Tessa Leoni: Crash And Burn Part 33

He had to flip back. He hadn't noticed it at first, still getting his bearings and all, but sure enough, the round room included several impressive windows. Nicky had meticulously drawn in each diamond pane of the gla.s.s. Then, behind that . . . the mountains. A view so familiar he felt that if he studied it just a minute more, it would come to him.

"The White Mountains. You think this is New Hampshire." He glanced at Tessa.

"She asked to move here, not Thomas."

"Because Marlene Bilek is here."

"Maybe. But you heard her talk. She's looking for answers. I think instinct brought her here. Closer to the truth."

"Sheriff asked me a good question this morning," Wyatt said abruptly. "If Thomas is the one responsible for the accidents against his wife, why? Only a few reasons a husband tries to kill his spouse. Revenge, money, power. After twenty-two years, what changed in their marriage?"

He knew the answer, but Tessa did the honors: "Nicky decided it was time to move forward. She was tired of being sad."

"A move toward independence can be threatening to any man, but especially to a husband who likes to tend as much as Thomas wants to tend," Wyatt agreed.

"I don't buy the story of them meeting in New Orleans," Tessa stated.

"Me neither. Always sounded rehea.r.s.ed."

"I tried to get her to talk more about Thomas while she was sketching. It sounds to me like there is part of her that loves him. But more than that, she believes she needs him. He takes care of her. I'm guessing for his own reasons. Think of their pattern: always on the move. That seems less like a couple who's living happily ever after, more like a pair on the run."

Wyatt turned back to the picture of the madam. "If Nicky was truly kept in this dollhouse, and Thomas was somehow part of it, I can think of at least one person who'd never want them talking to the police." He tapped the cold-eyed woman. "Tessa, if this is all true . . . How'd Nicky, Vero, get out? That's what bothers me the most. An operation like this, a woman like this, she didn't simply let one of her girls go. Something happened. And I'm not just talking Vero learned to fly, and all that nonsense."

Tessa hesitated. "I have a theory. Maybe I'm biased, having my own . . . past and all. But I think Vero was kidnapped thirty years ago. I think she was held by this woman in this house. And I think . . . I think something really terrible happened that enabled her to escape. No. I suspect Vero did something really terrible that got her out. And all these years later, that's what she can't stand to face. Except." Tessa shrugged, that sad smile back on her lips. "The past has a will of its own. It wants to be heard. Her own purposefully blocked memories are starting to break free."

"November is the saddest month," Wyatt murmured. "A woman twice returned from the dead."

"I think Nicky's trying to remember. I think some part of her even wants to tell us what happened, get it off her chest. She just needs a push."

"Another scented candle?" Wyatt arched a brow.

"No. I think we put her face-to-face with her mom. Let them finally speak."

Wyatt thought about it. "All right. I'll call Marlene, break the news. She's already taken an interest in Nicky. I can't imagine she wouldn't want to see her missing daughter after all these years. We'll need to keep it under wraps, though. G.o.d knows the press is about to descend upon us any minute."

"True."

"But it's gotta be tonight. And I don't just mean because the feds will change everything in the morning. Thomas Frank fled from his burning home nearly twenty-four hours ago, yet we pinged him only forty miles from here. Know what that tells me?"

Wyatt paused.

"He still considers Nicky a threat. And he isn't finished with her yet."

Chapter 29.

VERO AND I are sipping cups of tea. The rosebush mural has been obliterated on the wall, scribbled over in angry black marker. The pink gauze that once surrounded the bed is now sliced into ribbons. The mattress has been reduced to a gutted pile of shredded foam.

I can't even look at what she did to Fat Bear.

"You're scared," I tell her knowingly, though it's my own heart pounding in my chest.

"f.u.c.k off." Vero hasn't bothered with clothes. Or the memory of skin. I sit with a grinning skeleton, bits of hair and decaying flesh plastered to her skull. When she drinks, I can watch the scotch cascade down her moldering spine.

