Once she had blown out the candle in her lantern and shut her eyes, she’d found herself unable to sleep. Sophie’s breathing was loud and labored, but that was not all that was keeping Zoe awake. Her thoughts were on the telltale triad of behaviors about which the boarding school counselor had spoken so many years before. Whether or not that counselor had truly been in the habit of asking those provocative questions of all parents, she had clearly seen something in Marti that Zoe had tried hard to ignore. One more time, Zoe had failed her daughter by denying that Marti had any problems. If anything had been wrong with Marti, Zoe had hoped the boarding school could fix it, quietly. The world should never know that Zoe Pauling and Max Garson had a troubled daughter. If Zoe had admitted to her daughter’s problems and obtained help for her, would she be all right now? Would she be a happy, normal, productive young woman? Would she still have been capable of murdering the warden? Would she have been capable of murdering anyone?
It was her turn on the rickety old chair, and Marti held it steady for her as she raised a piece of the lavender sheet toward one of the cracks. Steeling herself, Zoe took in a breath, ready to ask the question that had plagued her during the night and was still dogging her this morning.
“There’s something I need to ask you, Marti,” Zoe said, as her fingers pushed the sheet into the crack. “And I want you to be completely honest with me.”
“About what?”
Zoe hesitated, but only for a moment. “Did you kill Tara Ashton?” she asked. She kept her eyes on the ceiling, pressing the sheet into the crevice with greater force than was necessary.
Marti did not answer, and all Zoe could hear was the sound of Sophie’s breathing through the bedroom door. She looked down at her daughter.
“Did you?” she repeated.
Marti was holding onto the back of the chair. She looked up at her mother with those beautiful, dark-lashed eyes.
“Yes,” she said
As carefully as she could, Zoe stepped off the chair and sat down on its edge. She felt as if she were choking, and it took her a moment to find her breath.
“Why?” She tried to keep her voice even and gentle. “What compelled you to do that? I thought you didn’t even know her, Marti.”
“I didn’t.” Marti sat down on the sofa, avoiding Zoe’s gaze. “I told the jury the truth when I said I didn’t know her. I met her ten, maybe twenty minutes before I…before it happened.”
“I—I don’t understand this,” Zoe said.
Marti’s eyes filled with surprising tears. Zoe had rarely seen her daughter cry, not even during the trial. “Mom…I don’t want to tell you why I did it. I didn’t want you to ever know.”
“Tell me,” Zoe said.
“She called me.” Marti glanced out the window toward the forest. “Tara Ashton. She called me a couple of weeks after Daddy died.”
“Why would she call you?”
“She said she needed to see me. That it was extremely important. I didn’t have a clue what she wanted, but I went over there anyhow. She sounded so insistent.”
Marti had been to Tara Ashton’s house, after all. Zoe thought back to the witnesses who had said they’d seen Marti’s car there, seen her exit the building. Zoe had thought they were mistaken, at best. Liars, at worst. She’d been wrong.
“She let me in,” Marti said. “She was all smiles and…oh, you know what she looked like. Just beautiful and…so damn sure of herself.” Marti looked teary-eyed again, and Zoe felt confused.
“Were you jealous of her?” she asked. “Was that it?”
“Jealous of that bitch?” Marti laughed. “No way.”
“Well, then…what happened?”
Marti looked uncomfortable. She shifted her weight on the sofa, raising her feet to the sheet-covered cushions, then lowering them to the floor again. “We sat in her living room,” she said finally. “She gave me a glass of ginger ale. Ginger ale. I thought that was weird.” Marti wrinkled her nose at her mother. “Who drinks ginger ale? And then she told me that—” Marti looked up at the ceiling and let out her breath. “Oh, Mom,” she said. “I just don’t want to tell you.”
“Tell me what, Marti?” Zoe was bracing herself. She had no idea where Marti’s admission was headed, but she knew it was going to sting.
“She told me that she was pregnant, and that Dad was the baby’s father.”
Zoe caught her breath, then let it out in a laugh. “Well, that’s ridiculous,” she said.
“I thought it was, too,” Marti said hurriedly. “But then she told me that Dad had helped her get the part that you were supposed to get in that movie. She said he got them to write it for a younger woman so she could have it.”
Zoe could barely breathe. She remembered Max coming home from his office one day, telling her that he’d argued with the writer. He’d described how he’d pleaded with the man to keep the character in the script just the way she was—perfect for Zoe—but the writer had wanted to rewrite the part for Tara Ashton. Max had looked genuinely pained over the turn of events. Suddenly, Zoe wondered exactly whose idea it had been to rewrite that role.
“I still don’t believe it,” she said.
“Mom, I do.” Marti leaned forward. “She was going to get DNA testing done on the baby. She had a lock of Dad’s hair…she actually showed it to me.”
Zoe laughed again, less heartily this time. “He hardly had any hair,” she said.
“I know that. But she had this piece of it, and it looked like his, you know, a little curly, the way his hair was in the back, and she said she was going to use it to get DNA testing done, and that it would be all over the papers and all, unless…”
“Unless what?”
“Unless she got some of Dad’s inheritance.”
