Lacey switched on the table lamp in the living room and motioned to the woman to sit down on the old couch. “Have a seat,” she said.
“Here are the directions I have.” The woman held out the sheet of paper, covered with lines of neat handwriting and a hand-drawn map, complete with squiggly lines that served as waves in the sound and tiny trees dotting the woods. Lacey sat down on the end of the couch closest to the light and studied it.
“Well, it certainly looks like this is the right cottage. But you know what?” It suddenly dawned on her. “The owner is away for the summer, and I don’t know his name. Maybe that’s who you’re looking for?”
The woman frowned. “I don’t think so. I’m looking for my son, Fred Pointer.”
Lacey shook her head. “I don’t know—” The name suddenly sunk in, and she felt an icy chill up her spine. “Pointer?” she asked.
The woman nodded. “Do you know him? Oh, I forgot! He goes by Rick, now. I’ve always called him Fred, though.”
Lacey pressed her hand to her throat, suddenly nauseous, wondering if she was going to throw up. The woman was beginning to look familiar to her. She could picture her face across the serving table at the women’s shelter as she ladled green beans onto her plate.
She stood up. “Oh, my God.”
“Are you all right?” The woman looked alarmed.
“He’s been using me,” Lacey said.
You don’t need to write that victim’s impact statement, Lacey. Let them go ahead without yours.
“Are you talking about Fred?” the woman asked. “About Rick?”
She couldn’t answer. She felt afraid, her head spinning, as she tried to sort one thought from another.
The woman got to her feet. “You’d better sit down,” she said, taking Lacey’s arm. “I don’t know what’s got you so upset, but you look like you might pass out.”
The woman nearly had to bend Lacey into a sitting position on the couch. She felt as rigid as a stick.
“I’ve upset you, and I’m very sorry,” the woman said, sitting close to her.
Lacey turned her face to hers. “Do you recognize me?” she asked.
The woman shook her head. “I…you do remind me of someone,” she said. “But I’m afraid that woman died a long time ago.”
“My mother,” Lacey said. “Annie O’Neill.”
It was the woman’s turn to blanch, her mouth open in disbelief. “Oh, honey,” she said, touching Lacey’s arm. “Oh, my God. You were there, too. I remember. And I’ve thought of you so often. But…” She looked around the room, helplessly. “I don’t understand what’s going on. Why would you be here with Fred? Is it just a…coincidence?”
“Oh, no.” Lacey stood up again, anger replacing the shock and nausea. She remembered the book he’d given her about forgiveness. She remembered the flowers. She remembered how he’d steer every conversation to the topic of Zachary Pointer’s parole. “Damn him!” She picked up an empty mug from the coffee table and threw it at the wall with such force that the woman recoiled. “He’s been using me all summer.” She raked her hair away from her face with her fingers as she let the reality of the situation sink in. She looked at the visitor. “Are you in on this?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Your husband is up for parole,” Lacey said.
“My ex-husband.” The woman nodded. “I learned that just today.”
Lacey sat down on a lumpy old chair near the window. “Well, here’s what happened,” she said. “Your son showed up in my art studio one day. He never said a word about Zachary Pointer being his father. He told me his name was Rick Tenley and—”
“That’s his partner’s name. Christian Tenley.”
Lacey stared at her. “His law partner?”
The woman shook her head. “His…his significant other.”
Lacey was incredulous. “He’s gay?”
The woman nodded, and in spite of her rage, Lacey could not stop a laugh. “Well, that explains a few things,” she said.
“So…” The woman prompted her. “Was it just a coincidence he came to your studio?”
