The longer his silence, the louder my brain. I dwelled on ugly things. Misty’s scars, the ones on her thighs, so parallel, so perfectly straight, so white, so unlike the random, disfiguring marks of a car accident. The six-inch line between her elbow and wrist. Neat. Precise. The opposite of the jagged fury that ripped Caroline’s skin and nicked marks into the bone, like those left by a boy whittling at a stick. Mike told me that.
He postponed the trip to Kentucky. I was slowly suffocating to death in this tiny locked-up box of a house. When I opened the door, an oven of oppressive heat stole my breath. I felt like I was living on the last place on earth, trapped in an Edvard Munch painting with the cast of Real Housewives.
Mike was less and less communicative, obsessed, drawing deep inside himself to a place he always assured me I didn’t want to go. I’d seen him this way on cases before. He made it home to shower and then passed a hand over my belly, poked his head in Jesse’s window, and took off again. I guessed he was catching naps in his vanilla-colored office with the plain vanilla art. I wondered briefly whether he was sleeping with his vanilla-boobed secretary, and then I hated myself for wondering that.
Jesse seemed to need no sleep.
Sometimes for ten hours, my only human contact was with Jesse. We fell into a loose routine. I’d bring him an occasional soda or sandwich, even though he stored a fully loaded cooler in his trunk. Every now and then, he rapped on the door and sprung me from my prison, inviting me along on a walk around the neighborhood with Parker.
I liked Jesse. I liked the smooth youthfulness of his skin, his wide and genuine smile, the easiness of his drawl, the kind core of him. I tried to believe it all, even though his body told a different story. Not the limp. The limp I could barely notice. It was the taut awareness of every muscle. Poised. Ready for something bad. This was a man like my husband, who would never sleep deeply again.
By mid-afternoon on the third day, I worked up the nerve to drive to Misty’s house, even though I knew it would infuriate Mike. Jesse nodded when I told him I was going to visit a friend, and turned the key in his ignition. No questions. He knew I was like a bird in a cage.
I justified this journey to myself. I thought my head would explode if I didn’t do something. Mike was getting nowhere he was willing to tell me about. Misty and Caroline were twisted up. The house was proof of that. All the other women I’d met or read about in those files hid secrets that fit into the machinery of a small town. But Misty and Caroline were aliens, like me, who ran from someplace else. It was curious that they were seen together fighting before one of them disappeared. Now one was dead, cut to pieces, while the other walked around with baffling wounds.
I pulled the station wagon up the winding driveway and parked in the mid-afternoon shade by the four-car garage. Jesse drew his car in behind me. The baby rolled around like a pinball against my vital organs.
I knocked, but no one answered. I twisted the knob. Open. I stepped inside. Apparently, I hadn’t learned any lessons. I ventured a few feet. The great room furniture was still in place, but the gaping blank space over the fireplace grabbed my eye at once. The Blue Rider, missing. The horse had run off. I wondered, for the first time, whether it was one of Caroline’s paintings. I involuntarily glanced to the table that held the picture of the little girl. Gone.
“Misty?” Tentative, then louder. “Misty?”
The house felt the same, an empty movie set, waiting.
At the bottom of the swirling staircase, I hesitantly took a step. “Misty!” My voice hung weighted in place, refusing to float up.
I kept climbing. At the top landing, a long, narrow hall led away. Rich, dark mahogany lined the floor. Dramatic black-and-white landscape photographs were carefully spaced on white walls. A couple were leaning against the wall, ready to be hung or packed up. I’d bet on the latter.
The sound of a shower fell like thick white noise somewhere deeper down the hall. A good one that ran hot and fast. I passed two square, empty bedrooms devoid of any furniture. They reminded me of small dance studios. Unmarred wood floors gleamed while dust danced in the patches of sunlight that fell through the casement windows. I walked on, beside rippled fields and surreal white clouds. These works were signed, unlike the photos downstairs. M.R.
Misty Rich? Before I had time to truly register this, the shower stopped abruptly, and so did I, two-thirds of the way to the end of the hall.
“Misty. It’s Emily. Are you there? Is that you?”
My feet pressed forward until I reached a large room on the left, double the size of the others, clearly the master suite. A queen-sized mattress rested on the floor under giant double picture windows. No headboard, no box spring, and I remembered what Holly had said about mattresses on the floor. The bed was unmade, a soft cream-colored duvet tousled, with matching sheets. A feather pillow imprinted with the shape of a head. Everything was clean and colorless. Misty was the art, and she’d stepped off the canvas.
Three empty black suitcases lay open on the floor alongside neatly folded piles of clothes. At least ten pairs of shoes lined the wall opposite the bed. The little girl was here, sitting in her frame, on the floor next to the mattress. She kept company with a cheap travel alarm clock, a small halogen reading lamp, a Vogue, a magazine tabloid starring Katie Holmes, and a crossword puzzle book.
Nothing on the white walls in here. Not even nail holes. Just two large windows overlooking the pool, revealing the secret of the infinity edge: a stepped waterfall tirelessly doing its job, recirculating the water.
I had the feeling-no, I knew-that this room and the others upstairs hadn’t changed much since she’d moved in. Misty never planned to stay. This was all for show.
The doorknob across the room turned, and my heart danced while my mind jabbed at me. My stalker had killed her. He had just washed himself clean of her blood in the hot, fast water. Now his hand was on the knob and that hand was going to kill me, too.
My feet stuck to the floor.
The door opened.
It was Misty, but my heart didn’t stop its dance. She wore a short, white terry-cloth robe unbelted, allowing a two-inch, top to bottom view of white skin, bony cleavage, and a small dark patch of pubic hair.
Her body reacted like a startled animal, and she fumbled for the belt of the robe, trying to gain her composure. She looked impossibly young and innocent, her face scrubbed of any disguise. The big, brown eyes were back. Her short dark hair was wet and wild, vigorously toweled off.
She didn’t speak, so I did.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to… scare you. I’ve been worried. You didn’t show at Letty’s memorial. You didn’t answer your phone. I called out for you on the stairs.” It sounded lame, even to me. I’d only tried to phone once. I’d only let it ring twice.
“Get out,” she said softly. “I’m leaving. You should, too.”
“Misty, please.”
“You need to go,” she said. “All of this was a mistake.”
Her eyes were red, glazed, not really focusing. The Misty who chewed her nails stood before me, not the one who twisted flowers in her hair, but, of course, one was just tangled up in the sheets with the other.
“Are you curious, Emily? Is that why you’re here? Do you want to see?” I didn’t like the way her voice sounded, and something inside me twittered a warning.
Too late.
Her hands tugged at the belt of her robe, opening it wide, and she stretched out her arms like white wings. The sun streamed cheerfully through the window, casting a gold glow on her skin and red tints into her dark hair.
A scarred angel.
I wanted to look away so badly, but I couldn’t.