“Dad’s inheritance?” Zoe shook her head. “Honey, I just don’t believe…”
“Mom, you never believe anything, you know that?” Marti stood up, her arms waving. “You never believed I did anything wrong, when I was fucking up left and right. You don’t believe Dad could have done anything wrong, when half of Hollywood knew he was screwing around on you. You don’t even believe that little kid in there is going to die.” She pointed toward the bedroom door.
Zoe shut her eyes. All she could see behind her closed eyelids was the softly curled gray hair above the nape of Max’s neck.
“Mom, it was like I had no choice,” Marti continued. “She was going to hurt you one way or another. I hated her for that, for what she was planning to put you through, especially right after Dad died. Either she was going to go directly to you to tell you about her and Dad, and you would have had to give her money—and she wanted a lot of it—to keep it quiet. Or she was going to plaster the news all over the universe. That’s what she told me. Either way, you were going to get hurt, and I just…” Marti shook her head and sat down on the sofa again. “She’d been hanging pictures,” she said. “She had a hammer there, on the coffee table. I—”
“I’m sure you didn’t actually mean to do it,” Zoe said. “You probably just impulsively picked up the hammer and…”
“Oh, I meant to do it, Mom,” Marti corrected her. “I meant to wipe that smug grin off her face. I picked up the hammer and…man, I just let her have it.”
Zoe fell silent. For a long moment, neither of them spoke. Then, finally, Zoe braved yet another haunting question.
“Did you…did you feel any regret, Marti?” she asked. “I mean, didn’t it bother you to kill her? To know that you took someone’s life?”
“If she’d been a decent person, then I would have felt bad about it,” Marti said. “Just like I would have felt bad about Angelo, if he hadn’t been such scum. Tara was scum, too. She deserved exactly what she got.”
What could she say? How did you respond to your child when she let you see the evil inside her? Recriminations would not help, of that she was certain. And anyway, she was just as responsible as Marti for what had happened.
She leaned toward her daughte
r. “Marti,” she began, “first of all, thank you for telling me this.”
Marti looked away from her, studying the corner of the living room floor. “Second, honey, you need help,” Zoe continued, her voice far calmer than she felt. “Do you see that? You’ve always been…troubled. It’s my fault, I know that, and you’re right. I didn’t want to see it. I never got you help when you needed it. But I want to help you, now.”
“Don’t get any crazy ideas, Mom,” Marti said. “I’m not turning myself in or anything like that. They’ll put me back in prison. You know that.”
“That’s the last thing I want,” Zoe said. “I wouldn’t let them put you back in prison. I know that’s not what you need, darling.”
“But that’s what will happen, Mom. If you turn me in, they’ll put me away for life.”
A rasping sound came from behind the bedroom door, followed by silence, and Zoe listened, afraid, until she heard Sophie’s breathing begin again.
“Sophie’s so ill, Marti,” she said. “I think we have to—”
“Mom, if you’re thinking about getting help for her again, just forget it,” Marti said. “I’ve killed two people.” She spoke slowly, deliberately, as though she feared her mother had lost the ability to understand her. “One more isn’t going to make much of a difference at this point. Especially one who’s half dead already.” Marti stood up, and fear filled Zoe’s heart.
“Don’t you dare touch that girl,” she said.
“Don’t worry,” Marti said, as she walked out the front door of the shanty. “I wouldn’t dream of hurting your precious little baby.”
Sophie got up later that afternoon. She shuffled into the living room on her swollen feet, and Zoe looked up from where she was lying on the sofa.
“How are you feeling, little one?” Zoe asked. Her throat was dry, and she had trouble getting the words out.
“Not so good.” Sophie sat down at the end of the sofa, and Zoe moved her feet to make room for her. She’d been lying there all afternoon, ever since the discussion with Marti that had rocked her hold on the universe. Nothing had been as it seemed in her world. Marti had not been the daughter she’d presented to the public with pride, and her marriage had been no better than any other Hollywood union. Of course, there had been rumors about Max’s tomcatting over the years, but she’d ignored them. There was always talk like that about people in power, about people with fame. If you didn’t ignore the rumors, they would eat away at you. But she’d ignored so much. It was far easier to deny that anything was wrong.
“I’m so afraid, Sophie,” Zoe said, her gaze resting on the little girl’s puffy face.
“What are you afraid of?” Sophie asked
Zoe shook her head. “I’m afraid for you, and for Marti. I’m a little afraid of Marti, actually. She’s…she’s just…”
“She’s crazy, I think,” Sophie finished the sentence for her, and Zoe had to nod in agreement.
“And I want to get help for you, darling. I do. I wish I could. But if I did that, I’d be sending my own daughter to…” She shook her head. “They’d lock her away for the rest of her life,” she said. “Maybe worse. They won’t see what I see…the troubled little girl inside her. They’ll just see someone who—who has done some terrible things. It’s always that way. They put people in prison instead of trying to help them.”
Sophie looked out the window. “I think I have to go to the outhouse,” she said, standing up.
She hasn’t heard a word I’ve said, Zoe thought to herself, as she watched Sophie hobble out the front door of the shanty. Just as well. Those words were truly not meant for the ears of a child.
