The kidnapper’s daughter, of all people. If not for bad luck, Alice would have none at all.
She followed Merrily away from the county courthouse, knowing she was being petty, knowing she couldn’t stop.
“Bugging a little casita in Port Beth, Indiana, that’s probably a ten-minute job,” Merrily said. “Our phones? No problem.”
“Witness—”
But she was thinking of the security cameras trained on the only door she used, the feed going fuck-knows-where. Her old phone, smashed under a cop’s boot. A favor.
“Maybe you’re the enemy,” Merrily said.
She’d told Jimmy King about Merrily. On the steps of the trailer, just before the Cruzes’ house got broken into. “I might be,” she said. How had one family of problems transmitted to another, if not through her?
When she next looked up, they’d stopped in front of a house with a flat gray face, yellowed newspaper in window eyes, front stoop mouth with boards missing. Alice checked up and down the street. Merrily had taken a stack of photos out of her purse and was sorting them thoughtfully, like a meditation.
“What are those?”
“Nothing.” Merrily tucked the photos away and held up her phone, framing a shot of the house.
“What are you doing?” Alice hissed.
“Rick lived here.”
Alice pivoted away from the house. With the letter to Merrily, all Rick’s sins were washed away. A baptism of sorts. He was sainted, no longer in the realm of man or mistake. And now they would walk the sites like pilgrims? “This is—you brought me to the house—”
“I didn’t bring you,” Merrily said, smug-faced. “You invited yourself.”
Alice wheeled on the house as though facing down a foe. But it was just a house. Faded brown paint, weathered and peeling. In the right light, with some tender attention, it might be cute, a home for a family. A wave of nausea passed over her, and she sensed the soft stretch of black wings somewhere near the base of her skull. “Did you ever ask your mother about this house, about me?”
Merrily’s self-satisfied twist of smile slid away.
“She confirmed it, didn’t she?” Alice said.
“My mom has fed me nothing but lies and birthday cake for a week.” Merrily sighed at the house. “Let’s go get a drink and you can tell me.”
“Convince you, you mean. Aren’t you going to knock on the door?”
Merrily gazed up at the house. “What does it matter who lives there now? Not every lead needs to be hunted down to its end.”
“But—” Tidy endings. Maybe she couldn’t resist them. Merrily started walking back the way they’d come.
Alice didn’t hurry to catch up, but watched from behind the swing of Merrily’s arms. “Witness protection from what?”
“No one will tell me. I don’t think he stayed in it. I mean, if you’re in witness protection, they know where you are, right? But they lost him.”
“They who?”
“The FBI shouldn’t have to come to my job and ask me where he is.”
“Why did they come see you and not your mom?”
“Right? They knew she wouldn’t tell them. Or maybe she really didn’t know. I was the one he texted all those years. Other than us, who else could they have asked?”
“Rebekah,” Alice said.
Merrily turned on her. “How do you know Rebekah?”
They needed to share information. Maybe that’s what Juby meant to say to Merrily, that they should work together. Except they weren’t really looking for the same man. They never had been. Rick, Richard—he’d been at least three different people.
And I’m not looking for any of them anymore.
No more lost causes. No more dead ends. Alice stuffed away the memory of Shawn Malayter’s hopeful face. She was only saving her own family from here on out.
They found a lit neon beer sign in the window of a pizzeria on the courthouse square. Alice hesitated, checked her phone for messages from her dad. There were none. She should go home anyway. Richard Banks was a closed case, and Merrily Cruz was no use to her.
“Come on,” Merrily said. “One drink with the likes of me won’t kill you.”
They sat down across from one another over a sticky table.
“So Rebekah probably reported him missing,” Merrily said.
“And submitted his info to the Doe Pages, I guess. Her or his landlord.”
“But then his info came down from the site.”
Alice tried wiping the table with a paper napkin. “It’s possible it was ordered down, by whatever agency had him in protection. He would have been in danger, from whatever he was hiding from in the first place.”
Their eyes met. “I wish I knew what that was about,” Merrily said. “I only know the last time he was arrested—”
“The last time?”
“Mostly speeding tickets, actually,” Merrily said. “But he was arrested for breaking and entering, and then, poof, nothing.”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing about you.” Merrily stared at her. “No police report on that supposed kidnapping. Are you sure he—”
“I’m sure,” Alice said.
Merrily caught the waitress’s attention. “Two Lites? OK, give me the facts, Alice in Wonderland.”
“Don’t—please don’t call me that.”
Merrily rolled her eyes. “What do you remember?”
“I remember that house,” Alice said. “The inside, I mean. My room was off the living room, a mattress on the floor. There were two people there. At first two people, a man and a woman, and then another woman and a baby. Your mom and you, I’m pretty sure. You were crying and she was yelling—”
“She’s an excellent yeller,” Merrily said, smiling. Alice noticed her hands were shaking, though.
“—and she didn’t like me being there at all. I suppose she felt—”
“Stop,” Merrily said. “No supposing. Facts.”
She doesn’t want the truth. She wants a story she can live with.
