“I’m delighted he found some solace in God,” her father said in a flat voice. “I wish my wife had had that chance.”
“I’m not saying it’s impossible to keep him in prison,” Diana said. “You just need to know what we’re up against.”
“So what do we need to do?” Clay asked.
“I wasn’t in this area when your wife was killed,” Diana spoke directly to Lacey’s father, “but I’ve heard about all the good she did for the community. I suggest you come up with a carefully formulated letter-writing campaign. First, since you three are the direct victims, you should each write a compelling victim’s impact statement.”
Rick had been on the right track, Lacey thought.
“The statements should describe how the loss of your mother and wife affected you. Still affects you.” She looked at Lacey. “This will be most important coming from you, Lacey, since you were there with her when she was murdered. Even if no one else gets around to writing a statement, you absolutely must.”
“I’m really not a good writer,” Lacey said truthfully. She thought of Rick’s warning that she would have to relive her mother’s death if she pursued legal action to keep Pointer in prison. He’d been right, and she wondered if she’d be able to handle it. Revisiting her mother’s death was not something she had the energy to do right now.
“You don’t need to win a Pulitzer,” Diana said. “Just write about the lasting impact that losing your mother—and being there when it happened—has had on you, and do it in a compelling but not overly emotional way. Too much emotionalism can be off-putting for the parole board. You have to strike the right tone, and I’ll help you. All three of you. Write your statements and then I’ll go over them with you.”
“Is that all we can do?” Clay asked. “Write these statements?”
“Don’t minimize their importance,” Diana said. “And the statements won’t just come from you. I need you all to think about who else should write one. The directors of the places she volunteered. That sort of thing. We want to demonstrate the magnitude of her loss on the entire community, not just on your family.”
“When do you need them by?” her father asked.
“The hearing’s in September,” Diana said. “But to give me time to go over them with you, you’ll probably want to finish them by mid-August. Here’s some information I’ve put together to help you see what you should include.” She handed a sheet of paper to each of them. “I suggest you make copies of it and give it to anyone you hope to have write a statement.”
“We could have one hundred statements for you,” her father said. “Is that overkill?”
“I would say it’s more important to choose carefully. Quality over quantity.” She stood up, obviously through with the meeting. “Ten great letters would do more good than inundating the parole board with a hundred overemotional diatribes.”
Her father stood up and reached out to shake Diana’s hand. “All right,” he said. “You’ll keep us posted?”
“I will.” She smiled at Clay, then Lacey. “It was very nice meeting all of you,” she said.
They walked out of the office in silence, and once in the parking lot, her father put an arm around each of them. “You guys okay?”
“Fine,” Clay said. “I wish there was something more we could do, though. I didn’t expect his staying in prison to boil down to how well we write.”
“Why don’t we grab something to eat?” Alec pulled his keys from his pocket and hit the remote button to unlock his car. “Then we can talk about who we should ask to write the other statements.”
Lacey looked at her watch. “I can’t, Dad,” she said. “I have to pick Mackenzie up at Nola’s in a few minutes.”
“How’s it going, hon?” Her father had met Mackenzie a few days earlier, when Lacey’d brought her over to introduce her to Jack and Maggie, a visit which had not been a success. No surprise there. Although she and Jack were the same age, Mackenzie was a couple of inches taller than him and looked a year or two older, and nine-year-old Maggie had looked like a little girl next to the newcomer. While Jack and Maggie swam in the sound behind their house, Mackenzie basked in the sun on their deck wearing her pink bikini. She wanted nothing to do with the weedy, brackish-looking water close to the beach. “In Arizona,” Mackenzie had told them with a haughty style she was quickly perfecting, “everyone has a pool.”
“Let’s just say that I’ve decided if Nola wants her, she can have her,” Lacey said, not really sure if she was joking or not.
“Ouch,” Alec said, and Clay laughed.
“She is a challenge,” Clay said.
