TESSA FLOPPED into the chair opposite Sara at the dining room table. “Am I going to be throwing up like this for the rest of my life?”
“I hope not,” Sara mumbled, not really paying attention. She was reading through a chart, trying to make sense of her own handwriting. “What does this say?” she asked, sliding the chart across to Tessa.
Tessa studied the scribble. “Permanent apples?” she guessed.
“That’s what I got, too,” Sara mumbled, taking back the file. She stared at the words, willing them to make sense.
Tessa reached into Sara’s briefcase and took out a magazine.
“That’s a journal,” Sara told her.
“I may not be a doctor, but I do know how to read,” Tessa shot back, flipping through the pages. After a couple of beats, she closed it, saying, “There aren’t any pictures.”
“There’re some in the back,” Sara told her, reaching across the table to show her sister a close-up of a very red, very enlarged appendix. She flipped the page to the companion shot, which showed the organ dissected in all of its bleeding glory.
“Oh, Jesus,” Tessa groaned, clamping her hand over her mouth as she stood from the table. She nearly knocked Cathy over as she ran out of the room.
Cathy asked, “What’s wrong with her?” as she put a plate of deviled eggs on the table.
“Dunno,” Sara said, staring at the chart. “Oh,” she said, finally figuring it out. “Palpated appendix.”
Cathy frowned. “Do you have to do that at the dining room table?”
Sara stacked the charts together. “Not anymore,” she said. “That was the last one.”
Cathy sat across from her, taking a sip of Sara’s iced tea. “How’s that going?” she asked, indicating the charts.
“Slowly,” Sara told her. “But, better than I thought. I mean, better for Grant. She kept a low profile here.”
“As your father would say, don’t shit where you eat.”
“Exactly,” Sara answered, her smile feeling tight across her face.
“Speaking of which,” Cathy said. “I heard Dave Fine is going to trial.”
Sara nodded. “He thinks he can stay out of jail.”
“I think jail might be the only safe place for him,” Cathy said, taking another sip of tea. “Did you talk to Lacey’s father about her helping out at the clinic after school?”
Sara nodded, tucking the charts into her briefcase. “He’s going to think about it.”
“I don’t imagine he’ll stick around town long,” Cathy said, giving Sara a careful look. “No matter what he’s saying, people think he knew.”
Sara shrugged, not comfortable talking about this with her mother.
Cathy said, “I heard his tires got slashed outside the Piggly Wiggly the other day.”
Sara studied her mother, trying to figure out what she was getting at.
“I just don’t want you to get hurt,” Cathy finally said. “I don’t want to see you get close to this girl, then have her father take her away.”
Sara busied herself arranging her briefcase. Jeffrey had said the same thing to her the other night.
“You know,” Cathy began, “you could always adopt a child.”
Sara felt a tight smile on her face. She took off her glasses and set them on the table. “I, uh…” She stopped, giving a humorless laugh. It was so much more complicated than that.
Cathy waited for Sara to speak.
“I really don’t want to talk about that right now, Mama.”
Cathy reached over and took Sara’s hands in hers. “I’m here when you want to.”
“I know.”
Tessa walked back into the room and popped Sara on the back of the head, muttering, “Bitch.”
Sara laughed, and Tessa stuck out her tongue.
Cathy raised an eyebrow as she stood from the table, but did not comment. She asked Tessa, “You feeling okay, baby?”
“Yes, Mama,” Tessa answered, but she did not look it. Sara felt a flash of guilt for showing her the photograph.
“You sure?” Sara asked.
“Oh, I’m just peachy,” Tessa snapped back. “My hair is oily, my skin feels scritchy, my pants are too tight.” She stopped on this, tugging at the legs of her shorts. “They keep crawling up my crotch.”
“Nature abhors a vacuum,” Sara told her, laughing.
“Sara,” Cathy warned, but she was laughing as she walked back into the kitchen.
Tessa sat down again, taking one of the deviled eggs. “Where’s Jeffrey? He’s half an hour late.”
“I don’t know,” Sara said, watching her sister suck down the egg. “I thought you were sick to your stomach.”
“I was,” Tessa said, taking another egg. “Now…not so much.”
Sara started to say something, then stopped when she heard a car pull up in the driveway. “That’s Jeffrey,” she said, standing up from the table so quickly that her chair fell back. She caught it before it hit the ground, and gave Tessa a nasty look, hoping to cut off the comment her sister obviously wanted to make.
Sara purposefully took her time walking to the front door. Jeffrey was about to knock when she opened the door. She leaned in to kiss him, but stopped when she saw the expression on his face. “What is it?”
He held up a videotape as his answer.
She shook her head, asking, “What?”
“Let’s go into the den,” he said, leading the way down the stairs. She could tell from the way Jeffrey held his shoulders as he walked that he was angry. His posture was rigid, his jaw set in a firm line.
Sara sat on the couch, watching Jeffrey put the tape in the VCR. He took a seat beside her, working the remote control until the picture came up. Sara recognized the black-and-white format as a surveillance tape.
“The post office in Atlanta,” she said.
