Catch Me (Detective D.D. Warren, #6)(122)

“Patron?”

Her features remained flat, hard. A cop’s face, a victim’s face. I had never realized until now how little separated the two.

“When I was fourteen, I left dear old mom. We were living in Colorado by then. She’d stopped hurting me and started selling me instead. See, her looks were no longer what they used to be, and a girl’s gotta pay rent. She still brought home the boyfriends, only they didn’t stay in her room anymore.”

I didn’t say anything.

“One night, it occurred to me that as long as I was selling my body, I ought to call the shots. So I waited for the right guy to come along—you know, one with lots of cash—and I made him a deal. I’d become his exclusive property, if he’d take me away.

“Turns out, I picked well. He was a successful attorney, had plenty of assets, and had always envisioned himself as one of those wealthy men with a little something-something tucked away on the side. I got my own apartment, and with a bit more negotiation, I got a new identity—you know, so Mommy Dearest couldn’t track me down and take me away. Perfectly legal, of course, which is the advantage of prostituting yourself to a legal eagle. Eventually, I enrolled in some online courses and earned my GED. Only problem became when I turned eighteen, and I wanted to go to college, and he wanted to keep me in a gilded cage.”

She stopped talking. On the couch, my aunt moaned, her eyes fluttering opened. She stared at both of us, but her eyes were still glazed over. I doubted she was seeing anything.

“When’d you kill him?” I asked conversationally.

Abigail smiled. “That’s not the relevant date. You should know the relevant date.”

“January twenty-one.”

“Absolutely. But why, SisSis? What’s so important about January twenty-one? You tell me.”

I studied her. I tried to remember our time together, the past I’d worked so diligently to forget. “Your birthday?”

She eyed me funnily. “No.”

“My birthday?”

“Please. Your birthday is in June.”

Frances was awake. Her breathing had changed, evened out. She wasn’t sitting up any straighter, but I could tell she was more alert. I wondered if Abigail could tell the same.

But my sister wasn’t paying any attention to my aunt or my landlady. She was staring at me. She appeared, for the first time, uncertain.

“Did you really forget…everything?”

I shrugged, feeling half-foolish, half-ashamed. “Most things, yes.”

“Even me?”

“I’m sorry, Abigail. I’ve tried and tried to remember, but I swear, I just…You’re a baby and then you’re not there anymore. I was so sure she’d killed you. Like Rosalind. Like Carter. These beautiful little babies, so perfect and precious and then…”

“I watched her kill the boy.”

“You did?”

“I remember everything. He was crying, and she took a pillow. It was bigger than his entire body. She pressed it down on him. ‘This is what we do when babies cry, Abigail,’ she told me. ‘Don’t be a crier.’”

“You would’ve been just a toddler yourself.”

“I think I was two. You would’ve been four.”

“How can you remember what happened when you were two?”

“How can you forget what happened when you were four?”

My aunt, sitting up straighter, moved her hand at her side.

“I wanted to die,” I heard myself say. “I woke up in the hospital, and the doctors were talking about how they put me back together and it had been touch and go, but I’d be okay now. Except, instead of feeling grateful, I wanted to kill them for saving me. I was so…angry. I was so…depressed.” I took a small step away from my aunt, easing toward the rear door, willing Abigail’s attention to follow me, and turn farther away from the two now waking women.

“I think I had to forget,” I told my sister honestly. “I think it was the only way I could remember how to live again.”

“She killed you,” Abigail said. “She stabbed you with a knife. I saw that, too.”

“There was fire.”

“You do remember!”

“I remember blood and flames and thinking it was strange to feel so cold.”

“She tried to burn the house down.”

“After stabbing me?”

“Yes. She’d gotten you first, but I didn’t see that part. She’d come back upstairs for me, then we were in the kitchen and she had the matches, and I couldn’t get away. She was going to burn us alive, but you appeared behind her and you hit her over the head with this heavy old lamp.”

“I did?”

She peered at me, and I was rewarded with a trace more uncertainty in her eyes. “You really don’t remember?”

“I wish I did. I would like to remember hurting her. Mostly, I feel like I’ve spent my entire life trying to learn how to be me. That she crawled into my head when I was too young to fight back and it’s taken me twenty-eight years to find my own thoughts, to be my own person. Our mother was crazy, Abigail. And we were too little to fight her. But we’re grown up now, and she’s dead. She doesn’t have to call the shots anymore. We can be ourselves. We can finally win.”