Catch Me

Chapter 41

I STARTED AT MY AUNT’S CAMBRIDGE HOTEL. A frugal woman, she’d looked up budget motels in the Yellow Pages and called for rates before making her decision. Given that she would’ve used a credit card to check in, I figured it wouldn’t be too hard for a Boston cop to track her down. Detective O could follow the credit card transactions right to my aunt’s hotel door, flash her badge, and my aunt would let her in.

I parked a block away. Telling Tulip to stay, I approached cautiously, trying to appear inconspicuous, while simultaneously scoping out the area for a sign of my aunt and/or Boston cops. The cheap no-tell motel formed a two-story horseshoe built around a central parking area. I followed the covered stairs up to my aunt’s room on the second story. Door was closed, but the curtains of the main window had been drawn back to reveal a brightly lit, perfectly kept, empty brown-and-gold space. I stood there a minute, absorbing the deliberateness of such a gesture. No woman in her right mind stayed in a hotel with the curtains drawn back to expose her entire room. And my aunt never left the lights on. Wasting money, you know, not to mention burning energy and ruining the planet.

Detective O. Had to be. Letting me know the room was empty. Letting me know, she had my aunt.

I headed back to Tom’s truck, hands thrust deep in my coat pockets, head down, ears acutely tuned for the sound of fast-approaching footsteps that might or might not signal an ambush from behind. But nothing. Just a dark, bitterly cold Saturday evening, where the rest of the world was hunkered down safe in their homes, laughing with the ones they loved, while I walked the empty streets of Boston, realizing that I was too late and it was going to cost me.

Clearly, Detective O had reached my aunt first. But she hadn’t strangled her in the middle of the hotel room; instead she’d taken my aunt elsewhere. Why?

Because a hotel room wasn’t her home. They had to die in the safety and security of their own homes.

Why? Because we never had safety and security? Or to heighten the terror, make it worse?

My hand went unconsciously to my side, I rubbed my scar.

And for an instant, I could almost feel it. My ribs, wet and sticky, my legs trembling, starting to go. Watching flames leap up a wall. Thinking it was strange, to feel so cold while staring at fire.

SisSis, a voice called to me. SisSis!

Sorry, I said. Sorry.

MY CELL PHONE RANG. Twenty feet away from Tom’s truck, I answered it.

“Do you remember yet?” my sister asked.

“The house was on fire.”

“Dear old mom. Always had a flair for the dramatic.”

“You beat out the flames.”

“Seemed like a good idea at the time.”

I hesitated. “SisSis. You called me SisSis.”

This time, she didn’t answer right away. When she finally did, her voice was bitter.

“You promised to always take care of me. You promised to keep me safe. But you didn’t keep that promise, did you, Charlene? You left me. Then you forgot me completely. So much for sisterly love, SisSis.”

I didn’t know what to say. It didn’t matter, she was already filling the silence: “Tell me, Charlene, are you still a good soldier?”

“Why?”

“Because everyone has to die sometime. Be brave, Charlie. Be brave…”

I felt the chills go up my spine. Not just because of the words she spoke, but because of the way she spoke them. A voice, rising out of the grave. My mother, whispering across the years.

“Please don’t hurt her,” I forced myself to say evenly. “This has nothing to do with Aunt Nancy. This is between you and me.”

“Then you still don’t remember.”

“What do you want?”

“You should know that.”

“Tell me, and I’ll come to you.”

“You should know where I am.”

Then I did. I understood. I opened the truck door. I climbed inside, phone still glued to my ear. I felt the weight of what had to happen next.

January 21. A day twenty years in the making.

“I love you, Abby,” I whispered to the sister who was about to kill me. “Remember, whatever happens, I love you.”

My baby sister hung up on me.

I thought long and hard about what I had to do next.

FOR MY ENTIRE LIFE, I understood on some basic level that my mother was insane. Maybe I didn’t dwell on what specifically happened when I was two or four or five. But the flashes of memory I did have were never warm and fuzzy. I didn’t picture my mother reading me a bedtime story or associate her with fresh-baked cookies.

Cold winter nights, when the wind howled through the mountains and the walls quaked from the unsettling power of it, I thought of my mom. Dank basements, the smell of rust, the tang of blood, I thought of my mom. Falling off the monkey bars at school one day, the funny popping sound my shoulder made when I landed, and the even louder sound it made when I whacked it against a tree trunk to pop it back in, I thought of my mom.

