Read The One I Left Behind Online
Authors: Jennifer McMahon
The One I Left Behind (11 page)
“Tara?” Reggie whispered. “You okay?”
She responded with a low groaning sound and her chin dropped down to her chest, eyes closed tight. Her shivering became more exaggerated.
Was she having some kind of epileptic fit? Or was all this possession stuff real? She knew it was neither, that Tara was just putting on a show, but still, as she watched Tara twitch, panic rose.
“Charlie?” Reggie said, “Something’s wrong with —”
“It’s cold here,” Tara said, her voice a snake-like hiss.
“Huh?” Charlie said, scrambling backward a little.
“It was cold where he kept me. There was a concrete floor, metal pipes.”
“What are you talking about, Tara?” Charlie asked, his voice sounding high and squeaky.
“My name is not Tara,” she said. Now that she’d raised her voice, Reggie detected the hint of a new and different accent, but couldn’t tell where it was from.
“Who are you?” Reggie asked, her mouth going dry. This wasn’t real. This was just Tara playing one of her games, taking things too far. But just like with all of Tara’s games, what choice did Reggie have but to play along? And wasn’t it kind of thrilling? Pretending that it just might be real. Tricking herself into believing so that her heart hammered while she waited for Tara to answer, even though she knew just what Tara would say.
Outside, the rain pounded on the roof. It was coming in through the windows, some drops making it all the way to Reggie’s arm, which turned to gooseflesh.
“Andrea,” Tara said, smiling. “My name is Andrea McFerlin.”
Reggie felt like she’d been hit in the stomach with a ball of lightning. The electricity moved through her, into arms and out her fingers, making them tingle as it discharged. She jerked her hands away from the Ouija board.
“Oh for God’s sake!” Charlie shouted, standing up and throwing the paper down. “That is so totally fucked up on so many levels, Tara. You are
sick
.” He slammed open the trapdoor and disappeared down into the rainy night. There was no denying that he was mad, but Reggie knew him well enough to see there was fear there as well. Charlie didn’t do well with the unexplained.
Tara remained in her trance state—if it was a trance—her chin resting on her chest. Reggie held her breath, not sure what might happen next. Tara didn’t move. Her breathing sounded raspy and strange.
“Do you know who he is?” Reggie asked, at last. “The killer?” More rain was coming in through the tarp, icy and cold. Reggie wrapped her arms around her chest, shivering.
“He’s no man and every man,” Tara said, her voice little more than a flutter. Reggie listened to Tara breathe in and out. Then she said, “There’s something else I know.”
Reggie leaned down, put her face right against Tara’s. She smelled like ashes and smoke. “What is it?” Reggie asked.
Tara sank lower down on the floor, her body going limp as a rag doll. When she spoke, it was a barely audible sigh:
“He’s already picked his next girl.”
October 16, 2010
Brighton Falls, Connecticut
“C
OCKSUCKING
W
ALMART,”
R
EGGIE
HISSED
. She gripped the steering wheel tight, clawing into it with her thumbnails. “Didn’t we just pass a Walmart?”
She would never have believed it possible that she’d get lost in her own hometown. Sure, it had been twenty-five years since she’d been back, but it was like the geography itself had changed.
In the beginning, Lorraine had invited Reggie back for Thanksgiving and Christmas (never going so far as to say anything like “It would be so nice to see you” but instead with a comment like, “George and I will have more than enough food—it’s a waste to have to throw things away”), but Reggie always made excuses: homework, projects, trips abroad. Eventually Lorraine stopped asking.
Reggie had turned off the GPS shortly after getting her mother into the truck back in Worcester. Vera was very suspicious of the device. “Who’s that talking? How does it know where we are? Who, exactly, is monitoring our whereabouts?”
Finally, Reggie pulled the plug, sure she could get back to Monique’s Wish from memory. She’d done fine until she hit the Airport Road exit; then it was as if she’d been dropped into a hall of mirrors.
“It’s the same Walmart,” her mother said in a sage voice.
“It can’t be the same,” Reggie said. “Because that would mean we’ve just gone in one big circle.” She wanted to cry.
