Fantasy Life (10 page)

“No, Mommy. Please.”

“Have you seen what’s there, Emily?”

Emily nodded her head against Lyssa’s shoulder.

“What is it?”

Emily’s entire frame became rigid.

“Em?” Lyssa said, waiting for an answer.

“Can we go home?” Emily’s voice was plaintive.

“You’re Mrs. Walters?”

Lyssa was beginning to hate that question. This time, it came from a squat man wearing a cotton dress shirt with the sleeves rolled past his elbows, and a pair of black pants. His blond hair was badly cut, and he was sunburned in the bald spot on his crown.

“Not anymore,” Lyssa said coolly.

“But you were married to Reginald Walters?”

For my sins, Lyssa thought. But she didn’t say that. Instead, she said, “My daughter’s obviously suffered some kind of trauma, Mr.—?”

“Detective Volker, ma’am, and I’m sorry for the trauma. But we have to keep moving on our investigation. Maybe Officer Dassen could hold your daughter for a moment?”

Emily clung tighter to Lyssa. Lyssa’s arms and back were growing tired. She hadn’t held her daughter like that in years.

“Em,” Lyssa said, “let me take you to your towel and your book. I’ll join you in just a minute, okay? You’ll be able to see me the whole time.”

Emily let Lyssa carry her as if she were still three. It was work carrying Emily up the lawn. Lyssa had done it countless
times when Emily was little, but Emily wasn’t that little anymore.

When they reached the patio, Lyssa eased Emily down. Emily let go as if she hadn’t wanted to be held in the first place. Then she grabbed her towel as if it were a lifeline. She turned her back on Lyssa, making the point without speaking it—she had asked her mother to stay away from those reeds, and Lyssa wasn’t going to, so Emily wouldn’t watch.

Lyssa ran her hand on her daughter’s damp hair, then turned, and gasped. The detective was standing closer to her than she expected, probably to try to hear what Lyssa and Emily were saying.

Fortunately they had said nothing.

“What’s going on, Detective?” Lyssa asked. The entire front of her shirt was wet. Emily had been soaked, which probably added a few pounds. Lyssa shook out the material, resisting the urge to squeeze it.

Volker glanced over his shoulder at Emily. Lyssa saw her through the corner of her eye. Emily had unrolled the towel and tossed her suit on the grass. She was drying her face and hair, her book at her feet beside her.

“One of your neighbors—”

“I no longer live here, Detective,” Lyssa said. “Reginald and I divorced in the spring.”

Volker made an acknowledging grunt, nodding his head once, as if he had already known the information. Maybe he had. Maybe he was testing her in some way.

“Well,” he said, as if they were having a comfortable conversation, “one of the neighbors called 911, said he heard a lot of screaming coming from the Walters place. Then another neighbor called, saying he saw a boat on fire near the Walters dock. They both stayed on the line—apparently they were from different parts of the neighborhood because the screaming couldn’t be heard on the second call. The dispatch got it on the first. The screaming was a man’s.”

A shiver ran down Lyssa’s back.

“If you don’t mind my asking,” the detective said, his hands clasped behind his back, “what are you doing here, Mrs. Walters? No one called you. We weren’t able to get a word out of your daughter, so we had no idea how to reach you.”

Lyssa licked her lower lip. It was chapped and dry, odd for this weather. She must have been doing that a lot.

She glanced at the reeds. The other officers were still there. One of them was talking on his radio, and another was crouched near the waterline.

The detective stopped walking halfway between the patio and the reeds. Lyssa did too.

From this position, she had to turn her head to see Emily. She did. Emily had finished drying off. She was sitting crosslegged on the flagstones, the book open in her lap. But she wasn’t reading. She was staring at the house.

“When I got home from work,” Lyssa said, “Emily was missing, and so was her bike. She’d been talking about swimming, and she’d never swam anywhere but here. I figured she had ridden to see her father.”

“Does she do that often?”

Lyssa sighed. “No. Right now, he’s not allowed to see her. My ex-husband is mentally ill, Detective. He threatened Emily’s life on more than one occasion.”

“And she still wanted to come here?”

