Little Girl Lost

  “I’m not taking you home.” Karen scoffed while slicking on another coat of lip gloss. “That’s clear across town, and Jonny Guzman said he has a surprise for me once we get to Vinny’s house.” She and Briana cackle at the idea of hickeys and herpes being doled out freely for the rest of the night. But I was sick. A nine at least on the pain scale.

  “I started to vomit.” I give the slight tick of the head toward McCafferty. “Karen rolled down the windows and proceeded to get me home as quick as she could.”

  “You stupid, stupid, bitch! Don’t you fucking yak in the back of my brand-new car!” A new Honda Civic gifted to her on her sixteenth birthday.

  Briana glanced back, daggers in her eyes for ruining their night. “She’s probably knocked up like that freak she hangs out with.”

  I wasn’t about to correct them, let them in on the fact that Heather had the baby and named her after me.

  “And then they dropped me off at home.” I try to shrug it off as if it were no big deal, but my entire body ricochets with the terror of their shared fate that night.

  McCafferty leans in, her entire demeanor reminds me of an angry old spinster school teacher who openly hates children. “What did you do after you went home?”

  My faces pinches with heat. My eyes settle over her a moment too long until it becomes unbearable.

  Karen stopped in front of my driveway with a jolt so hard I almost snapped my neck. I wasn’t fully convinced she was going to wait for me to take the time to get out, so I quickly took off my seat belt and swung open the door. A hand reached back. Karen dug her nails into my forearm, her entire face locked with a silent rage. “Rumor has it, you have a crush on David McMillan. Is that right, Pig Face?”

  I hated that nickname. Nobody had called me that since junior high, but ever since Heather glommed onto me like a fifth appendage it had resurfaced. Heather hated it as much as I did.

  “She does.” Briana snorted into the mirror on the sun visor where she watched the show unfold. “She’s blushing. She probably fucks him in her sleep. That’s the only way she’d ever get a piece of him.”

  “Good.” Karen winked—something so seemingly innocent, but I saw the devil in her eye right then and there. “I’m going to take a giant shit in front of his locker early Monday morning and let him know it was from you.”

  I ran straight into my bedroom, tears streaming down my face. Karen was mean enough to do it. Her father was the football coach, and she had already bragged about breaking into the school on several occasions to steal things from the biology lab, fetuses, an entire crate of dead frogs, the carcass of a cat. Rumor had it, she was a witch on the side and needed these things for her rituals. Not that I believed them. But what I did believe was that she was about to make my life all around shitty.

  But that wasn’t the only unnerving event of that night. I ran straight into my room and found more trouble waiting for me. Sitting high up on my bed, with a ruddy looking newborn on her lap was Heather Holy Shit Evans.

  She saw how upset I was so I told her what had happened. Then the baby started to cry unstoppably and they left. It was the first time I felt a smidge grateful to have her there to vent to. Heather was just as hurt as I was, her face doused in tears as she ran into the night.

  “And then the misfortune.” McCafferty turns over the first picture, a glossy eight by ten of the Honda Civic charred, the windows blown out, the front end pushed in like an accordion and I swiftly turn my head away.

  “What the hell?” James takes the picture and pulls it toward him.

  “They died.” McCafferty fills him in. Okay, so maybe I didn’t gloss over this with him. “The girls left. They took off for a party in the next town over. It was dark, a fog bank came in quick, and they flew off the side of an embankment—rolling all the way down. The car spontaneously combusted, blew out the windows. Both girls were found burned to a crisp still buckled in their seat belts.”

  They always did follow the rules—right up until they broke them.

  I pull the picture over and force myself to look at it. “That could have been me,” I whisper.

  “It couldn’t have been you.” McCafferty’s eyebrow hooks its way into her forehead. “Not according to Katrina Parker.”

  “Karen’s older sister.” Older, certainly not wiser. Certainly not above paying off a group of seniors to threaten to kick my ass for the rest of the school year. I’ve never been so happy to see so many people graduate. Good riddance.

