When was the last time you visited your in-laws at their house?” said the female detective, Louise Braddock.
Third time she and her ginger-pink partner Dupree had asked Kelly that question, phrasing it a different way each time. Kelly said nothing. She’d been here before. Literally been here before, in this same interview room. Different building or not, it felt like it. Same hard-backed chair as the one she’d sat in thirty years ago, same conference table between them, the announcement of the date and the presence of the tape recorder, police phrasing and rephrasing questions, Kelly saying nothing. Same routine. She’d known her rights back in 1980. She knew them now.
Kelly turned to her lawyer—Ilene Cutler. More déjà vu. She’d asked Sebastian Todd to find her a lawyer, and this, out of every criminal defense attorney in the greater Los Angeles area, was the one he’d found. Cutler had changed a lot in the past thirty years, just like Kelly had. But while Kelly had gone harder, grayer, and more angular, Ilene had smoothed out, her frizzy hair tamed and highlighted, wire-rimmed glasses abandoned for sky blue contacts, pasty skin spray-tanned and Botoxed to face the unforgiving cameras of the cable TV station where she’d been a regular commentator for more than a decade. Cutler was fifteen years older than Kelly, but age no longer divided them so much as experience. The effects of prison versus the effects of TV. A study should be done.
Ilene said, “Why should she answer that question?”
“You’d think she’d be interested in finding her father-in-law’s killer,” said Dupree.
“Don’t see how asking her about socializing with her in-laws accomplishes much of anything, other than . . . you know . . . TMZ fodder.” She smiled sweetly. “You guys on Harvey’s payroll?”
“No,” Braddock said between her teeth. “We’re not on Harvey’s payroll.”
“Well then, how about something a little more relevant?”
“Their relationship isn’t relevant?”
“Hey, Louise. I’ve known you for quite a while, and to be honest, I’d rather get a grapefruit juice enema than socialize with you. Does that mean I’m going to murder you? Not in the slightest.”
Braddock shook her head. Kelly could have sworn Dupree stifled a smile.
She’s good, Kelly thought. Strange—she’d done a triple take when Ilene had first shown up here, telling herself how dumb she’d been to have trusted ST. Yet still she had to admit that it was comforting, Ilene Cutler striding toward her, saying her name with the same intonation she’d said it thirty years ago.
“Kelly Michelle Lund. I’ve been a defense attorney for thirty-seven years. And in all that time, there’s only one thing I feel guilty about.”
“Repping those skinheads?”
“Treating you like a piece of crap. How about a do-over?” And the more time she spent with Ilene, the more she wanted to thank ST. A familiar face—bronzed and Botoxed though it may have been—was something to cling to, with everything else in her life shifting, changing, falling apart . . .
Kelly wondered if Shane had read the letter she’d left him or if he’d just seen her handwriting and thrown it away. She didn’t even know whether it mattered anymore. The truth was now a different thing than it had been when she’d written it. She was a different person.
I’m Sterling Marshall’s daughter.
“Kelly, are you the only one who drives your car?” Dupree said. “Or does your husband sometimes drive it too?”
She glanced at Ilene. Ilene nodded.
“Just me.”
“Okay, good. Can you tell me where you were in that car at”—he glanced down at the notebook on his lap—“two-eighteen A.M. on April twenty-first?”
“Excuse me?” said Ilene.
Kelly stared at him. “I . . . I don’t . . .”
“There’s a charge on your credit card at that time—Amoco station on Hollywood and Fairfax.”
“Long way from Joshua Tree,” Braddock said.
Ilene stared at Kelly. “You don’t know anything about this, do you?”
“How did you get my credit records?”
“Also,” Louise said. “And this is the part we’re having trouble with, Kelly. We found blood in your car.”
“What?” said Ilene.
“I . . . I was going to . . .”
“We’ll talk later.” Ilene swung around with her jaw set, and aimed her sky blue eyes at Braddock. Attack mode. “My client’s rights are being violated.”
“How so?” she said.
“Are you kidding me? You searched her car without a warrant and without permission. That’s what’s known as a violation, Louise.”
“Oh we did get permission.”
Ilene turned to Kelly. “You gave them permission?”
“No,” Kelly said as Ilene turned back to the detectives, everything around her dropping away, Kelly knowing the answer before they said it.
“We got permission from the car’s owner—her husband,” Dupree said, Kelly staring at the two-way mirror, numb. Lost. “He also gave us his extra key.”
