I Know a Secret

  The sound of voices—real voices—made her turn toward the kitchen.

  One glance through the doorway told her more than she needed to know. Angela and Korsak stood with their arms around each other, their lips locked in a kiss, their hands roaming. Jane had been forced to witness many sights in her life, things she did not ever want to see again, and her mother French-kissing Vince Korsak was one of them. She backed away, went into the dark living room, and sank onto the sofa.

  Now what do I do?

  She sat in the flickering glow of the TV, wondering how long she should wait for this make-out session to end. Should she call Gabriel to bring her mother’s suitcase and give her a ride home? She didn’t want to interrupt this reunion, but really, how long was this going to go on?

  On the TV, a woman was stumbling through the woods, fleeing what looked like a man in a giant rubber ant suit. She remembered that Korsak had a collection of these old horror films because, as he used to say, There’s nothing like a scary movie to make your gal want to cuddle. As if only fear would drive a woman into his arms.

  The ant creature emerged from the bushes in all his rubberized glory. The woman tripped over a tree root and fell. Of course she fell. Every woman who’s ever fled through the woods must trip and fall. It was another rule from Horror 101. Now the clumsy woman staggered to her feet, sobbing and hysterical. As Rubber Ant Guy moved in for the kill, Jane was suddenly struck by a memory. Another horror movie. Another young woman running in the woods, pursued by a killer.

  She sat up straight, staring at the screen, thinking of Mr. Simian, written and produced by Cassandra Coyle. A movie that Cassandra’s colleagues said was inspired by a true incident from Cassandra’s childhood. A girl who went missing.

  That girl would have been Lizzie DiPalma.

  “Oh, Janie. You’re here,” said Angela.

  Jane didn’t look at her mom; her gaze was still on the TV, her thoughts still on Cassandra and Lizzie. On her own misgivings about how the case had been resolved and how many questions had not been answered.

  “I’m not going home with you,” said Angela. “I’m staying here with Vince. I hope that’s okay with you, honey.”

  “Of course it’s okay with her,” said Korsak. “Why wouldn’t it be? We’re all adults here.”

  “This isn’t over yet,” said Jane, and she jumped to her feet.

  “No, it’s definitely not over,” said Angela, beaming at Korsak. “In fact, it might be better than ever.”

  “I gotta go, Ma.”

  “Wait. What about my suitcase?”

  “I’ll ask Gabriel to drop it off.”

  “So you’re okay with Vince and me living in, you know…sin?”

  Jane looked at Korsak’s fat hand resting on Angela’s hip and shuddered at the thought of what would go on in his bedroom tonight. “Life is short, Ma,” she said. “And I have things to do.”

  “Where you going in such a hurry?” said Korsak.

  “To see a movie.”

  “IT STILL NEEDS TO BE color graded and there’s no soundtrack yet, so there won’t be the full emotional boost you get with scary music,” said Travis Chang. “But this is our picture-locked version. It’s pretty much what the finished film will look like, so I guess we can finally show it to you.”

  Since Jane’s last visit to Crazy Ruby Films, the three filmmakers had tidied up the place. The pizza boxes and soda cans were gone, the trash cans were empty, and the dirty-socks odor was absent, replaced by the savory scent of microwaved popcorn, which Amber was now pouring into a bowl for everyone to share. But no one had gotten around to vacuuming the room yet, and Jane brushed old popcorn kernels off the sofa cushions before sitting down.

  Ben and Travis joined her on the sofa, one on each side of her, both of them looking at Jane as if she were an alien who’d plopped into their midst. “So, Detective,” said Ben. “We were all wondering.”

  “About what?”

  “Why you changed your mind. You told us you weren’t a fan of horror films. And suddenly here you are on a Saturday night, insisting that we show you Mr. Simian. Why?”

  “Insomnia?”

  “Come on,” said Travis. “What’s the real reason?”

  All three filmmakers were watching her, waiting for the answer. For the truth.

  “The night I interviewed you, right after Cassandra’s murder,” said Jane, “one of you told me that Mr. Simian was inspired by a real incident, something that happened when Cassie was a kid.”

  “Yeah,” said Amber. “She said that a girl went missing.”

