"But couldn't you have sued him or something?" I asked. "How could he have any legal rights if he didn't have any contact with me?"
"I'd hear from him," Mom said. "Around your birthday usually. A couple of times at Christmas. A couple of times for no occasion. He'd send a little money to buy you a present."
"What did you do with the money?" I asked.
"What do you think I did with it?" Mom snapped back. "Bought myself diamonds? If the money came before your birthday, before Christmas, I bought you a present. If the money came too late, I used it on clothes for you. Trust me, ten bucks once or twice a year doesn't go very far."
"But he remembered me," I said. "He remembered my birthday. And you didn't tell me."
"Don't second-guess me right now," Mom said. "Just don't, Willa. I'm exhausted and I don't need that. In a good year, he remembered you twice. Jack remembered you every single day. Jack read to you at night and chased away your nightmares and cried at your middle-school graduation. Jack's been a wonderful father to you."
"I love Jack," I said. "You know I do. It's just..."
"It's just what?" Mom said. "That you feel deprived because I kept you from your drunken, murdering daddy?"
"I do have another question," I said. "Do I look like Budge? Is that who I look like?"
"Yes, you do," Mom said. "You have his mouth. You have his eyes."
Six
I WOKE UP EARLY the next morning, peeked into the living room area, and saw Mom sleeping on the sofa. She hadn't even opened the mattress, just stretched out on the sofa and slept there instead.
There was no way of knowing when she'd fallen asleep. It wasn't like we'd sat around chatting. I'd gone into my room and she'd stayed in hers, and we both watched TV. Different shows, though.
I tiptoed back to my bedroom and turned the TV on to one of the cable news networks. It took about twenty minutes before the early-morning anchor said, "There's a new development in the story we've been covering of four-year-old Krissi Coffey, missing since the murder of her mother and two sisters in the small town of Pryor, Texas, two days ago. It was reported that a man fitting the description of Krissi's father, Dwayne Coffey, was seen taking a young child into a restroom at a gas station in Clayton, Ohio, late last night."
They showed a picture, like one of those Sears family portraits, of three little girls. My sisters, I thought. Three little blond girls, one slightly older than the other two. None of them had my mouth, my eyes.
"It's uncertain if the man was Dwayne Coffey, a person of interest in the murder of his wife and two of his children, or if the little girl was Krissi Coffey."
They showed a police officer then, saying, "We can confirm the deaths of Crystal Danielle Coffey, age twenty-five, her daughters Kelli Marie, age six, and Kadi Coffey, age four. Her husband, Dwayne Coffey, age thirty-seven, is wanted for questioning."
They cut then to a picture of Dwayne Budge-Not-Daddy Coffey. The man with my mouth, my eyes.
It was some kind of ID picture, but not a mug shot. Not a great picture, but you could see what he looked like, if not who he was.
Mom had been right. I did look like him. The shape of our faces, the way our mouths turned down so we always look sad even when we aren't.
Maybe he was sad. I had no way of knowing.
"Willa?"
I turned off the TV, feeling as guilty as if I'd committed a crime.
"I'm here, Mom," I said, opening the door and showing her that I was still alive, still part of her life.
"I heard the TV," she said. "Were you watching the news?"
"Yes, Mom," I said. "They may have spotted them in Ohio. A man took a little girl to a restroom in Ohio."
"Men take their little daughters to restrooms all the time," Mom said. "Why assume it's them?"
"I don't know, Mom," I said. "They have pictures of them. I guess they've been showing the pictures on TV, and someone saw them."
"What does he look like?" Mom asked. "I haven't seen him in ten years."
"He looks like me," I said.
"That's not what I mean," Mom said. "Is he clean-shaven? Does he have a beard, a mustache? The last time I saw him, he had a mustache."
"Clean-shaven," I said. "Didn't Faye keep you up to date on that stuff ?"
But before Mom had a chance to tell me what she and Faye talked about when they talked about Budge, the telephone rang. We both jumped at the sound.
