Down the Darkest Road

18

I read once that we are all born with instincts to protect ourselves and our loved ones, and then society spends every day drumming those instincts out of us until we’re too cowed by good manners to save our own lives.

The children of my generation were taught to respect our elders, not to talk back, not to make a scene in public. We were taught to be polite, to answer when asked a question, to be helpful to anyone who needed us.

Up until the time Leslie was taken, I don’t know if I could have brought myself to scream if I had felt threatened by a stranger. I would have been much more apt to talk myself out of my fear. I could almost hear my mother’s voice in my ear, chastening me for overreacting. What would people think? I would embarrass the other person and myself for no good reason.

Women of my mother’s generation especially were raised to minimize their feelings. They were taught by society that as women they were overemotional, prone to hysteria, and flighty to the point of ridiculousness.

As plain as if he was here in the room with me, I can hear my father speaking to my mother: Don’t be silly. Don’t be ridiculous. You’re overreacting. You shouldn’t feel this way. You shouldn’t think that way.

The day Leslie went missing, I knew as soon as I walked in the house that something was wrong. Not just amiss, but wrong, badly wrong. There was no reason for me to feel that way. I told myself I was just on edge because of the tension with Leslie.

I had escaped the house that afternoon to go to a job site. Judith Ivory was redecorating her beach house. To spend a few hours trying to argue Judith away from her own bad taste had seemed far preferable to staying home and dealing with my oldest daughter’s bad humor.

I knew Leslie well. I knew she would spend the day pouting in her room, coming out to inflict her sour mood on the rest of us at lunchtime and snack time. By dinnertime she would start to soften. By bedtime she would be contrite—if not the first day of being grounded, certainly by the end of the second. Then she would begin her clever, insidious campaign to wiggle her way back into the good graces of her father and me.

It wouldn’t go so easily this time, I knew. Leslie was making a stand for her independence, and Lance was making a stand for his absolute authority. A clash of the Titans. Life in the Lawton house was going to be a prickly affair for a few days.

I felt the worst for Leah, my sweet sensitive one. My peacekeeper. She had done nothing wrong, but was as much of a prisoner as her guilty sister. We would not be going out as a family again any time soon. And Leah would restrict herself from going out with her friends in an attempt not to rub Leslie’s nose in the consequences of her own wrongdoing—a courtesy Leslie did not deserve and would probably not have returned if the situation was reversed.

I felt the worst for Leah, and yet I had taken the chance to flee the hostilities, leaving her to deal with her sister alone. I felt some guilt for that, but I also knew the tension would be much less without me there, and that Leslie would soften to Leah long before she softened toward Lance or me.

I expected them to both be in the family room when I got home, watching a movie or playing video games, or out by the pool sunning themselves and reading fashion magazines. Life in the Lawton Correctional Facility was pretty cushy.

But when I walked into the kitchen through the laundry room door, laden down with fabric samples and wallpaper books, I stopped dead. The house was silent, and a sensation of dread went down my back like a cold, bony finger.

I discounted it, as I had been trained to do. I didn’t even call out to the girls to reassure myself. I went into my workroom off the kitchen and put the sample books on the table. I would come back after dinner and write up my notes regarding the Ivorys’ beach house. But even as I forced myself to do something normal, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. I felt tense to the point that I jumped when Leah came to the workroom door.

“Hi, honey,” I said, trying for my usual mom smile. “How was your day with Teenzilla?”

Leah’s eyes filled with tears. “Leslie went to the softball game.”

“She what?” I said, anger overriding whatever else it was that I was feeling.

Leslie might have been headstrong, but she had always been responsible. I would never have gone out that day if I had for one minute thought she would disregard her sentence and leave her sister home alone.

“She went to the softball game,” Leah said. The story all came out in an unpunctuated rush. “She said she would be back before you or Daddy but she’s been gone forever and Valerie Finley called for her and I told her Leslie went to the game and she said she saw her at the game but that the game has been over for hours and Leslie was supposed to call her when she got home.”

She dissolved into tears then and fell into my arms, apologizing. Whether she was apologizing to me or to her sister wasn’t clear, but I wrapped my arms around her, told her not to cry.

Don’t think this way. Don’t feel that way . . .

Even as I told her to deny her feelings, my own eyes filled with tears, and I knew in my heart that we were all about to fall down a rabbit hole into an alternate universe, and nothing would ever be the same again.