Reggie took a deep breath, reminded herself that just months ago, she’d gone to build houses in Haiti during a cholera outbreak, for God’s sake—surely she could handle Brighton Falls, Connecticut.
Vera chuckled, wheezing. She whispered a word Reggie couldn’t quite hear. It might have been
cocksucking
.
Neck tense and head beginning to pound, Reggie scanned the four lanes of traffic along what she was sure had once been Main Street. If it hadn’t been for the welcome to brighton falls sign they’d passed a mile back, she would have doubted they were even in the right town, never mind on the right street. Thickets of glossy signs sprouted from shopping plaza after shopping plaza:
STARBUCKS, KFC, DICK’S SPORTING GOODS, CHILI’S, OLIVE GARDEN, HOME DEPOT
.
“I mean really, it doesn’t even seem like the same town, does it? I feel like we could be anywhere.”
Vera nodded. “Anywhere,” she said. “Say, did you remember to pack my clock?”
“Clock? What clock? I didn’t see any clock.”
“The grandfather clock in the front hall.”
Reggie knew just the one she meant; it was at Monique’s Wish. “You’ll see it soon, Mom.”
“Runs slow,” Vera said.
“You’re right, Mom,” Reggie said, remembering how once a day, they’d need to push it forward about fifteen minutes.
“We just have to find West Street, right?” Reggie said, more to herself than her mother. She’d ended up in a left-turn-only lane again somehow, and had to cut in front of a silver minivan to avoid being forced to turn into the parking lot dominated by an enormous liquor store. The driver threw up her hands, blasted the horn. Reggie waved in what she hoped was an apologetic manner.
Then Reggie’s eye caught on one of the signs up ahead: berr ford. The dealership run by Charlie’s uncle Bo. It was still there and had, in fact, grown to nearly three times its original size. There was a letterboard out front that said:
No tricks, just treats. Let us put you in a new truck by Halloween.
“Look, Mom! Bo Berr’s Ford dealership. Do you remember Bo?”
Vera’s eyes glazed over. “Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep and doesn’t know where to find them.”
“Um, you went to high school with him? Bo Berr?”
Vera didn’t respond.
Down the street from Berr Ford was First Avenue—the little turnoff that led to the police station. Reggie could see it there, set back from Main Street—an imposing gray granite building that had a new addition tacked onto the left side. The new part of building was covered in windows and had a roofline that was all wrong. Instead of blending with the original roof, it sort of
collided
with it. Reggie’s eye went from the offending addition to the original front steps, where the milk cartons had been left. The milk cartons and their gruesome contents.
“Okay, there’s West Street,” Reggie said, taking the sharp right turn a little too hard and fast. The railroad tracks that had once run alongside West Street had been paved over as a rails-to-trails bike path—the only development Reggie had seen yet that didn’t make her want to scream.
There were many more houses than Reggie remembered, and the once open field across from Millers’ Farm was now condos, each building holding identical rows of black front doors, vinyl-clad windows, and balconies with Weber grills. Reggie wondered how its occupants found their way into the right home each night.
At last they turned onto Stony Field Drive. The house on the corner had a fake graveyard on the front lawn. A green hand reached up, clawing its way out of its grave.
Reggie’s chest felt tight.
“Almost there, Mom,” she said, white-knuckling the steering wheel as she eased the Escape down the street, passing the ranch and Colonial houses that were just as she remembered. Neighbors whose lawns she and Charlie had mowed, who’d bought lemonade from her when she’d set up a stand, given her popcorns balls and Hershey bars on Halloween. Plastic bats and bedsheet ghosts hung from the trees, put up by a new generation of parents—perhaps the kids Reggie had gone to school with, now with little goblins of their own.
“Where?” Vera asked.
“Home,” Reggie said, the word catching in her throat as she signaled to turn up the gravel driveway, passing the old black metal mailbox. It still leaned to the left, never righted after Reggie sideswiped it when she was first learning to drive.
dufrane.
M
ONIQUE’S
W
ISH WAS SMALLER
than Reggie remembered, more like the woodsman’s cottage in a fairy tale than the castle a princess might live in.
When she was growing up, it had felt large and sprawling—too big and dark to ever get warm. The stone walls sucked in light and sound and were always ever so slightly damp.