“Are you serious?” Alec asked her. “Is it that bad?”
“I don’t know, Dad,” she said. “I’m so crazed right now, I can’t think straight.”
Clay put his arm around her shoulders. “Well, I personally hope you keep her around,” he said. “She’ll make a great baby-sitter in another year or so.”
Nola greeted her on the front porch of her three-story house in Southern Shores. “She’s upstairs on my computer,” she said. “She’s been on my computer nearly her entire visit.”
“I know.” Lacey climbed the stairs to the porch and leaned against the railing. “She misses her friends.”
“Has she talked to you?” Nola asked.
“About?”
“Her mother? Or…well, about anything.” She looked exhausted. “I really haven’t been able to get her to talk.”
“Don’t blame yourself, Nola,” Lacey said. “She’s not talking to me, either. Has she always been reserved like this?”
“Not when she was younger.” Nola fanned herself with her hand. “But the truth is, she doesn’t know me very well. I saw her once a year, if that. It was just not enough. I regret that now.”
“I feel the same way,” Lacey said.
Nola slipped a wayward lock of her white-blond hair back into her French twist. “Tell me something, Lacey,” she said. “And please be truthful.”
Lacey nodded, waiting.
“Why do you really think Jessica left her with you and not with me?” Nola asked.
“I simply have no idea,” Lacey answered honestly.
“Was I a bad mother?” It was rare to see Nola look and sound so vulnerable, and Lacey felt sympathy for her. “Jessica told me that I could sometimes be cold.”
“Of course you weren’t a bad mother,” Lacey said, letting honesty fly out the window. “I doubt that has anything to do with why she asked me to take Mackenzie. I think what we talked about in Phoenix is right. Jessica probably wanted a peer, someone her age, to raise her daughter. Maybe she thought she’d come up with a brilliant idea by having it be me, since she knew I lived close to you.” She looked in the direction of the ocean. Although she couldn’t see it from the front porch, she could tell the water was rough today; she could hear the waves smacking against the beach. “But—” she looked back at Nola “—if we mutually decide at some point that she would be better off with you, or if she says that’s what she wants, I won’t fight you on it.”
“Well—” Nola let out a long breath “—I certainly expected to fight you for her,” she said. “But the truth is, I don’t know that I could handle her on an everyday basis. Maybe Jessica knew that, that I’m not cut out to have an eleven-year-old child in my life. Though I do love her. She’s all I have left of Jessie.” Nola sighed. “I just want whatever is best for her.”
“I think I’m going to contact her father,” Lacey said suddenly.
Nola’s eyes widened. “She has no father,” she said, a warning in her eyes.
“I know Jessica listed the father’s identity as ‘unknown’ on the birth certificate, but you and I both know who her father is.”
“She didn’t want him involved,” Nola said. “That boy was a complete and utter loser.”
“Then why did she leave Mackenzie with me, when she knew I would want to let Bobby Asher know about her?”
“He corrupted
Jessica.”
“I thought I corrupted her.” Lacey couldn’t resist throwing that statement back in Nola’s face.
“I was angry when I said that, Lacey. Angry and hurt. I’m sorry.”
Lacey had never seen Nola as soft and wounded as she seemed today. Twenty-four hours with Mackenzie had humbled her.
“That’s all right.” Her head was starting to ache and she rubbed her temples. “I’m not exactly sure what I’m going to do about Bobby, Nola, but I’ll keep you in the loop. Okay?”
Mackenzie was quiet on the drive back to Kiss River, giving her usual one-word answers to Lacey’s questions about the time spent with her grandmother. When they arrived at the light station parking lot, she jumped out of the car and ran ahead of Lacey into the house. By the time Lacey got inside, Mackenzie was sitting on the floor of the living room, watching a soap opera on TV and cuddling with Sasha, the one creature whose love was unconditional, who didn’t care if she talked or sulked. Mackenzie looked like a little child at that moment. Not like the girl who dressed like Britney Spears, who made scornful comparisons between life in Phoenix and life in this godforsaken place. She was, Lacey had to remind herself, just a hurt little kid.