I spent the next two hours swinging wildly between anger and worry as I called the homes of Leslie’s friends. She was probably still out with one or more of them. It was Saturday. They had probably gone to the mall or to a movie and lost track of time. Or maybe she hadn’t lost track of time at all, and she was just pushing her defiance even further out on a limb.

I wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her—something I had never done in her entire life.

I kept looking at the clock, willing Lance to come home. He had gone off before noon for a stick-and-ball game and a few beers with some of his polo buddies. He had said he would be home to grill steaks by six. It was six forty before he walked in the door.

We didn’t have dinner that night. Lance went out looking for our daughter. Leah and I stayed home and waited for Leslie to walk in the door. I let Leah heat a microwave dinner for herself. She made one for me as well, but I couldn’t eat. I don’t remember eating anything again until after I collapsed at a press conference two days later.

The following Monday afternoon a mail carrier had spotted Leslie’s bicycle discarded over an embankment on a country road.

The nightmare had begun.

Lauren saved her work and pushed back from the desk, feeling drained and wondering at the wisdom of tackling this project. She had thought it would be somehow healing to put all of the emotion down on paper, that she would somehow be able to let some of it go. But the reliving of it all . . .

She wondered what Anne Leone would have to say about it. Most therapists she had ever known or heard of from friends wanted their patients to spill their guts, lay it all out, dissect and examine and reexamine, regurgitate, and on and on.

She wondered if Anne had done that in the aftermath of her narrow escape from death at the hands of a madman. She wondered if getting it all out and hashing it all up had lessened the terror she felt in remembering that night when she had had to bash a man’s head in with a tire iron in order to save her own life.

She wondered how Anne managed to seem so normal after all of that. Lauren hadn’t felt normal one day, one hour, one minute since her daughter had been taken. She hadn’t been able to pretend otherwise. She had watched most of her so-called friends move farther and farther away from her as she had failed to crawl out of the emotional snake pit, as she failed in their eyes to even make an attempt.

They seemed to think losing a child was something one recovered from, got over. Lauren couldn’t see that happening. It struck her as obscene to think it, let alone do it.

It wasn’t normal to have a child violently snatched away. It wasn’t normal to have to live through the searches, the public pleas, the press conferences, the spotlight of suspicion that had been turned back on them. It wasn’t normal to watch the man who had taken your daughter and done who knew what terrible things to her walking around free to live his life.

And if none of what she was living through was normal, how was she supposed to be normal? Why would anyone expect her to be normal? Why would she try to pretend to be normal? To make the normal people with normal lives feel less guilty that they weren’t her?

We get through it the best way we can, Anne had said. It doesn’t matter what anyone thinks.

That was true from her own perspective, Lauren thought. She had long ago ceased to care what anyone thought of her, or of what she said or did. But she knew she routinely embarrassed Leah with her raw bluntness, and she routinely offended people she had to deal with. Not everyone would subscribe to Anne Leone’s philosophy.

Bump and Sissy Bristol had been the only people to really stick with Lauren through the never-ending “worst” of it (as if there was “better” of it). Bump had called earlier in the evening to check up on her and Leah.

“Hey, beautiful, how’s my second favorite lady in the world?”

“Hey, Bump, I’m okay.”

“I don’t like the way that sounded.”

“Some days are better than others,” she lied. There were no good days. There were just days to be gotten through.

“How’s my Leah doing?”

She was always amused by Bump’s proprietary claim to all females in his circle—like a lion with his pride of lionesses. That was kind of how she pictured him too: big, handsome, masculine, with a wild mane of steel gray hair and a roaring voice.

“She’s at a sleepover,” Lauren said. “She made a friend.”

“You let her out of the house?”

“Well supervised.”

“I’m still surprised. You must be doing better, sweetheart.”

“Don’t get carried away. I’m not exactly happy home alone.”

“You shouldn’t be alone, Lauren,” he said firmly. “Sissy is out of town, but I can come over. I can be there in an hour.”

“You don’t need to do that, Bump.”

“It’s not a problem. I should come over and check on the place anyway. You’ve probably got half a dozen things on the honey-do list by now.”

“Everything is fine. I’m fine.”

“You’re sure? I’m ready to get in the car.”

“No, really, don’t.”

“Well, I’m coming over there soon. I want to see my little Leah. I’ll take her someplace special. We’ll have a day, just her and I.”

Bump had been almost as despondent over Leslie’s disappearance as Lance and Lauren. He had sat in their family room and sobbed like a baby the day they found out Leslie’s bike and shoe had been found.

