ALL THE PRETTY GIRLS BOOK 1 (13 page)

She sat back and thought for a minute. At the very least, maybe she could find out if the poems were originals or copies. She bookmarked the site and pulled up Google, typing a line in from Susan Palmer’s poem.
A
perfect woman, nobly planned,
she typed, and hit enter. Bingo.

Apparently, the Southern Strangler wasn’t creative after all. The poem was written by William Wordsworth. 4,950 hits on the search engine. From a poem called “She Was a Phantom of Delight.” Well, how apropos.

Whitney realized she was on the right track. She did the same thing for Jeanette Lernier’s note.
For a
creature not so bright and good.
Whoa, that had 304,000 hits. She pulled up the poem and realized that both notes were simply stanzas from the same poem. She printed it, whipping the paper out of the printer almost before it was through and read aloud.

“She was a Phantom of delight

When first she gleamed upon my sight;
A lovely Apparition, sent

To be a moment’s ornament;

Her eyes as stars of Twilight fair;
 

Like Twilight’s, too, her dusky hair;
But all things else about her drawn
From May-time and the cheerful Dawn;
A dancing Shape, an Image gay,

To haunt, to startle and waylay.

“I saw her upon nearer view,

A Spirit, yet a Woman, too!

Her household motions light and free,
And steps of virgin-liberty;

A countenance in which did meet

Sweet records, promises as sweet;

A Creature not too bright or good

For human nature’s daily food,

For transient sorrows, simple wiles,
Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears and smiles.

“And now I see with eye serene

The very pulse of the machine;

A Being breathing thoughtful breath,
A Traveller between life and death;
The reason firm, the temperate will,
Endurance, foresight, strength and skill;
A perfect Woman, nobly planned,

To warn, to comfort and command;

And yet a Spirit still, and bright

With something of angelic light.”

She finished and thought hard for a moment. Something wasn’t right. Reading through it again, she realized she wasn’t seeing the lines from the latest poem she’d received. She followed the same process. The author of the poem fragment in the newest note was William Butler Yeats. She printed it out and read it aloud.

“Leda and the Swan

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By his dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

“How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?

How can anybody, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

“A shudder in the loins, engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.

“Being so caught up,

So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?”

And that poem covered Jessica Porter, Shauna Davidson and the latest missing, yet to be found but in all probability very dead, Marni Fischer. Wow, that was pretty impressive imagery. But Whitney wasn’t the expert in literature.

She walked back to her desk and sat hard in the supple leather, making the chair squeak in protest. No, Whitney was no English major. That was her twin sister, Quinn. Her identical twin. Ashleigh Quinn Connolly Buckley, to be exact. Married to Jonathan “Jake”

Buckley III, she was the perfect Belle Meade housewife. A Junior League hostess extraordinaire. Mother to two of the most adorable children on earth, the twins, Jillian and Jake Junior.

Whitney felt a quick stab of regret. She hadn’t called the twins in a couple of weeks. She may try to stay out of her sister’s perfectly groomed hair, but the kids were another matter. Quinn couldn’t be more Whitney’s opposite if she tried. They’d heard the same thing growing up all their lives, especially since their teenage years. That’s when they really came into their identities. Their mother had always used their full names, in conversation, addressing them, discussing them. Sarah Whitney and Ashleigh Quinn went to school today. Sarah Whitney and Ashleigh Quinn are going to camp this summer. Sarah Whitney and Ashleigh Quinn, get down here right now. Finally, Sarah Whitney rebelled, insisting that she be called just plain Whitney. Ashleigh Quinn had concurred, going with her more esoteric moniker, Quinn. It had taken several months of arguments, but the girls had prevailed. They became Whitney and Quinn, and their personalities diverged along with their names.

One thought led to another and Whitney realized she hadn’t heard from her little brother in a while, either. Reese Connolly was so far off her radar most of the time that she forgot he existed. That’s how she always wanted it. Who said families had to be close?