“She had no idea.” Lyssa’s voice broke, surprising her. She had thought she was under complete control. “I thought it was better to keep that from her. I mean, he’s still her father after all. She didn’t need to know that her father focused his insanity on her. I want her to be a normal child.”

The detective grunted again. Lyssa couldn’t tell what that sound meant. Was it a disagreement? Or did it mean that Emily would have no chance at normal now?

“So you just drove over here?” the detective said.

“I figured if she wasn’t here, then I’d panic.” The words came out before Lyssa even thought them through.

The detective smiled slightly and nodded. “I got two daughters myself. Just when I thought I had them figured out, they’d do something I wouldn’t expect. And with my job, you think of the worst.”

What was he doing? Trying to bond with her? Trying to be sympathetic? She didn’t care about his life. She cared about that little girl on the flagstones, the one pretending to read while she longed for the childhood that had already escaped her.

“What happened here, Detective?” Lyssa asked.

“Wish to God I knew. All we know is that someone died, rather horribly, and your little girl is the only witness.”

Even though Lyssa had expected something bad, she hadn’t expected the words “rather horribly.” Her knees felt weak. “The boat fire?” she asked.

“There was no boat. But there was a fire.”

Volker put a hand on her arm. The gesture seemed comforting and demanding at the same time. He helped her forward, leading her to the reeds.

“Have you ever seen a dead body before, Mrs. Walters?”

Why hadn’t she corrected him about her name? She had corrected the female officer.

“No,” she said. “Not outside of funeral homes and the Discovery Channel, anyway.”

Volker nodded. “This isn’t pleasant at the best of times. The first one, though, is always the worst.”

The ground was dry and unfamiliar. There used to be a bit of a marsh here, water seeping around the shoes. But the summer drought had apparently taken care of that.

“Then why can’t it wait until the body’s been taken to a morgue and maybe cleaned up a little?” Lyssa asked.

“Because, ma’am, if the body isn’t who we think it is, then our investigation proceeds differently.”

“Who do you think it is?” Her heart was pounding. She slowed as they approached the other officers, even though Volker kept the pressure on her arm.

“We’d prefer you to tell us, ma’am.”

They thought it was Reginald. She had known that somehow. It was the logical thing. Or they wanted her to rule out Reginald. And if she ruled him out, then he would probably become some kind of suspect, especially after what she had said about Emily.

Her hand went to her throat. She looked at Emily again. Her daughter hadn’t moved.

Suddenly all the pieces made sense. Of course. Reginald had set someone on fire, and Emily had tried to save him. That was why she was wet—she had tossed him in the lake, creating the burning-boat image for the other neighbor.

But even as Lyssa thought of that, she knew it wasn’t true. If there had been a fire anywhere near the shore or on the deck, there would be evidence of it, particularly considering how dry the grass was. And there wasn’t.

“Mrs. Walters, please,” the detective said. “Let’s just get this over with.”

She nodded, shook his hand off her arm, and walked to the reeds herself. Two of the police officers parted as she came, just enough to give her a view of the reeds.

They were flattened in the middle and gone on the lake side. The other cops stayed in their positions, perhaps protecting the crime scene or just continuing their work. Lyssa couldn’t see what they were focused on until she reached the first two officers’ sides.

She saw the feet first. They looked surprisingly normal—untouched in any way. They were bare; the toes as long as fingers and the black hairs sprouting from the top of the arch were as familiar to her as her own.

The ankles seemed naked and vulnerable—Reginald was not a man who looked good in shorts. To Lyssa’s surprise, her eyes filled and she didn’t blink. She couldn’t. She didn’t want to cry for him.

That smell she had noticed when she’d first got near the dock was stronger here, only it had a damp quality to it, like wood from a fire that had just been doused. Only this smell wasn’t woodsmoke.

Her stomach churned. She clasped her hands together and held them against her ribs, as if she were trying to control the nausea rolling inside her. She couldn’t take her gaze from those feet, knowing that everything else she saw in these weeds would be infinitely worse.

No one spoke. Even the man crouching near the top of the reeds watched her. They all seemed to be waiting for her verdict, as if they had prepared this body especially for her.