"She's your mother," I try again. "You've dreamed of this moment for years and years. Remember?"

"I liked this room best," she says abruptly. "Of all the places in this stupid house. This room looked like it was meant for a princess. All little girls dream of being a princess."

"Your mother still loves you," I tell her.

She suddenly smiles. "Don't you mean your mother?"

"It's okay," I hear myself say, to her, to me, to the sad remains of eyeless Fat Bear. "Everything is going to be okay."

Vero smiles again, tosses back another shot of scotch.

"Ah, Nicky," she a.s.sures me. "You always were an idiot."

BY 9 P.M., I can't stay on the bed anymore. I get up, pace around the hotel room. Sitting on the second bed, Tessa does her best to give me s.p.a.ce. She is checking all the news channels, trying to see if the story has gone national. There were news cameras arriving when Wyatt hastily shuttled us out of the back of the sheriff's department hours earlier, word of the discovery of a missing child, thirty years lost, having finally leaked out.

I'd just returned to the conference room, mesmerized by my black-stained fingerprints, when Wyatt dropped his second bombsh.e.l.l: Marlene Bilek wanted to meet with me. Immediately. Tonight. Not a discussion, not a debate. He'd already set it up. End of story.

I would speak with my mother. After all these years, doubts, wonderings . . .

Tessa got us back to the hotel, using every back road and evasive-driving technique she knew. Once we were safely ensconced in the room, she advised me to eat a good dinner, then rest up. It was going to be a long night.

Now Tessa works the remote. So far, a startling break in a thirty-year-old cold case seems to be local fodder only. The news producers are most likely in a holding pattern, Tessa informs me, waiting for the right confirmation, interview, photo op, to blow the story to the next level. Lucky me.

I pace around the beds again, my mind going in a million directions.

I think of that tiny, desperate little apartment. Of the woman who once tucked Vero in the closet for her own safekeeping. The mother who brought her ice cream and played hide-and-seek and would sleep, when he wasn't around, with her arms holding her daughter tight.

I pause to finger the yellow quilt, inhaling a fragrance my head knows can no longer be there, though my heart still hopes for otherwise.

And I miss Thomas. I wonder what he's doing right now, even as I struggle to understand what happened Wednesday night. I did call him. And he came, because he always came. For twenty-two years, he's been my anchor, my rock. I might scream in terror at night, but he greeted me each morning with love. At least, that's what I thought it was.

Or was it? For all of his talk of our closeness, I'd moved into the guest bedroom. More proof that at least some part of me knows more than I'm ready to consciously face? When I first woke up in the hospital, my initial response wasn't love but anger. I wanted him gone, away. I loved him; I hated him. The concussions may have scrambled my brains, but maybe there were head games going on way before that.

Why haven't I ever called my mom, made some kind of contact with my family? I got out. Somehow, someway- Vero learned to fly.

But I never went home. I stayed with Thomas. Always Thomas.

Do you trust me? he asked Wednesday night, handing me the pair of gloves.

Except why did I need to wear gloves? And why did I say yes?

I'm angry with him, I think. For torching our home, for disappearing in the middle of the night, for leaving me with so many unanswered questions.

"Run," Vero speaks up in the back of my head. And I know she isn't talking about the upcoming meeting with my mother. She's talking about Thomas.

Ten fifteen. The sound of a car engine breaks the unbearable silence. I pop off the bed, follow the noise of the vehicle approaching, the crunch of tires as it turns into the parking lot. Instinctively, I head toward the door. Tessa gives me a stern look and orders me to sit back down. I notice her hand has gone to her side, as if reaching for a gun, and the nervousness officially becomes too much.

I rush back into the bathroom to vomit. When I return, voices are now in the hall, followed by the sound of a key jiggling in a lock. The door of the room next to ours. This is what they planned. Tessa has reserved this room here; then, under a second name, the adjoining premises.

Nothing to trace back to the sheriff's department, which the press must be watching like a hawk. Nothing to suggest my presence. Or Marlene Bilek's.