"That's probably Jack," Mom said, but I could tell from her end of the conversation that it wasn't. She said "Yes" a few times, and "I see" and "I understand," but not much else.
"That was the police," she told me as she hung up. "They're sending a detective over later to interview me."
"Why?" I asked. "You haven't seen him in ten years."
"They're taking that Ohio report pretty seriously," Mom replied. "The town where they saw him was on Route Seventy."
"They really think he's coming here?" I asked. "To see me?"
"It wouldn't be a social call," Mom said. "Get dressed, Willa. I'm going to call Jack, and then I'll take a shower. The detective won't be coming for an hour. We'll order room service. I don't know about you, but I'm hungry."
I hadn't eaten anything since I'd thrown up, and I still felt more queasy than hungry. But there was no point starving to death before I got to meet my father, who apparently was on his way over to kill me.
I went to the bathroom and took a quick shower. I looked around the bathroom to see if the motel provided razorblades. There weren't any, although there was a little card that said if I needed any, or a comb, or a toothbrush, I should just call room service. It was nice to have that as an option, although I couldn't see doing it with Mom five feet away.
Instead, I carefully peeled the bandage off my palm and rammed my fingernails into the cut. The pain was sharp enough to race through my whole body. I gasped, but Mom didn't hear. I put the bandage back on and finished getting dressed.
"Jack spent the night at Val's," Mom said. "Not much of a night. Their flight was delayed, and they didn't get to Orlando until after midnight. Then their cabdriver got lost, so they didn't get to her place until nearly two. Val wants Jack to be there when the girls wake up."
"But he's coming back," I said.
"Of course he is," Mom said. "He'll be here before supper. With any luck, we'll be home by then."
"Mom?" I said.
"What?"
"Did you ever love Budge?" I asked. Would I have loved him? I couldn't ask.
"I told myself I did," Mom said. "But I had no idea what love was until I met Jack. I'm taking my shower. Don't answer the phone or open the door. I'll call room service after I get dressed. That should time out pretty well."
She gathered her clothes and walked into the bathroom. I turned the TV on and watched pictures of my father and my sisters and a gas station in Ohio scroll over and over again.
Seven
MOM, CURT, AND PAULINE were playing canasta. Mom didn't know how, so they taught her. They offered to teach me too, but I wasn't interested. I'm not sure Mom was either, but we appreciated that Curt and Pauline had given up whatever their plans for the day were to keep us entertained. They brought a pile of magazines, and I was leafing through them, keeping half an eye on the cable news station. They didn't have any new information about Budge or Krissi, but that didn't stop them from obsessing over the story. They showed an interview with Crystal's father, threatening to kill the murderer of his daughter and granddaughters with his bare hands. They showed another interview, this one with Crystal's sister begging Dwayne to return with little Krissi. Then they interviewed a former FBI profiler about what sort of man kills his wife and children, and why he might select one daughter to live. He was followed by a criminal pathologist, who explained what kind of damage multiple knife wounds could cause.
They showed Kelli Marie's kindergarten teacher and Pastor Hendrick of the New Hope Gospel Church, where my father and his wife and my three little sisters used to go every Sunday.
By midafternoon, they'd pretty much shown the entire population of Pryor, except for maybe Faye.
Mom looked up a couple of times, mostly when they showed Pryor. "It looks worse than I remember," she said. "Deader somehow."
"It's hard for those little towns to survive," Curt said. "There are plenty of small towns in Pennsylvania, Ohio, even New York, like that."
"Things were bad with Dwayne," Mom said. "But what really scared me was Willa growing up in that miserable place. I think if Dwayne and I had moved when I asked him to, I would have stuck with him. At least for a little while longer."
"How did you end up here?" Pauline asked. "At the newspaper? Meeting Jack?"
"I grabbed Willa one day," Mom said. "I packed some clothes and searched through the house for any money—spare change, anything. Dwayne drank pretty hard, so he was careless about money. I'd saved a few dollars over the weeks and I'd lifted a twenty from my father's wallet. I took all the money and put it in a sandwich bag and dragged Willa and my overnight bag to the bus station. I kept the twenty and handed the cashier all the rest and asked her for tickets to as far from Pryor as we could get. It took a few months of moving around before we ended up here."