He had doted on Leah in the years since, which had been nice for her, especially after Lance had died. He had stepped in as a surrogate father.

“Her birthday is coming up,” he said, as if Lauren needed reminding. “We’ve got to do something special.”

“She’ll like that.”

They would all celebrate Leah’s birthday and pretend to be normal for a few hours.

Sissy’s belief was that there could be no real normalcy without closure. Lauren didn’t know that there could be normalcy with closure, either.

What did closure even mean at this point?

Getting Leslie back? She still held out some hope that could happen, but it wouldn’t mean closure. One door would close, and another would open. There would be a long, long journey of healing ahead for Leslie—for all of them.

Did closure mean finding Leslie’s remains? One question would be answered, but the grief would be overwhelming and never ending.

Did it mean bringing Roland Ballencoa to justice?

What was justice?

She thought of her hour spent at the shooting range.

Body, body, head shot, breathe . . .

She had wished him dead a thousand times. Ten thousand times. She had imagined torturing him to death as he may have done to her daughter. She had imagined a dozen different ways to do it. Two dozen. But would she have closure after?

The stark, depressing truth was there was no such thing as closure. Tragedy was a heavy stone dropped in an ocean as still as glass. The effects rippled out and kept going and going and going . . .

Exhausted by the conundrum, Lauren walked out of the office. Too restless to go to bed, she wandered the house.

She had told Anne she would be fine to stay alone. After all, Leslie had not been taken from their home. No one had violated that space. But this house, on the end of a dead-end road, seemed even bigger at night. It was at night that she noticed all the large windows on the first floor and wondered why she hadn’t pushed Sissy to put in plantation shutters or drapes or something.

At night the views the windows had framed in daylight became gaping black holes. What was inside the house became the view to whatever eyes looked in from outside.

Chilled by the idea, Lauren pulled Lance’s old black cardigan sweater around her slender frame, imagining that it was Lance’s embrace wrapping around her, reassuring her. She hadn’t washed it in two years. She liked to believe it still smelled like him.

Even as she surrounded herself with the memory of him, she cursed him for leaving her, for leaving Leah. Now Leah had left her—if only for the night—and she was truly alone.

Like a cat in the night, Lauren prowled the first floor of the house in the dark. Beyond the house, a huge fat moon hung like a Chinese lantern in the sky, its quicksilver glow spilling over the countryside and in through the windows.

It was after two in the morning.

She turned the lights on in the kitchen/great room and hit the Play button on the answering machine as she poured a glass of wine. After Bump’s call early in the evening she had left the phone to answer itself. One telemarketer and a solicitation from the conservation league, then a voice that made her cringe despite the rough sexiness of the tone.

“Lauren, it’s Greg Hewitt. I’m just checking in on you. Call me.”

As if, Lauren thought, erasing the message.

She went to the faded blue antique console table she had situated behind the oversized sofa. She had placed it there with the idea that Sissy would come inside and toss her handbag on it, and her grandkids would come in and throw their book bags on it. It was where both she and Leah usually discarded their purses when they came in—except hers wasn’t there.

Strange. She was sure she had put it there. She always put it there.

She stepped back from the table, eyeing it with suspicion, as if perhaps she suspected the table itself of devouring the bag.

She always put her bag on this table.

Outside, the wind picked up like a sudden exhalation from the night sky, and the trees rattled and shook. Lauren jumped and pulled Lance’s sweater tighter around her thin frame.

She always put her bag on this table.

She thought back on the day, mentally retracing her steps. She had come home from the gun range, her first priority to get her gear bag from the trunk and bring it inside. She wanted the Walther where she could get at it if she needed it. It was of no use left in the car.

She had brought the bag in and taken it directly to her bedroom. Then Sissy had called from her hotel in San Francisco, where she was attending an antiques show, and they must have talked for an hour. And then . . . She had poured a glass of white wine and run a bath.

Maybe she hadn’t brought the purse in after all. She had gotten distracted. She had thought at one point of possibly going back into town to pick up something for dinner. Instead she had grazed on some pistachios and almonds, and gone to work.

She didn’t like the idea that she’d left her bag in the car. Like most women, her purse was like a security blanket to a two-year-old. Half her life was in it. Her wallet was in it. Her last picture of Leslie was in it.

Taken by Kent Westin, it showed Leslie pouting but pretty at the birthday dinner the night before she went missing. Kent had given it to Lauren the following week along with his regrets for what he had said that night as they had left the restaurant—that Leslie needed to be taught a lesson.

