Don't Say a Word (Strangers Series) (16 page)

My God! Get ahold of yourself.

When she reached the kitchen, she found Bitty sitting silently at the table with a cup of tea between her hands. Allie didn’t like the look on her face. She almost didn’t have to ask.

“Who was on the phone?”

Allie could tell Bitty was hesitant to answer her question. “I don’t know. The call came from a private number . . . and whoever it was hung up.”

Allie felt her shoulders sag. “Oh, God. Not again.”

“Yeah, I’m afraid so,” Bitty said, her voice weary.

“It was Gary, wasn’t it?” a soft voice asked in the distance. “On the phone?” Both women turned and were surprised to see Zoe standing at the mouth of the hallway.

The girl’s forehead furrowed with worry. “I heard you say he might be back. Is it true? Is he? Is he back?”

CHAPTER 26

EARLIER THAT AFTERNOON, Carrie had lain on the couch, her eyes closed, but not all the way. Through her eyelashes, she had watched Sammy carefully organize his minifigures.

Sammy reminded her so much of Joey it hurt. And it wasn’t just his age either. It was some of his features and mannerisms: the thoughtful, careful way he lined up his toys, the way he squinted and held his mouth when he was really focused—which he seemed to almost always be.

Now Carrie lay in the bottom bunk. It was in the middle of the night, and like most nights, she couldn’t sleep. She turned on her side and sighed, watching the shadows dance across the bedroom walls.

Zoe was snoring in the bed above her. Carrie was surprised she hadn’t been sleeping in Allie’s bedroom lately. Since they’d been living at the Callahans’, she’d watched Zoe’s fascination for Allie grow. Zoe wanted a mother badly, and Carrie could tell she had her sights set on Allie.

Earlier that night Zoe had snuck out the window, probably returning to their house to get more of her things. She’d done it twice before. The first time she said she’d walked. The second time she’d hitchhiked with a teenage boy. Both walking and hitchhiking were very dangerous. Normally Carrie would have tried to stop Zoe from doing either, afraid for her safety, but nothing was normal between her and Zoe these days. Carrie wondered if things would ever be again.

She thought about Gary and shivered.

Zoe had told her that he might be back in town. The very thought horrified her. She didn’t think she could handle seeing him again. She pushed thoughts of Gary to the back of her mind and turned her thoughts to Joey. She’d loved Joey so much. They all had. He had been the baby of the family, and definitely the golden child of the three.

Until fairly recently, her family had lived in a trailer just past a sharp bend in the road. The neighbors had repeatedly complained about the sharp curve and the roadside oak in full leaf, whose limbs were in bad need of trimming. There’d already been three accidents on that very turn that year, one fatal, and many more close calls.

The family trailer itself sat only a couple of hundred feet away from the road, down a short, cracked concrete slab that they used as a driveway. It wasn’t out of the ordinary to bolt awake late at night from the blare of honking horns, the loud squealing of brakes, and, if the windows were open—which they often were—the odor of burning rubber.

One summer afternoon, three years ago, Zoe was playing hopscotch in their driveway while their little brother, Joey, toddled around, carrying a kitten their father had brought home from a truck stop.

Their mother had been sunbathing on a bath towel in the grass. She stood up and readjusted her bathing suit. “Zoe. I’m going in for a second. Keep an eye on Joey?” their mother asked.

“Okay!” Zoe called.

Carrie had been sitting in a lawn chair, closer to the trailer, reading a book. Knowing her sister could be a little scatterbrained, every once in a while she’d look up and take her own accounting of their brother.

A few minutes after their mother had gone inside, she happened to look up to find the kitten bounding off toward the road, and Joey running after him. “Joey, no!” Carrie screamed. “Zoe! Get him!” she yelled. Her eyes flew to her sister, who was much closer to Joey than she was. But Zoe just sat, unmoving, gazing at him from her place on the driveway, holding a pink hopscotch chalk midair.

“Zoe!” Carrie screamed again. She scrambled from her chair and took off after him. “Joey, no!”

She heard the door to the trailer slam open. Then out the corner of her eye, she saw Zoe jump up and run after Joey, too. But they were too late.

He’d had too much of a head start.

He didn’t look either way when he ran onto the blistering asphalt. His eyes were focused directly ahead on the kitten.

“Joey!” their mother screamed from someplace behind them.

A truck flashed around the bend in the road. But by the time the driver saw Joey, he didn’t have the chance to stop. Carrie still remembered the squeal of brakes. The acrid odor of burnt rubber. The soft thump. She could still hear her mother’s hysterical screams.