Now, when no media vans suddenly scream into the parking lot, when no photographers suddenly bound down the hall, when the midpriced hotel remains just its normal level of off-season quiet . . .

The connecting door slowly swings open. Sergeant Detective Wyatt Foster steps into the room.

Then . . .

Marlene Bilek appears before me.

WE DON'T SPEAK right away. It's one of those moments . . . What do you say? Instead, we stand, we stare, we absorb. I'm holding her quilt. Her eyes go right to it; then she smiles.

"I knew that quilt was going to where it needed to be," she whispers.

I'm crying. The tears pour down my face. I can't stop; I can't move; I can't even wipe them away. I just stand there, staring at this woman, with water coating my cheeks.

Not everything is as I expect. The image I've pictured in my mind all these years is of a twentysomething mom, a little lost, a little resigned to her fate even before her beloved daughter was s.n.a.t.c.hed from her. I thought of her as softer, her body rounded in a comforting mom sort of way. This woman, on the other hand: Her face is drawn, features stamped by years of tough decisions. Tessa mentioned that she kicked her abusive ex to the curb, stopped drinking, turned her life around.

She still carries an unmistakable air of sadness. A woman who's lost much and knows she can never get it back.

"Why don't we, um, take a seat," Wyatt says. He gestures to the two beds. "Make yourselves comfortable."

He and Tessa exchange a glance. Tessa has her iPhone out. She is recording us, I realize. But of course, even this "private" reunion is still the subject of much scrutiny.

Marlene enters the room slowly. She is wearing her dark-red uniform from the liquor store, as that was the ruse they devised to throw off the press. But I'm surprised she didn't bring a change of clothing, something more personal for her first meeting with her long-lost child. It unsettles me further. I'm looking for Mom but mostly seeing state liquor store cashier Marlene Bilek.

I take a seat on the edge of the bed closest to the door. She takes a seat on the bed opposite me. Wyatt and Tessa move to the small circular table shoved in the corner of the room, trying to give us privacy, while still very much part of the s.p.a.ce.

"Your hair is exactly as I remember," Marlene murmurs now, her gaze raking over my face. I find myself rounding my shoulders self-consciously. "Long brown waves. Once a week, I used to bathe you in the kitchen sink. Then, if it was sunny outside, we'd sit by a window and I'd brush your hair until it dried. You had such gorgeous locks, much nicer than my own."

She touches her short, graying brown curls as if embarra.s.sed. I'm trying to remember exactly what her hair looked like back then, long, short, curly, straight, but coming up blank. She looked like Mom; that's what I've preserved after all these years. Not an image of a specific woman, but a generalized ideal.

"It's funny, though," Marlene says now. "Your eyes were much grayer when you were a child. Now they look more blue. I guess that's the way it is with some kids. I had a friend whose son was a blond until he was eight or nine. Now he's a brunette."

"You have another daughter," I hear myself say. Is my tone accusing? Surely I don't intend that.

"You mean Hannah?" Once again Marlene's expression falters. She glances down at the carpet. "She has brown hair, gray eyes, like you did. First second she was born, my heart nearly stopped in my chest. It's Vero, I thought. My G.o.d, I've gotten my daughter back!

"I had to work hard on that, to let Hannah be Hannah. Because there is only one Vero. Lord, child, I've missed you so much."

She bursts off the other bed. I'm not prepared. I can't get my hands up in time. Her arms go around me, hold me tight.

She is hugging me, I think, nearly bewildered. This is me, being hugged by my mother.

I should open my arms. I should hug her back. I should declare, "Mommy, I'm home."

But I can't move. I can't say a word.

I'm too aware of Vero, who's back in my head, laughing hysterically.

"YOU MAKE QUILTS," I say finally, two, three, ten minutes later. Mine is setting next to me on the bed, one more thing I suddenly don't know what to do with.

