The Night Before(29)

Rosie pounded her fist on the table. “No! I told you—we found the car. It was parked on Richmond. We drove it home! It’s right there—in the driveway!”

Conway now. “So the car isn’t missing. Just your sister?”

“Yes!”

Two heavy sighs, then the officers stood up.

“We have her social security number,” Rosie said, handing a piece of paper to Conway. “What happens now?”

“We’ll file a report. Likely not much happens until tomorrow, unless there’s more that surfaces between now and then to indicate a crime has occurred. Most of these cases, the person shows up.” Conway tried to sound sympathetic but it came off as patronizing.

Rosie stood, helpless, as both officers walked to the door. “And it doesn’t matter that we know she wouldn’t do this?” she asked, following behind them.

Pearson answered without stopping. “Like my partner said, they usually turn up.”

There’d been no promises. No sense of urgency. They didn’t seem to recognize the name, but that would happen the minute they put it in the system. Laura Lochner. The girl found next to a dead body. The murder weapon in her hand.

The decision to call them had felt monumental—as though they would find Laura in an instant even if it came at the cost of dredging up the past. But the car drove off, again with no sirens, no lights. Nothing.

Joe returned from upstairs. He checked the screen then looked up at Rosie, shaking his head. There was nothing new.

“What’s happening?”

Joe came closer. He was moving slowly. Ominously. He had papers in his hand.

“What?” Rosie asked. She didn’t like what she saw on his face.

He handed her the papers. Three of them. Typed notes.

“I found these in her room. In the pockets of her coats.”

“Just like she used to do,” Rosie said. When she was a teenager, Laura would hide things from their mother in her coat pockets—coats worn in a different season, shoved into the back of the closet. It could be anything—cigarettes, condoms, her phone. Not that their mother ever bothered to look.

Rosie opened the first note.

I know what you did.



Then the second one.

You should never have come back.



And the third.

You will pay.



Rosie stared at the notes, reading them over and over. Joe stood beside her, holding her by the arms.

She looked at him hard, trying to gauge the amount of fear in his eyes. “Did you know about these?”

It wasn’t the same as hers, her fear at seeing these notes. It changed everything.

Joe was indignant. “What are you asking me?”

“Did Laura tell you about these? Where they came from? Who might have sent them?”

He let go of her and walked away, then turned back. “I can’t believe you would ask me that. Don’t you think I would have told you? If not right away, then certainly this morning when she didn’t come home?”

Rosie couldn’t answer him because she didn’t know what to think anymore. There had been so many conversations that seemed to hush when they heard Rosie coming down the stairs or around the corner—Laura and Gabe and Joe, sometimes just Laura and Joe.

Maybe she told him about the notes. Maybe she told him other things as well.

“Do you know?” Rosie asked, finally.

“Know what?”

She couldn’t say the words. She’d never said them. Never asked the question. Not in eleven years.

“What, Rosie? Just say it already!”

And then they came, escaping from her mouth before she could catch them. The words, the question she didn’t want answered.

“Did she tell you she killed him?”

It had always been there, this question. Hanging over all of them since that night.

All they ever knew was what Laura told the police. She was in the car with her boyfriend. The door opened from the driver’s side. A man dragged him out. Laura heard the crack of wood against bones. Then a cry. She crawled out the other side and hid in the brush by the side of the road. The man swung the bat twice more, then got in the car and drove away.

They held her for twenty-four hours until the car was found, deserted in another part of the reserve, deep in the woods. Lionel Casey had made it his new home.

Laura was never charged. Still, the question lingered—why was she found standing over the body? The bat in her hands? Blood on her clothing?

Rosie asked it again.

“Did she tell you she killed that boy?”

Joe shook his head. “No.”

Then she stood in the silence, wondering things about her husband. Wondering things about her sister. What she had done all those years ago to a boy in the woods. Her first love. A boy named Mitch Adler.

And what she might have done last night to a man named Jonathan Fields.





SIXTEEN


Laura. Session Number Eight. Three Months Ago. New York City.

Dr. Brody: Can’t you see his cruelty?

Laura: Who, Mitch Adler? Cruelty is a harsh word. He was just a high school jerk-off playing his options.

Dr. Brody: He knew he was causing you pain. It wasn’t incidental to his selfish actions. It was intentional. And that is cruelty.