She must have drifted off, because the next thing she knew, Marti was standing over her.
“Where’s Sophie?” Marti asked. “She’s not in the bedroom.”
Zoe sat up on the sofa, her head foggy. “She—” Zoe struggled to remember. “She went to the outhouse, but that was a while ago, I think.” She stood up quickly, heading for the door. “I hope she’s all right out there.”
She and Marti rushed around the side of the shanty to the outhouse. It was empty. There was no sign of Sophie anywhere.
“That little bitch must be trying to get away,” Marti said. She ran back to the front of the shanty, and by the time Zoe caught up with her, she was emerging from the cabin with her gun in her hand.
“Where are you going?” Zoe asked.
“I’m going to find her,” Marti said.
“You don’t need to take a gun with you.” Zoe reached for the weapon, but Marti quickly turned away from her and headed for the woods.
“I’m just going to scare her with it,” she called over her shoulder.
Zoe ran after her, but Marti swung around, pointing the gun in her direction. “Leave me alone, Mother,” she said. “I mean it.”
Frightened, Zoe set out in the opposite direction, hoping that she would be first to stumble across Sophie. The little girl could not have gotten very far, not in the shape she was in.
She searched for nearly an hour, her nerves on edge as she listened for Marti’s gun to be fired. But there were no gunshots, and no Sophie.
She reached the shanty before Marti had returned, and when she looked into the bedroom, she spotted Sophie sound asleep on her sleeping palette. Her breathing was loud and gravelly, but at least she was still alive.
Lying down on her own palette, with its lumpy mattress of towels and clothing, she vowed to stay awake all night. She would not let Marti harm this little child.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Janine was turned around. Even with the GPS, she felt uncertain of her bearings, although she’d tried to follow her progress on the map. If these woods got any thicker, she would not be able to make her way through them. She had a new appreciation for hiking trails—and for the people who cut them. But she felt no fear at being alone in the forest, amazing even to herself. She knew it was because she felt so bonded with Sophie in these woods. She could feel Sophie out here, the way she had at the camp.
This was her second day alone in the forest. She’d been out here the previous afternoon, trying in vain to find the old log cabin and returning to the motel just before dark. She was not having any more luck today, but she knew the cabin had to be around here somewhere. She’d passed another cabin an hour or so ago, and at first she’d thought she’d reached her goal. She’d been apprehensive as she’d neared the old shack, and she’d understood the source of her anxiety: if Sophie was not inside the cabin, Janine’s last hope would be dashed. She’d felt relief when she saw that the shack was actually caving in on itself, that it was barely more than an old stack of boards and could not possibly have been the log cabin she and Lucas had seen from the air. That was fine. The longer it took her to find that log cabin, the longer she could cling to hope. She knew her thinking was irrational, even a little bit crazy, but that was how she felt: half, maybe two-thirds, out of her mind.
Shortly after stumbling across the shack, she’d found herself near the peak of a small hill, and she’d taken the opportunity to call Lucas. It had been impossible to get through to him on the cell phone while she’d been deep in the woods, but in the more open air at the top of the hill, she reached him easily. He was still in the hospital, he said, getting chewed out for not taking better care of himself. He sounded cheerful, though, and she remembered all the times he’d put on that happy voice to boost Sophie’s spirits. He was doing it for her now, but she was not as easily cheered as Sophie had been. And, as it turned out, he could not keep up the act for long.
“Janine,” he said, after he’d been quiet for a moment, “I think you should come home.”
“Do you need me?” she asked.
“Of course I need you, but that’s not it. It’s just…it’s time to let go, Jan.”
She felt a stab of betrayal. “But I haven’t found her yet,” she said.
“It’s been too long,” he said. “I’m getting worried about you.”
&nbs
p; “I’m close,” she said. “I think the cabin must be nearby.”
She heard him sigh as he gave up the fight. “Take care of yourself, okay?”
“I will,” she said. “You, too.”
She’d hung up the phone and continued her trek, walking in what she hoped was the direction of the log cabin.
Now she was turned around and aware of how the light in the forest was beginning to fade. She looked at her watch: five o’clock. She would have to head back to the road soon if she hoped to get out of the woods before dark. Just a little farther, she told herself.
She had walked another ten yards or so when she heard something in the brush to her right and stopped to listen.
Quiet. Everything was still. Then the rustling sound came again. She’d heard any number of squirrels and birds and rabbits and other small animals scratching in the undergrowth during her afternoon in the woods, but this was different.
“Sophie?” she said, her voice softer than she’d intended. “Sophie?” she called again, louder this time.
The rustling subsided, then began again, and she walked slowly in its direction, stopping short as she spotted the source of the sound: a dog was digging wildly in the earth, leaves and twigs flying out from behind his front paws. Broad-headed and bony-shouldered, his yellow coat mangy and matted, the dog turned his head toward her and bared white teeth.
Janine froze. She looked away from the mongrel, afraid to antagonize him further, and she let her breath out when the dog suddenly turned and trotted off in the opposite direction. Her gaze was drawn to the bare earth where he had been digging. There was something there, something pale in color, something that didn’t belong in nature.