name is Monica Percale. I followed her home, then looked up the tax records to see who owned the house.” She snaps the phone back with a prideful grin.
That bitch Monica. Should have known.
“You’re quite the little detective.” I frown at the neglected petunias bordering the house. “I do know her. She was the girl doing his makeup. His ex. I met her at the press conference. She has a thing for him.” My head ticks without meaning to. “But he can’t stand her. Besides, she’s not his type.” Hailey Oden and her thin, tan frame, flawless skin, shock of white teeth flash through my mind. “I know his type, and that’s not it.”
“You’re his type.” Her voice hikes with a righteous indignation. “He damn well better get that through his thick pretty little head.”
A burp of laughter rattles around my chest and I clap my hand over my mouth at the grievous sin I’ve just committed.
“It’s okay, A. You go on and laugh. You’re allowed.” Heather grabs ahold of me and rocks me like an infant, and as much as I’m repulsed by her touch, by the sweaty scent of her skin, I begin to weep like a baby. I had laughed. I wasn’t allowed to feel one ounce of joy. Reagan is somewhere out there with the freaks who lured her to the side of the road like an animal. Then, in a moment of clarity, I realize I’m on the side of the house, out in the open where anyone can see. Heather Evans has crawled back into my life from the grave, an impossibility, something I had sworn would never happen. There are some people you will go to lengths to avoid, and for me Heather was one of them.
“Look”—I wipe down my face with my sleeve and extract myself from her strangulating embrace, but her hot hand remains flat and clammy over my back—“you are a very good friend.” The thick knot in the pit of my stomach gets a little tighter. “And you have proven yourself an excellent detective.” Oddly true. “I need you to do something very important for me.”
“Anything.” Her hands flail as if she might rocket right off the planet with excitement. “Anything for you, Alley Cat. You just name it. I’d give you the moon if I could.”
I try not to cringe at the performance she’s putting on, genuine as it might be.
“I need you to find my baby.” My voice breaks. “I need you to find the bastards that did this to her and bring them to me so I can kill them with my bare hands.” She swallows hard, her eyes shutter like an old-fashioned doll with a haunting expression to match. “I’m going to dig my fingers into their eye sockets and take extreme pleasure in plucking them out. I’m going to stomp on them with my heel, and then I’m going to make them eat it.”
“You’re going to kill them.” Her expression grows somber, and her cheeks fill with crimson. “And then we’re going to stomp their eyes out!” Her voice ratchets up to a curdling roar. Heather jumps in place over and over. “Stomp! Stomp! Stomp!”
I pull Heather over and turn her body toward her minivan parked in front of the house.
“Now go find my baby.” I give her a firm shove toward the van and head back into the house. That ought to keep her out of my hair for a while.
Wouldn’t it be something if it were Heather Crazy Train Evans who brought my baby home?
Now that would be something.
* * *
They say suspicion grows like a fungus, and if James and I were anything, we were suspicious. The white-hot spotlight had landed on us, and no sooner did the early days of November blow in than a trickling of hatred dressed in human skin arrived down the street. First, there was the egg splattered window. Charles said it was because we didn’t open up our home to trick-or-treaters. But then a bucket of paint was hurled at the driveway, spattering the back of the car. The walkway to our home is now temporarily dipped in red.
“Where is she?” they chant as James and I hole up in our bedroom.
I pull the curtains shut at the seam. “What the hell do they think we’ve done with her?”
“I’ve read it all. That we’ve sold her into some perverted underground network. We sold her for cash. We offered her as a sacrifice in some satanic sick ritual, and now we’re covering and profiting from it.” He slumps over himself at the foot of the bed, looking every bit as tired and dejected as I do.
“I read where someone has a theory she was abducted by aliens. That Concordia is full of them.”
His chest thumps with a dull laugh. “I’ve heard that one, too. That Ota was an alien.”
“A demon.”
“A disgruntled little girl who wanted a sister.”
“A ghost.”
“A liar,” he counters. “Only that is the truth.”
“I don’t like liars.” I take a seat next to him and take up his hand.
James pulls me in and I look up at him, the closest I’ve been to my husband in weeks. We sleep on opposite sides of the bed with an ocean of blankets between us. I can’t remember the last time his lips touched mine.
I bump my finger over his nose, his mouth, and chin. “Why were you at your dad’s house with that woman?”
His head ticks back as if I slapped him. His eyes remain wide a moment too long. He’s been caught, and he knows it.
James frowns in that seductive way only he knows how to do and makes me feel as if this is all somehow my fault.
“My dad asked me to pick up a few things.” He winces just the way he always does when he lies. “I was looking for my mother.” His voice drops to a hoarse whisper, and his gaze falls to the floor. And there it is. The truth. “About halfway through my treasure hunt, Monica showed up.” His face contorts in a grimace. It looks natural. I can tell he’s as repulsed by her as I am with Heather. “My father—he stripped that place clean of all our shit. Not one trace of my mother, my siblings—just me.” He shakes his head in disbelief. “It’s as if they never existed. As if with them gone he could finally breathe. All of the photo albums my mother spent decades painfully assembling, the storage boxes of memories—all of it up and disappeared.”
“It’s because he needed to heal,” I offer, unsure if it were true at all. “Charles is stoic, stubborn, locked in his ways. I could see him loading up the trunk of the car and transporting it somewhere off the grounds. Maybe he put it all in a storage unit. Didn’t your parents keep one?”
“That’s right.” A swell of relief fills his features. “My mother had one filled with the things she used for the holiday fundraisers. A fifty foot Christmas tree, boxes and boxes filled with party supplies for every single occasion.” He tips his head back as if offering a silent thank you to the sky. “I bet that’s where it is.”
“So nothing happened between you and this Monica woman?” A part of me doesn’t want to quantify her as human.
“No.” He winces. “She was just there doing who knows what. She tried, but I’m not going there. I said goodnight and took off.”
“She tried. Was that the hug? It must have been.” She was pawing all over him.
“How did you know?” He cocks his head, those serious blue eyes filled with curiosity.
“Charles.” I swallow down the lie before I can finish the sentence.
He grunts. “Figures. He probably saw a hair out of place. Better yet, Monica filled him in. She’s been a longtime member of the Charles Price Fan Club.”