  “Did she ever tell you the girl’s name?”

  “No. It was just someone from her school.”

  “I think that child’s name was Lizzie DiPalma. She was nine years old when she vanished.”

  Amber frowned. “The characters in Cassie’s script, the ones who go missing, are seventeen years old.”

  “I think they’re stand-ins for Lizzie, the real nine-year-old girl. I also think the killer in your movie might represent the man who took her.”

  “Wait,” said Travis. “Mr. Simian is real?”

  “In your movie, who is Mr. Simian?”

  Travis went to his desktop computer and tapped on the keyboard. “I think the best way to answer that question is to show you the movie. So make yourself comfortable, Detective. Here it comes.”

  As Amber dimmed the room lights, the Crazy Ruby Films opening logo appeared on the big-screen TV, an image of broken shards joining together to form a cubist image of a woman’s face.

  “That logo was my idea,” Amber said. “It represents all these unrelated fragments joining into a visual whole. It’s moviemaking in a nutshell.”

  “There, you see that?” said Travis. He grabbed a handful of popcorn from the bowl and settled onto the floor near Jane’s feet. “That opening shot in the woods ended up taking four horrible days to film. Our original star turned up completely stoned, so we fired her. Had to replace her, like, overnight.”

  “And I sprained my ankle on that shot,” said Ben. “Limped around for weeks. It’s like our project was jinxed from the very first day.”

  Onscreen, a pretty blonde in mud-spattered jeans stumbled through dark woods. Even without any ominous music, the tension was evident in her panicked expression, her gasping breaths. She glanced back over her shoulder and a light flared, the beam illuminating her face, her lips frozen in a rictus of terror.

  Smash cut to the same girl, sleeping peacefully in her pink bedroom. The caption read: One week earlier.

  “That first scene in the woods was just a flash-forward,” explained Amber. “Now we go back a week to see how our character Anna ended up in those woods, running for her life.”

  Cut to Anna’s biology classroom, where the camera panned across the students: two girls, giggling and passing notes. A bored-looking jock slouched in his varsity jacket. A pale and studious boy conscientiously taking notes. Slowly the camera swung to the front of the classroom and focused on the teacher. A man.

  Jane stared at the wispy blond hair, the round baby face, the wire-rim glasses. She knew exactly why this actor had been chosen for the role. He was the spitting image of a young Martin Stanek.

  “Is that Mr. Simian?” she asked softly.

  “Maybe,” said Travis. He added with a sly smile, “Or maybe not. We don’t want to spoil the movie for you. You just have to keep watching.”

  Onscreen, the students filed out of the classroom and chattered as they opened their hallway lockers. Here were the standard characters of every teen horror flick: The jock. The wallflower. The nerd. The catty cheerleader. The levelheaded brunette. Of course, the brunette would survive; in horror movies, the levelheaded girl usually did.

  Twenty minutes into the movie, the brunette lost her head to an ax.

  The death scene was a slo-mo gorefest of spurting blood and flying cranium that made Jane squirm on her couch cushion. Jesus, no wonder she didn’t watch horror flicks; they reminded her too
much of work. She stared at the brunette’s headless body sprawled in the woods and remembered seeing just such a corpse lying in a bathtub in Dorchester, a young woman beheaded by her crack-crazy boyfriend. That particular horror was real-life, but at least she didn’t have to watch while it was happening, and she’d had the benefit of being warned ahead of time about what she was going to encounter. Usually the warning came in a phone call from a grim-voiced officer at the scene, advising her that this one’s really bad, and before walking onto the scene she’d brace herself for the sights and the smells, because an audience of patrolmen was always watching and waiting to see if the girl cop was tough enough. She made damn sure she was tough enough.

  She glanced at the three filmmakers, for whom fake gore was their stock-in-trade. For them, murder was fun. For me, it’s always a goddamn tragedy.

  Onscreen, the killer was just a vague silhouette. No face, no features, only a shadow looming over the brunette’s decapitated body. A shovel sliced into the ground. The severed head arced into the night and landed with a thud in the open grave.

  Ben grinned at Jane. “Bet you didn’t see that murder coming, did you?”