Tamping down a moment of frustration, Whitney went to her stainless-steel refrigerator and pulled out a can of sugar-free Red Bull. Coffee and more caffeine, the secret to her figure. She jokingly called it the model diet. Cracking open the can, she stood at the sink, staring out the kitchen window at the huge birch tree in her backyard. A male cardinal parked his red feathers on the bird feeder, chirping contently while he ate his breakfast. Two squirrels barked at each other in a game of chase, and the breeze lightly shuffled leaves from the tree onto her deck. The Virginia creeper that was slowly strangling the bark from the tree reminded her of her past. Whitney had never quite recovered after her parents’

deaths. In an instant, all the comfort and stability she had known was gone. The Connollys were returning from an evening at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center, a drive they’d taken innumerable times. In a brutal collision, two loving, vivacious, happy people were stolen from their family by a drunk driver. Though it had been eight years, time hadn’t lessened her sense of loss. The uneasy peace their parents had provided between the siblings never fully recovered. The three children split their parents’ fortune, but the rift between them grew with each passing year.

Whitney struck out on her own, throwing herself into her work, building her career. It fell to Quinn to mother Reese, shepherding him through his final year of high school, then getting him settled at Vanderbilt. Quinn had met Jake Buckley by then, and was getting pretty hot and heavy with him, but Jake was a good guy. Waiting for Quinn’s little brother to get out of the house so they could marry wasn’t a big problem for him. Quinn’s money would cement his place in the world. 

The unwelcome thought of Reese made Whitney’s stomach turn. Even all these years later, she still resented him. Reese had always been an exceptional child, gifted in ways Whitney would never be. He was brilliantly smart and driven. He entered Vanderbilt when he was fifteen, finished his undergraduate coursework in two years and started in their medical school program. Now Reese was finishing his final year of residency in psychiatry.

Whitney thought back to the last time she’d seen him. It wasn’t a planned meeting, they’d just run into each other at Quinn’s home. He’d been talking about going to some godforsaken country in South America to work with a group operating on poor people. What lofty aspirations the boy had. Yet Quinn had been all dewy eyed about it, such an amazing opportunity, he’s so young, blah, blah, blah. Grudges could last a lifetime, Whitney knew that better than anyone. Quinn understood. She didn’t approve, she just understood. Maybe she should give her sister a call. She looked at the clock. Surely Quinn was finished with tennis or dropping the twins at school or whatever it was she did in the mornings with all of her and Jake’s money. Taking one last look at the birch tree, she shook off the past.

She picked up the phone and speed dialed her sister’s cell phone. The voice mail answered instead, requesting in Quinn’s perfectly cultured southern accent that she leave a message. Whitney hung up without saying a word, instantly relieved. She’d just try again later. Slamming the empty can into the sink, she walked back to her office. She wheeled her chair back to the desk and pulled out her file on the Southern Strangler. Maybe she could get some more work done on the background story. She was theorizing on many of the killer’s attributes, working off research that she had gathered over the years on serial kidnappers and killers. She worked quietly, the hour passing quickly. Closing the file, she stretched and decided it would be a good idea to hit Starbucks for another coffee. She always asked for Starbucks cards as presents, she lived off their espresso. She walked to the living room, gathering her purse, when something on the television screen caught her eye.

A News Alert was flashing across the screen. They’d found Marni Fischer.

She sat and turned up the volume. The anchor was intoning that Marni Fischer’s body had been found off Highway 81 in Roanoke, Virginia. Roanoke. Something niggled at the back of Whitney’s mind. She ran back into her office and pulled the file out again, reading the names of the cities involved.

“Huntsville, Baton Rouge, Jackson, Nashville, Noble, Roanoke. Huntsville, Baton Rouge, Jackson, Nashville, Noble, Roanoke.”

Her heart was starting to beat just a little faster. Hands shaking, she pulled out the notes again, copies of the poems she had printed from her e-mail. She read through them, her breath coming in little gasps. Read them again. And again. Then it hit her. She knew who the Southern Strangler was.

She dropped the files and grabbed her cell phone out of her purse. Journalistic creed be damned. Screw the anchor job in New York. She had to warn her sister. 