Their beers arrived, and they took a minute to sip them. “OK, facts. I was scared and crying and clutching my blanket and I remember my dad holding me. I felt absolutely safe.” She closed her eyes, letting a shadow of something like grief pass over her. She reached for the memory, testing. The great black wings stretched but did not take flight.
Merrily sighed. Alice opened her eyes to find the other woman sorting the stack of photos from her purse again. She slapped them down into piles like a strange hand of solitaire. It must be self-soothing, like the worn satin edge of her old blanket as she tried to sleep. “How long were you missing?” Merrily said.
“Why does it matter?” Alice looked out the window. “An afternoon.”
Merrily paused over her array of photos. “Only an afternoon?”
“My parents would have been frantic.”
“Of course, I’m not saying it’s nothing. It’s just—you said ‘my room.’”
“What?”
“‘My room,’” Merrily said. “You said my room.”
Alice put down her beer. “No, I didn’t.”
“You did,” Merrily said. “You said your room was off the living room. You make it sound like you lived there.” She returned her attention to the photos, then plucked one, stared at it. Finally she held it out. “Do you know this house?”
The black-and-white photo shook a bit in Merrily’s hand. Alice took it from her. The photo showed a young man in a leather jacket, thin and tall. Rick. He grinned down at a woman, her long, straight hair a shiny curtain drawn across one corner of the frame. The photo revealed little about the room or surroundings. The photographer had only meant to capture the interaction of the couple.
Alice traced the curve of the woman’s jaw in profile. “Who is this? Is this . . .” It made no sense.
Merrily slid another photo across the table in answer. The same couple, a lakeside cabin. The man sat in a camp chair and the woman grasped at him playfully from behind, the length of her hair swinging across her face. The same curve of jaw, barely visible.
I know who you are, Alice thought.
But she didn’t. She didn’t want to know. She only wished the woman could turn more fully into the frame of the photo, could reveal herself to be a stranger. But from this angle, she was all too familiar. Her cheek, her face—
“Is she—”
“I think she’s Laura Schmidt,” Merrily said gently.
“I don’t understand.” Alice could only muster a whisper.
“You don’t know her?”
Alice’s stomach hurt, and her head felt like it might blow apart. The beating of black wings was like distant thunder, closing in. “No, I— Is this some kind of joke?”
“On the day I met you, I thought you looked like someone I knew. But it’s this woman I was thinking of.” Merrily held up the other photo, gazed at it lovingly. “I’ve had these photos a long time, you know? They’re almost like—well, it’s sad to say friends and now it turns out they’re family.”
“What is this? What is this about?”
“I don’t know, but—” Merrily met her eyes, looked away. “I thought you must know her. Your mother maybe—”
“My mother—” Alice’s voice was stronger, louder, but then it strangled into nothing. She couldn’t breathe, though the great black wings beat the air. She tasted the dust they stirred.
“Alice?”
The clippings Lillian had collected, the ones Jimmy had been spoon-feeding her like an infant. The woman at the county clerk’s office. I would know you anywhere. The bad xeroxes of Laura Schmidt’s face. An amended birth certificate? “No.” The word was a wheeze. She sounded like Lillian. How could this woman be her mother? She could think of a way. “I can’t—” she choked. “I have to—”
“Are you—”
“I have to talk to my dad.” Her dad hadn’t wanted her to know. “My dad or . . .”
Not Uncle Jim.
Merrily looked down at the photos, then started collecting them, one by one, searching. “I used to have a photo of Rick with two buddies at the beach. I wonder if your dad was one of the guys.”
“They weren’t friends.” Were they? How had her dad known how to find her when she’d gone missing? Why had it been kept out of the papers, exactly? What precise arrangements had been made?
Alice grasped the photo of Laura Schmidt. That Harris Fine could have gone easier on her. She was the product of some dalliance? And then what? She remembered the clipping from Lillian’s pile of research, the child sent to family services from the scene of an overdose. You are my sunshine, sung in a bright kitchen. A memory that had never matched the woman Alice knew as her mother. She had always blamed the change in their relationship on the isolation, the depression, herself. She was no one’s fucking sunshine.
Why not tell her? She was an adult! He had to stop protecting her, shielding her. He’d had plenty of opportunity to explain it to her when he’d taken his notes—
Alice stared at the photo in her hand.
What had Lillian said? Something about how the notes showed how much she remembered—for a while. She’d even noticed herself that the interview notes documented the loss of memory, not the gain. Was she supposed to forget something—or someone?
In her pocket, her phone buzzed. Rnn. Jimmy. She couldn’t look. “This doesn’t make any sense. My dad wouldn’t cheat on my mom and then—I don’t believe any of it. It’s crazy.”
“Hey, I already live in the funhouse,” Merrily said, cornering the photos together, tidy. She darted a look at the photo clutched in Alice’s hand. “But still.”
Alice took out the last of her emergency cash and threw it on the table. She needed to see her dad. He could sort this all out. “What? But still what?”
Merrily shrugged, threw down her own money. It was a hundred-dollar bill. “Even if it’s the worst thing you can imagine, it might still be true.”