“YOU DID THE RIGHT THING,” SAID BELLAMY.
Shane looked at her. “I don’t feel like I did.”
“You protected your family. Our family. It’s what Dad would have wanted.”
“You’re serious?”
“Do you want a drink?”
Shane shook his head. He collapsed on Bellamy’s Navajo print couch, and as she went into the kitchen to mix cocktails for Mom and herself, he rolled it over in his mind, what his sister had just said to him. It’s what Dad would have wanted. He couldn’t even respond to that—the level of delusion.
But that was what Bellamy was about. It was what she’d always been about—believing the lines she said, the roles she played—Daddy’s girl, party girl, respected artist . . . A natural actor just like Dad had been, Living the Part. She’d only taught at Irvine for one year, yet here she still was, six years later, in the condo the university had found for her, playing “artist-in-residence” because she couldn’t find another character. She booked speaking gigs, invited local press into her home, brewed herbal tea for them in her Spanish kitchen, chatted them up in her southwestern-style living room, her one successful piece glaring down at them from the wall. She invited them into her studio out back, no doubt, just as she’d taken Shane there this morning, showed them her glitter and her paints and her fancy tape-recording equipment, these fresh young reporters who probably had no idea that she was just saying lines, wearing a costume, discussing “pieces in progress” that she would never complete or even begin. It was getting stale. Bellamy had to know that. “Artist-in-residence” had a short shelf life when you took no joy in making art, only in talking about it.
But now, Dad had given her a new role to play.
Bellamy returned from the kitchen with Mom’s martini and a glass of red wine for herself. “Just the way you like it, Mom,” she said, handing her the drink. “Cold and dry as an agent’s heart.” She gave her a brave smile befitting her new role: Brave Daughter.
Mom didn’t look at her. She took the drink, downed half of it, then set it on the coffee table, staring straight ahead the whole time. “I miss my house,” she said quietly.
Bellamy took a pull off her wine. She glanced at Mom, then at Shane and smiled again, her teeth stained bloodred from the wine. “When was the last time,” she said, “when we were all together like this, as a family?”
Mona Lisa watched Shane from its spot over the fireplace, Kelly’s teenage smile angry and accusing. The real Kelly, the grown-up one, was probably being questioned by police right now because of Shane, because of the credit card record he had printed out and shown the detectives—a gas station at 2:00 A.M. on the night of Dad’s murder, ten minutes away from his parents’ home—and also because of the things he’d told them about Kelly, all true, but damningly so when arranged a certain way.
He had to do it, he knew. As Bellamy had pointed out, he had no other choice—they were family after all. The family had to protect each other. But he’d taken no joy in it. And Bellamy, being Bellamy, so desperately wanted him to.
“Mommy,” she said. “Remember when you and Dad had them shut down Disneyland for my eighth birthday party?”
Mom stared at her, that lost look in her eyes. “Yes. I remember.”
Bellamy smiled again. Her bloody wine-smile directly under Kelly on the wall. One of those moments when positioning shows you something you could never put into words. Shane wished he had his camera, which made him think of his room, his home, his marriage. “I miss my house too,” he said.
Shane. Your whole life has been built on a lie. Mom had said that to him yesterday morning at the house she now missed, a house caked in Dad’s blood, strewn with yellow police tape. She’d said it, just before letting him know that fifteen years ago, he’d married his half sister.
“I would have told you long ago,” she had said. “I would have stopped the wedding. But you see, Shane. I just found out myself.”
“You made the most wonderful cake for that party, Mom, remember? It was Cinderella, and her dress was the cake—vanilla with buttercream filling and blue fondant frosting.”
“I do,” Mary said, warming a little. “Flora and I made that together. It was her idea to use those edible crystals on the gown . . .”
Shane still couldn’t get over it. Dad had never said a word when Shane announced his plans to marry Kelly. Dad, movie star, and war hero letting two of his children get married to each other without saying a word. How had he rationalized it? Had he told himself that he was protecting his family from getting hurt? That he could keep a secret forever if he had to, that this was his mess, why should Shane’s love life have to suffer? Family means everything. He used to say that all the time.
“That birthday party was the best day of my life,” Bellamy was saying. “You guys were wonderful parents.”
