Confessions on the 7:45(98)

Pearl seemed small, sad, apart from Selena, apart from the world. A butterfly. Beautiful, but elusive. A flap of her wings and the world shook. A black butterfly.

“My mother,” said Selena. The edges of the world felt fuzzy and gray. And Pearl was backing away. “My father. They told me everything that happened to you. Everything you did. I know you. I see you. All of it.”

Pearl looked at her, a smile on her lips, something like kindness—or was it pity—in her eyes. There was a connection there. She’d felt it the moment they met on the train. It was true; it ran deep. But it was also dark, flawed, not sustainable in the real world.

Pearl looked over her shoulder toward the sound of the sirens, then back to Selena.

“Whatever happens next,” Pearl whispered, “the worst of your problems is about to go away. For good.”

Selena closed her eyes. She thought for just a moment.

“What about Geneva?”

But when she opened her eyes again, the room was filling with light and shouting voices.

And Pearl was gone.



FORTY-TWO

Selena

She lay in the back of the ambulance, her house alit in flashing red. She counted—two other ambulances, four police cars, two unmarked sedans. There were twenty men and women, at least, cops and paramedics, moving about her lawn and house, calm in their work. Outside the cordoned area, neighbors collected in their pajamas—arms folded, faces worried. A crowd gathered around her house in the middle of the night, a chorus, an audience to the destruction of everything she’d built and thought was hers. But she felt lifted out, apart from it all. Maybe it was the meds they gave her.

Detective Grady Crowe sat across from her, quiet, gaze intense.

Her body ached. Her jaw, where he’d hit her so mercilessly. Her throat, where Graham tried to strangle her and nearly succeeded. Her shoulders, her back, her hips. Her heart. She pulled the blanket they’d given her tight around her shoulders.

She watched as Graham was wheeled out in a stretcher, flanked by two police officers. She couldn’t see his face; she leaned back so she wouldn’t have to see him at all. Will, she thought, was still in the house, managing the situation. As much as a situation like this might be managed. It was a runaway train, decimating everything in its path.

She’d told Detective Crowe everything—from the moment she met Pearl to the moment her sister had saved her life. She told him everything that Cora told her, too. How Pearl had been shadowing their lives for years, and Selena never knew she existed. She let it all go. Every secret and lie. He’d scribbled it all in his little book.

“I had a visitor today,” said Crowe. “A man named Hunter Ross, a private detective.”

The world was fuzzy and unreal, his voice sounded far away. But she listened.

“He was the cold case investigator hired when a woman named Stella Behr was murdered and her fifteen-year-old daughter, Pearl, went missing, more than ten years ago now. A man in her mother’s life was suspected of the murder, and of Pearl’s abduction. Their case went unsolved and the department brought Ross in to keep following up leads.”

Selena let the information sink in. She thought of the girl her mother described, thin and feral, following Cora in the grocery store. Someone on the outside, looking for a way in. Or maybe Cora was right about Pearl. That she was just a destroyer. Someone in pain, looking to give pain to others. She could be either. Or both.

“Our father abandoned her,” said Selena. “Then her mother was murdered, and she was abducted?”

Cora had never said anything about Stella, or Pearl’s suspected abduction. Maybe she didn’t know. Or maybe it was just another thing she hid. So many layers, so many secrets buried deep. Pearl was a child. Who took her? Where was she all those years before she showed up in their lives?

“Ross was never able to find them,” said Crowe. “A man named Charles Finch, a con artist, had apparently worked his way into Stella Behr’s life in the months before her murder. But he was a ghost. Hunter Ross believes that Finch killed Behr, and abducted Pearl, raised her as his own.”

Selena thought about Pearl, that darkness in her. No wonder.

“But, believe it or not, that’s not who he came to see me about today,” said Detective Crowe.

He took a picture out of the file he gripped in his hand. There was a picture of a young girl with golden curls and sad eyes. She was many years younger, but Selena recognized her right away. The paper shook a little in Selena’s hand.

“This is Gracie Stevenson,” said Crowe. “Her mother was also murdered, and she, too, has been missing since that night.”

“It’s Geneva,” said Selena.

Crowe nodded.

“Same scenario, a man worked his way into the life of Gracie’s mother, Maggie. Maggie was strangled in her bed, just like Stella. And Gracie disappeared. When Hunter Ross saw Geneva’s picture on the news, he recognized her. All these years, he’s kept investigating both cases, following stories he heard in the news, pinging the system for any new DNA evidence. Nothing until now.”

Selena struggled with it, how the pieces fit together.

“So, they were connected,” said Selena. “You think the same man abducted them both?”

“This woman,” said Detective Crowe, holding up a picture of a young Pearl, “is the sister that reported Geneva missing in the first place.”