Taylor sat back in her chair, her hands entwined in her long blond hair. Sunlight glinted through the slats of the Venetian blinds behind her, the window one more small concession to her rising credibility in the world. The words of the doctor slapped through her brain like a pinball. Pregnant. Pregnant. Pregnant.

She ran the conversation with Dr. Gregory over and over in her head, as if she could rearrange the words, realign their meaning.

“That’s impossible. I’m not late. I haven’t ever been late. I think I’d know if I was late. And I’m on the Pill. Trust me, it’s not something I forget about. So you have to be wrong.”

“Taylor, these things happen. The tests are very sensitive, they can detect pregnancy hormones almost immediately. What you need to do is relax. I’m going to prescribe a prenatal vitamin for you and I want you taking one milligram of folic acid every day. No drinking, of course. And I don’t suppose I have to tell you no smoking?”

Taylor felt like throwing up. Psychosomatic, she told herself. She couldn’t have morning sickness just because the doctor told her she was pregnant.

“I’m telling you, Doc, this just can’t be. I never—”

“It can, and it is,” he said gently. “Now, I want you to make an appointment with your OB/GYN, and she can go over all of the additional information with you.”

His voice had quieted even more. “This is a blessing, Taylor. With the damage done to your body, you should be jumping for joy that it happened so soon. It’s going to be fine, I promise. I have to run now, but I’ll talk to you soon, okay?”

He’d hung up as soon as she whispered okay back to him. She stared at the phone receiver, then tossed it across the room like it was a snake that tried to bite her. Damn. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to have a baby. Just not now. At least, not until she knew if Baldwin was into that kind of stuff. They had been too busy doing what it took to make a kid rather than talking about the consequences. Consequences. Hell, she sounded like a thirteen-year-old in an after-school movie. What in the name of God was she going to do?

She picked up her cell phone and dialed Baldwin’s number. As soon as she hit Send, she hit End and put the phone down on the desk in front of her. The tears started to come, and she felt even worse. As a woman in her mid-thirties, she should be thrilled at the mere thought of a healthy child. Nearly everyone she knew had at least one child in the stable. The ones who didn’t were desperately trying—innocuous prescription bottles of Clomid suddenly appearing on the bathroom vanity, the fervent prayers that the little stick would turn pink and the bleeding wouldn’t begin. Then that heart-stopping moment when it did. The shots of Ovidrel, once daily, the woman bent in half in front of the mirror making sure her man is sticking her right. The prayers again that the maturation of the follicle would kick out that magic egg. The basal thermometers, the ovulation kits, tired husbands jacking off into plastic cups, their despair and embarrassment nearly as bad as their wives’ desire for offspring. The in vitro fertilization, the bank accounts dwindling, all in that desperate search for something permanent of themselves to be left on this earth. Most of these women had spent years trying not to get pregnant; suddenly finding themselves unable to fulfill that one promise of womanhood was more than they could take.

The level of guilt Taylor felt rose appreciably. She wasn’t trying to get pregnant. She didn’t want to be pregnant. Hell, she and Baldwin were just finding each other. How would that fragile union support another life?

They had never spoken of children. Their lives didn’t seem to have room for that kind of future right now. A knock on her door startled her. She quickly wiped away the tears, cleared her throat, mussed her hair and said, “Come in.”

The door opened and ADA Julia Page stepped into the room. Glancing over her shoulder, she shut the door behind her, then leaned back against it. She looked Taylor up and down.

“Bad time?”

“No, not at all. I was just…” Taylor shrugged as her voice trailed off. No need to explain herself. Julia wouldn’t be interested in the details.

Julia Page was one of the assistant district attorneys representing Davidson County. Smart as a whip and about as tall as a dandelion, she looked more like a Pomeranian fluffed out for Westminster than the cutthroat attorney that she was. Her light brown curls framed her face, making her seem innocent and pure, a tactic that had snowed many a criminal. They got on the stand and saw her sweet blue eyes and cupid-bow lips and just knew that this sweet young thing was no threat. How wrong they were.