She’d been insane in the truest sense of the word. Unpredictable, unstable, unreliable. Driven by wild ambitions and deeper, darker bouts of despair. She loved, she hated. I was her best girl, her favorite daughter. Now, be a good girl and stand still, while she dropped a bowling ball on my foot.

In my mother’s world, to love someone was to hurt someone. Therefore, the more she hurt me, the more I should feel adored.

Insanity is genetic, you know.

I’d spent most of my adolescence terrified I’d wake up one morning suddenly overwhelmed by the need to hurt someone. I’d start hitting my friends, screaming at my aunt. I’d stop compulsively cleaning my aunt’s mountain B &B and start ransacking the rooms instead.

I’d go to bed Charlene Rosalind Carter Grant, and wake up Christine Grant, terrorizer of small children everywhere.

Fortunately for me, that never happened.

But I don’t think my younger sister had gotten so lucky.

MY FIRST THOUGHT WAS that my sister would take our aunt back to New Hampshire, to her cozy B &B tucked away in the White Mountains. But that involved a three-hour drive north. Plus, just because you’re crazy, doesn’t mean you’re stupid-my aunt ran a business in her home, meaning the place would be crowded with witnesses.

Far better for this final family reunion-my own little Cambridge rental. One room in a historic house occupied by a single older woman. I hoped for my landlady’s sake that she had been out today. I doubted any of us would be that lucky.

I parked across the street, at the Observatory. After 5 P.M. on a Saturday, the parking lot held only a scattering of automobiles. Dark had fallen completely, the street lamps casting a feeble glow which reflected off the white snowbanks.

I’d planned for Tulip to stay, but the moment I opened the truck door, she bounded out, using my lap as a springboard. She ran a couple of quick circles in the snowy parking lot, clearly happy to be on the move. I contemplated rounding her up, forcing her back into her four-wheeled prison, but in the end, I didn’t have the heart for it.

Instead, I called her to me one last time, kissed her on the top of the head, and thanked her for being the best dog in the world. She whined a little, wagged her tail, then shook her white-and-tan body as if to ward off a chill. She trotted across the parking lot, moving away from my unit, off on some adventure that maybe someday she’d tell me about, if only I were alive to hear.

I watched until she disappeared around the side of the brick buildings. My throat was thicker than I wanted it to be. I patted my coat pockets, fidgeted with the scarf wrapped tight around my neck.

I had spent a year planning, preparing, and strategizing.

Now I simply heard my mother’s words, back inside my head: Everyone has to die sometime. Be brave.

I headed across the street for my landlady’s darkened home.

THE BOTTOM ROW OF EMPTY WINDOWS gaped like a toothless smile as I approached. No front porch light burned, no back patio light beckoned. Maybe the front door was unlocked. Maybe my sister was standing on the other side, waiting for me to walk right in.

I decided to do the unexpected. She wanted me here, obviously. There was unfinished business on both sides, so I didn’t think she’d simply shoot me. She wanted to talk. I wanted to listen. She wanted to kill my aunt and hurt me as much as possible. I wanted her to know that I was sorry, that I loved her, and that, even though I didn’t know how to fix the past, doubted it could be done at this stage of the game, I wished it could be.

I wished we both could start over.

No sign of life on the street as I walked to the rear garden fence, opened the gate, and closed it gently behind me. Now free from prying eyes, I approached the back door, the one I used to come and go.

Deep breath in. Deep breath out.

I knocked. Three times. Rap, rap, rap.

And ten seconds later, she answered.

The hallway loomed dark and shadowed behind her, while I imagined the Cambridge night sky cast a faint urban glow behind me.

She was dressed in black jeans and a tight-fitting black sweater. She looked leaner and meaner than Detective O, with her hair scraped back in a tight ponytail and her eyes blazing with crazy blue contact lenses.

I looked at her, and I saw my mother.

I looked at her, and I saw myself.

“Hello,” she said. “My name is Abigail.”

SHE RAISED HER RIGHT HAND, revealing a hypodermic needle, which she pointed at me.

“Arm,” she said.

“What is it?” I gestured to the needle.

“You of all people know better than to question. Now, be a good girl, and do what I tell you.”

“No.”

