Page 21 of Silent Ridge

This is all like a replay of the past. I hear Ronnie’s shoes echo on the gleaming hardwood floors, just as I’d heard Monique’s designer shoes as she led me to a cozy seating area in a corner of the elegant great room. The room is larger than the last two houses my family had lived in. Larger than the entire apartment I live in now. For a moment I taste the amazing almond cookies she made. She gave me coffee with them. I had been eating fruit and granola bars since the day I’d gone on the run. I wanted to get a proper meal, but back then I couldn’t because I was running out of time.

I feel that same sputtering urgency now.

“What’s wrong, Megan?”

“I was just thinking how hard this must be on Gabrielle,” I lie.

“What are we looking for?”

“You start in the bathrooms. See if you can find a hairbrush, a toothbrush. Anything with DNA for the lab. I’ll start in the kitchen.” I don’t say I know that’s where Monique spent a lot of time with her laptop and drinking tea.

“I wonder where the bathroom is in this place?” Ronnie walks down a hallway and out of sight.

Eighteen

Ronnie is off looking for the bathrooms. There are probably three or four. She should be busy for a while.

I go into the kitchen and remember a conversation I’d had with Dr. Albright in one of my first therapy sessions. The session comes at me in words and pictures, like a movie. I’m sitting on her couch, breathing in the scent of the flowers in the tall vase.

This time, calla lilies.

Tell me more about Monique, Dr. Albright says.

Her deep-blue eyes are full of concern.Her daughter is dead,I tell her. I’m pretending to be a reporter, asking questions that I know are causing her pain. Mrs. Delmont looks at me closely and asks, “Are you all right, dear?” I wonder what it is that she thinks is wrong with me. I’m good at hiding my emotions. “Excuse me?” I ask in the kindest, most nonthreatening, attitude-free manner in which anyone could ever utter those words.

She looks at my hands. “You’ve chewed your nails to the quicks.” My hands are in my lap. My fingernails are nearly gone. I didn’t realize that I’d been gnawing them to the point of oblivion. I wonder what other ways my anger, anxiety, fear and need for revenge was manifesting itself. I felt I was changing in ways that I both reviled and welcomed. Chewed nails are on the reviled side of the T-chart that makes up my life’s pros and cons. “It’s just this story,” I lied to Mrs. Delmont, and notice one of my fingertips is still wet. I wonder how I could be so unaware of myself. What is wrong with me?

Mrs. Delmont says, “It’s been a long time since Leanne was taken from me, but it still hurts deeply. I try to keep busy. I try to help, but in my mind I still see my Leanne and her father on the sailboat, smiling, having the time of their lives. She went missing from the marina and I play that day over and over.”

I assure her that she’s not alone, that all homicide survivors feel that way. But as the words tumble from my lips, I notice her face tighten. I was trying to be thoughtful, but it came off as condescending. I quickly came up with a lie.

I tell Mrs. Delmont my sister Courtney was murdered. That I grieve for her every day. I don’t tell her that I don’t really have a sister. That Courtney is my mother and she’s not dead. I’m trying to find her.

Dr. Albright asked me: You told her that you had a sister and she was murdered?

I said,I guess.

Why did you use your mother’s name when you spoke about a sister?Dr. Albright asked.

I see where you’re going with this,I told her. I was mad at my mother for the lies, the betrayal, but I didn’t wish her dead. Even though I was on the run, I was trying to find her. To save her.

I remember now how Dr. Albright gave me that non-judgmental look that she is so good at. Letting me decide what I’d had in my mind and in my heart.

You’re safe here,she said. You can say anything you want.

I told her how Monique’s face relaxed and she rested a hand on my knee.Mrs. Delmont said, “Well then, we’re in a sisterhood of unending grief.”

I remember that I didn’t want to be in any such sisterhood. Who would? For my part, then and now, I wanted to be in the sisterhood of vengeance and retribution. All of her fundraisers, all of her talk show appearances, haven’t added up to anything. Not really. As long as a killer breathes the same air as we do, a victim’s family is never free.

Nineteen

I was in her kitchen a very long time ago. It still smells of the almond cookies she served me before she knew the truth about me. I see a plate on the kitchen island with half a dozen store-bought almond cookies on it. I try one. Stale. I eat the rest of it and another. I put a couple in my blazer pocket for later and save the rest for Ronnie.

Monique was old school. People her age grew up sitting around kitchen tables, having meals as a family, talking about school or other interesting things that had happened or will happen, playing board games. After Hayden’s short visit I’d broken down and bought a smart TV and watched an old show a few nights ago. In it the mother wore dresses with short, puffy sleeves, a ribbon tied at the waist, lipstick, eye makeup, stiff but perfect hair with half a can of hairspray on it. She never said anything catty. Never argued with her husband. The kids were as perfect as they could be.

And yet I know that beneath perfection sometimes lurks something very disturbing.

I sit at the kitchen table. Magnets hold a calendar on the refrigerator. Monique had been marking days with a big X. The marks ended three weeks ago. There was nothing else to indicate why she was doing this. I take the calendar and flip through it. The only things she’s marked are hair appointments. No doctors. No birthdays. Nothing. I don’t keep a calendar in my place for this very reason. I don’t want anyone violating my privacy.

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