The Zero Night

34

“Delaney, I will protect you in any way I can,” Serena told her, hoping it was a promise she could actually keep. “Tell me about the accident. Tell me what happened. You’ve been holding onto this secret for too long, and you need to let go of it.”

The teenager pulled her knees onto the sofa. She looked away from Serena and stared at the fireplace, twisting strands of her long dark hair around her fingers. Her eyes were far away, and her bright smile had gone missing again. She was young, but she looked even younger now.

“That Sunday, Mr. Larsen drove me home,” Delaney said, her voice low.

“This was after the camping trip?”

“Yes. I was feeling so good. Zach and I were in a really great place. I love — loved him. It was May, and school was going to be over soon, and I was thinking about me and him spending the summer together. Mr. Larsen was flirting with me like he usually did, but I tuned it out. He dropped me off at home, and then he left, and I went inside.”

Serena waited. Delaney bit her lip, not wanting to go on.

“You know how my mom could be, right?” the girl continued finally.

“She was drunk?” Serena murmured.

Delaney nodded. “Yeah, but this was worse than that. She was unconscious. It was late Sunday afternoon, and she was still in bed. I struggled to get her up at all. She was really, really out of it this time. When I finally got her up, I made her take a cold shower and have some coffee. That helped.”

Serena thought about this fifteen-year-old coming home from a camping trip and suddenly becoming the mother of the house again.

“Go on,” she said, as she watched Delaney hesitate.

“I asked her what had been going on while I was gone, and she didn’t know. She didn’t remember any of it. That happened a lot. She couldn’t tell me if she’d gone out drinking or stayed home or whether she was alone or with someone. She felt bad about it. She always felt bad. I could tell when she looked at me that she was ashamed that it had happened again.”

“And you told her it was fine,” Serena guessed.

“Sure, I did. It was fine. As long as one of us could take care of things, it was okay.”

Serena shook her head and spoke quietly. “No, it really wasn’t.”

Delaney looked ready to object, but she didn’t. “Anyway, I let Mom sober up for a while. When it was evening, we were starting to get hungry. She suggested we go to Big Daddy’s for a burger. I thought that sounded great, but I made her promise no bars, no drinking. She was good about not drinking when I was with her. She would never drive drunk if I was in the car.”

She said it as if this was a great accomplishment. A huge sacrifice.

“Your grandfather told me there were times when you had to pick your mom up yourself. You didn’t even have a driver’s license.”

Delaney shrugged. “Gramps taught me how to drive when I was thirteen. I knew what I was doing. And it was only a couple of times. Usually, if Mom had a problem, she could get somebody else to take her home.”

“Men?”

“Yeah, but I didn’t care about that.”

Serena held back because she didn’t want the teenager retreating into her shell again. “Tell me what happened next.”

Delaney was silent for a while. The girl’s face was pale, and she tugged at her long hair in quick, nervous gestures. They’d reached the crisis point. Serena reached out and took hold of her hand. “Tell me,” she repeated gently. “It’s okay.”

“We went out to the garage,” Delaney said, her voice stumbling on the words. “That’s when I saw it.”

“Saw what?”

“The damage.”

Serena felt her stomach lurch. She opened her mouth to say something, but she shut it again, letting Delaney find her own words. The girl looked as if she might cry, but then she closed her eyes and steadied herself.

“Mom owned a Highlander,” she finally went on. “It was red. She loved that truck.”

A red Toyota Highlander.

Just like that, a warning bell went off in Serena’s memory, but she didn’t remember the significance of the vehicle right away.

“When I opened the garage door, I saw that something had happened,” Delaney continued. “The front end was all damaged and dented. Broken headlight. The bumper practically falling off. Mom had been in an accident. I asked her what had happened, but she didn’t know. She didn’t remember anything. She couldn’t remember where she’d been or what she’d done. I knew this was trouble, so I closed the door right away to make sure no one would see anything if they drove by. And then I started running some searches on my phone.”

Serena remembered now. She remembered the case. The name. The accident near Proctor.

“Jonah Fallon. The jogger killed in a hit-and-run.”

Delaney nodded, and she couldn’t hold back the tears anymore. They dripped silently down her cheeks. “I didn’t know for sure. I mean, I found the headlines about the accident. It was all over the news. But I didn’t want to believe it, you know? The papers said the accident happened up in Bayview Heights, and there’s nothing up there. No bars or anything. Mom had no reason to be driving in that area. I thought maybe she’d hit another deer.”

“The deer whistles,” Serena murmured under her breath, as one of the puzzle pieces fell into place. “That’s why she ordered them. They got knocked off in the accident. She was replacing them.”

The girl nodded again.

“Delaney, you knew the truth,” Serena said softly. “Didn’t you?”

“Yeah. I was pretty sure that Mom had killed that man. I kept the garage closed, and we didn’t go anywhere. I stayed home from school. I didn’t want anyone seeing the condition of the truck. I knew if somebody saw it, they’d call the police.”

Serena waited.

“Mom couldn’t deal with it. So it was up to me to fix this for us. At first, I thought if we waited long enough, people would forget. If they couldn’t figure out what kind of car it was, we could hold on for a while, and we would be okay. Then the police had a press conference the next day. They said the vehicle in the accident was a red Toyota Highlander. And that was that. If anyone saw our truck, we’d be screwed. I needed to do something.”

As Delaney told the story, Serena watched her take on a false maturity that she knew only too well. I needed to do something.

“I kept pushing Mom to remember, but she didn’t. Nothing came back. It was a total blackout. I knew that wouldn’t matter if anyone found out. You would have arrested her. She’d have gone to prison. Probably for years. I wasn’t wrong about that, was I?”