“Charlene Rosalind Carter-”

“Our mother is dead. I won’t go back and neither should you. We’re sisters, and sisters don’t treat each other like this.”

“Arm.”

“No.” I turned and walked away.

“Leave now and she dies,” she shrilled behind me. “Eight minutes. Maybe nine. All your aunt has left. Or maybe you don’t care. Maybe leaving your family to die is what you do best, SisSis.”

She had used my old nickname, which I considered a victory of sorts. The beginning of getting both of us to remember. I needed to recall most of my childhood if I was going to survive the next fifteen minutes. And Abigail…I needed her to recall at least some parts when she didn’t hate me so much. When maybe, she even loved me a little.

I turned back toward her. She once again pointed the needle. After another moment’s hesitation, I held out my arm. She moved quickly, before I changed my mind, jamming the needle straight through my coat into the fleshy part of my upper arm. I barely felt it, a faint pinprick that could’ve been a piece of grit caught in the weave of my shirt. She hit the plunger, and the whole thing was done in a millisecond.

Abigail eyed me. I returned her gaze levelly, waiting to feel something. Woozy, a burning in the back of my throat, maybe tingling down my arm. Most of our mother’s tricks were meant for instant gratification, but I didn’t feel a thing.

Abigail nodded, apparently satisfied, then made me strip my coat and hand it to her, immediately divesting me of most of my homemade weapons, which I’d stuck in the pockets. Next she patted me down, claiming my cell phone, but overlooking the ballpoint pen tucked into the back of my hair and the duct-tape knife covered by my ragged jeans, thick wool socks, and worn winter boots. Once I’d passed inspection, she opened the door wider, letting me into the darkened hall.

“Randi never even felt it,” she said, as if that should mean something to me. “Your other friend, Jackie, she turned around when I pricked her. I told her there had been some kind of thorn stuck to the back of her shirtsleeve and she believed me. Aunt Nancy saw me coming with it, though. I let her. I wanted her to know.”

Abigail led me past my own bedroom to the large living room, with its multiple seating areas plus kitchen. I’d been right earlier-no one’s lucky day. Both Aunt Nancy and my landlady, Frances, were present. Frances was slumped, pale and weak-looking, in a faded wingback chair, the farthest from me. My aunt was closer, reclined on the camelback sofa, eyes closed, eyelids fluttering in a way that didn’t appear good.

I rushed to her immediately and felt for a pulse. I found it, but it was weak. My aunt’s skin was clammy, and she was shivering uncontrollably.

“What did you do?”

“You mean she never tried it on you?”

“What?”

“Insulin. Crashes the blood sugar. Leads to coma, possibly death. Or a free trip to the emergency room.”

She delivered the words flippantly. I understood the untold story behind them, the countless episodes she must’ve endured at our mother’s hands. I would’ve liked to offer her compassion. Instead, I faced off against her, legs spread for balance, and pleaded my case.

“I’m here, you have what you wanted. Now, let me give Aunt Nancy and Fran some sugar cubes, and we’ll send them on their way.”

“Frosting,” Abigail stated. “Works better. I gave it to both of your friends right at the end. Otherwise the postmortem blood tests would’ve revealed low blood sugar, giving away my little game. But a little frosting applied at the right moment…You’ll find a spray can of it behind you on the kitchen counter.”

Her ready agreement to let me treat my aunt and landlady puzzled me. Instead of being relieved, I felt even more on edge as I turned around and headed toward the darkened kitchen. Halfway to the center island, my legs suddenly faltered. I missed a step, stumbled slightly, then caught myself. I shook off the episode, blinking my eyes against a sudden bout of light-headedness. The insulin, going to work. I retrieved the silvery spray can of decorator’s frosting sitting in the middle of the counter and returned with it to my aunt’s side.

“You may give them the frosting. Take any for yourself, and I will shoot you.” Abigail had pocketed the needle. In its place she now held a. 40-caliber Sig Sauer.

“And take away all your fun?” I asked lightly.

“I didn’t say I’d kill you. I just said I’d shoot you.”

It took me a bit to figure out the spray nozzle, which came complete with four decorative tips. Color was white, flavor vanilla. Decorate cookies, rouse a loved one from impending death. My hands were shaking. I had to concentrate to make my fingers do what I needed.

I tended first to my aunt, who seemed worse off. Next, I crossed to Frances, jamming the nozzle into her slightly gaping mouth and squirting in more frosting.

