Cold Woods Page 3

  “No,” he said and didn’t elaborate. He’d gotten the job in the warehouse two weeks after the backyard wedding to Trisha’s mother. He’d complained the entire drive to Pennsylvania that he didn’t want to work in the warehouse. He wanted to be on the floor selling. “You’ll work your way up,” her mother had said.

  “Well.” Evelyn wiped her hand on her thigh. She turned to Trisha’s mother. “I’m heading to the grocery store. I’d be happy to pick up a few things for you while I’m out. Do you need milk or bread or anything?”

  “That’s so nice of you,” Trisha’s mother said. Trisha thought it was really nice of Evelyn to ask too. She didn’t recall any of their old neighbors being so neighborly.

  Her mother fished around in her pocket for cash. “We could use some—”

  Lester cut her off. “Thanks anyway,” he said. “We’re all set.”

  “Oh, okay, sure,” Evelyn said. She looked to Trisha’s mother when she said, “I’ll be back in a few hours. Don’t hesitate to knock if you need anything.” Then she turned to Trisha. “Go on—say hi to the girls.”

  Trisha pulled herself up from the porch step. The sun scorched the top of her shoulders, and the heat from the sidewalk burned her bare feet as she walked toward the other kids. She was nervous, a little self-conscious, as she approached.

  “Try again,” the tall wiry girl said, balancing on her long leg.

  The shorter, chubbier girl picked up her foot and lost her balance. “I’m no good at this.”

  Trisha stopped next to the chalked hopscotch. She lifted her chin and stuck out her barely budding chest with the faded decal of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers stamped on the front of her T-shirt. The two girls stopped talking, looked her over.

  “I’m Trisha. Just moved in a few houses down,” she said.

  “I’m Carlyn,” the wiry girl with the long legs said. “And this is Dannie.”

  The chubby girl, Dannie, gave Trisha a timid smile. “How old are you?”

  “Ten.” She shifted her weight onto her right hip. “You?”

  “The same.” Carlyn pointed to Lester as he stumbled off the curb and into the street. “Is he okay?”

  “He’s had a couple of beers,” she said.

  Dannie stared at him, eyes wide.

  “Does he always drink like that?” Carlyn asked.

  Trisha shrugged, trying to make it seem like it wasn’t a big deal. “He’s not my real dad. My real dad lives in Chicago.” She’d write a letter to her dad tonight, tell him where she was. They’d become something close to pen pals in the last year since his latest incarceration. “Why do you have towels on your heads?” she asked.

  “It’s our hair.” Dannie touched the streaming terry cloth. “See how long it is?”

  “That’s cool,” she said.

  Dannie smiled.

  “Do you have a towel for your head?” Carlyn asked.

  “We’re still unpacking.” She had a bath towel but not a beach towel. She hadn’t done much swimming back home. Mostly, she’d run under the fountain in the neighborhood park.

  “Come on. I’ll get you one inside, but we have to be quiet. My mom sleeps in the day. She works the night shift at the hospital. She’s a nurse,” Carlyn said.

  They walked up the front steps and crept inside.

  “You two wait here while I go upstairs and find another towel,” Carlyn whispered.

  “Make sure it’s a long one,” Dannie whispered back and pulled Trisha toward the kitchen.

  The inside of Carlyn’s house unfolded in much the same way as Trisha’s. They followed a worn beige carpet through the family room and dining room. The walls had the same dingy white paint. The staircase to the second floor separated the dining room from the kitchen at the back of the house.

  Dannie opened the gold refrigerator door. “You want something to drink? She’s got Kool-Aid.”

  They sat at a collapsible card table and drank fruit punch. Pink stains ran up the sides of Dannie’s mouth.

  “Are you from Chicago like your dad?” Dannie asked.

  “Just outside of Chicago.” She wiped her lips with the back of her hand, wondering if she had a juice mustache too. “Some shitty little town you probably never heard of.”

  Dannie’s eyes widened again. “You always cuss like that?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “My mom would stick a bar of soap in my mouth if I ever talked that way.” She drank from her cup, keeping her eyes on Trisha’s face.