One of the casualties of the investigation into Leslie’s disappearance had been the Lawtons’ relationship with the Westins. Kent had been questioned several times, and had taken—and passed—a polygraph. But the Westins had then pulled back, and everything had become awkward and uncomfortable between them. There had never been another annual joint birthday dinner, or any other kind of dinner.

Lauren had never entirely forgiven Kent the remarks he had taken back or the fact that the police had looked so closely at him. Until Roland Ballencoa had emerged as the likely suspect, Leslie’s objections to that last dinner had kept whispering in the back of her mind. She didn’t like the Westins. She thought Dr. Westin was creepy.

But still Lauren had carried that snapshot taken by Kent Westin in her bag for four years. She began to feel panicky that it was out in the car, that she couldn’t just pull it out and look at it. It was important to her that she looked at it before she went to sleep. She worried irrationally that if she didn’t, she would forget what her daughter looked like. And if she forgot what her daughter looked like, it would almost be like conceding that Leslie was dead and gone.

Lauren went to the door but stopped short of reaching for the knob. An uneasy feeling crept over her. Outside, the wind chattered through the trees. The black windows seemed to grow even larger than they were, inviting the world to look through them.

She knew what it felt like to be watched. It felt like a cold breath going down the back of her shirt. She shivered.

The property is gated, she told herself.

Fences could be climbed.

She thought of the photograph in her purse, and already in her mind the image of her daughter’s face was beginning to fade. A lump the size of a fist came into her throat.

She had to go out to the car and get the bag.

Decision made, Lauren hurried through the house, up the stairs to her bedroom. Her black duffel bag sat on the floor beside the dresser. She tossed it on the bed, unzipped it, and took out the Walther and a loaded clip. She shoved the clip into the gun, pulled back the slide, and chambered a round.

When she returned to the kitchen she stood before the door, took a big, deep breath, and turned the knob.

She had left the car in the driveway rather than putting it in the garage because her plan when she had come home had been to go out again. It looked vaguely sinister sitting there, like a big, sleek black panther. And it looked farther away than she wanted it to be.

Holding the Walther close to her shoulder, finger on the trigger, she stepped outside. Her heart was pounding as she moved toward the BMW, looking to one side and then the other. She went to the passenger door and looked in, relieved to see the shape of her bag on the seat.

No one had taken it. She was just paranoid and neurotic.

She grabbed the purse, but before she could pull back from the car, something caught her eye, something on the windshield on the driver’s side.

Lauren stepped back, slinging the strap of her bag over her shoulder. A piece of paper fluttered against the windshield, beneath the wiper blade. She looked around, adjusting her grip on the Walther. The wind seemed to slip inside her clothes and down her back.

She went around the hood of the BMW and snatched the paper off the windshield.

In the amber light from the sconces that flanked the garage doors she could tell it was a photograph. Black and white. Someone had come onto the property without her knowing and pinned a photograph beneath the wiper of her car.

She felt violated without even knowing what the subject of the photograph might be. She imagined she could feel someone’s eyes on her as she backed toward the garage, closer to the light. The shadows in the yard moved with the wind.

Lauren’s heart fluttered in her chest like a frightened bird. She didn’t dare to take her eyes off her surroundings and look at the photograph for more than a few seconds at a time.

A person. A person standing behind a car. Dark clothes. A dark cap.

Me.

Panic-stricken now, she walked backward as quickly as she could. Hurry, hurry, hurry. She felt as if a thousand eyes were chasing her as she went.

She fumbled with the doorknob, trying to turn it with the hand that held the photograph as she clutched the gun to her with the other. Tears blurred her vision. She was hyperventilating.

The knob turned and the door pushed in and Lauren almost tripped and fell in her haste to get inside and lock the door behind her. She banged into the console table, set the gun aside, and nearly upended a lamp in the attempt to turn it on.

Her hands were shaking like a palsy victim’s. She looked at the photograph again. It was her standing behind her car in the parking lot of the gun range.

Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God . . .

She turned around, looked out the windows, expecting to see a face staring in at her. There was no one there—not to be seen—but Lauren felt their eyes on her. She felt naked and exposed.

Hiking the strap of her bag up on her shoulder, she grabbed the Walther and hurried through the house and up the stairs. In her room she put the gun down, emptied the contents of her purse onto the bed, and sifted through them impatiently, sorting out the one thing she was looking for—a business card.

Detective Anthony Mendez.