Livia Lone (Livia Lone #1)(79)

She’d always assumed Fred Lone was simply a freak. Maybe there was an explanation—he’d been molested by a priest or a teacher or a coach, and infected by evil. She’d certainly seen enough of that. Or maybe he’d just been born twisted. She’d encountered plenty of that, as well. Evil with no explanation, no origin.

But two brothers, and both of them monsters? That wasn’t a coincidence. Something had happened to them both, when they were boys. If she could find out what that thing was, maybe she would be one step closer to finding Nason.

She thought about Fred Lone’s funeral. The family crypt, with the sister who had died when Lone was young. Livia had never thought to ask about that before. She’d never cared.

Well, she did now.





53—NOW

She walked back to the parking lot. She was getting cold, and anyway it was too windy for a phone call.

She turned up the heat in the Jeep and pulled out onto Admiral Way, heading toward the West Seattle Bridge and Georgetown. The streets were quiet, the windows dark in the buildings she passed.

She called the number Tanya had given her when they’d talked after Livia had graduated from the academy. Answer, she thought. She didn’t want to wait for this information. She’d waited so long already.

The phone rang only once, then Tanya’s voice: “Livia Lone, as I live and breathe.”

Livia smiled, relieved. “Tanya. You must be on call.”

“You guessed it. Not that you’d be waking me anyway. I’m a night owl. How are you, sister?”

“I’m good. I’m sorry to bother you this late, but I have a strange question, if you don’t mind.”

“I never mind, and I told you, for me it’s not late. Tell me what I can do to help.”

“Thanks. You’ve lived in Llewellyn for a long time, right?”

“Born and raised. Went to Llewellyn High School, just like you.”

“Well, even born and raised, this would have been a little before your time, but . . . what can you tell me about Fred Lone’s family? I mean, when he was a boy. I know about his older brother Ezra, the senator. But there was a sister, too, right? Who died when they were young?”

There was a pause, probably while Tanya considered asking what this was about. Then she said, “Actually, there were two sisters. One was the oldest child. She committed suicide. That’s the one buried in that fancy mausoleum. And the youngest child was also a girl. She left Llewellyn after high school, and the word is she’s never been back.”

Livia felt her cop instincts prickle. There was something there. She just didn’t know what yet.

“Suicide? Why?”

“No one knew why. Not really. Supposedly there was a history of mental illness. There were several attempts before she finally succeeded. Threw herself out her bedroom window onto a fence. Picket fence.”

Livia frowned. What had Eric and his bully friends used to taunt her with, when she was new in the school? Hey Lahu, when are you going to jump out a window onto a fence and kill yourself? She had never known what they were talking about. But it must have been that. Some kind of town lore.

“How old was she?”

There was a pause, then Tanya said, “Seventeen, I think. It was the summer before her senior year.”

Livia imagined how desperate a teenage girl would have to be to hurl herself onto a row of wooden stakes.

Though it was more remembering than imagining.

“What was her name?”

“Ophelia, believe it or not.”

Livia thought of Hamlet, which she had read in one of her high school English lit classes. “Unlucky name.”

“I’d say so.”

“So you weren’t even born when all this happened.”

“That’s right, I came along ten years later. But you know the Lones. They’ve always been a big deal in this town, going back to Fred Lone’s grandfather, who started the paper mill. In a town like Llewellyn, news is like throwing a rock in a lake—the bigger the rock, the bigger the ripples, and the farther they go. Ophelia Lone killing herself the way she did . . . shit, kids were still talking about it when I was in high school, and that was almost twenty years later. ‘They took the fence away, but that’s the spot where she landed, and the fence posts went through one of her eyes, her mouth, her heart, her private parts’ . . . depending on how gruesome the teller wanted to be. You never heard any of this when you were in school? I guess the talk finally died out.”

“No, there was still talk. I just didn’t know what it meant.”

“I’m not surprised. It’s like a ghost story, you know? People want to keep telling it around the campfire.”

“How old were the brothers and the other sister when it happened?”

“They were each only a grade apart. So figure Ezra was sixteen. And Fred . . . he was a tad younger, so fourteen. And Rebecca, who they called Becky, she was thirteen.”

“Sounds like Lone Senior was a man with a mission.”

“Yeah, he wasn’t giving the missus long breaks, that’s for sure.”

“You said Becky moved away.”

“That’s right. Caused a minor scandal by going to Berkeley rather than Yale.”

“Why a scandal?”

“The family was a big Yale legacy, going all the way back to the grandfather, and then the father, and Ezra and Fred were both Yalies. I think there’s even a Lone building somewhere on campus—that’s how much money the family donates. Plus you know how conservative the Lones are—church every Sunday, a flag out in front of the house. And back then, Berkeley was a hotbed of hippie radicalism. So a Lone going to Berkeley . . . hell, it was like changing religions, or something. Becky was the black sheep of the family.”