When everyone was in bed that night, Lacey got up and rummaged through her top desk drawer for a notepad and a pen. Sitting down at her desk, she stared out at the moonlit lighthouse, thinking. Composing.
I was with my mother when she was killed, she wrote. I still have nightmares about it. My mother had taken me to the battered women’s shelter to give a little something to people who had less than we did. She was always like that. She would help anyone who needed it. She even donated her bone marrow to save the life of a child she didn’t know. She was the kindest woman in the world.
And she was also a self-centered whore who slept with half the men in the Outer Banks, and she hurt my father more than words can say.
“Shit.” Lacey balled the paper up in her hands and tossed it across the room into her trash can. This would not be an easy thing to write.
CHAPTER 17
Twenty dollars was missing from her wallet, and Lacey was afraid she knew who had taken it. She and Nola were putting their new schedule of sharing time with Mackenzie into place, and Lacey had made a couple of stops with the girl in the car on her way to the Realtor’s house. She’d gone to the bank, where she cashed a check for one hundred dollars, and she’d stopped at a 7-Eleven to pick up a cup of coffee for herself and a doughnut for Mackenzie. She’d taken one of the twenties into the 7-Eleven with her, leaving Mackenzie and her purse in the car, and she’d stuck the change from the twenty in her pocket. It wasn’t until she stopped for lunch later in the day that she noticed only three twenties remained in her wallet. Her heart sank as she rummaged through her purse, hoping to find the missing twenty. She had no proof that Mackenzie had taken the money, though, and she didn’t have a clue how to deal with the situation.
Driving home from Nola’s that afternoon with Mackenzie, sullen and uncommunicative, in the back seat, she thought of ways she could broach the subject. She could simply make a declarative statement: “I got five twenties from the bank, took one into the store with me, and at lunch discovered there were only three twenties left in my wallet.” Or she could make a bargain with Mackenzie: “A twenty disappeared from my wallet. If it reappears within the next day, all will be forgiven.” The fact was, she was afraid to say anything to Mackenzie. Chicken, she chided herself. Their relationship was already rocky enough, and she feared making it worse. She would warn Gina and Clay to watch their money. She would keep her own wallet on her at all times. And she would give Mackenzie an allowance. She had not even thought about that. Of course. The girl needed money of her own.
She knew how her own mother would have handled the situation. She would have said something like, “Twenty dollars is missing from my wallet, and I guess someone needed it more than I did. I hope that someone will simply ask me for it in the future instead of taking it.” That would have been so typical of Annie O’Neill’s gentle and slightly goofy parenting style. But Lacey was not her mother. She would have to come up with her own approach, and right now, that appeared to be doing nothing.
Bobby Asher had been a thief. He’d stolen money from her and from Jessica. He’d stolen a Danish from a little corner store in Nag’s Head nearly every day, and Lacey had felt sorry for the elderly clerk behind the counter, who was half-blind and who had no idea he was being ripped off. She’d seen Bobby steal something as small as a cigarette from a pack lying on a table in a restaurant, and as large as boogie board from a store window. He had been a master thief, and just as Lacey seemed to have inherited her mother’s gene for promiscuity, perhaps Mackenzie had inherited her father’s gene for stealing.
Why on earth had Lacey been so attracted to him? She’d dreamt about him at night and fantasized about him during the daytime. She would have done anything he asked her to, and she’d felt a deep ache in her chest every time she saw him with Jessica. Maybe Jessica had been wise to keep Bobby out of Mackenzie’s life. Yet he was the girl’s father. Even Rick, Mr. Conservative himself, thought that he should be told. And she was going to tell him. At best, he would understand Mackenzie better than she did. At worst, he would have graduated to more sophisticated forms of running outside the law. Either way, though, she’d decided that he needed to know he had a child.
