“You have an interesting way of showing it,” she said. She’d found her book at last, but didn’t open it.
McQueen sighed. He beckoned to her and she walked to him, sitting in front of him on top of the coffee table between his knees. He leaned forward and took the book from her hand and put it aside. He raised her hand to his lips, kissed her knuckles, before turning her hand over. He caressed her palm with his fingertips, a sensual touch but also comforting.
“Did something bad happen to you in that house?” he asked, meeting her eyes. If she’d thought for one single second that McQueen was prying out of curiosity or nosiness or because he felt entitled to her secrets, she would never have answered. But the man who’d asked that question wasn’t McQueen the rich jerk who was dumping her, but McQueen the scared father who’d burn the world down if anyone hurt his children.
“Dr. Capello didn’t molest me if that’s what you’re asking.”
McQueen took a heavy breath, relieved on her behalf.
“That’s what I’m asking,” he said. “So nobody hurt you, then?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Tell me what happened.”
“It’s not—”
“Tell me what happened and I’ll leave.”
“You promise?”
He carved an invisible X on his heart with his finger. “Once I know you’re okay, I’ll go.”
Allison hadn’t thought about her old life with Dr. Capello and his kids in a long time. She tried not to think about them, she certainly never talked about them and she never ever invited memories into her mind. They came sometimes, however, uninvited, creeping like ants through a crack in the wall.
“You wouldn’t be this freaked out if it was really that good there,” McQueen said.
“I’m not freaked out,” she said, maybe a lie, maybe not. She was just...surprised, that’s all. “You’d be shaky, too, if your brother contacted you out of the blue after thirteen years.”
“True. Because I don’t have a brother, even an almost-brother. You do.”
Allison released his hand and picked up the book she’d found, an old copy of Shaw’s Pygmalion, the pages highlighter-yellow from her days as an English major in college.
“Allison?”
She gave in.
“The last summer I was there, someone in the house maybe possibly pushed me down the stairs.”
“What?” McQueen said, eyes wide with fury.
Allison shrugged, said nothing.
“An accident?” McQueen asked.
“So I was told.”
“But you don’t think it was an accident?”
Allison held the book to her chest.
“My great-aunt was seventy when my mom died. She was living in southern Indiana. That’s why I went to live with Dr. Capello instead of her. But I still called her once a week to check in. The day of my fall—or whatever it was—someone apparently called her, pretended to be me and told her that there was a killer in the house and I needed her to come get me.”
McQueen started to speak.
“Before you ask,” Allison said, “I don’t know who it was who called or who pushed me—if someone did push me. When I fell, I hit my head so hard I don’t even remember falling. I don’t remember waking up in the hospital. I don’t remember much of anything from around that time. What I do remember is that I was living at The Dragon, happiest kid on earth, and then I was in Indiana later that summer, living with my aunt in her tiny apartment.”
“That must have been a hard hit,” McQueen said. “What did the police say?”
“There wasn’t even an investigation,” she said. “There was no evidence other than the phone call, and everyone chalked that up to my aunt being old and hard of hearing, maybe even confused. Everyone but me. That woman could hear a pin drop and she had all her faculties intact to the day she died.”
“No witnesses?” McQueen asked. Allison ignored the urge to roll her eyes. He was talking like a cop.
“Nobody came forward that I know of.”
“Kids can be really violent,” McQueen said.
“Not these kids,” Allison said.
“Then who did it? Someone did something or you never would have had to leave.”
“I’m telling you what my aunt told me when I started asking her why I was with her and not with the Capellos anymore. Apparently Dr. Capello was the one who found me at the foot of the steps bleeding from the ear. He said he was too panicked to do anything but scream for someone to call 911. If it had been an accident I’d like to think whoever it was would have admitted to it. But nobody ’fessed up. Not even when my aunt flew out to pick me up and take me home with her. When I went to live with her, she wouldn’t let me contact the Capellos. She thought... She didn’t know what to think. And the Capellos never contacted me, either, after that. Probably because my aunt told them not to. Thirteen years of radio silence. Until today.” She glanced over at the table where the package from Roland still sat, unopened.
“So you never called? Never visited?” McQueen asked.
“I wanted to when I was a kid and then a few years passed and the whole thing kind of felt like a good dream with a nightmare ending. When I was old enough to go back on my own, I just...didn’t. If they’d sent me even one birthday card, I might have. But they didn’t.”
“I can’t believe you never told me any of this,” he said, shaking his head.
“You never asked. You never wanted to know, did you? Then you’d have to think of me as a real person,” she said. McQueen had the decency to look ashamed of himself.
“You still could have told me.”
“You still could have asked,” she said. “Anyway, doesn’t matter. Ancient history. I’m over it all.”
“Except you aren’t,” he said. “Except you see the name Roland Capello on that envelope and you turn white as a ghost. You take a book off the shelf and hold it so tight for some reason your hands shake.” He took the book from her hands. “Except you...” He flipped through the book and found a page marked by a photograph, which he pulled out. “Except you keep a picture of your old family pressed in the pages of that book.”
Allison swallowed. “Except all that,” she said.
McQueen was staring at the photograph he’d taken out of her book. Allison didn’t look at it. She didn’t have to. She saw it in her mind’s eye. There were three kids in the picture—all three in red hoodies. One boy with dark blond hair that fell past his ears, one girl with hair so red it was almost orange and one boy with black hair straight as an arrow. They all held sparklers in their hands and in the background of the photo was the ocean, vast and gray.
“Roland?” McQueen asked, pointing to the one with black hair.
“That’s Deacon. Roland’s the dirty blond,” Allison said. “The girl’s Thora. Dr. Capello gave us those red sweatshirts. He said it made it easier for him to find us on the beach when there were big crowds.”
“Sweatshirts on the beach?”
“It was Oregon,” she said.
“And where are you in this picture?” McQueen asked.
Allison pointed to the left side of the photograph that had been torn away.
“There,” she said. “I don’t know who has the other section. I found this in my suitcase when I unpacked at my aunt’s.”
“So there were four of you?”
“No, there were others,” she said. “But they were fosters, like me. There was an older girl named Kendra. And a boy about my age or a little older named Oliver. A few others but they didn’t stay long. Roland, Thora and Deacon were the three kids Dr. Capello adopted.”
“Did he want to adopt you?”
“I think so,” Allison said. “But he didn’t.”
Allison took the photograph out of McQueen’s hand, slipped it back in the pages of the book, walked over and put the book back on the shelf.
“There, I told you everything. Now you can go.”
“Not until you open the package.”
“Why do you care?”
“What if this Roland guy is writing to confess to the crime?”
“Roland was sixteen by then, almost seventeen. He had a summer job in another town. He wouldn’t have been home at the time. Trust me, I thought about this a lot after I left them.”
“So you aren’t over it.”