  “No,” she murmured. What other surprises were lying in store in this film? What were you trying to tell us, Cassandra? The story had eerie parallels with the real-life murders to come: Five potential targets. Death after gruesome death. A relentless killer who worked at an after-school center. Had Cassandra somehow foreseen her own fate, as well as the fates of the other child witnesses?

  Twenty minutes later in the film, the faceless Mr. Simian struck again, this time his ax chopping through the muscular neck of the jock. No surprise there; in splatter flicks, the jock was almost always doomed. Nor was Jane surprised when the mean cheerleader went down next in an explosion of brains and fake blood. Mean girls were supposed to die; it was every moviegoer’s guilty pleasure, revenge against all the snooty girls who’d made their lives miserable.

  Travis turned to her. “What do you think so far?”

  “It’s, uh, engaging,” she admitted.

  “Have you figured out who Mr. Simian is yet?”

  “Obviously it’s that guy.” Jane pointed to the Martin Stanek lookalike, who was now crouched in a dark closet, peeking through a chink in the wall into the girls’ restroom. On the other side, the wallflower hiked up her skirt and adjusted her tights. The peeping teacher leered. “He’s definitely a creep.”

  “Yeah, but is he the killer?”

  “Who else would it be? Except for the kids and their parents, there aren’t any other suspects in this movie.”

  Travis grinned. “What seems obvious isn’t always the truth. Don’t they teach you that in detective school?”

  Jane flinched as a fresh fountain of blood splattered the wall where the peeping Tom had been crouched. The creepy teacher—the man she’d assumed was Mr. Simian—collapsed to the floor, an ax embedded in his skull. Slowly the figure of the real Mr. Simian moved into the frame, into the light. A killer she’d never suspected. A killer wearing a knit hat sparkling with silver beads.

  “Surprised ya, right?” said Travis. “It’s just Horror 101. The killer’s always the person you least suspect.”

  Jane pulled out her cell phone and called Frost. “We had it wrong,” she told him. “This case was never about the Apple Tree. It was never even about the Staneks.” She stared at the screen, where a terrified Anna was running through the woods, pursued by a killer who now had a face. “It’s all about Lizzie DiPalma. And what really happened to her.”

  —

  FOR SEVENTEEN YEARS AFTER HER daughter’s disappearance, Arlene DiPalma had remained in the same neighborhood and in the same house that she’d shared with her nine-year-old daughter. Perhaps she’d nursed the hope that Lizzie would someday walk through the front door again. Perhaps the loss of her only child had frozen her in a grief so profound that she was unable to move on, unable to cope with any change. Then, two years ago, change was thrust upon her when her husband collapsed and died of a stroke.

  Sudden widowhood was what finally shook Arlene out of her state of suspended animation. A year after her husband’s death, she’d sold her Brookline house and moved to this seaside retirement community in East Falmouth, on the elbow of the Cape Cod peninsula.

  “I always wanted to live near the water,” said Arlene. “I don’t know why it took me so long to finally make the move. Maybe I never really felt I was old enough to be in one of these retirement places, although I certainly am.” She stared out her living-room windows at Nantucket Sound, where the water was a forbidding gray under wintry storm clouds. “I was forty when Lizzie was born. An old mommy.”

  Which would make her sixty-nine now, thought Jane, and the woman wore every one of those years on her face. Grief was like an aging pill, spinning the years in fast-forward, graying one’s hair, sagging one’s flesh. On the mantelpiece was a photo of Arlene as a newlywed, fresh-faced and pretty. That young woman was nowhere to be seen now; like her daughter, Lizzie, the newlywed Arlene had long ago gone missing.

  Arlene turned from the window and sat down to face Jane and Frost. “I thought the police had forgotten all about her. After all this time, I was surprised to hear from you. When you called me this morning, I couldn’t help thinking that maybe you’d finally found her.”

  “I’m sorry we had to disappoint you, Mrs. DiPalma,” said Jane.

  “Twenty years, with so many false leads. But it never goes away, you know?”

  “What doesn’t?”

  “Hope. That my daughter’s still alive. That all this time, someone has kept her in his basement, like those girls in Ohio. Or like that poor Elizabeth Smart, who was too terrified to run away from her kidnappers. I keep hoping that whoever took her just wanted a child of his own, someone to love and take care of. That someday my Lizzie will remember who she really is, and she’ll pick up the phone and call me.” Arlene took a deep breath. “It’s possible,” she whispered.

