Detective Diaz was different from Detective Donnelly.
She was older and didn’t talk much, and though Maya never saw her smile, her face was kinder than Donnelly’s. She wore her graying hair in a long braid. She had just listened to everything Maya had to say and gave no indication as to how she felt about it, whether or not she believed it. But she’d written it all down, including the date and time of the calls made to Brenda’s landline. She sat across from Maya and her mom in a small white room very much like the small white room where they had sat with Detective Donnelly seven years ago.
They listened to the recording. The sound captured on Maya’s phone wasn’t as good as she’d hoped—Frank had spoken quietly, and most of his words were inaudible beneath the music at the bar—but they could hear some of the conversation.
After the part Maya remembered, she heard herself stop talking. Frank took over. His voice began to change. He grew quieter and quieter, as if someone were turning down his volume.
He slipped into that voice she remembered from the day Aubrey died. The cadence of nursery rhymes. Of spells. Even now, knowing what she knew, she found his voice bewitching. She heard arms and legs and head. Between two songs, they heard him say that her limbs were too heavy to lift. Then he drifted into a vivid description of the place he called home—table, fireplace, loft—and she understood that, although she had never been to Frank’s cabin, a part of her had.
Detective Diaz took notes as she listened, jotting down the strange words that filled the room. Her calm face betrayed nothing.
Frank went on for several minutes, then fell quiet, and all they could hear was the music. A man laughed in the distance. Someone set down a glass. Eventually Maya began to speak, but her voice was almost unrecognizable.
Her words dribbled from the phone like syrup, low and slurred. Unintelligible. She sounded like she was drooling.
Her mom’s mouth hung open.
“That’s you?” asked Diaz.
“It must be, but I don’t remember.”
They kept listening as she and Frank went back and forth a few times—and Maya thought she heard herself say Cristina. She leaned forward, hoping to catch his response, but the music drowned it out.
“We should be able to clean this up,” Diaz said. “Recover some of that audio.”
Frank was still talking when the song ended, and they heard relax and slow and breath in a voice that was even more singsong. Maya quaked with fear. Brenda and Diaz stared at the phone, all their attention on the recording—and suddenly Maya was sure that his words had worked their magic on them. On all of them. Aubrey’s blank face flashed through her mind, then Cristina’s. He’d put them all in a trance.
“Let go,” the recording said. “Relax your heart.”
Maya looked at her mom. At the detective. They looked vacant.
Her hand shot across the table—she stopped the recording. “Mom,” she said, panicked, terrified that Frank’s words had stopped her mother’s heart, just as they must have stopped Aubrey’s, Ruby’s, Cristina’s—just as they’d nearly stopped her own.
Brenda stared at her.
“Are you okay?” Maya asked.
Her mom blinked. “You’re the one I’m worried about. Are you okay?”
Maya exhaled.
“Would you like to take a break?” Diaz asked.
“No,” Maya said. “I’m all right.” She restarted the recording, and a moment later they heard her mom arrive.
“What the hell is wrong with her?” Brenda’s voice was clear and loud. “No, you settle down . . . Yes, Mom. I hear you.” Maya sounded normal again. The recording ended a few seconds later.
Diaz looked at her notes. Her brown eyes crinkled at the edges in a way that was thoughtful, even as it was impossible to tell what she was thinking. “You said you had a beer there,” she said. “Did you have anything else to drink?”
Maya sank. Here we go again. “I had some gin. Maybe two shots, but that was earlier. I wasn’t drunk at the bar.”
“Do you take any medications?”
Maya sank lower. She knew how this looked. Paranoia was a symptom of benzo withdrawal. She couldn’t look at either of them. “I used to take Klonopin, but I quit.”
“How recently?” Diaz asked.
“Last week.”
The detective wrote this in her notes. Then she sat back, tapped her pen absently on the pad.
Maya wasn’t hurt or angry at realizing that Diaz might not believe her. She was too exhausted for that. She wouldn’t argue this time. If no one believed her, she would happily swallow whatever pills Dr. Barry prescribed—the more, the better.
While Diaz tapped her pen, Maya imagined spending the rest of her life hiding from Frank. Changing her name. Moving out of state. She pictured herself telling Dan why it was no longer safe for him to live with her. She imagined the pain she would feel, but at least she would be medicated. She’d have to be.
“I’d like a copy of that recording,” the detective finally said.
Maya looked up. Blinked back tears. “Of course.”
“I’ve been in this job twenty years. Never heard anything like that.” She shook her head. “I don’t know what to make of it, not yet. But I’ll clear up the sound, see what else I hear. And I’ll look into that business you mentioned, Clear Horizons. I’d also like to have you talk to someone, a psychologist, about that med you were on. Get an assessment.”
“No problem,” Maya said, starting to feel hopeful. Diaz seemed to take her seriously. She asked a few more questions, then walked Maya and her mom back to the empty lobby of the police station. It was almost two a.m. and the station was quiet. A tray of Christmas-tree-shaped cookies sat on the front desk. “Let me know if he tries to get in touch with you,” Diaz said.
“I will,” Maya said. “Thank you.”
A ray of warmth cut through Diaz’s neutrality. “I’m sorry for what you’ve been through,” she said.
Brenda started the car, blasted the heat, and blew on her fingers, waiting for the fog on the windshield to clear. She was still in her pajamas, having run out as soon as she saw Maya’s note. She had always done her best to protect her daughter; Maya knew this. Brenda was just afraid of the wrong things. She’d thought that she was helping when she found Dr. Barry and set up Maya’s first appointment with him, and then when she brought home the meds he prescribed.
But tonight, she had saved her daughter’s life. Even if she didn’t know it—even if all she thought she’d done was interrupt a conversation—Maya knew and she was grateful. She was alive.
“I’ll take a sick day tomorrow,” her mom said. “You shouldn’t be alone.”
“I’m doing all right.”
This time Maya more or less meant it. It could have been relief, or the fact that she’d been awake for so long, or the hot air rushing from the vents, that made her feel as if she could finally sink into the kind of sleep that had evaded her since she quit Klonopin. The sleep of a baby in a car seat. She blinked, and the next thing she knew they were home.
She didn’t notice until they were inside that her mom was crying, tears dripping from her chin onto her boots as she knelt to take them off. Maya rarely saw her cry and found it alarming. “What is it?” she asked.
“I should’ve believed you.”
Maya sank onto the couch. She hadn’t cried at the police station, but she cried now. They both did. They cried, then hugged, then laughed at themselves. Her mom draped a quilt around her shoulders and looked at her with such love and sorrow that Maya almost wanted to comfort her. Because her mom was Frank’s victim too. Nothing hurt her more than seeing her daughter in pain.
“I don’t blame you,” Maya said. “The things I said didn’t make sense . . .” She had talked of magic tricks. Of spells.
“I could have tried harder to understand. And even if I couldn’t—I could have accepted that he . . .” A wave of anger threatened to burst from her mom’s mouth. “He hurt you. I couldn’t bear the thought of someone hurting you. The thought that I . . .” She’d never looked so broken. “I failed to protect you.”
“You saved my life, Mom.”
A shadow crossed Brenda’s eyes as this sank in. To believe her daughter meant believing that Frank had killed Aubrey and that he had almost killed Maya. It meant believing that he still could.