“No way,” Lacey said. “He knew what he was doing. He started…courting me. Sending me flowers. Asking me out. And when he got close enough—not that we had sex,” she added quickly. “You can tell this Christian guy that Rick’s been faithful to him, if to nobody else.” She thought back to their conversation that evening. It all made sense now: He had not been angry about her sleeping with Bobby. His rage had to do with her decision to write the victim’s statement. “When he got close enough to me,” she repeated, “I told him about my mother’s death and that my family was going to fight her killer’s parole. He started talking about the whole parole thing, telling me how I shouldn’t fight it, how I should learn to forgive your…husband, or whatever he is to you now. I was so touched that he took such an interest in me. He was such a good listener. God, he really sucked me in!” She looked at the table in the corner, where a stack of papers rested next to his computer. “He told me he was staying here in his friend’s cottage so he could have some peace and quiet to write, that he was working on a book about tax law.”
“I believe he is working on a book,” the woman said quietly, “but Christian told me it has something to do with parole.”
Lacey got to her feet and walked the two steps to the table in the corner. Lifting a few of the sheets from the top of the pile of paper, she scanned them quickly. The word “parole” was everywhere on the pages. “Bastard!” She lifted the entire stack of papers in her hands and tossed them into the air, letting them fall into disorderly layers on the floor. She felt wildly out of control. She wanted to destroy something.
The woman was leaning forward, watching Lacey’s tirade, with her fist pressed hard against her mouth and a deep crease between her eyebrows. Suddenly, she lowered her hand to her knees and sat up straight.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Lacey O’Neill.”
“I’m Faye Collier,” the woman said. “I took back my maiden name when I divorced Zachary, and I’ve been estranged from my son since he was a teenager. I’ve had no contact with him, and I came here to try to reconnect with him. I live in California now, but I was able to find out that Fred lives in Princeton, so I—”
“Princeton?” Lacey stood riveted to the floor in the sea of papers. “He told me he lived in Chapel Hill and taught law at Duke.”
“He does teach law,” Faye said, “but it’s at Princeton. I went to the address I had for him there and met Christian, who told me I could find Fred here. He doesn’t know I was coming. We haven’t talked in ten years, Lacey, so I don’t even know him anymore. But even though I don’t…” The woman blinked back tears, and Lacey could see the pain in her eyes. “Even though I don’t know him, I feel like I need to apologize to you for what he’s done.”
Her voice was calming. Lacey sat down on the couch again, sideways, drawing her feet up and wrapping her arms around her legs.
“You’re not the one who owes me an apology,” she said.
They both turned at the sound of the screen door creaking open, and Rick walked into the room carrying a pizza box. It took him a moment to recognize his mother, but when he did, Lacey saw all color leave his face, and the box fell to the floor with a thud.
“Mom?”
No matter what Faye had just learned about her son, it was apparent that it didn’t matter. She rose from the couch in a rush, moving toward Rick, motherhood transcending all else. And despite the fact that Rick had to know the jig was up, he opened his arms wide for her. They embraced with an intensity that Lacey couldn’t watch. She rested her head on her knees, feeling intrusive, and it was a full minute before the two of them finally let go of each other.
“How did you find me?” he asked.
“Christian,” Faye said.
They were both quiet for a moment, then Rick seemed to notice her. “Lacey,” he said.
Sh
e lifted her head and saw that he was crying, his face red.
“I’m truly sorry,” he said.
She shook her head slowly, without speaking, filled at that moment with more pity than anger.
“I lost it,” he said. “I’m sorry. I just want my father to be free. He was crazy when he shot your mother. Crazy and needed help, not prison. I need to get him out. I—”
“What you need right now is time with your mother,” Lacey said abruptly, standing up. “And what I need to do is go home and write my victim’s impact statement. And you can bet it’s going to be a good one.”
She marched past the two of them, deliberately stepping on the loose pages of his book about parole, and let the screen door slam behind her as she left the cottage. She’d forgotten to get her bathing suit from the spare bedroom—the second bathing suit she had lost in as many days—but she didn’t care.
It wasn’t until she was sitting in her car in the dark wooded driveway that she started to cry. The windows were down, the song of the cicadas blaring in her ears, and she didn’t reach for the ignition or even bother to wipe the tears from her face for a long time. She’d been taken advantage of sexually by men, too many times to count. But Rick—the one man she’d never imagined would hurt her—had used her in a way that cut right to the core.
