I ran straight into my bedroom, tears streaming down my face. Karen was mean enough to do it. Her father was the football coach, and she had already bragged about breaking into the school on several occasions to steal things from the biology lab, fetuses, an entire crate of dead frogs, the carcass of a cat. Rumor had it, she was a witch on the side and needed these things for her rituals. Not that I believed them. But what I did believe was that she was about to make my life all around shitty.
But that wasn’t the only unnerving event of that night. I ran straight into my room and found more trouble waiting for me. Sitting high up on my bed, with a ruddy looking newborn on her lap was Heather Holy Shit Evans.
She saw how upset I was so I told her what had happened. Then the baby started to cry unstoppably and they left. It was the first time I felt a smidge grateful to have her there to vent to. Heather was just as hurt as I was, her face doused in tears as she ran into the night.
“And then the misfortune.” McCafferty turns over the first picture, a glossy eight by ten of the Honda Civic charred, the windows blown out, the front end pushed in like an accordion and I swiftly turn my head away.
“What the hell?” James takes the picture and pulls it toward him.
“They died.” McCafferty fills him in. Okay, so maybe I didn’t gloss over this with him. “The girls left. They took off for a party in the next town over. It was dark, a fog bank came in quick, and they flew off the side of an embankment—rolling all the way down. The car spontaneously combusted, blew out the windows. Both girls were found burned to a crisp still buckled in their seat belts.”
They always did follow the rules—right up until they broke them.
I pull the picture over and force myself to look at it. “That could have been me,” I whisper.
“It couldn’t have been you.” McCafferty’s eyebrow hooks its way into her forehead. “Not according to Katrina Parker.”
“Karen’s older sister.” Older, certainly not wiser. Certainly not above paying off a group of seniors to threaten to kick my ass for the rest of the school year. I’ve never been so happy to see so many people graduate. Good riddance.
“She seems to think you caused the accident.”
“I heard the theory.” I shake my head at James as if to dismiss it before it ever comes from my mouth. “If they never brought me home, they wouldn’t have ever gone that route. They would never have crashed, never had rolled to the bottom of the cliff.”
“You don’t think it’s true?” McCafferty seems amused by my delivery.
“I learned at a young age not to entertain what-ifs.” What if I had another mother? What if my mother had died in that horrific crash that night instead? It was useless. I was her charge, and until the government issued me a reprieve after eighteen long years, I was hers to use and abuse as she wished and she did.
“Katrina Parker doesn’t buy that theory either.” McCafferty mimics my casual shrug and I blink to attention.
“You spoke with her?”
“I didn’t have to.” She bleeds that wicked smile my way. “She has a website dedicated to her sister.”
“What does it say?” James has that intent look on his face as if he might give weight to whatever it is she’s spouted off. Katrina Parker was an angry bitch. Just as mean and heartless as her sister.
McCafferty takes the picture back and turns it upside down. I can feel all of the negative energy in the room start to evaporate.
“Katrina believes someone bumped them off the side of the road.”
I shake my head as if it were lunacy. “She’s a finger pointer. She doesn’t want to believe it was an accident.”
“She found a body mechanic to back her up.” Her eyes light up as if this news tantalized her.
“Oh? So a fender bender or something? There were a lot of drunk teenagers out on the road that night.” My heart drums wild in my chest.
“True, but not on that end of town. There were no eyewitnesses. The mechanic says there was a very sharp indentation in the right rear passenger’s side. It had a distinctive quality of a sedan.”
“They tumbled over boulders,” I point out. “Their car looked like a wrinkled piece of paper. Not to mention the fire.”
“I’m just playing devil’s advocate, Allison. No reason to get worked up. Both the Parkers and the Humeras were resentful of the fact you lived and their daughters didn’t.”
“I know.” It was hell, and I hated every moment of it. There were times I actually wished I had stayed in the damn car.
James taps his fingers over the table. “Wait a minute. You don’t think some twisted fuck from one of their families is responsible for what happened to Reagan, do you?”
“I’m not implying that.” She turns over the next photo, and my entire body recoils as if she had uncovered a snake. “Who’s this?”
There we are. High school. Senior year. I had finally conceded to the fact I would never have another friend outside of the one who stalked me so proficiently. A staffer from the yearbook snapped that picture of Heather and me running track.
“Some girl I had P.E. with.” My heart gives a hearty wallop with the lie.
McCafferty flips the next photo. Heather and I locked in an embrace on the front lawn yesterday morning. Shit.
“And this is the same girl?”
“Yes.” My voice grows small with shame. My fingers twitch to flip over that entire damn stack of incriminating photos, cutting to the demonic chase. I’m not a fan of these wicked games.
“Who is this?” James leans in to get a better look at her.
“A friend from high school.” The one I forced into admitting she ran Briana and Karen off the road that night. Heather said she would have taken it to the grave, but I couldn’t sleep not knowing if it were true. Of course, I didn’t sleep afterwards either. I promised Heather I wouldn’t breathe a word, and that’s when she said she knew we were soul sisters. I hated to break it to her, but I was no soul sister—simply an accessory to a very gruesome crime. The only reason I didn’t turn her in was because I was too afraid the case would go sideways and it would be me serving time. Maybe that would have been best, Heather and me serving out our sentences in the very same cell forever. Her heaven. My hell.
I clear my throat. “She was in the area and stopped by to give her support. The one that started the GoFundMe.” I roll my eyes as if the entire thing were ridiculous.
“Heather Evans—Porter.” McCafferty flips over another shot of her crouching in the crowd down at the Boys and Girls Club. Did I know she was in town then? I try to filter through my memory, but the damn thing is stuck on stupid.
“She’s married. Has a family.” I try to whitewash her strange behavior with a patina of normalcy.
“Was,” McCafferty corrects. “Had a family. She and her daughter moved out to Torrance California a while back.”
My mouth falls open. That’s an outlying city close to where we lived. And here I thought Heather Evans was safely tucked in Nevada. “Local school records show the child attended Alta Vista Elementary School for the remainder of the last school year. Never did reenroll.”
“No, that’s not right. Her daughter has to be older than that by now, at least in junior high.”
“That’s the older one.” She grimaces at the picture of Heather. That’s right. Heather has more than one. Honestly, I can’t keep track of my own child—in the most literal sense—let alone Heather’s brood. And poor, poor Heather can’t even evoke sympathy from someone like McCafferty. “They both have curious names.” Here it is. “Allison.”
“Both?” James and I say in unison.
I clear my throat. My skin begins to crawl in that familiar way it has every time Heather is around with those little Heather-shaped maggots of hers burrowing into my flesh.
“How old would you say the youngest of the two is?” Tears blur my vision because I think I already know where this is going.
“A little older than Reagan.”
I pull Ota from the dark recesses of my mind and dust her off, slap her face with Heather’s juxtaposed over it. She doesn’t look anything like her, but then she doesn’t have to.
“Do you think this woman took my child?”
McCafferty leans back in her seat. That intense glare of hers spears right through me as if to say I should know.