She wanted to laugh at the ludicrous thought, but knew it wouldn’t be appropriate. Any release of emotion at this time wouldn’t be right, because once she let the emotion out, she wouldn’t be able to rein it back in and she had to, for Emily. Lyssa had to be strong.

Lyssa swallowed the bile that rose in her throat and made herself look at the rest of the body.

She wished she hadn’t. There was no torso, only a blackened mess. The stench came from there, as if the fire had started inside him and burned its way out.

The pain must have been incredible. No one deserved that. Especially not someone she had once loved.

Someone Emily still loved.

Lyssa blinked, but her eyes were dry and sore. The stench was palpable. She was slightly dizzy, and she knew if she stood here much longer, she would pass out.

Her gaze moved upward one last time. To his face.

It still looked like Reginald. Reginald, after a bad sunburn or too much time in the wind. Or maybe he had stood in front of an open oven too long.

His skin was red and cracked, his lips swollen, his eyes sunken into his face. They were open in a way he never kept them in life, making him look startled, even though the rest of his face had no expression at all.

His eyebrows, thick, bushy, and so much a part of his humor, were gone, burned away, like the cowlick in the center of his forehead. All of the hair around his face was gone, and she wondered briefly if he looked the same in the back.

But the fire had come outward. She knew that as if she had seen it happen.

She swallowed again, her Adam’s apple bobbing dryly against her parched throat.

“It’s Reginald,” she said.

One of the men beside her put his arm around her shoulder and turned her around. She needed his help. Her feet weren’t working right. He led her to a space on the grass where she and Reginald had once kept a horseshoe pit—now overgrown and weedy—and she sank onto it.

Her entire body was trembling. The screaming—that had been Reginald. The fire—that had been him too.

And Emily had been here, alone with him.

Emily, who was physically fine. Just a little wet.

The detective sat down beside Lyssa. His face was filled with compassion. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said. “We just had to know if that was him or if he had somehow caused this.”

“And then you’d go looking for him.” Her voice, raspy, small, didn’t sound like her own.

“The neighbors said he’d been irrational lately.”

Irrational.
Such a small word for all the damage she saw around her. The cracked windows, the ruined flagstones, the destroyed path.

Irrational. Reginald had become so much more than irrational, and his famous family, so concerned with its own reputation, hadn’t foreseen the problem.

Now they would have an even bigger PR mess than they’d realized.

Another shiver ran through her. Emily. Emily had been here alone and the tabloid press would swallow her whole.

Lyssa raised her head.

Emily was watching her, worry on her small face.

“Can you ask your daughter what happened?” Detective Volker said.

“I’m sure she tried to save him, Detective,” Lyssa said.

“Her hands aren’t charred,” he said.

And that was when Lyssa knew. She would get no real sympathy from this man. Something terrible had happened to Reginald while Emily was here, and that made Emily at best a witness, at worst a suspect.

Lyssa stood and walked over to her daughter, without saying another word to the detective.

Emily stood too, that expression still on her face. She hunched forward, as if she were protecting herself, but from what Lyssa did not know.

As Lyssa got close, Emily whispered, “I’m sorry, Mommy.”

And Lyssa didn’t have the needed moment to compose her face. Her daughter saw the full measure of her horror as the realization hit her.

The Buckingham powers worked away from Anchor Bay. Emily had come into her own, and Lyssa hadn’t even noticed. Cassie had said that Emily would be more powerful than all of them, but Lyssa thought it a scare tactic, a way to make Lyssa run back to Cassie and Athena, who would turn Emily into another Buckingham witch.

Emily saw the look and matched it, horror for horror. She turned away, bending down, grabbing her book and stumbling
blindly toward her towel. Her world was ending—her father gone, her mother disgusted by her—and Lyssa knew the feeling. She remembered it so incredibly well.

“Em, hon,” she said.

But Emily wouldn’t stop. She bent over, reached for the towel, and her fingers didn’t grasp it.

Lyssa caught her, wrapped her arms around her, and pulled her up. Lyssa’s back protested again, but she didn’t care. She turned Emily around.

“Em, honey, I’m sorry too. I love you. I love you more than anything.”

But the words did nothing. Emily kept her head down, refusing to meet Lyssa’s gaze.