“I went there and basically searched the house.”
My stomach bottoms out. I’m not sure why I’m so surprised, why the visceral reaction. James has a hobby of paying other women visits. It’s apparently his thing.
“You find anything?” For so long I never thought to look to my husband’s harem as people of interest in my daughter’s disappearance, and now I wonder what took me so long.
He shakes his head, but that distant look in his eyes lets me know he’s not telling the truth. “Actually, I did find something. Remember a couple of weeks ago I discovered that my father wiped the house of any trace of my mother, my brothers, and my sister?” His dimples press in, but you can see the pain in his eyes. A part of me is glad about it. A very large, childish part of me wants James to hurt just a little bit more than I do at the moment. Not that my pain can be trumped by anyone—certainly not someone willing to break their wedding vows for three weeks straight. “Monica had them stored in her attic. It was eerie. It was as if she didn’t want me to go up there, but the more she protested, the faster I ran. And there it was. Every last box of crap my mother had spent a lifetime piecing together.”
His heart riots against my hand and I step in another inch. “And your father? How is he?” How is the killer I want to ask. McCafferty all but called him out on it. As much as I like Charles, it doesn’t change the fact he could be culpable for the deaths of his child and his wife. If it’s true, he’s psychotic, and when Reagan does come home, I don’t want her to have anything to do with him.
James looks dazed as if the question is enough to set him back emotionally twenty-five years. He looks every bit the lost little boy.
“I don’t want to focus on him right now.” He pinches his eyes shut a moment. “How old do you think that little girl in there is?” His lower lip pulls down with a heavy tick as if he’s about to bawl.
“I don’t know—about Reagan’s age, a little older maybe.”
“That’s what I thought.” He tugs his neck from his collar. “I’m thinking Monica lied about the baby she had. I don’t think it died as an infant.”
“Your baby?” I take a partial step back and the air cools me slightly.
“I don’t know if Monica’s child is or was mine—but that happened long before we were together.” He offers it up like the weak consolation it is. “I’m sorry,” he whispers. “That doesn’t paint me in a better light. Not sure why I went there. Hell, I do know. I’ll do anything to make things right with you. Every step from here on out matters, and I’m desperate to follow the right path this time.”
“You’re rich with children as of late, aren’t you?” I couldn’t help smearing it with the sarcastic edge it deserved. Hailey Oden and her impossible perfection will now haunt me for the rest of my natural life. I remember the day they moved in. She was the first to greet us. She wore a bathing suit, a full-brimmed hat, and sunglasses. She looked like an old-time movie star, and even I admired her beauty.
“I’m sorry.” James bows his head and weeps silently a moment. His chest bucks hard and violent. “I’m so damn sorry.” He wipes his face clean. “I’m going to get a paternity test.” He glances to the door behind me.
“You think you’re Ota’s father, too? Is this some kind of God complex? Some mid-life crisis you’re dealing with?” My husband’s mid-life crisis has driven us all into a fiery abyss.
“No. I just thought maybe that was her, Monica’s daughter. I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about anymore. I just need answers. Monica’s off her rocker. She’s obsessed with me.”
Heather blinks through my mind, that invisible daughter of hers. “I have to tell you something.” My voice shakes as I pull him farther down the hall. “You know that girl in the pictures McCafferty shared with us?”
“The nut case who named both of her kids after you? The one that started the GoFundMe?”
“I saw her. She tried to introduce me to her daughter and—” that scene from the hotel room comes to mind and a choking fear clings to me.
He grips my shoulders and gives a light shake. “And what?”
“She acted as if she were right there with us. She was—invisible.” Even sharing the notion with James seems ludicrous. “She simply wasn’t there.”
“Shit.” He looks just as stunned as I was. “McCafferty said she existed. There were school records.”
“But where is she now?”
We both glance to Reagan’s room as if the answer waited inside.
“I don’t know,” I whisper. “I’m not saying that’s her. I’m just saying Heather is out of her mind and she doesn’t know where her child or her sanity is.”
“Who is that little girl?” James wraps his arm around my shoulders and we continue to stare down Reagan’s door as if it had the answers.
“Who is she indeed?”
* * *
James and I decide that I should sleep on a blow-up mattress in Reagan’s room with one eye open. It’s the same blow-up mattress she used back home for sleepovers with friends. James jammed both the front door and the back to ensure that if Ota tried she couldn’t easily get out of the house. He wedged roofing nails into the downstairs windows to make them nearly impossible to pry open. If the house combusted into flames, we would all be toast quite literally.
But Ota didn’t sleep. Ota didn’t even come to bed. Instead, she took me up on the offer and colored all night long. The desk lamp bled right through my onionskin lids, assuring I wouldn’t sleep a single wink myself. It didn’t matter. The last good night’s rest I had was the night before Reagan was taken.
In the morning, after sharing a cup of coffee on the base of the stairs, James thinks it’s best if we keep Ota to ourselves another day and I happen to agree.
“Social services would scoop her right up. We’d lose the upper hand. She hardly trusts us. God only knows how long she’d stay clammed up if she was with strangers.” I raise my mug to him as the toilet flushes in the bathroom behind us, and we watch as Ota walks silently back into Reagan’s room, straight to the coloring projects that have possessed her. I glance to James. “She’s gone through half the ream.”
“I’ll bring up a few blocks of paper from the office.” James and I once bought a huge box of printer paper from Costco and spent the next year wondering how we would ever use it all. I think we have our answer.
He peers in at her from over my shoulder. That stubble of his has grown out. I love him like this, with his hair unkempt, his wrinkled shirt, barefoot with sweats. I wish he was still mine. “Have you looked at any of it?”
“No. She’s hoarding it all in the corner. I figure she’ll have to crash soon, and I’ll get to sift through it all I want. We need her to speak, though.”
“Maybe we should call Rich?” James looks resigned to the fact. I start to protest and he holds a hand up. I know that Rich is more of a brother to him than he is some errant cop working the case, but still. He has laws to uphold. “I’ll make sure he doesn’t say a word.”
“You can’t promise.”
“I will.” He picks up my hand and gives it a squeeze. That small gesture makes me ache to have him again. And then Hailey pops through my mind with that bowling ball uterus of hers and the feeling leaves as quick as it came.
My phone rings from my pocket and it startles me for a second. Jane can’t call me and my mother refuses. I pull it out, half-anxious to see Heather’s name even though she prefers to text. But it’s not Heather. It’s a number I don’t recognize altogether, so I decide to pick up.
“Hello?” The world wobbles beneath me, because at this point anything is possible.
The line clots up with silence.
“Hello?” My voice shrills into the line. “Reagan, is that you?”
The clearing of a throat. “Is this a Mrs. Allison Greer?”