Jeffrey leaned back on the couch, and Sara pressed herself against him as they watched the tape. The scene was pretty ordinary, a room full of post office boxes with a table in the center of it. Jeffrey fast-forwarded the tape, playing it when a slim-looking young man came into the frame.
“He could be Mark Patterson,” Sara whispered, watching the kid walk to the back of the room. As he came closer to the camera, the similarity between the boy and Mark was amazing. They had the same lanky build and insolent look about them. The way his clothes hung on his body conveyed the same androgynous sexuality.
Jeffrey said, “He looks just like him.”
On screen, the boy had a suspicious walk as he crossed the room. He stopped, furtively looking around before opening a box. His back was to the camera, blocking the view, as he took out the contents of the box, looked around again, then shoved the envelopes into the waist of his pants. He tucked his shirt in as he walked toward the exit and past the camera.
Jeffrey paused the tape, freezing the image of the boy on the screen.
“She sent someone else,” Sara guessed.
“He walked out into the parking lot, got into a black Thunderbird, and drove to a local mall,” Jeffrey said. “No one showed up to meet him. He waited a couple of hours, then used a pay phone.”
“To call whom?”
“Nick traced the number to a cell phone. No one answered it.”
“What about the kid?”
“David Ross, a.k.a. Ross Davis,” he told her. “Nick ran his prints. He was abducted ten years ago from his home in broad daylight. Missing, presumed dead.”
Sara felt her heart sink in her chest. “Ten years?”
“Yeah,” Jeffrey said, anger in his tone. “He was playing outside with his older brother. Dottie came up in her car. They think it was Dottie. Wanda. Whoever the fuck she is. It was a woman. Ross Davis went with her and never came home.”
Sara put her hand to her heart. “His poor parents.”
“He’s not their kid anymore, Sara. He’s just like Mark. He won’t talk. Nick grilled him for six hours, and the kid wouldn’t say a word. Wouldn’t even acknowledge that he knew Dottie. He just said he was there picking up some of his mail.”
“Did he have a tattoo like Mark?”
Jeffrey shook his head.
“How old is he?”
“Seventeen.”
“He was taken when he was seven?” she asked.
“He’s legally an adult now,” Jeffrey said, and there was such an air of defeat to him that Sara took his hand in hers.
She asked, “Did you notify his parents?”
“Nick did,” Jeffrey said. “He couldn’t hold the kid, though. It’s not illegal to check a post office box, and the car is legally registered to him.”
“Nick put a tail on him, right?” Sara asked. “At least he can tell the parents where he is.”
Jeffrey nodded, his eyes on the frozen image of the boy. “Watch,” he said, pointing the remote at the VCR again. He pressed play, and the boy left.
The tape showed the empty room for the next few seconds. Sara was about to ask what she was supposed to be looking for when another figure came on screen. A woman wearing a baseball cap and glasses walked purposefully into the camera’s range. She went directly to the back of the room and opened the same box the boy had just checked minutes ago. She took out a couple of envelopes, then tucked them into her purse. When she turned, Sara gasped, even though she should not have been surprised.
“Is that Dottie Weaver?” Sara asked, but she knew that it was. There was no mistaking the woman on screen for anyone else. Then, as if she knew that they would one day be watching her, Dottie lifted up her sunglasses, stared right into the camera, and raised her middle finger at them.
Jeffrey paused the tape.
“Where was everybody?” Sara demanded, sitting up on the edge of the couch. “Where was the tail?”
“They followed the boy,” Jeffrey told her. “Nick found a bunch of junk mail on him. The credit cards were left in the box.”
“She can’t possibly use them,” Sara countered, still incredulous. “As soon as the numbers come up in the computer, they’ll know where she is.”
“She knows that,” Jeffrey assured her. “She gave you and Lena all those clues when you interviewed her. It’s all a game. She’s just fucking with us.”
“Why?”
“Because she can,” he said caustically. “God damn her.”
Sara put her hand on his shoulder. “Jeff.” She tried to help, pointing out, “Dave Fine will never get out of jail. Lacey is home. Grace is dead.”
“Don’t comfort me, Sara,” he said, his voice tight in his throat. “Please.”
She dropped her hand, and he leaned forward, putting his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands.
Jeffrey said, “She’s out there, Sara. She’s out there doing this again.”
“Someone will catch her,” Sara told him, but she wasn’t sure of this herself. Jeffrey must have sensed the hesitancy in her tone, because he turned to look at her. There was so much pain in his eyes that Sara had to look away.
Sara stared instead at the television, at Dottie Weaver telling them in no uncertain terms that she was not only free from the law, she was free to do whatever she wanted to children like Mark and Lacey Patterson. She was probably doing it right now.
“How could this happen?” Sara asked, but there was no answer to the question. She thought of Lacey, and what the child had been through, and the things that Lacey had experienced but was still incapable of talking about. The thirteen-year-old girl had been through more pain and suffering than anyone should be expected to bear, yet she was still getting up for school in the mornings, going to church with her father on Sundays, as if she were still a child, and not aged by circumstance.
Jeffrey sat back on the couch, taking Sara’s hand in his, holding it too tight. They sat like that, neither of them talking, both of them incapable of expressing how they felt, until Cathy stood at the top of the stairs and called them up for dinner.