  “If your mom heard the stuff that comes out of my mouth, she’d want to shove a bar of soap so far down my throat it would come out my ass.”

  Juice sprayed from Dannie’s lips. They stared at each other and then burst out laughing.

  Carlyn walked into the kitchen with a beach towel. She handed it to Trisha. “What’s so funny?” she asked.

  “She is,” Dannie said, pointing at Trisha.

  Trisha tied the towel around her head.

  From the bottom step, Carlyn’s mother poked her head inside the kitchen. Her brown hair was tangled and messy.

  Trisha watched, waited, expected to be introduced as the new girl, but Carlyn’s mother ignored her.

  “Get outside and give me some peace and quiet,” Carlyn’s mother said.

  Carlyn made no attempt to get up. Instead, she sat back in the chair and crossed her arms. Dannie kept her head down and fiddled with her cup. Trisha leaned back in the chair and crossed her arms like Carlyn to show her solidarity.

  Carlyn’s mother glared at them. “Go on. Get. I need to get some sleep before my shift. I’m not asking you again.” She turned and stomped up the steps.

  “Come on—let’s go,” Carlyn said under her breath.

  Trisha and Dannie trailed her outside.

  Carlyn sat on the stoop and rested her elbow on top of her thigh, her chin in her hand.

  “Do you want to play hopscotch?” Dannie asked.

  “I don’t feel like it anymore,” Carlyn said.

  Down the street on the porch of Trisha’s new house, her mother and Lester shouted, arguing over something, or quite possibly nothing.

  “I have an idea.” She sat next to Carlyn. “Let’s make a club.”

  “Like a secret club or something?” Dannie asked.

  “Sure,” Trisha said.

  “Okay,” Carlyn said. “We should make it official, with a name and ceremony.”

  Trisha hadn’t had friends in Chicago—not close friends anyway. Most girls her age were mean, catty, and she didn’t have time for that kind of drama, not with everything else wrong in her life. But she was here in a new town with a whole new batch of girls. Maybe things could be different for her, like her mother had said: a fresh start.

  “Let’s make it a friendship club,” she said at the same time Lester called for her. She pretended not to hear him.

  “Let’s grab our bathing suits. Do you have a bike?” Carlyn asked and pulled the towel off her head, her brown hair falling to the tops of her shoulders. Trisha and Dannie yanked their towels off too.

  “Yeah, I got a bike,” Trisha said. Her mother had picked it up for her at a yard sale last summer. The blue paint was chipped and the handlebars were rusty, but the tires were in good shape.

  Lester called for Trisha again, spotting her on Carlyn’s porch. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him walking down the sidewalk toward them. She braced herself.

  “There you are,” Lester said and turned his gaze on the other two girls. “Aren’t you going to introduce me?”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Trisha was the last to leave Dannie’s mother’s place after arguing with Carlyn about Trisha’s return to Second Street. Carlyn had walked out on her, leaving her to lock up the house.

  Trisha turned off the lights, carried a bag of trash outside, stuffed it into an overflowing garbage can at the curb. Then she crossed the street and paid the taxi driver.

  “You never saw me,” she said. “I never got in your cab. You never d
rove me here.”

  He nodded, took the stack of bills from her hand.

  After sending him away, Trisha stood on her mother’s front porch next to her suitcase. She knocked once. Her mother opened the door, stood on the other side of the glass, looking out at her. For a panicked second, Trisha thought her mother wasn’t going to let her in. She hadn’t planned on being turned away when she’d told the taxi driver to leave. She hadn’t made other arrangements. When she’d fled the penthouse suite, leaving Sid and Vegas behind, she hadn’t thought any further ahead than hopping on a plane and flying home. Although she hadn’t thought about this place as home in many years, she supposed it had never left her. Nothing ever did. She’d learned that lesson a long time ago: that no matter how far she’d run, how much time had passed, she couldn’t escape where she’d come from, the things she’d done.

  Her mother finally opened the storm door. “Linda said she saw you. I wasn’t sure whether you’d stop by.”

