Something New (26 page)

His arms crossed, looking like a guard, Rodrigo nodded. “I know.”

Moving across the room, Braden came to sit at Abby’s side. “Do you remember anything else?”

“I remember wishing my mother would wake up. Somewhere inside me I knew they were dead, but they were my parents, you know, so there was this big chunk of me hoping that somehow they weren’t and would be fine if someone would come help them.” Abby swiped her cheeks with the heels of her hands and was surprised to find them dry today. “I’m told I was screaming endlessly, but I don’t recall doing that.”

“Can you remember if you looked around the room?” Braden flipped through the pages of his file. “Was there anything out of place or missing? Something beyond the obvious that wasn’t right? It might help if you walked around.”

“No. Well…” Abby’s fingers shook, but she let them run along the perimeter of the room as she walked. Abruptly, she came to a stop. “This was my mom’s side of the bed.” Using her hands, Abby framed out a small table. “She had a picture of me and my dad on her nightstand. I was a baby, and he was holding me at the hospital. I always used to touch it when I came into their room. I think I looked up for it when I knelt down next to my mom.” Rushing to the exact spot where her mom had lain, Abby crouched and stared at the emptiness where the picture would have been. “But it was gone. It was definitely gone.”

Braden thumbed through his file again, made an affirmative noise, and then stooped by Abby’s side. “Moved but not taken. It’s here on the floor in one of the evidence photos.” He showed her a picture that had no blood or body in it, just a depiction of the photo frame, the glass shattered, against a wall. “It must have become part of the casualties in the struggle with the killer.”

“That’s it.” Abby fingered the small depiction of her vibrant, smiling dad. “I loved that picture. I don’t have one for myself.”

“I’m sorry.” Braden rubbed her shoulder. “Evidence wouldn’t have kept a picture all these years. Otherwise, I’d see if I could get it for you.”

Brushing aside the whisper of old longing, Abby said, “It’s all right.” Abby’s hiding place loomed behind an accordion wall of slatted white wood. “I want to go up in the attic now.”

“Wait.” Rodrigo put a hand on Abby’s shoulder before she even got to her feet. “Let me go up there first and check it out. Braden,” he said as he moved and jimmied open the closet, “can you get the ladder for me?”

Braden leaned the file against the wall by the door. “Be right back.”

Abby matched Rodrigo’s stance of hands clasped at his back where he blocked access to the closet. “I’ll be all right,” she told him, nudging right up against his immovable force. “I know it’s going to be a lot tighter up there than I remember, and probably a mess too.”

“It’s also possibly less structurally sound,” Rodrigo said, no negotiation or wiggle room in his voice. “Let me crawl around up there first, and if I think it’s all right, you can go up. I’m not trying to stop you, Bit.” He planted his hand on the wall, dipped down, and invaded some of her space. “I just don’t want you falling through the ceiling and getting hurt.”

“All right. That’s fine.” She beamed at him. “See? You know what you’re doing, and I don’t, so I don’t have a problem with your plan.” Leaning in, she pecked a kiss on his warm, stubbly cheek. “When you’re reasonable and explain yourself, I can work with you.”

He snagged her lips with a fast kiss. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

Braden returned with the ladder. “Here you go.”

Murmuring a “thanks,” Rodrigo opened the short double-sided ladder under the covered hole in the closet ceiling, climbed up, and pushed the rectangle of wood aside. “Hold on to the ladder for me, will you?” he called down. “I’m going to climb through.”

Braden steadied the metal with his arms and legs, and Rodrigo hoisted himself through the dark hole.

“Hand me up a flashlight, Bit.” Rodrigo’s dark arm appeared through the opening. “It’s fucking dark as hell up here. Musty too.” She could hear him cough and clear his throat.

Once Abby handed a flashlight up to him, Rodrigo disappeared from sight. The occasional groan of wood or a banging noise—sounded to Abby like Rodrigo using his hand to hit against the flooring—and an eternity later, Rodrigo poked his head through the opening again, his face smudged and cobwebs putting silver in his hair. “I feel confident the attic is still in good shape, but I don’t want more than one person up here at a time.” He lowered himself down feet first to the top rung on the ladder and joined Abby and Braden in the closet. “You go up.” With his hand on Abby’s back, Rodrigo put her in front of the ladder’s rungs. “There are bugs and droppings and all kinds of nasty stuff up there, so be careful. You shouldn’t be up there for more than a short time either. Braden and I will stand on the ladder and watch you from here.”