  “She seems to think you caused the accident.”

  “I heard the theory.” I shake my head at James as if to dismiss it before it ever comes from my mouth. “If they never brought me home, they wouldn’t have ever gone that route. They would never have crashed, never had rolled to the bottom of the cliff.”

  “You don’t think it’s true?” McCafferty seems amused by my delivery.

  “I learned at a young age not to entertain what-ifs.” What if I had another mother? What if my mother had died in that horrific crash that night instead? It was useless. I was her charge, and until the government issued me a reprieve after eighteen long years, I was hers to use and abuse as she wished and she did.

  “Katrina Parker doesn’t buy that theory either.” McCafferty mimics my casual shrug and I blink to attention.

  “You spoke with her?”

  “I didn’t have to.” She bleeds that wicked smile my way. “She has a website dedicated to her sister.”

  “What does it say?” James has that intent look on his face as if he might give weight to whatever it is she’s spouted off. Katrina Parker was an angry bitch. Just as mean and heartless as her sister.

  McCafferty takes the picture back and turns it upside down. I can feel all of the negative energy in the room start to evaporate.

  “Katrina believes someone bumped them off the side of the road.”

  I shake my head as if it were lunacy. “She’s a finger pointer. She doesn’t want to believe it was an accident.”

  “She found a body mechanic to back her up.” Her eyes light up as if this news tantalized her.

  “Oh? So a fender bender or something? There were a lot of drunk teenagers out on the road that night.” My heart drums wild in my chest.

  “True, but not on that end of town. There were no eyewitnesses. The mechanic says there was a very sharp indentation in the right rear passenger’s side. It had a distinctive quality of a sedan.”

  “They tumbled over boulders,” I point out. “Their car looked like a wrinkled piece of paper. Not to mention the fire.”

  “I’m just playing devil’s advocate, Allison. No reason to get worked up. Both the Parkers and the Humeras were resentful of the fact you lived and their daughters didn’t.”

  “I know.” It was hell, and I hated every moment of it. There were times I actually wished I had stayed in the damn car.

  James taps his fingers over the table. “Wait a minute. You don’t think some twisted fuck from one of their families is responsible for what happened to Reagan, do you?”

  “I’m not implying that.” She turns over the next photo, and my entire body recoils as if she had uncovered a snake. “Who’s this?”

  There we are. High school. Senior year. I had finally conceded to the fact I would never have another friend outside of the one who stalked me so proficiently. A staffer from the yearbook snapped that picture of Heather and me running track.

  “Some girl I had P.E. with.” My heart gives a hearty wallop with the lie.

  McCafferty flips the next photo. Heather and I locked in an embrace on the front lawn yesterday morning. Shit.

  “And this is the same girl?”

  “Yes.” My voice grows small with shame. My fingers twitch to flip over that entire damn stack of incriminating photos, cutting to the demonic chase. I’m not a fan of these wicked games.

  “Who is this?” James leans in to get a better look at her.

  “A friend from high school.” The one I forced into admitting s
he ran Briana and Karen off the road that night. Heather said she would have taken it to the grave, but I couldn’t sleep not knowing if it were true. Of course, I didn’t sleep afterwards either. I promised Heather I wouldn’t breathe a word, and that’s when she said she knew we were soul sisters. I hated to break it to her, but I was no soul sister—simply an accessory to a very gruesome crime. The only reason I didn’t turn her in was because I was too afraid the case would go sideways and it would be me serving time. Maybe that would have been best, Heather and me serving out our sentences in the very same cell forever. Her heaven. My hell.

  I clear my throat. “She was in the area and stopped by to give her support. The one that started the GoFundMe.” I roll my eyes as if the entire thing were ridiculous.

  “Heather Evans—Porter.” McCafferty flips over another shot of her crouching in the crowd down at the Boys and Girls Club. Did I know she was in town then? I try to filter through my memory, but the damn thing is stuck on stupid.