Right after his mother had told him everything, Shane had gone into her bathroom and taken half her bottle of Ambien. Washing down the pills, he’d thought of all the times he’d tried to make love to Kelly, during arranged conjugal visits and then after her release. She never wanted to. She kept apologizing. It was prison, she’d say. It wasn’t him, she’d say. She just had these barriers, she couldn’t help it, be patient and things would change. But it was him. It had been him all along, and it had been the two of them together, and he had felt it too, much as he’d tried to ignore it . . .
Some families must have meant more to Dad than others.
Shane had taken the Ambien intending to off himself. Mom hadn’t followed him into the bathroom. She hadn’t even asked what he was doing in there for so long, and when he’d left her room, left the house . . . when he’d gotten behind the wheel of his car . . .
He couldn’t remember the strip club, couldn’t remember the fight or the arrest, or Bellamy picking him up at the station. The only thing he could remember from that entire night was Bellamy, putting him to bed in her guest room, kissing his forehead, telling him, “You can’t kill yourself. You have a purpose. And that purpose is to help your family.”
He had drifted off to sleep again, longing for more Ambien, wishing himself back to a week ago, when the worst secret he had to struggle with was Kelly’s affair with Rocky Three.
“I think I’m going to hit the sack,” Bellamy said. She emptied her wineglass and put her arms around Mom, who made a weak show of hugging back. “I hope I dream of that birthday party tonight,” she said, and for a few seconds Shane flashed on Bellamy in her prom dress, walking down the marble staircase to meet her date, her gaze focused not on the guy at all, but on Mom and Dad. It was 1981. Kelly had just gone to prison, he realized now. He hadn’t thought of it then. That night, Kelly Lund had been the last person on anyone’s mind. “Doesn’t she look beautiful, Mary?” Dad had said. And Bellamy, his only daughter, had basked in his praise.
SHANE AND HIS MOTHER SAT IN SILENCE, MOM SIPPING HER MARTINI with the truth thick in the air, Bellamy no longer in the room to drown it out. Shane tried to think of something to say, but he couldn’t. Everything had changed, including him. Especially him. Nothing made sense anymore.
His gaze traveled around the room—all this tasteful, sunbaked, West Coast college professor furniture, photographs strategically placed among bookshelves with color-coordinated books, most of them moody-looking black-and-whites of Bellamy—publicity promos from the ’90s, when she was art’s “It” Girl and took great pains to look the part. One of the frames was broken—a big chunk of glass missing from the front. He hadn’t noticed it before, this one thing out of place in this orderly world, and he wondered why. Usually, his photographer’s eye worked in his favor when it came to spotting things like that.
“That house on Blue Jay Way was a wedding present to me from Dad,” Mom said. “Did you know that, Shane?”
He looked at her, the blue-veined hands delicate on the glass. “No, I didn’t,” he said.
“After we came back from our honeymoon, the driver took us up that hill and then he carried me over the threshold. I almost fainted from the shock.”
“It was a surprise?”
“Completely. I’d never seen the house. I had no idea he was even thinking of buying. I looked at that marble staircase, that enormous window overlooking the canyon, and I just started to sob.”
“Tears of joy.”
“Yes, of course. But also . . . something else.” She took another sip, set the glass down on the table. “The idea that he could have bought that house and kept it such a secret that I never had the slightest clue until we drove through the gate . . .”
“Yeah?”
“It was fear, Shane. That’s what I was feeling and the real reason why I cried. I feared that part of your father . . . that ability to, to hide things . . . It terrified me.”
“But, Mom, he was an actor.” Shane winced. He bit back tears. Despite everything, it hurt to use the past tense with Dad, and he couldn’t hide it. He didn’t have that ability.
But Mom didn’t seem to notice. “Your father called Kelly that night,” she said. “I heard him on the phone with her.”
“I know, Mom. You told me.”
“He thought I was asleep. I never would have known about it if I hadn’t overheard him calling.”
“Mom . . .”
“He said he’d wronged the girls. He wanted to make things right with the one surviving one before he died. He was changing his will. So he could take care of Kelly in a way he never had in life. I thought, What about me? Our whole life together was a lie. How was he ever going to make up for that?” Tears started to run down her cheeks.
“He took care of you, though.”
“That isn’t the point,” she said. “I married a man who abandoned two of his three daughters. He let one of them go to prison, and the other one . . . she died, Shane. He didn’t go to her funeral. He never once shed a tear. Kelly would come over and he would treat her as though she was any other friend of Bellamy’s. I married a man who was capable of that, and if I had known—if I had known what type of person he really was . . .” Shane put his arms around Mom and hugged her to him, her body so weak and frail and thin. “I didn’t mean to shoot him. I was so angry and it was right there on his desk. I pulled the trigger. I don’t even remember doing it. I didn’t know it would go off . . .”
