The Last Kiss Goodbye (25 page)

Jenna broke off. Her eyes closed.

“Everything’s all right now. We’ve got you safe,” Mrs. McDaniels told her daughter.

Taking a deep breath, Jenna nodded, then opened her eyes and looked at Tony. “That’s when we saw him: when the water started getting up to our chests and Laura was freaking out and crying and we were trying to tell her how to swim. He leaned over the top of the well and shined a light down on us. At first I thought it was somebody come to help us and I was begging him to get us out of there. Then he must have slipped up with the light and I saw him. He was wearing a black hoodie or cloak or something with one of those Guy Fawkes masks, you know, all white with the creepy smile. And he said—and he said—”

When she broke off again, Tony waited a few seconds and then asked, “What did he say?”

Charlie could almost see the chill passing over Jenna’s skin. The girl gave a long, shivery sigh, then squared her shoulders. She looked straight at Tony. “He said, ‘Two of you are going to die here tonight. Maybe all three of you are. I’ll let one of you live—
if
you kill the others. Kill the others, and I’ll let the last one alive go home.’ ” Jenna’s voice was cold and clear suddenly, as if she was repeating words that had burned themselves into her brain. Which those had, Charlie knew. She also knew that they would haunt Jenna for the rest of her life.

Charlie’s heart ached for the girl.

“Then what happened?” Tony prompted.

“Then he threw a knife down into the water, and he said one of us should grab it and go after the others, but none of us would. He kept filling up the well. He’d fill it and leave us swimming in it for a while then let it drain, and each time he started to fill it up was worse than the last because he left the water in longer and we knew what was coming. Raylene and I could swim but it was awful and scary and the water was so cold and it kind of swirled around, which made it worse because there was a current that felt like it was trying to suck us down. We started realizing we couldn’t do it forever. Laura kept trying but she really couldn’t swim and she was getting tired and we were getting tired from trying to help her. After what I think was the fourth time, when most of the water had drained out again, and Laura, like, collapsed on the bottom, Raylene said, ‘She’s not going to make it,’ and when I looked around she had picked up this rock. She was kind of sneaking across the bottom of the well toward Laura, and I looked at her and she said, ‘She’s going to drown anyway,’ and then she hit Laura in the head with the rock. Laura started screaming, but Raylene kept hitting her and hitting her in the head with that rock and there was blood everywhere and her brains were coming out and then Laura just—she just curled up in the mud and died.”

Jenna drew her knees to her sharply and covered her face with both hands. Charlie could see the shudders that wracked her.

“Baby.” Eyes welling, Mrs. McDaniels rose from her chair.

Jenna’s hands dropped. Tears spilled from her eyes. “Oh, Mama, that’s when I—”

“Jenna,” the lawyer interrupted. “That’s enough for now. Agent Bartoli, please turn off the tape recorder.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Jenna started to sob. Mrs. McDaniels wrapped her daughter in a hug, which Jenna returned. The sight of mother and daughter so lovingly entwined made Charlie’s throat tighten—her overly emotional reaction was, she knew, the result of her own mother issues, and nothing to do with the case. Tony turned off the tape recorder as requested, although as he punched the button he said, looking first at the lawyer and then at Judge McDaniels, “It would really help us to hear the rest of her story. We’re all on the same team here.”

When the lawyer shook his head and the judge answered with, “That’s all my daughter has to say,” Tony said, “Could I talk to you two for a minute in private?” and when they agreed the three men went into the hall.

Out of the corner of her eye, Charlie was aware of Michael moving protectively closer to her, and supposed that with Tony gone he felt he had to up his bodyguard-to-the-vulnerable-female game. But he didn’t say anything. He just leaned against the wall near her, his arms crossed over his chest, a stalwart sentinel she knew she could count on to have her back. As her glance found him, and their eyes held for the briefest of seconds, she immediately felt calmer, more centered. She recognized the ridiculousness of it: how screwed up was her world when the ghost of Michael Garland served as a grounding presence? That’s when Charlie remembered that he might be—
might
be—the exact same kind of monster as the one they were hunting.