  “She’s married. Has a family.” I try to whitewash her strange behavior with a patina of normalcy.

  “Was,” McCafferty corrects. “Had a family. She and her daughter moved out to Torrance California a while back.”

  My mouth falls open. That’s an outlying city close to where we lived. And here I thought Heather Evans was safely tucked in Nevada. “Local school records show the child attended Alta Vista Elementary School for the remainder of the last school year. Never did reenroll.”

  “No, that’s not right. Her daughter has to be older than that by now, at least in junior high.”

  “That’s the older one.” She grimaces at the picture of Heather. That’s right. Heather has more than one. Honestly, I can’t keep track of my own child—in the most literal sense—let alone Heather’s brood. And poor, poor Heather can’t even evoke sympathy from someone like McCafferty. “They both have curious names.” Here it is. “Allison.”

  “Both?” James and I say in unison.

  I clear my throat. My skin begins to crawl in that familiar way it has every time Heather is around with those little Heather-shaped maggots of hers burrowing into my flesh.

  “How old would you say the youngest of the two is?” Tears blur my vision because I think I already know where this is going.

  “A little older than Reagan.”

  I pull Ota from the dark recesses of my mind and dust her off, slap her face with Heather’s juxtaposed over it. She doesn’t look anything like her, but then she doesn’t have to.

  “Do you think this woman took my child?”

  McCafferty leans back in her seat. That intense glare of hers spears right through me as if to say I should know.

  “I’m saying anything is possible and we have an entire list of suspects to consider.” She tweaks the corner of the photos with her thumb as if they were playing cards. Her gaunt frame turns toward my husband.

  “James.” She blinks a dry smile. “Let’s move on to you.”

  8

  James

  Marilyn McCafferty sits at the head of the table, bitter, yet drunk with revenge. I’m not sure what I’ve ever done to this battleax, but I can tell by that gleam in her beady little eyes that she’s about to knife my balls off so fast I will never see it coming. For a moment I envision her hunched over a pentagram, the leader of a black mass—worshiping trees in her birthday suit, her arms flailing to the sky as she decries her hatred for men.

  “I need some water.” Allison springs to her feet. “Can I get anything for the two of you?”

  Both McCafferty and I offer a silent refusal.

  I wait until Ally is deep in the kitchen before leaning in. “I’m working on my marriage.”

  Allison comes back with a water bottle in hand before I can finish my thought. But McCafferty doesn’t look amused by my efforts. Instead, it looks as if I’ve only managed to piss her off that much more.

  Allison gives me a quick wink. “So let’s see what cobwebs lurk in the attic of your past, shall we?”

  She’s awfully glib. I can’t believe she didn’t mention the fact some chick from high school has been hanging around. You would think she would mention something like that. I’ll have to pick her brain later. See if this girl is off her rocker. See if her kid can pass for Ota. Leave no stone unturned. I frown at McCafferty because a part of me is afraid she’s about to land a boulder on my chest.

  “Are you certain that Reagan is your biological daughter?”

  Allison jerks, kicking me from under the table without meaning to. “What?” She slaps her hand down over the stack of pictures patiently waiting for their moment in the spotlight. “Listen, I’m about to ask you to leave our home.” Her face is red with rage. “This is insulting and completely unnecessary.”

  “Yes,” I assure them both. “Reagan is one hundred percent my child.” Allison settles down a bit, just enough to take a deep breath. “Look, this is the kind of speculation we don’t need right now. All those morons camping out on my lawn, chanting bullshit until the wee hours of the night, would love to feast off something like this. Reagan is mine. End of debate. You can take all the DNA samples you want once you bring my baby girl back alive.”

  Allison gives a frenetic nod of agreement, her eyes set wide as an open sky.

  McCafferty places her fingers onto the next photo in her surprise lineup of horrors. “The only reason I ask is because we located a few of your fraternity brothers. One of them mentioned a lengthy breakup ensued just before the two of you announced you would be parents.”

  “That’s true.” Allison takes in a quivering breath. “Suffice it to say we were ecstatic to get back together. I’m fertile.”