Shane didn’t ask her about the last shot—the one that landed square in the middle of Dad’s forehead. It didn’t matter. None of it really did, now.
When her breathing finally calmed and she pulled away, Mom dabbed at her eyes with her handkerchief. Within moments, she was herself again—serene, elegant, slightly drugged. She stood up, steadying herself on the back of the mission chair. “I worry about your sister, Shane,” she said. “She isn’t as strong as she looks. I want you to promise me you’ll be there for her.”
Shane sighed. Just like Dad. “Trust me,” he said carefully. “Bellamy has been doing fine without me for years.”
She gave him a sad smile and headed for the room she was sleeping in—a fully equipped sewing room, with two spotless machines that hadn’t been used once. “I wasn’t talking about Bellamy,” she said.
SHANE WOKE UP ON THE COUCH, SUNLIGHT POURING IN ON HIM, assaulting his eyes. His head felt heavy and he couldn’t figure out why, until he remembered the four vodka rocks he’d consumed last night after his mother had gone to bed. He didn’t drink usually, but he’d poured and poured to shut out his thoughts. To take the edge off the pain, he’d told himself. What a dumb idea.
Shane threw an arm over his eyes and groaned. Vodka was a crappy replacement for Ambien. His eyes were too big for their sockets. His stomach gaped. He was so thirsty and achy, he felt as though his entire body had been wrung out like a sponge.
He plodded into the kitchen and ran himself a glass of water, chugged all of it without taking a breath. He sliced off a piece of the crusty bread Bellamy kept on the counter, wolfed it down. ARTISINAL BREAD, the label said. He hated that, hated reading the words. Made him want to throw the loaf under a truck.
Shane gulped water from the faucet until he felt slightly human, then headed back into the living room again. He looked at the antique grandfather clock in the corner. Seven A.M. and so bright already. He hated this place—the big windows, the piney smell, the arduous, overbearing sunlight. Bellamy said she found it stimulating here. He would never understand her . . .
He started to lie down again when he spotted his denim jacket on the couch. He hadn’t remembered leaving it there—he was sure, in fact, that he’d hung it on the coat tree, yet it had apparently been there with him all night, on the edge of the couch, next to his feet. He picked it up, his hand slipping into the inside pocket, fingers searching for his extra camera lenses, their reassuring feel. He wasn’t sure why he always did this. It was almost as though touching them reminded him of who he was. Even now the cool feel of the glass lifted the hangover, just a little.
There was something in the pocket with the lenses—a thick piece of paper. He pulled it out and saw the writing.
He sat down on the couch and stared at it—Kelly’s round, loopy script. Shane choked up. “You were here,” he whispered. “You came to see me.”
Dear Shane,
I realize I never thanked you, all those years ago, for the letters you wrote me in prison. I’ve always felt that the best gift you can give another human being is to truthfully answer all their questions, and that’s what you did for me. You are the only person who ever has. But I never answered yours. You’ve never asked, I know. But not asking questions doesn’t mean you don’t deserve answers—it just means you’re kind.
From somewhere outside Bellamy’s house, Shane heard a faint wow, wow, wow . . . Gambel’s Quail. Kelly had told him about that bird, a desert bird. “They like running better than flying,” she had said. “So they don’t go very far.” He closed his eyes for a moment and felt that heat under his lids—not tears so much as the threat of them.
To be honest with you, I wish I had answers for half the things I’ve done. They seem to make sense at the time, but shine a good, strong light on my reasoning, it all falls apart. Here are my answers: Why do I visit Rocky? I believe he may be someone I used to know. I can’t bring myself to ask him, but I keep hoping he’ll tell me on his own. That’s why I keep going back to see him—I like the feeling of hoping for something. Why did I kill John McFadden? I learned that shortly before she died, he got my sister pregnant. I believed (and still do) that he killed her because she wouldn’t get rid of the baby. 3) Why do I believe he killed my sister? Bellamy found a tube of Catherine’s lipstick in the trunk of McFadden’s car. It’s very rare. At the time, you could only get it in Europe. It was called Rouge de la Bohème.
Shane’s breath caught in his throat.