CHAPTER 41
Never, never cut glass when you’re upset.
Tom had told her that a dozen times and yet Lacey needed to lose herself in something, and working on a stained glass project had always been her release. But she was making a shambles of things in the sunroom. She cut pieces too big or too small. She cracked one of the most expensive pieces of glass she owned, and got a sliver of glass caught in her forearm where she rested it on the table.
She’d hoped that the work might drive the previous night’s incident at Rick’s cottage from her mind, but that did not seem possible. When she’d arrived home the night before, she’d found Gina, Clay and Bobby in the living room, watching a movie on the VCR, and for once she was glad that Mackenzie preferred the company of her computer to that of the adults in the house, because she’d needed to fall apart and didn’t want to do it in front of her.
She’d been calmer than she’d expected to be, sitting on the sofa as she simply told them the facts, trying not to embellish them with her emotions. Clay, though, was livid.
“He hung around this house like he thought he belonged here, manipulating all of us,” he’d said. He was on his feet, pacing, the way their father did when he was upset over something. “Give me the directions to his cottage, Lacey,” he said. “I’m going over there.”
It took both her and Gina to calm him down. “He’s with his mother right now,” Lacey said. “It’s not the time.”
“Did he sleep with you?” Clay asked with such righteous fury that she loved him for it. Especially since he’d asked if Rick had slept with her rather than the question that would be, to her ears, at least, more accusatory: “Did you sleep with him?” She assured him that she had not. She didn’t bother to tell them that he was gay.
Bobby said very little while she spoke, and she avoided his eyes as much as she could, afraid that something in her face might give away their altered relationship to Gina and Clay.
Later, when she was alone in the kitchen pouring herself a glass of lemonade, Bobby came into the room and put his arms around her. She waited for him to mock her, however gently. After all, she’d told him that she was afraid of him, but not of Rick. That she thought Rick would be good for her. Bobby would be perfectly justified in taunting her with her words. But he said nothing of the sort.
“I’m sorry” was all he said, before squeezing her shoulders and leaving the room, and she had the feeling that he meant it from his soul.
She stopped in Mackenzie’s room on her way to bed to tell her good-night, then climbed into her own bed with her notepad. She’d planned to pour her fury into the victim’s impact statement, only to find that the words still eluded her. If she couldn’t write the statement when she had her anger to propel her, she was never going to be able to write it. She gave up after ten minutes, then tried to sleep, but the evening at Rick’s played over and over in her mind. Finally, she got up and knocked on Bobby’s door. He was still awake, and when he opened his door his expression was one of frank curiosity at finding her there.
“I was wondering if you had anything to help me sleep?” she asked, speaking quickly to prevent him from thinking she might be there for something more.
He shook his head. “Sorry, Lace,” he said. “The only drug I take these days is aspirin.”
She’d nodded and took a step out of his room.
“Lacey?”
She turned to look at him.
“Do you want to talk?”
She shook her head. “Thanks,” she said. “Not now.” Talking to Bobby, in his room, in the middle of the night, when she was feeling so fragile, could only lead to trouble. Plus, she felt a strong need to be by herself. She was the only person she knew she could trust—and, occasionally, even she was suspect.
Lacey finally managed to score a piece of glass cleanly and was congratulating herself when she heard the screen door creak open and closed. In a moment, Mackenzie was in the doorway of the sunroom, Sasha next to her. Lacey knew she’d been outside, walking around the perimeter of the house with the dog, trying to find the best reception for her cell phone. It was not working well inside the house today.
“Did you get your phone to work?” Lacey asked, slipping her safety glasses from her face to the top of her head.
Mackenzie nodded. “I talked to everyone,” she said.
“That must have felt good.”
Mackenzie sat down at the second worktable in the chair Bobby usually used and began to swivel it back and forth. “I think they’re all forgetting about me,” she said.