Then I stepped back, and both my sister and I studied them.

“How did you become Detective O?” I asked. I stood six feet from her, slightly in front of her, her Sig Sauer aimed at my left shoulder. Without any lights on, the room was dark, a series of larger and smaller lumps which indicated furniture, other objects that could be used for cover.

I thought the lack of lighting gave me the advantage, as I knew the space better than her. But she still held the gun, and looked very comfortable with it.

“Patron,” she said.

“Patron?”

Her features remained flat, hard. A cop’s face, a victim’s face. I had never realized until now how little separated the two.

“When I was fourteen, I left dear old mom. We were living in Colorado by then. She’d stopped hurting me and started selling me instead. See, her looks were no longer what they used to be, and a girl’s gotta pay rent. She still brought home the boyfriends, only they didn’t stay in her room anymore.”

I didn’t say anything.

“One night, it occurred to me that as long as I was selling my body, I ought to call the shots. So I waited for the right guy to come along-you know, one with lots of cash-and I made him a deal. I’d become his exclusive property, if he’d take me away.

“Turns out, I picked well. He was a successful attorney, had plenty of assets, and had always envisioned himself as one of those wealthy men with a little something-something tucked away on the side. I got my own apartment, and with a bit more negotiation, I got a new identity-you know, so Mommy Dearest couldn’t track me down and take me away. Perfectly legal, of course, which is the advantage of prostituting yourself to a legal eagle. Eventually, I enrolled in some online courses and earned my GED. Only problem became when I turned eighteen, and I wanted to go to college, and he wanted to keep me in a gilded cage.”

She stopped talking. On the couch, my aunt moaned, her eyes fluttering opened. She stared at both of us, but her eyes were still glazed over. I doubted she was seeing anything.

“When’d you kill him?” I asked conversationally.

Abigail smiled. “That’s not the relevant date. You should know the relevant date.”

“January twenty-one.”

“Absolutely. But why, SisSis? What’s so important about January twenty-one? You tell me.”

I studied her. I tried to remember our time together, the past I’d worked so diligently to forget. “Your birthday?”

She eyed me funnily. “No.”

“My birthday?”

“Please. Your birthday is in June.”

Frances was awake. Her breathing had changed, evened out. She wasn’t sitting up any straighter, but I could tell she was more alert. I wondered if Abigail could tell the same.

But my sister wasn’t paying any attention to my aunt or my landlady. She was staring at me. She appeared, for the first time, uncertain.

“Did you really forget…everything?”

I shrugged, feeling half-foolish, half-ashamed. “Most things, yes.”

“Even me?”

“I’m sorry, Abigail. I’ve tried and tried to remember, but I swear, I just…You’re a baby and then you’re not there anymore. I was so sure she’d killed you. Like Rosalind. Like Carter. These beautiful little babies, so perfect and precious and then…”

“I watched her kill the boy.”

“You did?”

“I remember everything. He was crying, and she took a pillow. It was bigger than his entire body. She pressed it down on him. ‘This is what we do when babies cry, Abigail,’ she told me. ‘Don’t be a crier.’”

“You would’ve been just a toddler yourself.”

“I think I was two. You would’ve been four.”

“How can you remember what happened when you were two?”

“How can you forget what happened when you were four?”

My aunt, sitting up straighter, moved her hand at her side.

“I wanted to die,” I heard myself say. “I woke up in the hospital, and the doctors were talking about how they put me back together and it had been touch and go, but I’d be okay now. Except, instead of feeling grateful, I wanted to kill them for saving me. I was so…angry. I was so…depressed.” I took a small step away from my aunt, easing toward the rear door, willing Abigail’s attention to follow me, and turn farther away from the two now waking women.

“I think I had to forget,” I told my sister honestly. “I think it was the only way I could remember how to live again.”

“She killed you,” Abigail said. “She stabbed you with a knife. I saw that, too.”

“There was fire.”

“You do remember!”

“I remember blood and flames and thinking it was strange to feel so cold.”

“She tried to burn the house down.”

“After stabbing me?”

“Yes. She’d gotten you first, but I didn’t see that part. She’d come back upstairs for me, then we were in the kitchen and she had the matches, and I couldn’t get away. She was going to burn us alive, but you appeared behind her and you hit her over the head with this heavy old lamp.”

