The Bitter Season (Kovac and Liska, #5)(85)

She placed her business card on the table near the centerpiece.

“As for your other situation, keep your doors locked. I’ll put in a call and make sure the extra patrols are happening.”

“Thank you.”

Evi Burke followed them to the front door and locked it behind them. As they hustled through the drizzle to the car, a police cruiser rolled slowly past.

“Filthy weather,” Nikki muttered, starting the car and turning on the defrosters.

“Not a pretty picture of the Duffy family,” Seley said. “They were coming apart at the seams. I’d love to know where Barbie was going every time she left those kids alone with her personal house slaves.”

“Yeah, and I’d like to know what Ted Duffy threatened Donald Nilsen with.”

“Something worth killing over?”

Nikki put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb. “Let’s go see if we can find out.”





24


Evi closed the door and turned the locks. She was trembling, and angry with herself for it. It had been so many years since she’d talked about that time in her life. Angie Jeager was someone she used to know, not someone she wanted to acknowledge still lived inside her. She had to think of it that way—that that girl was someone different from the girl who had lived on the streets, and the girl who had done terrible things to survive on the streets was not the young woman who had finished college or the woman she was today. She tried to keep each version of herself in its own box, and kept all the boxes closed and locked as well as she could manage.

Two detectives had just pried the lid off one box and allowed the contents to spill out.

Evi knew from experience that every version of herself would come crawling out tonight in her dreams. She would see them, one looking accusingly at the next, all of them stalking the woman she had fought to become, doing their best to tear her down. Who did she think she was, having a nice life? Why did she think she deserved to succeed? She could call herself whatever she wanted, but beneath the fa?ade of her too-perfect life she was still just Evangeline Grace Jeager, the abused, abandoned daughter of a drug addict. No matter what she did with her life, she couldn’t change what had been done to her life. She couldn’t change who she had been or the things she had done to save herself.

All those other versions of her had dreamed of the life she had now, and had seen it as a life not meant to be, nothing but the foolish wish of a lonely child. Now she had that life, and she did her best every day to believe it was real, that she wouldn’t wake up as Angie Jeager, living in a filthy hotel room, smoking dope to dull the pain of her reality.

She went to the kitchen and busied herself cleaning up. She had just started the supper dishes when the doorbell had rung. Now she had to drain the cold water and start over. As the sink filled and the soap bubbled up, she stared out the window at the black emptiness of the backyard.

The memories rolled through her mind. She could see the chaos of the Duffy house—toys everywhere, the piles of half-read newspapers, the stacks of mail, the dirty dishes in the kitchen, the piles of dirty clothes in the laundry area in the basement.

The smell of the basement came back to her with the memory: vaguely musty and moldy. It was always just a little damp down there. Most of the basement was unfinished and dark. With the exception of the finished laundry/workbench area, the only light in the rest of the space was supplied by a couple of bare-bulb fixtures screwed to the floor joists overhead.

She had always hated going down there. She didn’t do well in dark, creepy places where early memories could crawl out of the corners like snakes on the floor.

She had spent three days in a dirty old basement when she was little more than Mia’s age, with nothing to eat but junk food and soda her mother had left in a grocery bag, and only some blankets and pillows, and her dolls for comfort. Meanwhile, her mother had partied upstairs. Three days of drugs so she could do what she had to do to make enough money to pay the rent. Evi had stayed in the basement, trying not to cry loud enough for anyone to come looking for her. The men who came to see her mother frightened her more than the dark and the bogeyman.

When Anna Jeager finally came off her high and sobered up enough to realize what she had done, she spent two hours sobbing and apologizing, holding Evi so tight she could hardly breathe. When the emotion subsided, her mother had calmly called Child Services to report herself, and then locked herself in the bathroom and tried to slit her own wrists, not the first of many suicide attempts.

Evi suffered through that memory every time she went into the Duffy basement to do their laundry, going down the old stairs into the dim maze of open stud walls dividing the space into potential rooms. Only the area with the laundry and Mr. Duffy’s workbench was finished and well lit, a strange oasis in the dank and dark, like a stage set for a play.

Some nights, Mr. Duffy would come downstairs to sit at his workbench and clean his guns, which unnerved her. Growing up, she had learned early on not to trust men, and most especially not to trust men who drank. She would watch him from the corner of her eye as she rushed to do her work. He would sit at his workbench ten feet away, slowly taking a gun apart, carefully cleaning each piece as he smoked a cigarette and sipped at a glass of whiskey while old rock music played on the radio.

He had probably been handsome when he was younger, Evi thought at the time—which now seemed ridiculous to her as she stood in her kitchen washing dishes. She was older now than Ted Duffy was at the time of his death. He had been in his late thirties, but he looked older, harder, worn out by his life. Gray threaded through his black hair. Lines dug deep around his mouth and across his forehead.