She remembered how hard their mother had slapped Zoe across her face after the ambulance left with Joey’s body. And the words of blame that she would serve like poison over the next three years.

Carrie remembered it all like it had just happened yesterday.

Their mother barely left her bedroom in the two weeks after Joey died. But when she finally did, their father was already on another long haul. In fact, he left the evening after Joey’s funeral.

Their mother walked out of her bedroom one afternoon with a strange look on her face and alcohol on her breath. She clutched a bottle of baby shampoo and told Zoe to get in the bath so she could shampoo her hair. Carrie remembered thinking something was very wrong. Their mother hadn’t shampooed their hair for years. Carrie stood outside the bathroom door, listening in.

“I’m sorry, Mom. I’m
so
very sorry,” she heard Zoe say. But if her mother replied, Carrie didn’t hear it. The knob on the bathtub faucet squeaked and bathwater roared into the tub. Carrie heard Zoe’s voice again. She was probably still apologizing, but Carrie couldn’t make out her words over the rush of water.

Carrie leaned against the door and continued to listen. A few minutes later, Carrie heard the thrashing of water and her mother’s loud grunts. Panicking, Carrie tried to open the door, but it was locked. She rammed her body into it. “Zoe? Mother? What’s going on? Open the door!” But no one answered, and the thrashing and grunting continued. Carrie kept ramming and ramming until finally, the bathroom door swung open.

She ran to the tub to find her mother leaning forward, tears streaming down her flushed cheeks, both palms flat against Zoe’s chest. As she tried to pull her mother’s arms away from her sister, Carrie could see Zoe’s face beneath the water. She was looking up in horror, her dark hair swimming around her face.

“Stop!” Carrie screamed, the sound of blood rushing into her ears. She tried to yank her mother’s arms away from her sister as hard as she could. “Mom, stop!” she yelled. After a long moment, the woman, her face a crumpled mess, finally released her grip and Zoe shot up, sputtering and crying.

Their mother claimed it was an accident and warned them not to say a word about it to their father or anyone. And Zoe never did say a word.

Neither of them did.

CHAPTER 27

THE NEXT MORNING Allie woke up to Sammy playing with his minifigures in bed.

“How are you feeling, honey?” she asked.

“Fine.”

It looked like the preschool’s secretary had been right and Sammy had just had a twenty-four-hour bug—one that, thankfully, hadn’t even lasted that long.

She yawned. “Did you have fun with Zoe yesterday, honey?”

“Uh-huh. Zoe fun,” he said, adjusting a leg on one of his minifigures.

“Good, because Mommy has to work again today and you’re going to play with Zoe again. All right?”

“Okay.”

He set his toy down and curled into her. She squeezed her eyes shut and held him tight, enjoying his warm little body in her arms.

“But . . . but Zoe say something weird,” Sammy said.

Allie opened her eyes. “What did she say?”

“She say you will be her mommy.”

“She did?”

He twisted around and searched her eyes. “But you’re not, Mommy. Right?”

“No, I’m not,” she said, softly.

Allie thought of the glass heart.

It’s my heart. And I just gave it to you.

Having someone’s love was a big responsibility . . . one Allie wasn’t ready for. She had all the love she could handle. Allie sighed. The girl was twelve years old and had just lost everything. She needed someone to reach out to, who could give her what she needed.

“That what she say. I tell her you are
my
mommy. Not hers.”

“We need to try to be nice to Zoe. She just misses her mommy.”

“Because her mommy will not ever come back?”

“That’s right.”

After breakfast, Zoe cornered Allie, wanting to know everything about the phone call the night before. If Allie thought the person had been Gary, and if she thought Gary was back.

Allie told her that there was nothing to tell. The caller hadn’t said anything . . . and yes, it was
possible
Gary had been the one who’d called and hung up, but that they couldn’t know for sure.

It could have been anyone.

Allie didn’t say anything about his truck being found. There was no point in worrying the girl any more than she already was.

Before heading to the home office, Allie showed Zoe how she liked everything to be locked up, then she showed Zoe how to mix Sammy’s vitamins and add them to an oral syringe to help him drink them down. Since he’d been six months old, Allie had prepared his vitamins in the same manner, careful to combine pleasant flavors like citrus-flavored vitamin C with not-so-pleasant flavors like cod liver oil, in order to get Sammy to get everything down without much complaint. She found that when she closely followed the regimen, Sammy rarely got sick. And when he
was
sick, that the regimen decreased the severity of the illness and shortened its duration.