"I started twenty years ago," Marlene tells me. In contrast to my constantly ping-ponging gaze, her eyes remain locked on my face, as if mesmerized. "I, um . . ." She takes a deep breath. "The years, right after your disappearance. They were a dark, dark time. And Lord, I'd already thought I'd been through some dark times. I'm sorry I took you to the park that day. I'm sorry I fell asleep. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

"You'd been drinking." My voice is sterner than I expected. I don't soften it. "You were drunk."

"I'm sorry." She speaks the words automatically, the syllables nearly worn out from thirty years of utterance.

"The moment I realized I couldn't find you," she says. "When I'd been all around the park, calling your name over and over, and you still weren't coming . . . I knew. I knew immediately the worst had happened."

"Vero just wanted to play with dolls," I murmur. I've switched to third person. I can't help myself. I don't know how to tell the story any other way. For too many years, Vero has been a little girl inside my head, one p.r.o.ne to shedding her skin in times of distress. Even knowing she is me, or I am her . . . It feels too surreal. Vero is Vero. I'm just a gatekeeper. I know things because she tells me things. A way of disa.s.sociating myself from the horror, I guess, a quirk of coping. But it has worked for so long, I don't know how to magically undo it now. Even sitting face-to-face with this woman-my mother, I keep telling myself-feels strange. She is Vero's mom, I think. I've always wanted to meet her. But my mom . . .

I'm just not ready for that.

"Vero followed the girl away from the park," I continue now. "But Madame was waiting for her. A stab of the needle, a quick shove into the car. By the time you missed her, Vero was already gone."

Marlene's fingers dig into the edge of the mattress. But she nods. I'm not telling her anything she hasn't already imagined over the years.

"I tried so hard to find you," she a.s.sures me now. If my use of third person bothers her, she doesn't show it. "I answered all the police's questions, went around to the neighbors. I was sure it was only a matter of time. They'd find you wandering down the street. Maybe you'd followed a stray dog or an ice cream truck, who knew? But the police were on it; even all the locals turned out to search. You were mine, but after you were lost, you became everyone's. Except we still couldn't bring you home."

"Madame Sade took Vero to a house," I tell her. "A beautiful mansion where Vero was given a room fit for a princess. Soft bed, beautiful hand-painted rose mural. Her very own china tea set."

"The first few days, I didn't drink a drop," Marlene murmurs. "I was sober. Stone-cold for the first time in a decade. No sleeping, no drinking, no eating. I waited. I waited, waited, waited, because at any moment, the phone would ring, and it would be the police returning you to me."

"Madame gave Vero new clothes, then took them away when Vero couldn't stop crying. Madame left Vero alone in this huge cold room for days and days. No sleeping on the bed. Vero found a closet instead. She curled up naked on the floor and cried for you."

"Ronnie beat me the first night," Marlene whispers, her eyes locked on mine. "Called me a stupid wh.o.r.e for losing you. Then he beat me the second night because I wouldn't stop crying. Then the third and the fourth. The fifth night, the officer who'd come over to update me on your case ended up taking me to the emergency room. They had to screw my jaw back together. That officer, Hank, told me I should never go back to that apartment again. The first step to saving my daughter, he told me, was saving myself."

"There were cla.s.ses. Madame Sade came every afternoon. 'Girls can't afford to be stupid,' she said. So Vero learned reading and math and geography and history. Then there was dancing and fashion and makeup and hairstyling. She told Vero she was her mother now. They were family. She would live in this beautiful house forever; she just had to do as she was told. Then Madame Sade would leave again and Vero was alone. Every morning, every evening. Hours and hours and hours, all night long, so very alone.

"Vero wanted to be brave," I whisper. "But the isolation . . . It became harder and harder to remember who she was. And easier and easier to be whatever Madame wanted her to be. Especially once she turned twelve and the first man arrived. When it was over, she didn't cry. Vero simply locked it all up, something that happened to someone else, and stuck it way back in her mind. None of that could've been done to the real Vero, because the real Vero was a princess from a secret realm, whose mother was a magical queen who'd vowed to keep her safe from the evil witch."