After depositing her purse on the floor, Abby climbed up the ladder and pulled herself through to the attic. Shadows overtook the entire area, leaving Abby empty of nostalgia or a tug on her heart. Rodrigo appeared with flashlight in hand and passed it to her. Braden joined him a second later and used her second flashlight to direct a beam of light across the floorboards, creating a dust-filled streak of illumination in the darkness.

Turning the light back on himself so Abby could clearly see his face, Braden said, “I’ll train this flashlight in whatever direction you crawl, and hopefully that will help to guide you too.”

Her smile and her entire body feeling tight, Abby nodded. “Thanks.”

Now. Here it is
. Abby turned herself around, away from Rodrigo and Braden, and pointed her light into one corner of the musty space. As promised, Braden directed his flashlight alongside hers and doubled her ability to see.
But to see what? What the heck am I hoping to find?

Abby stalled in place, staring at nothing. Back in her rooms or in any of the dozen foster homes she’d ever lived in, she could envision her attic playroom clear as day. She could always close her eyes, cover her ears to block out the world, and hear her parents’ voices and picture them crawling around so as not to bang their heads on the angled roof. Now, here she was, crouched in the very place, and she could not see either one of them, hear them, and didn’t have any idea what to do to help solve their murders.

Behind her, Braden startled her, making her grab her chest, as he said, “You mentioned this morning that you needed to look in the den. Can you remember what that means now?”

The vents. Right.

The nudge from Braden got Abby out of her stupor. She started to crawl as remnants of her latest dream came back to her. “When I was hiding up here,” she talked back toward Braden and Rodrigo, needing to remind herself they were close by, “I was looking through these vents in the floor. I think I was hoping I’d see my mom or dad. I started at the kitchen but nobody was there.” Abby squeezed her eyes shut as her knee landed on something that
crunched
. Reaching the kitchen vent, just like that day, Abby looked through, down to an empty space. “Then, as I was going to the vent where I could see my dad’s den, the phone rang, so I crawled real fast to that vent so I could look down into the hallway.”

As Abby repeated that pattern on her hands and knees, Braden’s voice reached her from across the attic. “They collected the machine as evidence. It was your neighbor calling because you’d run from her house when she was babysitting you. Do you remember that?”

Looking down into the empty hallway, pieces of that day mixed in Abby’s mind with the dream she’d had last night and flooded every bit of that day over her in a torrent. “Yes.” The flash of dark blue blurred a line before her eyes right now, as it had done that day. “That was why he left,” she whispered, her voice suddenly thick. “When Mrs. Bruno called, the killer cursed and then ran out the front door. I saw an arm and part of a shoulder in a blue shirt. The arm and shoulder were thick, like a muscular man’s.”

“The detectives on the case at the time figured the phone call scared the murderer off,” Braden answered. “Mrs. Bruno’s statement says she was coming to get you—which her recorded phone message backs up—but then one of her sons fell out of one of their orange trees. She rushed him to the emergency room instead, so she didn’t come for you right away.”

“No, she didn’t come.” Although Abby didn’t move a muscle, she could feel her eight-year-old body push out of her adult skin and make that trek across the attic and down the rope ladder, straight into a nightmare. “She said she was going to come.” Abby’s voice sounded high and tight, and her throat hurt. “When I felt sure the man wasn’t trying to trick me, and wasn’t hiding outside waiting for me to show myself, I climbed out of the attic to wait for Mrs. Bruno.” Abby squinted as if it would help see through the blur of her memories attached to that day. “I don’t think she came for a really long time.”

“Approximately six hours,” Braden supplied.

“Leaving you with just your parents in that room?” Rodrigo sounded like someone had gutted him. “Son of a bitch.”

“Mrs. Bruno admits she forgot about you.” Braden filled in some of the blanks. “When she finally got her kid home from the ER, she remembered. Then she started worrying because your mom hadn’t called to find out why you’d come home. Then she called your house again, and still nobody answered. That’s when she sent her husband over to see if everything was all right. He’s the one who found you.”