"That was very brave of you," Pauline said.
Mom shrugged. "Brave and dumb," she said. "But it all worked out."
By that point I'd seen the photograph of my father and the one of my sisters so often, I felt as though I knew them. I wished they'd show a picture of Trace so I'd get to "meet" my brother also, but they didn't mention him by name, or me. Just that Coffey had two older children and it was believed he might be en route to see one or both of them.
"Do you know where Trace lives?" Pauline asked Mom.
Mom shook her head. "Trace bounced around a lot," she said. "His mother. Budge and me. Foster care. The last I heard he was living with Budge's grandma, but he took off, or maybe she threw him out. That was maybe four years ago. Faye hasn't mentioned him since."
I thought about the message board in our kitchen, where we all wrote down our schedules for the week. Tennis lessons. Lacrosse practices. Choir rehearsals. Study dates and trips to the mall. Every minute accounted for. Even Val's business trips were listed.
"Maybe Dwayne heard from him," Pauline said. "Maybe Trace's in Ohio and that's why Dwayne drove there."
"Assuming it was Dwayne," Curt said, "and not some poor guy who was driving around last night for a completely innocent reason."
We sat there, playing cards, leafing through magazines, looking up at the TV more when there was a commercial than when there was news. Sometimes there'd be a reported sighting of Budge and Krissi, but the only one that had credence was the gas station in Ohio.
A criminal psychologist came on to discuss why Budge had stabbed his family rather than shooting them. Assuming he had, of course—which we all did.
"Stabbing is a more intimate way of killing," the psychologist said.
Mom looked up from her cards and snorted. "That's such crap," she said. "Budge was terrified of guns. Probably the only person in the Texas panhandle who wouldn't touch one. His daddy died in a hunting accident when Budge was seven. Shotgun went off and blew his head to bits. Budge saw the whole thing."
"That's horrible," Pauline said.
"Most likely he was drunk," Mom said. "Probably never knew what hit him. Budge used to say his momma left before the body was cold. Budge's granny raised him. She had her share of shotguns, rifles, but Budge wouldn't go near them. Everyone teased him, so he got real good with a knife. Nothing intimate about it. He just didn't own a gun."
"They have a lot of time to fill," Curt said. "Twenty-four-hour news. They interview any so-called expert they can find."
"I'm glad Jack covers sports, then," Mom said. "Clean and easy. A score is a score."
Curt grinned. "It's not always that simple," he said. "Nothing is."
Jack got to the motel room around five. We still had the TV on, but nothing new had been reported.
"I called the police from the airport," he said. "They're pretty sure it was Dwayne and his daughter at the gas station in Ohio, but there haven't been any other sightings they trust."
"How long do they think you should stay here?" Pauline asked.
"Checkout time tomorrow is eleven," Jack said. "They'll let us know if it's safe for us to go back home then."
"Will you have to go back to Orlando to get the girls?" I asked.
Jack shook his head. "They can fly home by themselves," he said. "They've done it before. Curt, Pauline, I can't thank you enough for staying with Terri and Willa. I worried a lot less knowing they weren't alone."
"Our pleasure," Pauline said. "But now, if you don't need us, we'll go home."
We exchanged farewell hugs. I was sorry to see them go, but I was relieved Jack was with us. It might not have been rational, but I felt more protected with him around.
"I told the girls I'd call them when I got here," he said, pulling out his cell phone. "They're a little jumpy because of everything. Hi, Brooke. Yes, I'm back. The flight was fine, much better than last night's. No, nothing new. Yeah, Sunday, Monday at the latest. I'll know better tomorrow, and I'll tell your mother. Where's Alyssa? Oh, all right. Yes, she's right here. Hold on." He handed the phone to me.
"Willa, how are you?" Brooke asked.
"Fine," I said. "Bored. You'll be back this weekend?"
"That's what Dad says," Brooke replied. "Monday at the latest. Willa, have you checked your messages?"
