Don't Look for Me(53)

“And now you blame yourself.”

He touched her arm. She didn’t pull away. And she felt it again, the anticipation of relief that she knew would come if he held his hand there. If she let it linger just long enough to travel through her. A little bolt of electricity. And from there, another touch, and another and another until they were swept away.

“Tell you what,” Reyes said, moving his hand. “Tomorrow we’ll check the land records and utilities for the property, and the log for the search and canvass. We can even go knock on the door if you want. And I’ll do a little looking into your father. Shouldn’t be too hard. We have all the bank and credit card statements.”

That would all be fine, tomorrow. But tonight—what about tonight and right now? Exhausted, confused, the hollow spaces wanting to be filled. She couldn’t fight it.

The words flew from her mouth.

“Let me buy you a drink.”





23


Day fifteen





I wake up with two bodies beside me. Alice is lodged against my spine, under the covers. One arm over my waist, the other on the back of my neck.

But I feel another hand on my hip. Over the covers, but still heavy enough to feel its weight. The hand of a man. The hand of Mick.

I do not move a single muscle. I do not turn my head to see him, to confirm what I already know. I stare at the beams of light coming through the cracks of the boarded up window. And I wait for them to stir. His touch is repulsive, and yet I am suddenly filled with hope.

Be patient, I tell myself this morning, as the light comes in and the plan continues to form in my mind. Maybe I have more time than I thought. Maybe he is starting to like me the way Alice does.

I feel the hands touching me, the bodies stealing comfort from mine. I lie still.

Be patient.

Alice is the first to wake. She groans a bit and pulls me closer with her little arms, snuggling deeper.

“Hi,” she whispers.

“Hi,” I whisper back.

“He’s here with us,” she whispers.

“I know.”

I wait for her to giggle or feel her cheeks smile against my back. I think that this should make her happy, that we are all together in this bed. That I am being a good second mommy to her and pleasing Mick.

But her voice grows shaky.

“This is how it begins,” she says. “When he gets into the bed with us.”

“How what begins?” I ask.

She pulls my hair so my head is forced closer to her ear.

I wince but I do not complain.

Be patient, I say to myself, even as I hear the words she says next. Words that make me gasp in the cold air.

“The end,” she says. And then she gives me a kiss.





24


Day fifteen





Nic awoke with a hangover and scattered memories. It was both familiar and unnerving.

She did not linger in bed. Instead, she went straight to the bathroom and ran a shower. She stepped in while it was still cold and let the water sting her skin.

She brushed her teeth, downed four Advil.

Her head still ached from the four drinks with Officer Reyes. From going to bed drunk.

Then she remembered that she’d had to leave her mother’s car at Laguna. Reyes had driven her here, back to the inn, walked her to her room.

But that was all. She was certain. Although not for lack of trying.

Shit. What had she done, exactly? Tried to kiss him. Pull him into her room? And he’d wanted to, hadn’t he? She’d felt his body respond. Now she was grateful he’d resisted. She needed someone to help her find her mother. Not another stranger she had to kick out of her bed in the morning.

But it had been more than raw need last night. It was the story he’d told her, which she was also now remembering. A story worthy of four drinks and a new perspective on Officer Jared Reyes. It explained why he’d come to Hastings, and why he had such a strong alliance with Chief Watkins.

Reyes had been involved in a shooting when he was a rookie back in his hometown, in Worcester, three hours north of here. A lone gunman had been lurking outside a school. Stalking the grounds, waiting, as it turned out, for the police to arrive. Waiting so he could draw them close, then pull his own weapon, forcing them to shoot. Forcing them to kill him. But his gun had been a toy, a fake. Reyes had killed an unarmed man in a suicide-by-cop. She could have listened to him all night, talking about the emotional pain that was now a deep scar he’d learned to live with.

Nic looked in the bathroom mirror, stared into her own eyes to see if she was remembering all of this right.

Reyes had described his memory of the young man falling to the ground. The blood pooling around his torso. The way it entered his own body as a fantasy, a scene from a movie. And then the rush of something vile as his brain processed reality. And this vile something changed every cell in his body in an instant. Every single cell. Those had been his words. But they were also Nic’s.

Reyes had managed to describe exactly what had happened to her as she stood on that driveway and watched her mother’s car send her little sister flying through air.

Had she started to cry then? She stared into her own eyes now, trying to remember. Yes, she had cried. And Reyes had held her. Kissed her forehead. Then driven her back here, sparing her the degradation of turning their new connection into something sexual. He knew about living with hollow spaces.