You Are Not Alone(103)
She did one final thing on the morning she fled town.
She wrote an anonymous letter to her stepfather, using her left hand to disguise her handwriting, telling him his new wife was sleeping with the manager of a steak house on Wednesdays when she pretended to be taking step aerobics.
* * *
It took years for Cassandra and Jane to finally learn the truth about Valerie.
Their big sister hadn’t fled Mossley because she no longer cared about any of them. She didn’t write that letter to their stepfather out of spite, as the younger Moore sisters had suspected.
On the night that Valerie left Los Angeles after what she described as the second-worst betrayal of her life, she finally told Cassandra and Jane her secret. She explained she’d written the anonymous letter because she hoped it would make their stepfather divorce their mother and get them away from Trey.
Valerie knew at the center of her soul that he would target Cassandra or Jane next. Valerie had to get them out of that house.
She had been their secret protector all along.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
SHAY
According to one comprehensive survey, the odds of having three children in one family who are all girls is 21 percent. In the 1920s, Alfred Adler—himself the second of six children—studied birth order and how it shaped personality. He theorized that the oldest child can develop a “taste for power” and can dominate younger siblings.
—Data Book, page 75
THREE MOORE SISTERS. Not two.
The city is swimming around me, with streetlamps and cars throwing off elongated, wavy streaks of light. A siren starts to blare, the noise echoing in my skull.
Cassandra, Jane, and Valerie had a stepbrother. His nickname was Trey, but he went by James as an adult. He was murdered in New York a few months ago. The revelations explode in my brain, one after another.
I have to get to somewhere safe.
I step to the curb and hail a cab. When one pulls up, I give the female driver the address of the Seventeenth Precinct.
If Detective Williams isn’t in, I’ll wait all night for her on one of those old wooden benches—at least there’ll be an armed officer a few feet away.
As I sit down on the bench in the cab’s backseat, a fatigue descends over me. I feel almost as groggy and weak as I did after I drank the champagne I’m now certain the Moore sisters doctored with some drug.
The driver catches my eye in the rearview mirror. She doesn’t smile.
Could she be in on all this, too? I wonder.
I don’t latch my seat belt, and I check the locks to make sure they’re not engaged. But a moment later the driver pulls away her eyes and I see a picture of her children on the dashboard.
I’m being paranoid, I tell myself.
Still, I wonder if I should call Detective Williams to let her know I’m coming in.
I flip to a clean page in my Data Book and begin to write down exactly what I want to say to her. I need to sound cogent and believable.
I’ve barely written two sentences when a call comes in on my burner phone from an unfamiliar 917 area code. I hesitate, then pick it up and press the button to accept the call.
“Shay Miller?” The woman sounds middle-aged and has a deep New York accent.
“This is she.”
A lot of noise in the background—a mechanical rumbling and clattering and distant voices. “It’s Detective Santiago from the NYPD.”
Detective Santiago’s next sentence feels like a bombshell. “I’m the lead homicide detective on the case of James Anders. Look, I know you’ve gotten wrapped up in something crazy. Things are moving fast. We’re reopening the investigation into Amanda Evinger’s suicide.”
“What?” I gasp.
“There’s no doubt she jumped. We have a clear view of that from our surveillance cameras in the subway. But we have reason to believe someone was pursuing her. And we’ve been investigating the Moore sisters ever since Amanda’s death.”
“They were James’s—”
“Stepsisters. We know. Sorry, hold one second.”
I hear the sounds of a subway train pulling into a station; then a man shouts, “Santiago!”
“One minute!” she shouts back. “Shay?”
“I’m still here.”
“We need you to come down to the Thirty-third Street subway station as soon as possible and show us exactly where you were standing in relation to Amanda and walk us through the scene. How quickly can you be here?”
I wonder if she can also hear noises in my background—the sound of a heavy engine and the drone of traffic.
Everything she says sounds believable. And I’m only a couple of blocks from the subway station now. I could be there in five minutes.
But I’m going to verify Detective Santiago’s identity first. And I’m definitely not doing anything until I’ve spoken to Detective Williams.
The lie springs to my lips so easily it astonishes me. “I’m actually just driving back to the city.” I know she can probably hear the sounds of the car. “I was visiting my mom in New Jersey. I’m not too far away, though.”
“Oh. Which exit are you near on the freeway?”
I pause. “Just about to pass Newark, so I’m forty-five minutes away. I’ll get there as soon as possible.”