  “Yes. It is.”

  “But now you’re talking about homicide cases. About four people being murdered. And that takes away any hope I might have had.”

  Frost leaned forward on the sofa and touched the woman’s hand. “They never found her body, Mrs. DiPalma. Until they do, we don’t know that she’s dead.”

  “But you think she is, don’t you? Everyone does—even my husband did. But I refused to accept it.” She looked straight at Frost. “Do you have children?”

  “No, ma’am. But Detective Rizzoli does.”

  Arlene looked at Jane. “A boy? A girl?”

  “A little girl,” said Jane. “Three years old. And just like you, I’d never give up hope either, Mrs. DiPalma. Mothers never do. That’s why I want to find out what happened to Lizzie. I want you to have your answer.”

  Arlene nodded and sat up straight. “Tell me how I can help.”

  “Twenty years ago, when Lizzie vanished, the prime suspect was Martin Stanek. He was sent to prison for molesting children, but he was never found guilty of kidnapping your daughter.”

  “The prosecutor told me she tried her best.”

  “Did you attend the trial?”

  “Of course. A number of the Apple Tree parents did.”

  “So you heard the evidence. You were there when Martin Stanek testified.”

  “I kept hoping he would confess on the stand. That he’d finally tell us what he did to her.”

  “You believe Martin Stanek took your daughter?”

  “Everyone thought so. The police, the prosecutors.”

  “What about the other parents?”

  “Holly’s parents certainly did.”

  “Tell me about Holly Devine. What do you remember about her?”

  Arlene shrugged. “Nothing in particular. A quiet girl. Pretty girl. Why do you ask?”

  “Did she ever strike you as odd?”

  “I didn’t know her well. She was a year older than Lizzie and in a different grade, so they weren’t frie
nds.” She frowned at Jane. “Is there some reason you’re asking about her?”

  “Holly Devine was the child who found your daughter’s beaded hat on the school bus. She was also the first child to accuse the Staneks of abuse. She started the whole chain of events that led to the Staneks being convicted and sent to prison.”

  “Why is all this coming up now?”

  “Because we’re wondering if Holly Devine told the truth. About any of it.”

  That possibility seemed to stun Arlene and she gripped the armrests of her chair, clearly struggling to understand what this might mean. “You don’t think Holly had something to do with my daughter’s disappearance?”

  “That possibility has been raised.”

  “By whom?”

  By a dead woman, thought Jane. By Cassandra Coyle, who’d conveyed her message from the grave, in the form of a horror movie. In Mr. Simian, the killer had not been the teacher, whom everyone suspected. Like Martin Stanek, the teacher in the movie was merely the distraction, the convenient scapegoat who drew everyone’s attention while in the shadows lurked the real killer: the wallflower.

  It’s just Horror 101.

  Arlene DiPalma shook her head. “No, I can’t imagine the girl hurting my daughter. Maybe that boy would do it, but why would Holly?”

  “Boy?” Jane glanced at Frost, who looked equally bewildered. “What boy?”

  “Billy Sullivan. Lizzie despised him. They weren’t even in the same grade at school—he was two years older than her. But she knew enough to stay far away from him.”

  Jane rocked forward, her attention suddenly laser-sharp. Quietly, she asked, “What did Billy do to your daughter?”

  Arlene sighed. “At first it seemed like normal schoolyard teasing and bullying. Kids do that sometimes, and my Lizzie was the sort of girl who refused to be a victim. She always stood up for herself, which only made Billy nastier to her. I don’t think he was used to not getting his way, and Lizzie wouldn’t give an inch. So he got more and more aggressive. He’d shove her at recess. Steal her lunch money. But he was clever about it, never doing it when anyone was watching. Since no one saw it happen, it was always Lizzie’s word against Billy’s. When I called his mother to complain, Susan didn’t believe it. Oh, her Billy was an angel. He was brilliant, and my Lizzie was nothing but a liar. Even when Lizzie came home one day with a bloody lip, Susan insisted her son didn’t do it.”