A chill slid down her spine.

I have to know the truth.
No matter what, she had to ascertain to her own satisfaction whether Michael was innocent or guilty. Not knowing would eventually tear her apart.

The door opened. Judge McDaniels poked his head into the room.

“Jill, could you come out here for a minute?”

“I’m not leaving her.” Mrs. McDaniels was shaking her head even as she looked around at him. With her head on her mother’s shoulder now, Jenna was crying in deep, shuddering gasps. Listening to her, Charlie remembered the fear and the pain, the shattering guilt, the desperation, she herself had felt all those years ago, and her heart broke for the girl.

“Mrs. McDaniels?” Charlie moved closer. “If you need to go talk to them, I’ll stay here with Jenna. She won’t be alone.”

“It’s important, Jill,” Judge McDaniels insisted.

Jenna let go of her mother and wiped her eyes. “Mama, I’ll be all right.”

“Are you sure?”

Jenna nodded, and with a searching look at Charlie, Mrs. McDaniels joined the others in the hall.

“So is this some kind of trick to get me to spill my guts to you now that we’re alone?” Jenna’s eyes still brimmed with tears. Her voice was shaky in the aftermath of her sobs. It was also faintly hostile.

Charlie shook her head. “No, I promise. Anyway, I’m a doctor. All you have to do is claim doctor/patient privilege and I can’t repeat anything you say to me.”

She watched Jenna absorb that.

“Last night you kept talking to … some invisible person. What was up with that?”

Luckily, Charlie had already anticipated that Jenna might ask her that particular question.

“I don’t like to talk about my beliefs, but I will tell you that when I’m under a great deal of stress, as I was last night, I tend to pray out loud,” she said with dignity.

“Oh.”

Out of the corner of her eye Charlie saw Michael’s wry smile. She saw Jenna digesting her words, saw the last of her hostility fade away. Jenna’s eyes were red-rimmed and still wet with tears, and the occasional soblike breath still shook her. Charlie remembered way too vividly how it had felt to be in Jenna’s shoes: terrifying; disorienting; soul-crunchingly lonely. As if her whole life had just been destroyed, and she had been left in a place she didn’t recognize, in a place that didn’t even feel like it was real, with nobody who knew her, or that she knew. And she made a decision.

“Jenna,” she said. “I know what you’re going through. Fifteen years ago, I survived an attack by a serial killer, too.”

The girl dashed away a tear that had started to slide down her cheek and stared at Charlie suspiciously. “What are you talking about?”

“When I was seventeen, my best friend and her whole family were murdered by a serial killer. I was in the house. I had a chance to save my friend, but I was too afraid that he would catch me and kill me, too. I—ran away and hid.” Charlie hadn’t expected the punched-in-the-gut feeling the confession would give her. She had to stop talking and breathe.

“Is that the truth?” Jenna demanded.

Get a grip,
Charlie ordered herself fiercely, and nodded. Then she told Jenna about Holly.

By the time she was finished, she was sitting on the side of the bed and she and Jenna were holding hands.

“You’ll experience survivor’s guilt,” Charlie told her. “There will be days when you wonder why you lived and the others died. You’re going to feel depressed, and you’re going to feel afraid, and you’re going to feel angry. You may have nightmares. You may find yourself having flashbacks, or revisiting every little detail of what happened obsessively. You may lash out at the people who are trying to help you. All these things are normal reactions to the trauma you’ve been through. You’ll never forget what happened, and you are never going to be the same person you were before it happened. There will always be a before and an after. But I’m here to tell you that you can get through this, you can get your life back, you can go on and be successful and be happy and fall in love and—”

Charlie broke off when the door opened and the McDaniels, Mr. Andrews, and Tony filed back into the room. As they gathered around the bed, Charlie squeezed Jenna’s hand and relinquished her place to Jenna’s mother.

“So are you going to tell me what the summit meeting was about?” Jenna looked from one parent to the other.

Her father cleared his throat. “After talking to Agent Bartoli, we think it’s best if you tell him exactly what happened, exactly the way you told it to us.”