Glancing through the dusty windshield now, she guessed it to be about thirty-five feet long and maybe twenty wide—a big rectangle of dull gray cement and stone. The corners weren’t square or true, making the house list this way, then that. The cement was crumbling in places. Some of the stones had fallen out, leaving gaps like missing teeth. The white paint on the sills and eaves was peeling, hanging off in places like dead skin. The roof was in sad shape, bowing in the middle, the slate shingles cracked and loose.
The house was laid out west to east, all wrong for a hilltop that got such great southern exposure. If Andre had studied the landscape, worked with it a little, faced the building to the south, put in more windows, considered the placement of trees more carefully—it could have been a warmer, brighter place. The density of the stone might even have worked in their favor, acting as thermal storage. As it was, the house was in shade most of the year, and the walls and roof were spotted with moss. The building looked as gray and damp as a poisonous toadstool.
“Do you remember what you used to say?” Reggie asked her mother as she squinted out at the crooked walls. “How Monique’s Wish sounded more like the name of a racehorse than a house?”
Vera grinned and bobbed her head, but seemed to be studying something in the sky. Reggie had no idea if she had heard or understood the question.
“Lousy odds,” Reggie mumbled, thinking that if the building were a horse, it was old and lame, ready for the glue factory.
Just then the heavy wooden front door slammed open and a cloud of smoke came pouring out. From behind the screen of black smoke came a woman in a faded housedress and fishing vest. Reggie blinked, thinking she was an apparition at first, a body born of smoke and dust and ruin. But then she came into focus. It was Lorraine, walking down the steps, her right hand held up in a strange, forced-looking wave that could have also been a warning to stop, don’t come any closer.
Reggie opened the door of the truck as Lorraine came closer. Her body was stiff and gangly, puppetlike as she jerk-walked to them.
“I’m afraid we’re on fire,” Lorraine said, stinking of fish, eyes streaming, hair wild and singed.
The Silver Spoon is a classic American diner about a mile south of the airport. The exterior is gleaming stainless steel, the booths are red and white vinyl. A miniature jukebox adorns each table. The specials are listed on a chalkboard above the counter:
open-faced turkey sandwich, blueberry crumb cake, cream of tomato soup
. Open twenty-four hours, it’s a hot spot with local teens—a place to catch up after the double feature at the drive-in or share a banana split with your date. It’s also popular with truckers and is usually packed come 2:00
A.M.
, after the bars close, when folks come in to sober up with coffee and a western omelet.
Forty-two-year-old Candace Jacques had been a waitress at the Silver Spoon for seven years. At 11:15 p.m. on Thursday, June 6, she punched out and her coworkers saw her get into a tan sedan driven by a man no one got a good look at.
Candace was an outgoing woman who’d lived in town all her life. She had a lot of friends who popped in and out of the diner.
“She seemed to know most everyone in town,” said the diner’s manager, Lou Nordan.
Candace’s late-model Skylark had blown its transmission a week earlier and she was saving up for a new car, picking up extra shifts whenever she could. Friends and coworkers gave her rides to and from work.
“She’d had some hard knocks,” Lou Nordan said. “But she always got back up and had a real positive attitude about things. People were happy to help her because they knew she’d do the same for them.”
Candace’s elderly mother, with whom she shared an apartment, was waiting up because Candy always brought her a slice of pie. At 3:00
A.M.
, when there was still no sign of Candace or the peach pie she had left the diner with, her mother called the police.
“Something’s happened to her,” the frail-looking woman said when interviewed by the Eyewitness News Team. “This isn’t like Candy. I just know something’s happened. A mother knows.”
June 7, 1985
Brighton Falls, Connecticut
“M
Y MOM TOTALLY KNOWS
her,” Reggie said when she met up with Charlie and Tara at the Silver Spoon that evening. “She brought me here one time and introduced us.”
“No way!” Tara said. “What was she like? How’s your mom know her?”
Going to the diner had been Tara’s idea. As soon as she heard about the missing waitress, she said they had to go—just
had
to.
“Imagine it,” Tara said dreamily, “touching saltshakers she’s filled, sitting in her section, in the very seat the killer might have sat in when he was stalking her.”