“You never asked?”
“No.”
“How come?”
“Because it was their thing. I wasn’t a part of it.”
“Okay. How did you feel when they’d go off without you?”
“Kind of lonely.”
“Anything else?”
“Angry, maybe?”
“Anger’s a pretty strong emotion.” My smile challenges him. “There aren’t many maybes about it.”
“I guess you’re right. It did make me kind of mad.”
“What made you mad about it?”
A dimpled grin appears, and he shakes his head as if admonishing himself for the next thought.
“What is it?” I ask.
“It’s really kind of dumb.”
I motion for him to continue anyway.
“It’s just that . . . like . . . when they’d come back, she always had an ice cream cone. I was just a kid and all, but I’d get jealous. She really pissed me off that way, know what I mean?”
“So your sister pissed you off. Did your sister do anything in particular to make you feel that way? Did she . . . I don’t know . . . Did she brag about getting something that you didn’t?”
“No. Not at all.”
“Then why were you angry at her instead of your father? After all, wasn’t it his decision to give her the ice cream cone? To spend time with her and not you?”
“Yeah . . . but it wasn’t really his fault,” Donny Ray says, and now he’s not just gripping the arm of his chair—he’s white-knuckling it.
“Why not? He was the adult, and it was his choice.”
“Because that’s how little six-year-old girls are. They know how to get what they want.”
Cold goose bumps scale up my arms. The hair on my scalp tingles.
Donny Ray squirms in his chair.
“I’m not sure I understand,” I say. “What do little six-year-old girls want?”
“Everything.” He spits out the word, then instantly sees my uneasy reaction and schools his expression into one of remorse. His lips start to part, but nothing comes out.
Tension twists through the air.
He breaks it. “Or at least that’s what I thought.”
I let my silence indicate he should continue.
“Because I realized I had it all wrong . . . So very wrong . . .”
“Had what wrong?”
“Everything,” he says again, but this time in a manner so feeble and fragile, it seems as though he could crumble and fall within seconds. A manner that surprises me, because in a flash, Donny Ray has flown from one end of the emotional spectrum to another, first disconnected, and now, quite the opposite. The only problem is, both seem so convincing that I can’t determine the validity of either.
“I’m a little confused here,” I say.
“Imagine how I felt.”
I wait for him to explain.
“One day,” he goes on, “I was sitting on a swing in the front yard. My dad and Miranda were taking off again.” Donny Ray looks off to one side as if watching the scene play out. “The second her feet hit the driveway, a hard rain started to fall, and she immediately turned back my way. So slow . . .”
“What was?”
“The way she waved at me . . . and so sad.”
“Did you know why?”
“No . . .” He looks past me and into some distant place, seemingly lost in the retelling. “She’d never waved good-bye to me before going off with him. It was so strange. Then they were gone.”
“What happened next?”
“The rain fell harder, but I just sat on the swing. I must have been there for two hours. I’d never felt so lost before in my life. When they finally came back, Miranda got out of the car. This time”—a sad smile crosses his face—“she had two ice cream cones in her hand. She walked up to me and gave me one. Then without so much as a word, she just walked away.”
“Did she seem upset?”
“No . . . She seemed empty.”
He falls into a hush, as if thinking about that.
“I sat and watched her disappear into the house. Water was pouring down my face, and the cone was melting in the rain. I had ice cream dripping down my wrists, into my lap, but I couldn’t move a muscle.”
“Did you ever find out what was wrong?”
Donny Ray looks at me. A tear rolls down his cheek.
“I never got the chance.”
29
The ice cream cone story carried a disturbing—but as of yet unproven—undertone of Miranda’s sexual abuse. If true, it could lend reasonable support to the cops’ suspicion that the dad was a viable suspect in her murder. And while Donny Ray stopped shy of revealing those dark circumstances, he came close. My goal now will be to glean that information from him, then determine whether it has any bearing on Jamey’s murder or my patient’s alleged inability to remember it.
Still, Donny Ray’s comment about six-year-old girls was chilling, not just because it seemed off-color, but also because Miranda and Jamey Winslow were the same age when they went missing. Then before I had a chance to form an opinion, he threw me for a loop with his heartbreaking story about sitting alone in the rain that day.
But is the story true?
I just don’t know. Once again, his emotional response seemed right on cue—and once again I find myself lost and searching for truth between layers of doubt.
After leaving the consulting room, I pass through Alpha Twelve, and a pocket of brightness off to the right flags my attention.
I don’t like what I see.
Nicholas’ door hangs wide open, fluorescent light spilling out onto the floor like something toxic. I look inside: empty, not only of him but also all his belongings.
What the hell?
I quicken my pace toward the nurses’ station. Melinda Jeffries, the head nurse, is working at her computer, and while I know my footsteps are loud enough to hear, she doesn’t look up.
“Hello?” I say upon reaching the counter, urgency and impatience ramping up my voice.
Melinda raises her head, but when our eyes meet, something in hers strikes me as peculiar—cold and detached. I nod toward the room and say, “What happened to Nicholas?”