“I did?”

She peered at me, and I was rewarded with a trace more uncertainty in her eyes. “You really don’t remember?”

“I wish I did. I would like to remember hurting her. Mostly, I feel like I’ve spent my entire life trying to learn how to be me. That she crawled into my head when I was too young to fight back and it’s taken me twenty-eight years to find my own thoughts, to be my own person. Our mother was crazy, Abigail. And we were too little to fight her. But we’re grown up now, and she’s dead. She doesn’t have to call the shots anymore. We can be ourselves. We can finally win.”

“I tried to kill her that night,” Abigail murmured, as if I hadn’t spoken. “You were dead, I thought. And she was waking up and I couldn’t survive without you. I knew that, Charlie. Even back then, I knew I wasn’t that strong. So I picked up the lamp, and I was going to hit her. Except, next thing I knew, she kicked my legs and I fell to the floor, and while I was lying there, she picked up the lamp and whacked me with it.”

I jolted. I felt a shiver…no, a shock wave…move through my entire body. For a moment, I wasn’t sure if it was the insulin nose-diving my blood sugar level, or the seismic shift of a long-buried memory.

“I watched you die,” I heard myself whisper. “I…she…she killed you. With the lamp. I remember that. And I couldn’t move. I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t raise my arm, yell, beg, nothing. I was stuck on the floor, feeling so cold and so hot. And screaming on the inside. I remember that. Feeling my whole body scream and scream as you fell down and she got up, but no sound came out. Nothing happened. I screamed, and there she was with the lamp, raising it up, bringing it down. Killing you.

“I’d kept you safe for so long, Abby. You have no idea. The nights I fled with you through the woods, or shoved you under the bed, or hid you in the crawlspace. I’d failed with the others. Hadn’t been smart enough, strong enough. But with you…by the time you were three or four, I remember thinking I’d done it. I’d saved you and you were mine, and I loved you. I loved you, Abigail.”

My voice wavered, broke. My body started shaking uncontrollably while my thoughts scattered, flew apart, refused to come back together. Losing it. Blood sugar plummeting. Confusion, disorientation. Grief. Genuine grief. My baby sister had died. And in the crazy way my mind worked, I hadn’t remembered it, but I had known it. I believed I had watched Abby die and that had broken me in ways no doctor had been able to put back together again.

“But I didn’t,” Abigail said. Her own hands were shaking, the gun unsteady. I should move, take advantage.

I couldn’t get my legs to respond. Instead, I reached for the wall, feeling the world lurch again, desperate for balance.

Hadn’t practiced for this, I thought. Hadn’t prepared for this complication.

“I lived,” Abigail continued, her voice hoarse, both accusing and mournful. “She took me away and it was terrible and awful and I prayed for you every night, Charlie. You were my big sister and you’d promised to save me and I prayed for you. Night after night after night. Then I was ten, and the first man, and it hurt. I cried and begged for you to save me. But you never came. You never saved me. Instead, I turned fourteen, and sold myself to a professional pervert just to get out. Except it wasn’t quite enough, so I had to kill him. Except that wasn’t enough either, so I had to track her down and kill her, too. I thought I’d feel better then. But it turned out, that still wasn’t enough.”

I stared at my sister. “You killed our mother?”

“Of course.” She smiled. “Tell me when.”

“January twenty-one. You killed her January twenty-one.”

“Yes. Finally, you understand. I used her own pillow and did it just the way she taught me.”

I wondered if I should feel horrified. I wondered if I should feel grateful. “But…it should’ve been over then. That should’ve been enough.”

“Of course not, because that still left you. The one who never came. The one who never saved me.”

“But I didn’t even know you were alive!”

“Yes, you did.”

“No, I didn’t. How could I have?”

“Because she would’ve told you.”

Abigail turned and thrust her finger at Aunt Nancy, who was now fully awake and staring at both of us.

“I’m sorry,” my aunt burst out. “Charlie, I’m so sorry!”

Just as Frances suddenly lunged out of the wingback and, with an unexpected roar, hurtled herself at Abigail.

The gun went off.

I fell to the floor.

Screaming. Frances, Aunt Nancy, Abigail.

“SisSis,” Abigail’s voice. My little sister, calling for me.

“SisSis!”

I grabbed the can of frosting, which was rolling across the floor, and started to crawl.