The evening after discovering her twenty was missing, Lacey sat in her bedroom, the phone in her lap, and dialed information. There were several Robert Ashers in the Richmond area, the operator told her, and Lacey wrote down all the numbers. The first one she reached turned out to be Bobby’s cousin. “He lives down the street,” the cousin said, and he gave her Bobby’s number, just like that. She wanted to ask the cousin, “What is he like? Does he still do drugs?” but the only question that came out of her mouth was, “Does he still go by ‘Bobby’?”
The cousin laughed. “He sure does, “he said. “Just about all us Ashers go by Bobby.”
Lacey chewed her lip now as she looked at the number he’d given her. Mackenzie was in her room exchanging e-mail with her Phoenix friends. Rani was asleep, and Gina and Clay were downstairs watching a movie on the VCR. She had the time and privacy she needed for the call. All she needed now was courage and the ability to find the words.
She dialed the number. It rang seven times, and she was trying to formulate a message for his voice mail when he suddenly picked up.
“Hey.” He sounded winded.
“Is this Bobby?” she asked.
“Speaking. Who’s this?” She would not have recognized his voice. It was the voice of a man, not the boy she had known.
“I don’t know if you remember me or not,” she said. “I’m Lacey O’Neill and I—”
“Lacey!” he said. “What a flash from the past! How are you doing, girl?”
She felt relief that he remembered her, that she would not have to add that explanation to this conversation. He’d been so wasted much of that summer that she’d not been sure he would be able to recall any of it.
“I’m fine,” she said. “And how about you?”
“I’m doing good.” He sounded boisterous and upbeat. She did not remember him that way. “So, how come I’m hearing from you after all these years?”
“Well,” she said, “this is a little complicated, and I’m not quite sure where to start so bear with me, okay?”
“No problem.”
“You remember Jessica Dillard?”
“Sure. I practically spent one summer of my life with her. How’s she doing?”
“She recently…she passed away recently.”
There was a beat of silence before he responded. “Jesus, you’re kidding. She was only…what?…twenty-six?”
“Twenty-seven. She was a year older than me even though we were in the same grade. She started school a little later than—”
“What the hell happened?” He interrupted her.
“She was
in a car accident. She was hit by a drunk driver, but she survived and had to have a lot of surgery. They thought she’d recover, but she got a blood clot in her lung and it killed her.”
“A drunk driver?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Son of a bitch. How fair is that?”
“Not at all fair.”
“The two of you stayed close, Lacey?”
She liked the way he used her name, the way it sounded in his new, grown-up voice. “Yes and no,” she said. “She’d been living in Arizona since she was fifteen, and we didn’t get to see each other much. And…here’s the real reason I’m calling you. Jessica had a child. A little girl. She…that’s why Jessica moved to Arizona, because she got pregnant and her mother really thought it was best that she not stay here. She—”
“Lacey.” He stopped her frantic rambling. “What are you trying to tell me?”
“You’re the girl’s father.”
That silence again, this time stretching for long, agonizing seconds, and Lacey squeezed her eyes shut as she waited for his response.
“I…uh…” He let out a short laugh. “What makes you think that?”
“Jessica knew you were the baby’s father,” she said. “There was never any doubt. But she also knew you were young and that it was just a summer fling and that you were…well, you weren’t exactly the responsible father type back then, and she figured it was best just to put ‘unknown’ on the birth certificate where it asked for the father’s name.”
“Hold on,” he said. “I’ve got to sit down for this.” She heard some rustling of papers and then he was back on the line. “You don’t plan to dump this kid on me, do you?” Now, that sounded like the Bobby she remembered.
“Jessica left her in my care,” she said. “But I thought you should know.”
“Why didn’t she tell me?” he said. “I mean, she could have tried to get child support out of me, if nothing more.”
“She figured you were…” What could she say? “The two of you didn’t have a serious, adult relationship, Bobby. You know that.”