“No, you weren’t wrong,” Serena acknowledged. “This was criminal vehicular homicide. Given her prior DUIs, she probably would have been looking at significant prison time.”

“I would have lost her. I wasn’t going to let that happen.”

“Delaney, a man died.”

“I know that. And I felt horrible about it. So did my mom. What made it even worse was that she knew Mr. Fallon.”

“She knew him? How?”

“He and his wife used my mom to cater their wedding. It was one of her first jobs, and they picked her because she was local. She was really grateful for that. It helped get her business off the ground. Now he was dead because of her. We couldn’t believe it.”

“The angel figurine,” Serena said. “The message on it. I’m sorry.”

Delaney nodded. “She wanted me to drop it off at their house anonymously for his wife. But I wasn’t going to do that. I didn’t think we could take any chances. I thought maybe the police would be watching their house, or they’d have cameras installed.”

Serena felt a little chill, listening to Delaney map it all out. There was a strange ruthlessness in her voice. A cold calculation as she laid out the details of making sure Nikki never got caught for her crime.

You do what you have to do.

It was as if Delaney could hear what she was thinking, because she said the same thing.

“You do what you have to do,” the girl went on. “I made a plan for us. I had my mom take a bus to town and rent a car for a few days. I went with her to make sure she didn’t say anything stupid. At that point, we didn’t have to use the Highlander for a while. But I needed to do something about it. We couldn’t just leave it like that. I thought about trying to ditch it somewhere, but even driving it out of the area wasn’t safe. The police would be looking for it. Plus, no matter how far I took it or where I tried to hide it, somebody would find it eventually, and the vehicle ID would send people right back to my mom. So I needed to get it fixed. Repair the damage and get it painted. But I was sure the police had gone to every garage in town — probably around the state and over in Wisconsin, too — and told them to be on the lookout for a red Highlander with front-end damage.”

Serena felt a terrible sickness again. She knew what was coming next.

“Zach’s father,” she guessed.

Delaney’s whole face hardened. You do what you have to do.

“Yeah. I decided that was our only chance. Zach’s father had a garage, and he could fix the Highlander. But I knew he’d tell someone, unless I gave him a reason to keep quiet.”

“Oh, Delaney.”

“I went to the garage. It was late. He was the only one there. It wasn’t hard to convince him. He’d always had a weird fetish about me. Zach didn’t see it, but I knew. One time he even stole my underwear, the big pervert. So yeah, I knew he wouldn’t say no. I mean, to me it was no big deal. It was just sex, right? And when it was done, I told him what he was going to do for me in return. Pick up the Highlander at night, fix it in his garage, make sure nobody found out. Because if they did, I’d tell everybody about him and me.”

Serena closed her eyes. All the flashbacks came. Her and Blue Dog. The things Cat had gone through, too. Years went by, and the world never changed. She listened to the monotone of the girl’s voice as she described giving herself to Zach’s father as no big deal, when in fact it was a huge, ugly, life-changing big deal.

“That’s an awful thing,” Serena murmured. “I’m so sorry.”

“Well, like I said, it was my idea. My plan. And it worked. He fixed the Highlander, and we got it back, and it was perfect. A cool shade of blue, too. Nobody ever noticed. We were free.”

Free.

That was the last thing Nikki and Delaney were.

“Your mom found out what you did?” Serena asked.

She nodded. “Yeah. After Mr. Larsen delivered the truck back to us, I had to show it to her. She wanted to know how I got it done, how I was sure that nobody would find out. At first, I just said Mr. Larsen knew me and he’d agreed to keep it quiet. But she saw through that. She knew I’d broken it off with Zach, and she guessed why. I couldn’t see him anymore. I just couldn’t. I couldn’t be with him after what had happened with his dad. And to be honest, at that point, I was just dead inside, you know? I didn’t feel anything. It wasn’t fair to Zach to stay with him when I was pretty sure I could never love anybody.”

The calmness with which this seventeen-year-old described never loving another human being was like a knife to Serena’s heart. She put a hand on the girl’s shoulder, and Delaney closed her eyes briefly but didn’t cry. The numbness returned to her face. That was the only way she could deal with what had happened. When Serena looked up, she saw that the bedroom door was open. Cat had been listening, too. Serena was about to wave her away, but Delaney shook her head.

“It’s okay.”

Cat came and curled up in front of the sofa and took the younger girl’s hand and didn’t let go.

“Anyway, Mom saw through it,” Delaney went on. “I had to tell her what I did. She went berserk. I tried to stop her, but she confronted Mr. Larsen. She said she wanted to kill him. When she got back home, it was like her life was over. I’d done all of this to save her, and instead, she acted like I’d made it worse. She kept talking about turning herself in. I made her swear she wouldn’t, but I didn’t believe her. That next weekend, I went to see my grandparents in Mora. Mom wanted me to go. She said I needed time to be a girl again, whatever that meant. She hugged me so hard when I left. I told her again and again not to tell anybody, not to go to the police, that it was done and over, that it was all behind us. She said okay. She told me she was fine. But when I got back on Sunday, there she was.”

Delaney shook her head.

“See? It was all my fault.”

Serena and Cat said in unison, “It wasn’t.”

But the girl didn’t listen to them. “Now you know why I didn’t want to deal with any of this again. Nobody killed my mom. Nobody murdered her. You were wrong about that, Serena. She just couldn’t handle the guilt anymore. She killed herself, and that’s the end of the story. She killed herself because of me.”