  Ah, yes, Linda and her mother had become best friends. Linda probably couldn’t wait to tell her that Trisha had returned home.

  “I’m hoping to do more than just stop by.” Trisha hated admitting it, but there it was. She was asking if she could stay here, in her mother’s house, for an undetermined length of time. Oh, she had enough money that she could’ve gone anywhere, stayed anywhere. She’d squirreled away Sid’s money through the years, the amounts so small that he’d never noticed. So going anywhere had been possible but not practical. He’d come looking for her eventually. But he’d never think to find her here. She’d only ever mentioned to him once who her father was, that she was born in Illinois, but she’d never mentioned she’d grown up in Pennsylvania. And everything she’d purchased on her trip here—the plane ticket, taxicab, the drinks at the airport bar—she’d paid with cash.

  Paying with actual paper money had come with a price. Everything came with a price. Something else she’d learned early on. Apparently, buying a one-way ticket to New York with a stack of dough instead of a credit card set off all kinds of alarms. She’d been manhandled by airport security and then later locked in a small room, where she’d undergone what had felt an awful lot like an interrogation. Uniformed men had questioned her up and down and sideways until she’d finally convinced them she wasn’t some kind of terrorist. They’d rummaged through her suitcase, pulling out her toiletries, lace bras, fingering her underwear, not once but twice. It hadn’t been until they saw the fresh fingerprints on her biceps, the black-and-purple bruise spreading across her rib cage, that the pieces had come together. And still they’d gone through with a full strip search, leaving nothing untouched. If they’d thought they were putting her through one last humiliation before she’d make her escape, they were wrong. She’d endured years of degradation: so much so that she could brush off one more hour of abuse as though it were nothing more than crumbs in her lap.

  “Well, get in here and let me look at you,” her mother said.

  Trisha lugged her suitcase in, pretended the pain in her ribs didn’t exist, set the case down next to the couch. The foam stuffing oozed from one of the cushions. The beige carpet was stained, and the place smelled like smoke and stale beer. She hid her disgust. No point in provoking her mother by the mere look on her face.

  “Vegas, huh?” Her mother tapped the airline’s tag still stuck to the handle of Trisha’s luggage. “Is that cashmere?” She touched the sleeve of Trisha’s sweater.

  “Yes,” Trisha said and pulled her arm away.

  Her mother looked her up and down. “What are you, like that Sharon Stone character or something from that movie? What was it called? Casino?” Her mother ran a hand through her short hair, which was no longer bleached blonde and teased but now gray and spiky like a porcupine.

  “Sort of, but her character was classier.”

  It took her mother a moment to understand; then she laughed out loud. “You want a drink?”

  Trisha followed her to the kitchen, noticed the limp again. Her mother pulled open the refrigerator door, grabbed two cans of beer, handed her one. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d drunk from a can. She’d grown accustomed to top-shelf liquor, expensive champagne, priceless wine, crystal glasses. She took a sip. The beer was awful, but it was alcohol, and it would do the trick. It would stop the shakes that had started a few minutes ago.

  “I can’t believe Evelyn’s gone,” her mother said of Dannie’s mom. “We were friends for so long. For nearly forty years she was right across the street, and now she’s dead. I can’t wrap my head around it, you know?”

  Trisha nodded. But she didn’t know. What did she know of friendship, let alone the lifelong kind? Her two best friends had ditched her their senior year of high school, each going their separate ways, or so she thought. It really grated on her that Carlyn and Dannie had kept in touch on occasion, as Carlyn had said.

  Her mother continued. “I don’t know why I’m so surprised. The heart can’t take that kind of fat.”

  Trisha paused from taking another sip of beer, arched an eyebrow.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” her mother said. “She got so much bigger than what you must remember. She always struggled with her weight, you know. But this was more than just being heavy. She was downright obese. I kept telling her it was going to be the end of her one day. Linda—being a nurse, if you remember—she was always on her, trying to get her to diet and exercise. But Evelyn . . . well, she just didn’t have it in her.” Her mother looked away.