I never discussed my reasons in court because my lawyer said they weren’t relevant—and no one would believe me anyway. I never discussed them with you because I promised Bellamy I wouldn’t tell anyone, ever . . .
He dropped the letter. He couldn’t read any more, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move for the memory flooding his mind: the waxy leaves of the magnolia tree, his special perch in the crook of the thick, high branch, the place he always spied on Bellamy, watching his sister through her window, watching her opening her drawer, thinking she might do that scary thing with the razor again . . .
But she hadn’t. He’d seen her take something shiny and silver from her jacket pocket, saw her put it in that drawer, pushing it all the way to the back. He’d thought, Something important. Something she wants to hide.
Later, when Bellamy was out with her friends, he’d sneaked into her room. He’d gone through her vanity drawer, looking for that shiny thing, thinking that it had to be very valuable. I bet it’s a silver bullet for killing werewolves . . . God, he still remembered having that thought. He’d felt around her drawer for it, pulled it out. A fancy tube of lipstick. He still remembered the brand name, the strange words he didn’t understand: Rouge de la Bohème . . . Shane had been eight years old. Bellamy, fifteen. It had been early in the morning on a weekend, just after Valentine’s Day. Right around the time when Kelly’s sister must have died . . .
Shane put the letter down. He walked down the hall to his sister’s tastefully appointed master bedroom with its pillow-strewn sleigh bed and flat-screen TV and heavy silk curtains. For a few moments, he stood in the doorway, watching Bellamy the way he used to as a kid. Bellamy always thought it was creepy, the way he’d spy on her. She’d shut doors in his face and complain to their parents and set her friends on him, calling him names. But Shane had had a reason—the same reason he watched her now. He was trying to figure out who Bellamy was.
And still, all these years later, Bellamy slept the way Shane had always known her to sleep—on her back, her body still, breath soft, face placid: Snow White in her glass coffin. Bellamy Marshall, still posing, even in her sleep.
He backed out into the hallway, softly closed Bellamy’s door. For a few moments, he stood outside the silent sewing room, thinking about what Mom had said last night. If I had known what type of person your father really was . . . But hadn’t she? That pale memory worked into his head again, Mom clutching his hand on the Defiance set, the heaviness of her step as she went for his trailer. “You wait here, Shane. Mommy’s going to see Daddy for a few minutes.” She had known what kind of person he was. She’d just chosen to be ignorant.
Did you kill Dad for keeping secrets all those years—or was it because he was finally ready to start telling the truth?
When Shane was sixteen years old, he’d overheard his family’s personal chef on the phone with someone from the National Enquirer, talking about Mom. He hadn’t heard the whole conversation, but he had heard “junkie” and “pathetic” and “life-threatening pill habit.” And being sixteen and drunk, he’d gone ape shit. The police were called, lawsuits were threatened—that’s how brutally Shane had attacked the chef, who had dared to try and tell the truth about his mother. Dad had made a big show with the cops, assuring them Shane had been out of his mind from booze and crystal meth and had lashed out against their trusted employee for no reason at all—ultimately shipping him off to Betty Ford for six weeks in order to fully satisfy the officers that Shane (who in reality had simply raided his father’s liquor cabinet for the first and only time) was the drug addict in the family. In the car on the way to the clinic, the two of them alone, Dad had offered up the only words he ever would about the incident: “You did the right thing, son. Your mother and I are grateful.”
Shane went for his cell phone, called a cab. He waited for it in silence, staring up at Mona Lisa, looking into teenage Kelly’s eyes, an emotion inside them he’d never noticed and didn’t know the name for. What would you call it—that feeling of being the only person left in the world?
“I can’t do this to you,” he said to the picture—to seventeen-year-old Kelly, whom he had loved at first sight, the only friend of Bellamy’s ever to say hi to him. Kelly, his dream girl. His pen pal. His soul mate. His sister. Shane couldn’t let her take the fall for Sterling’s murder. She didn’t deserve that. More than anyone else in their messed-up family, she deserved the truth.
He got his phone out of the pocket of his denim jacket, typed in Kelly’s number, and texted her everything he now knew to be true. It took a long time. Then he headed for the sewing room, knocked on the door. He listened for his mother’s heavy, pill-fed sleep-breathing but heard nothing.
Shane tried the door. It hadn’t been locked. And sure enough, when he pushed it open, the bed was empty and neatly made, everything in its place. His mother was gone.