“No,” Lacey said with sympathy. Sasha walked over to her chair and she ran her hand over the dog’s shiny black fur. “They might be getting involved in activities you’re not a part of, but they’re never going to forget about you.”
Mackenzie sighed.
“You’re missing them, huh?” Lacey asked.
“That’s the weird thing,” she said. “I feel like I should be missing them, but I don’t so much anymore.” Mackenzie ran her fingertip over a small piece of ivory lying on the worktable. “Like, I talked to Sherry about Wolf and everything, but she doesn’t even like dogs, so she wasn’t really interested. And all Marissa talks about is this boy I don’t even know at her swim club, and she doesn’t get why I’d want to hide in the woods waiting for a dog to find me. And the most annoying part is she keeps saying ‘tight.’”
“Tight?”
“Yeah, it’s like this new word that’s supposed to be cool or something. The boy she likes is tight. She thinks the new store at the mall is tight. Doesn’t that sound stupid?”
Lacey had to laugh, the warmth she felt for Mackenzie pushing the venom from her heart. “You are so cute, you know that?” she asked.
Mackenzie nodded, smiling herself. “Yeah,” she said. She peered out the windows, then leaned forward, her elbows resting on the worktable as she pressed her cheek against the glass. “You can’t see the kennel from here,” she said.
“No.”
“Do you know when Clay’s coming home?” Mackenzie sat down again.
Lacey shook her head. “I don’t know.” As they often did on the weekends, Gina and Clay had taken Rani to Shorty’s Grill to entertain Henry and Walter and the other regulars. She wasn’t sure where Bobby was, but she guessed he was at a meeting. “Were you supposed to do some training with Clay today?”
“No, but Wolf’s bone is stuck behind his doghouse and he’s going crazy trying to get it out,” Mackenzie said. “I went over to the kennel when I was out there and he was, like, crying trying to get at it. I felt so bad for him.”
“He’ll be okay,” Lacey said. She gave Sasha a dismissive pat on the head, and, w
ith a heavy sigh, the dog lay down next to her worktable.
“Don’t you think I could go in and get it for him?” Mackenzie asked. “He loves me.”
“Clay said no one should go into his kennel except him.”
“That was a while ago, though,” Mackenzie protested. “Wolf loves me now.”
“Yes, he does.” Lacey smiled. “But you know what Clay said.”
“Well,” Mackenzie stood up. “Maybe I can use a stick or something to reach through the fence and try to get the bone unstuck for him.”
“That’s a good idea,” Lacey said. “Just be careful.”
The phone rang the moment Mackenzie left the room, and Lacey checked the caller ID display: Rick, for the third time that morning. She was not ready to talk to him, and was not sure she ever would be. She lowered her glasses over her eyes and thought once more about the statement she needed to write. What if she simply avoided any discussion of her mother’s character? All the other statements would be addressing how wonderful and generous Saint Anne had been. But none of them could describe her murder with the sort of detail Lacey could provide. It seemed like a brilliant idea and she wondered why she hadn’t thought of it before. She would write the facts about what had happened that evening in the battered women’s shelter. She didn’t need to pass judgment on her mother’s morality.
She was setting her glass cutter to a piece of cobalt glass when she heard a scream that made Sasha spring to his feet. Mackenzie. Releasing the glass cutter, she jumped out of her chair and ran from the room, tearing off her glasses and dropping them to the floor. The screams were unceasing. She pictured Wolf, having somehow climbed over the six-foot-high kennel fence, chasing Mackenzie around the yard. But that was not the scene that greeted her when she pushed open the screen door and ran onto the porch.
Mackenzie was lying on the ground inside the kennel, the German shepherd standing above her, snarling and growling and tearing at her clothing or—God forbid—her flesh. From this distance, Lacey could not tell which. The dog shook his head as though he was trying to kill whatever prey he had caught in his mouth. Mackenzie’s screams pierced the air, and Lacey heard the terror in them.