And Now She's Gone(105)

“Isabel disappeared almost twenty-five years ago,” Gray said. “She was fifteen.”

Alicia cut a look at Carol. “How did she die?”

“Don’t know,” Gray said. “But after coming back from this trip to Alabama, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Deanna used the identity of a missing fifteen-year-old.”

Alicia groaned and sank into the couch cushions.

“So, back to Deanna disappearing,” Gray said. “She ran off with Xavier?”

“That’s what we thought,” Carol said.

“You ever meet him?”

“Nope,” Alicia said. “He wasn’t big on meeting his girls’ families.”

“And we didn’t want to meet him, either,” Carol added.

“Dee thought she was the shit,” Alicia said. “Nose in the air, like she was better than everybody. Xavier was about twenty-two when they started dating. Dee was only fifteen.”

“Already a snake,” Carol added. “She drove this souped-up Mustang, had all this jewelry and all this cash. That’s what she wanted. Money.”

“And Xavier knew that, too,” Alicia said. “They were like Bonnie and Clyde. Antony and Cleopatra. Taking over the world, one base-head at a time. But then he went out and got some other young girl pregnant. He dumped Dee, cuz all she wanted was money. I saw him break up with her out there.” She pointed toward the scraggly front yard. “She told him that if he didn’t change his mind, she’d kill herself. He didn’t change his mind, but maybe he should’ve.”

“Xavier was murdered,” Carol said, shaking her head. “Shot to death. Police didn’t care because he was a drug dealer and a rapist and a thief. Good riddance to bad rubbish.”

“My boyfriend at the time knew Xavier,” Alicia said. “They were on the same junior high school basketball team. Paul told him to be careful, to watch out for Dee. Told him that she wasn’t right in the head. Dee and Xavier had been together for too long for her to just … go away. And as soon as he dumped her? It was just a matter of time before she got him back.”

“When was he killed?” Gray asked.

“Oh…” Carol thought for a moment. “I remember it was right before Thanksgiving, 1990. Right before she ran away.”

“She seemed … off,” Alicia remembered. “More than usual.”

“And the last time you spoke to Deanna was…?”

“A week or so before Xavier was shot,” Alicia said.

“And who shot him?”

Carol shrugged.

Alicia drained her glass. “His mom found him at his house in Richmond. His blood was everywhere—soaked in the carpet, dried on the door handle, on the light switch…”

His mother had followed the blood trail to the bathroom, where Xavier lay dead in the bloody tub. The place had been ransacked.

“He’d hid cash in two safes,” Alicia said. “About one hundred seventy-five thousand dollars of drug money. And all of it was gone.”

Gray blanched. “Did the cops…”

“Suspect Dee?” Carol asked. “No. By then, her juvenile record had been expunged and she hadn’t been caught for anything else. They questioned her and that was it. She left Oakland and never came back.”

“And no arrests since then?”

Both women shook their heads. “Still unsolved to this day,” Alicia said.

She’d been in hiding for two years when she started living as Elyse Miller.

Alicia shook her head. “Can you even image the effort to do all of this?”

“She used to be on the honor roll,” Carol said. “She played flute and liked Winnie-the-Pooh and … Her father lived in the home. I worked, but I took her to practices and … Her big brother came out just fine.”

Alicia tapped Carol’s knee. “It’s not your fault. Some people are just born that way.”

Carol said, “Yeah,” but shook her head. “I smoked when I was pregnant—”

“Aunt Carol,” Alicia said, words hard. “Stop. Don’t.” She tossed Gray a look of helplessness. “She does this sometimes.”

“If she had used all those smarts for school,” Carol continued, “all that energy hustling people and stealing from people, she’d be the president of the United States. But she didn’t, and she used a dead baby’s name and this other poor girl’s name and…” Carol looked at Gray with tear-filled eyes. “I don’t know who this woman is.”

No one did.





THREE YEARS AGO


DEAD AND ALIVE

The space left by Sean Dixon had been too big to deal with at times, and she found herself crying without even knowing that she was. She’d stand on the deck at Dominick Rader’s beachside house and he’d ask, “You okay?” She’d scrunch her eyebrows and say, “Huh?” He’d point at her cheeks and she’d swipe her fingers across her face to find them wet.

Sometimes she and Dominick took walks along the shore. That’s when her salty tears would mix with ocean mist.

Hiding in his guest room, she contracted with Rader Consulting to do research on a few cases, and that phenomenon—crying unknowingly—would find her as she determined the birth gender of the prostitute caught with the client’s husband.