  That’s not entirely true. Ally and I have had a few slipups. Not once did she get pregnant. And then there were the intentional slipups on my part, and again it wasn’t happening. It wasn’t meant to be. Yet. Once Reagan comes home, I want to get to the serious business of expanding our family. I want more daughters, and yes, I would like to have a son. I think that would be wonderful. I want the whole package with Allison. For as many mistakes as I’ve made, I want to spend the rest of my life making it up to her.

  “Do either of you know who this man is?”

  Allison gasps before McCafferty turns the picture over, but once I see my brother’s smiling face it’s me gasping.

  “Aston.” I crane my neck a bit. “It was accidental—his death.”

  “I know.” McCafferty flips the next one over, and we find Wilson smiling back at me. “Your other brother.”

  “Yes, Wilson. He was a good guy. He OD’d on opiates or something. I was just a kid. I’ve never plied my parents for the details.” The fact he died was all I needed to know at the time. It’s still too much for me to take in.

  “He didn’t die of opiates.” She cleans her eye teeth with her tongue. I steal a moment to glance at the door. For once I’m glad my father is taking his scheduled walk of the day. If he couldn’t handle it in the privacy of his own home, he certainly couldn’t tolerate the casket tossing going on in my dining room. “There was another chemical found in his bloodstream.”

  “What was that?” Who knew what shit he was on. Toward the end, half the time he didn’t know what state he was in.

  “Ethylene glycol. A chemical found in antifreeze. It’s hard to detect.”

  “Antifreeze.” I shake my head at Allison. “Sounds like he got ahold of some bad stuff.”

  “Sounds like it,” Allison is quick to agree with me, but too quick, and it unnerves me. The last thing I want is for McCafferty to think we’re covering for one another.

  She flips the next picture over, exposing a younger, far less affable version of my father—not that any version of him is affable. But this particular one screams asshole even to the kindest, soft-footed woman. There’s not a person on the planet who wouldn’t want to give him the finger in his younger years. He was tough and he had to be.

  “That’s my father. Looking good, right?” I glance to Ally
and we share a quick smile. When Allison first met Pops, she said if she were older my mother would have to watch out. It was in jest, and something I appreciated at the time since I’ve gone through life wearing his face.

  “Handsome devil.” McCafferty gives the photo a slight wink and both Ally and I share a smirk. “Rumor has it, he was a hard man.”

  “Still is,” I offer. “He’s been—”

  “Staying with you.” She sniffs at the idea. “Yes, I do know that. How do you feel about your father, James? Would you say you have a good relationship with him?”

  “Excellent. Better than ever.”

  “And your mother?”

  “She passed about a year and a half ago.” Something deep in my chest unhinges and I resist the urge to bawl. “She was the best. I miss her like crazy.”

  “Sounds like she meant the world to you.”

  “Doesn’t every mother?”

  “Not every mother.” She shoots a quick look to Ally. “How did your father feel about his children?”

  “He was tough. He needed his kids to be perfect. He ran the courthouse. How would it look if his kids were running around wild? Small town.” Wilson was running around wild.

  The past comes flooding back and I bite down over my lip so hard I taste blood.

  McCafferty flips the next picture. Rachel standing in front of a batch of brownies. Home ec yearbook picture. I recognize it because the editor of the yearbook gave us a blowup print to display at the funeral. She looks happy. Whole.

  “Is that your sister?” Allison pulls it over and admires her with a saturated smile. I would like to think that Allison and Rachel would have been very good friends. It’s a recurring fantasy I have—all my siblings alive, the entire lot of us enjoying long and joyful Sunday dinners. We could have been something great. Great indeed.

  “And this one.” McCafferty flips another one over, the remaining pile growing markedly thin.

  “That’s Mom.” God, I miss her. I give a wistful twist of the neck. There she is in all her redheaded Irish glory. “Rich in a dress.” Both Allison and McCafferty share a quiet chuckle.