  Trisha wasn’t sure what she was supposed to say to this. She settled for “I’m sorry.”

  “Dannie was good to her, though. She was a great daughter, taking care of her the way she did. At least Evelyn had that.”

  “Yes,” she said, wondering if it was meant to be a dig directed at her for leaving town, for not even bothering to phone.

  Her mother plopped onto one of the kitchen chairs.

  Trisha hadn’t expected to see her so defeated. She remembered a much stronger version of the woman in front of her, one who knew how to take a hit and pull herself back up. But this woman was old and broken, weakened during the years they’d been separated.

  She finished her beer in two long swallows. “It’s been a long day. If you don’t mind, I’d like to head up and get some sleep.” She tossed the empty can in the trash under the sink. She plucked another can from the refrigerator: something to drink while she unpacked.

  “You can have your old room,” her mother said.

  Trisha left her mother sitting at the small round table from Trisha’s childhood. She grabbed her suitcase from the family room and carried it up the narrow stairs, forced herself not to wince from the pain the lifting caused in her ribs.

  Her old bedroom was exactly as she’d left it. The mattress she’d slept on her entire adolescence was still on the floor in the corner with the same faded purple comforter. The bedspread and sheets were crumpled as though she’d just slipped out from under them and the last three decades had never taken place. Her dingy robe hung from the hook on the door. Old posters of Duran Duran and Madonna were tacked to the wall, the edges curled and yellowed with age.

  Her mother hadn’t changed a single thing, as though she’d been waiting all this time for Trisha to come home.

  She popped the tab on the can of beer and took a sip. Dust bunnies scattered when she strode through the room to the closet. She slid the door open. The clothes inside were the ones she’d left behind all those years ago. She lifted the sleeve of a hot-pink sweatshirt, bringing the cotton material to her nose, smelling the hair spray she wore as a teenager. She took a deep breath, but the scent was lost, replaced by a musty odor. She slid the closet door closed. On the small dresser, she touched a bottle of dried-up nail polish, a deck of playing cards, and an empty can of the hair spray she’d smelled a moment ago. Everything was the same and yet completely different.

  She poked around the room some more, drinking, pulling open drawers, lifting the lid off an
old shoebox, finding it empty.

  The wear of the day settled into what were now sore muscles. She downed the rest of the beer, reached for her suitcase, wanting to shed her clothes and the smell of traveling in them all day. She didn’t know if she could make it through the rest of the night without a drink. For the first time in years, she wanted to try.

  She turned, startled to find her mother standing in the doorway, covered her racing heart. “I didn’t hear you come up.”

  “You shouldn’t have come back here,” her mother said.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Parker stood under the hundred-year-old Kilroy tree near the site where the bones had been recovered. It was day four and what he hoped was their last day on the mountain. The cold wind whipped through the bare branches of trees. Every now and again it picked up speed and made an awful howling sound.

  Geena sat on a large rock on Parker’s right. Her hands were shoved deep inside her winter parka. She wore hiking boots, fur lined with deep tread.

  Parker shivered. “I hate the cold,” he said.

  “I don’t mind it if I’m doing something fun like skiing or snowmobiling,” Geena said. “It’s in my Nordic roots.”

  “Brassard is Nordic?”

  “Nope. I got the Nordic part from my mom. My dad is French. Was French.”

  Parker waited for her to explain, but she didn’t say anything more about it. He wasn’t surprised. They were just getting to know each other. He said the only thing he could: “I’m sorry.”

  She nodded, turned her gaze back to the site. Parker had noticed the way she’d watched Cheryl and the team’s every movement the last few days, as though she were taking mental snapshots of not only the site but also the collection of evidence. Her intensity, the sharp clear blue of her eyes, made him a little uncomfortable. Not that he’d admit that to anyone, and never to her.

  The word around headquarters was that Lieutenant Sayres had taken her off her last case when her previous partner, Albert Eugenis, had announced his retirement. She’d been working what was the second rape and murder of another young woman in the last thirty-six months. Parker was under the impression that neither the removal from the case nor the transfer to the field station had been Geena’s idea.