Jenna sucked in air. She seemed to shrink, like a child caught doing something wrong. “Dad …”

“You can tell them, baby,” Mrs. McDaniels said.

“I want you to start where you left off,” Tony said. “What happened after Laura died, Jenna?”

Jenna met Charlie’s eyes.

“It’s all right, Jenna,” Charlie said. “You can trust us.”

Jenna nodded, and closed her eyes. As she started to talk, with a nod at Judge McDaniels, Tony quietly turned the tape recorder back on.

“After Laura died, Raylene was kneeling there beside her holding that rock. The freak job at the top of the well yelled, ‘Only one more, and you get to go home,’ in like this gloating voice, and I knew he was talking to Raylene. I knew he meant she should kill me next.”

Jenna broke off then, and wet her lips. Her eyes opened, and she looked at her mother, whose face was tight with love and anguish. As she continued her voice was barely above a whisper. “So when she stood up, I grabbed the knife out of the mud and I stabbed her with it. I stabbed her and stabbed her and stabbed her until she was dead. Then the freak job yelled down, ‘Congratulations, we’ve got a winner!’ and he lowered a ladder into the well and I climbed out and he told me to run. And I did.”

By that time she was utterly white and tears were sliding down her cheeks.

“You only did what you had to,” Mrs. McDaniels sounded like the words were wrenched out of her.

“All right, you’ve got enough,” Judge McDaniels said abruptly to Tony, as his wife wrapped her arms around their daughter and Jenna burst into noisy sobs. Watching mother and daughter clinging together, Charlie had to turn away. The moment felt too private to witness.

“Thank you for your cooperation.” Tony spoke to Judge McDaniels in a low voice as he scooped up his tape recorder and dropped it into his pocket. “We’ll be in touch.”

Charlie, meanwhile, pulled a business card from her wallet and scribbled her cell phone number on the back of it. By the time she and Tony had said their goodbyes to Judge McDaniels and Mr. Andrews, Jenna was once again leaning back on her pillows while her mother sat beside her clutching her hand. Jenna’s breathing was still ragged, her eyes still gleamed with tears, but there was determination in the tilt of her chin and a new strength in the firm line of her mouth. Jenna, Charlie felt sure, would be all right. Holding the card up so that Jenna could see it, Charlie put it down on the bed table, within her reach.

“Call me if you want to talk,” she told Jenna.

“Thanks.” Jenna’s voice was wobbly, but she managed the smallest of smiles.

“Yes, thank you, Dr. Stone,” Mrs. McDaniels echoed over her shoulder, and Charlie nodded by way of a reply.

“You know what? You’re a real nice person, Charlie Stone,” Michael said in her ear as they were leaving the room. “And take it from me, that’s a rare thing.”

Charlie couldn’t respond, because right at that moment Tony was exchanging a few quick words with Sager and the men with him, and with Special Agents Flynn and Burger, who had just shown up to relieve Sager and crew from door guarding duty, and she was surrounded by the living. Then Tony took her arm and ushered her toward the freight elevator. He’d made arrangements for Kaminsky and Buzz to switch cars with them, leaving the rented Lincoln near the loading dock and driving off in her car. That worked like a charm—half the media types present were busy chasing Kaminsky and Buzz, and the other half, the half that held their positions, paid no attention to the Lincoln when Tony nosed it out of the parking lot. As they drove, she and Tony talked—for one thing, she asked, “What
was
the confab in the hall about?” and he told her that he had decided to tell the elder McDaniels and the lawyer about the Gingerbread Man’s MO so they wouldn’t be afraid Jenna would face legal problems if she confessed to killing Raylene. All the while Charlie was conscious of a warm little glow pulsing deep inside her. It served as a small but steady counterpoint to the cold wave of horror that the visit to Jenna had evoked, and it came, she knew, from Michael’s words.

It wasn’t so much what he had said, as how he had said it: there had been, she thought, genuine admiration in his tone. Approval and, yes, affection had been mixed in there somewhere, too.