"No," I said. "Why?"
"I've gotten a lot of calls and texts," Brooke said. "A lot. Some at lunchtime, and nonstop since school ended. My friends. A few of your friends. They're all worried about you."
"They know?" I asked.
"It's all over the news," Brooke said. "You having the same last name and Dwayne driving east from Ohio. Someone made the connection. I told everyone you were fine, but I couldn't tell them where you were." She laughed, but I could hear the embarrassment in her voice. "A few kids thought that was kind of exciting," she said. "Like you were undercover. But most of them just wanted to know if you were okay."
"I don't think I'm supposed to use my cell," I said, having no idea if that was true or not. "In case anyone can trace me from it."
"That makes sense," Brooke said. "Well, I'll tell everyone I spoke to you, and you should be in school on Monday."
Up until then, I'd been looking forward to getting back to school. If I were home and in school, it would feel as though none of this were real.
But that was before I'd realized people would know what had happened. And I'd go from being that quiet girl who happens to be Brooke McDougal's stepsister to being the daughter of a killer.
I handed the phone back to Jack and pulled out my cell. I had seventeen messages and twice that many texts. Three of the messages were from Lauren. Someone must have let her know what was going on and she felt my father murdering his family was important enough to get in touch. I rammed my cell back in my bag.
Mom looked at me. "It'll be all right," she said. "I promise."
"I know," I said, because I didn't want her or Jack to be any more upset. Besides, a mother and two little girls were dead. What difference did it make if I was embarrassed?
Eight
THE PHONE RANG.
The sound woke me up, and it took a while before I understood what was going on. I was in the motel bedroom, with Jack and Mom on the sofa bed in the living room area. It was three forty-five in the morning and something very bad must have happened.
No one calls at three forty-five A.M. with good news.
Mom opened the bedroom door and peeked in.
"I'm awake," I said, which was half true. "What is it?"
"I'm not sure," Mom said. "There are two police officers coming up. Do you think you can go back to sleep?"
"No," I said, climbing out of the bed and putting on my robe. "Do you know why they're here?"
"The desk clerk called," Mom said. "To let us know they
were on their way up and that he'd checked their ID."
Jack was sitting on the opened sofa bed, talking on his cell. "I just wanted to be certain," he said. "Yes, it's better to be safe. Thank you." He hung up. "They're cops, all right," he said. "But I still don't know what's going on."
We could hear their footsteps coming down the hallway to our suite. "It can't be anything about Brooke and Alyssa," I said. "They're in Orlando."
"I'm sure they're fine," Mom said. "Most likely they found Budge and they're coming to tell us we can go home tomorrow."
They knocked quietly on the door. Jack got up and opened it.
The officers were in uniform. They introduced themselves and showed Jack their badges and ID. Mom and I sat on the sofa bed while Jack and the officers stood there.
"There's no easy way of saying this," Officer Washington said. "We have reason to believe your ex-husband is dead, ma'am. It would be a big help to us if you came down to the hospital and identified him."
"He's here?" Mom asked. "He came here?"
Officer Myers nodded.
"The little girl?" I asked. "My sister." For a moment, I couldn't remember her name. "Krissi. Did they find her?"
"I'm afraid she's dead also," Officer Washington said.
Mom gasped.
"What happened?" Jack asked.
"There was an incident," Officer Myers replied. "It's under investigation."
"Look," Jack said. "I can turn on the TV and find out exactly what's going on. Or you can stop beating around the bush and tell us what we need to know. We're talking about Willa's father and sister. We have a right to hear what happened."
"I'm sorry," Officer Washington said. "But before we go on, can you confirm your home address?"
"Twenty-two Cedar Lane, Westbridge," Mom said. "Why?"
"A man believed to be Dwayne Coffey approached your house," Officer Washington said. "The house was under surveillance, in case he showed up. A police officer approached him and asked for identification and the man attacked him with a knife. The officer's partner shot him. The attacker was taken to the hospital, but he died in the ambulance, presumably from the gunshot wounds."