A few minutes later, Allie was at her desk when Bitty appeared in the doorway. “You have a minute?” she asked.

“Yeah, sure.”

Bitty came in and closed the door. She looked like she wanted to talk about something serious.

Allie felt her palms go moist.

“I just spoke with Detective Lambert,” Bitty said. “He followed up on the phone calls made to the house, and he said they both pinged from a cell tower nearby.” She exhaled wearily. “Which I’m afraid means it’s very likely Gary’s back in town.”

Allie felt a crawl of dread in her stomach. This was worse than the truck being found abandoned near the house. Far worse.

“And he’s positive the calls came from Gary’s cell phone?”

“No, apparently Gary hasn’t used his phone in quite some time. The calls came from Julie Parish’s cell phone. She had accounts with two providers. The phone that was used seems to have been a personal phone Julie kept exclusively for communicating with Gary.

“And assuming Gary has the phone in his possession, which it’s likely he does, he was nearby when he made the calls.”

Sweat pooled in Allie’s armpits. It seemed they were getting more bad news every day.
Seriously—how much worse can this get,
she wondered, then immediately shook the thought from her mind. She didn’t want to know.

“We’ll just keep doing what we’re doing and stay aware. Okay, honey?”

Allie nodded. “Yeah. Okay.”

Bitty stood to go. “The good news is that Detective Lambert said he now has approval to put more manpower behind finding Gary. So if he
is
local, chances are they’ll find him.”

The doorbell rang.

Bitty looked at her watch. “Hmm. I wonder who that is? The girls’ caseworker isn’t due for another hour.”

Allie followed Bitty out of the room and checked on the kids. Sammy and Zoe were in the living room playing Ms. Pac-Man on the Xbox, and Carrie was sitting on a chair in the kitchen, staring out the window into the backyard. Allie wondered if she was looking for Gary.

Allie stepped barefoot on the cool ceramic tiles of the foyer to see who Bitty had opened the door for. It was a woman she’d never seen before.

“Please? I just need some answers,” the woman was saying to Bitty. She sounded desperate.

“Okay, come on in,” Bitty said and gestured for the woman to enter the house.

“This is my daughter, Allie,” Bitty said.

The woman looked very nervous, frightened. She was also very pregnant. She nodded a hello to Allie.

“And Allie,” Bitty continued. “This is Laura Willis. Gary Willis’s wife.”

Allie set up the Xbox in the girls’ bedroom. She made sure the window in the room was locked, then told the kids to stay in the room until they were told otherwise. When she returned to the kitchen, she found Bitty and Laura sitting at the kitchen table. She sat down and listened.

“I haven’t seen him in nearly three weeks. Since the eleventh. I’m worried. If he was okay, he would’ve called,” Laura was saying. “I just know he would have. I
know
Gary.”

Allie did the math in her head. Gary had shown up in their yard on the twelfth, so if Laura was telling the truth, they’d been the ones to see him last. Not her.

“I’m worried. He suffers from depression. That’s why he uses, you know. But he gets . . . he’s tried to kill himself before. And with all the stress this is causing . . . I’ve got three kids . . . and another on the way.” Her voice trailed off as she wiped tears from her cheeks. “Look, I’m not gonna sit here and pretend he’s a good man. He’s done his share of bad things. But I just can’t see him hurting people like that. Like he supposedly did with the Parishes. I don’t think he’s capable of that.”

Allie thought it was interesting that the woman had chosen the word “hurt” and not “killed.” Her mind flashed back to Gary holding the gun in the backyard. Waving it around. Pointing it at Johnny. Obviously she’d seen a side of Gary that Laura never had.

“I understand your distress. Have you talked with Detective Lambert about this?” Bitty asked.

“I have, but it didn’t do any good. I wanted to know if it was true that Julie Parish had given him money before she . . . died. But the detective wouldn’t tell me anything.” She sniffed, her eyes glittering with more tears. “It’s not that I wanted it. The money. But if she had . . . I mean, they’d have to have really been serious for her to give him money like that.” The woman paused. “Plus, I’m not sure why they even suspect him in the first place. I feel like I’m the only person who has no idea what’s going on here.”

“I can understand that,” Bitty said. “How far along are you?”

Laura laughed nervously. “My due date was yesterday.”

Bitty nodded. “Okay, what do you want to know?”