“I don’t remember that,” Abby murmured, trying to recall short, beefy Mr. Bruno in her parents’ room with her.

“You’d been screaming so much, honey,” Braden said, his voice so terribly gentle, as if he were handling the child she had been back then. “It’s noted in the file that the physician who looked at you said your throat was like hamburger. I’m sure you were in a severe state of shock. It makes sense that you don’t remember everything and had trouble talking about what you had seen.”

Abby look down through the vent to the hallway, but in her head she saw herself watching an entirely different scene. “I could see my mom through the slats in the closet doors before she died. She didn’t speak, but her eyes told me to be quiet.” Abby swung her flashlight around to Braden and Rodrigo, studying their shaded, angular profiles. “So I was.”

Braden nodded, almost imperceptibly. “For over two years.”

“Yeah.”

“Do you think that’s why the killer never went after you again?” Rodrigo asked.

Abby started. “What do you mean?”

She could see Rodrigo’s face turn grim. “That bastard was looking for you to kill you. Why didn’t he come after you again later? It makes me cold inside to even think about it, but you were still a witness.”

Before Abby could say she’d never even thought about that, Braden said, “That would have been way too risky. Abby was no longer in a rural area. She was living in town, in addition to having detectives and child psychiatrists checking in on her. There’s no way the killer could have made a move for her without being caught. I’m sure he laid low in terror at first, but then days, weeks, and months go by without anything happening to him. The police are pursuing Cormack, the news is reporting the child found in the house is mute and traumatized, and I bet he just started breathing easier. When Abby doesn’t dispute Cormack as the guy, the real killer probably realized that Abby either didn’t see anything or wasn’t even there, and he’s home free.”

Rodrigo nodded. “That makes sense,” he said, even though he still looked dark and fierce.

“And he was right.” Abby felt sick to her stomach admitting that. “He was home free.”

The light flashed across Rodrigo’s eyes, and they suddenly gleamed. “Until now, Bit.”

“But not if we don’t find some new concrete evidence that I can use as leverage to keep this case open.” Braden moved the beam of light around the entire attic, momentarily lighting up every nook and cranny in the room. “Abby, why don’t you try to focus on why you wanted to get into the attic again. You said you looked for your mom in the kitchen that day”—he flashed the light on the first vent—“and you wanted to look for your dad in his den.” He swooped the band of light across and spotlighted the second. “Only, the phone rang, so you went to the hallway vent instead.” He focused the flashlight back to where Abby knelt.

“This is where I stayed,” Abby shared. “Watching, to make sure the killer didn’t come back. After that, I thought Mrs. Bruno was coming to help, so I never went and looked for my dad.”

“But he wasn’t there, honey,” Braden responded. “He was in the bedroom, already dead, which you know. So why would you wake up this morning with such a need to come see the den?”

Tension began pressing behind Abby’s eyes, pushing for the beginnings of a powerful headache. “I don’t know.” She rubbed her nape, trying to work the knots out so she could think clearly and remember. “It’s where I was in the dream when I woke up, I guess. It was on my mind, and you guys were asking me what was going on, so it’s what I said.” Folded on her knees, Abby pressed her cheek against her thighs and looked at Rodrigo and Braden over the lines of light connecting them. “Back then, where I was in my dream, I don’t think I’d wrapped my brain around the fact that my mom and dad really were dead. Especially my father, because I couldn’t see him from where I was in the closet. I heard him gurgle and try to scream, but I had no visual of him, so I guess I hoped he was still alive and would go to his favorite room to call for help.”

With cramped legs, Abby turned herself around and started crawling back to the second vent, pushing through the places inside her mind that told her to stop. “My dad had a desk and a phone in there, and I guess I’d just twisted it in my head that he would be there if I looked.”

Once Abby got to the metal grate in the floor, she pressed her face down into the dusty slats of metal. Like a mirage, before her very eyes, the taupe room below swirled to shades of blue and gray with accents of oak everywhere. She could see the back of her dad’s auburn head as he stood at his desk, his back to the room. Then, rough shouts in her father’s voice that didn’t make any sense to Abby sounded like they consumed the entire house. They burst up into the attic right now, making Abby jerk backward and tuck her knees against her chest, as if her father were in that room right this second and could see her watching him.