Tattooed (15 page)

17

“K
ate, it’s me,” Nat said. “Are you already at work?” She had called Kate’s cell phone.

“Yes, I’ve been here for a while. Why? Were you able to set up the interview?” She felt a tremor of excitement. Nat had come through with her request to do a televised interview of Frances Sloane. But alongside the excitement lurked unease. Frances had been right about the appeal of Kate’s so-called fame. Nat had told her that the news show would be interested in doing an interview of Frances only if Kate would agree to appear with her on TV.

“Yes, it’s on.” Nat sounded pleased. “But we need to do it this morning at 11:00 a.m.”

“This morning?” Kate glanced at the clock. It was just after nine.

“Sorry for the short notice—but it was the only time I could make this work.”

“No problem. In fact, that’s fine for me.” Kate was happy to get it over with. “But I’ll have to make sure Frances can get there in time. She lives outside the city and her mobility issues slow her down.”

“We’d like to do it at your client’s house, Kate. Then viewers can really appreciate what her life is like.”

“Of course.” Nat was right—she should showcase Frances at home, amidst all the tubes, machines and paraphernalia that were required to keep her body functioning.

But a sense of dread hit Kate. She knew where it came from.
You are just going to have to suck it up.
“I’ll check with Frances and get back to you.”

Half an hour later, the interview confirmed with her client, Kate closed her office door and prepared a set of stock answers to the Body Butcher questions.

They needed all the ammunition they could get to take on Harry Owen. The final stroke of brilliance—masterminded by Nat—was that the news show would air the segment on the anniversary of the Body Butcher’s death.

But that meant that she would have to dredge up that terrifying day where she’d had to kill—or be killed.

Stop thinking about it, Kate. You agreed to do it.

Armed with an Americano, she hurried to her car and tried to relax while she drove along Purcell’s Cove Road to Frances’ home at Chebucto Head. The Northwest Arm, a long dark blue finger of the Atlantic Ocean, gleamed.

Twenty minutes later, Kate turned onto the private road to her client’s house. She thought that her memory had exaggerated its length, but no, it was a good hike from the main highway. Every pebble that crunched under her tires, every tree that she passed by, every single thing about this road set her heart jumping.

She was not on neutral territory. That was another reason she dreaded the interview. It was bad enough reliving the Body Butcher attack in front of thousands of viewers, but to do it at the place where, seventeen years ago, Kate had made the biggest mistake of her life…

Strange how time blurs so many memories, and then driving down a driveway in the early morning May sunshine brought back, in vivid detail, the dark May night when Kate was seventeen.

Her sister, Imogen, had fussed with her eye makeup in the passenger seat. She had been excited, full of nervous energy. Kate, however, was uneasy. Her sister had been acting strangely and Kate knew Kenzie Sloane was behind it. She was sure the only reason she had been invited to this party was to provide chauffeur service to her fifteen-year-old sister. But Kate had wanted to go, anyway. Everyone at her school—especially the
in-crowd—was going, and she wasn’t immune to the lure of hanging out with them.

The road had been lined with the poorly parked cars of her peers, most of them encroaching on the immaculate lawn. The dashboard of her car vibrated from the music pounding through the glass walls of the house. Imogen had been impatient, urging her to hurry while Kate trolled for a safe place to park their mother’s car. As soon as she had backed the car into a spot, Imogen threw open the door and hurried to the house.

Three hours later, she was dead.

How many times had Kate wished she hadn’t taken her sister to Kenzie’s party?

Let me count the ways.

The final curve of the road crunched under the wheels of Kate’s car. Frances Sloane’s house came into view. She forced herself to exhale.
It’s the past, Kate. You can’t change it.

Advocating for Frances to achieve a peaceful death was perhaps her form of forgiveness. Of allowing that darkened recess of her heart to have light.

Yet she couldn’t shake the feeling that something dark hovered over her head. No matter where she tried to hide, the dark bird of Death always found her.

It didn’t help that Frances Sloane had left a trail of breadcrumbs for it.

Hopefully, that damned bird wouldn’t assume they were meant for her.

Kate strode up the walkway, her heart hammering, studying her client’s house. It had been designed to elicit intellectual awe rather than emotional attachment. And today, in the cool, clear May light, it appeared stark and unwelcoming.

She rang the doorbell. Phyllis answered the door with a warm smile. “Ms. Lange, please come in. I’ve been tidying the room for the interview.”

“I’m sure it will be fine,” Kate said. “We want to show what Frances’ life is really like.”

“Good. I think it’s ready, then,” Phyllis said. She left Kate at the entrance to the living room. “I’ll go make some tea.”

The living room was exactly as Kate remembered, and yet entirely unfamiliar. When she had last been here, the room had been crammed with excited, drunk, hot bodies dancing to The Cranberries’ Celtic-flavored rock. Kate had vaguely recognized the song: “Salvation.” That song had played over and over in Kate’s head after Imogen’s death, the lyrics frustratingly blurred in her memory. Four months after her sister’s funeral—following an afternoon of binge-crying and self-recrimination—Kate bought the CD and read the lyrics on the insert.

She had been incredulous.

“Salvation” was an anti-drug anthem.

She had wondered if Kenzie played that song as a middle-finger salute to her parents.

And now, as Kate stepped into Frances Sloane’s living room, the memory of that song bouncing off the full-length windows, the frenetic beat whipping the partygoers into a manic energy, barged into her consciousness.

Salvation.

Frances Sloane sat in her wheelchair by the massive windows that had deflected “Salvation” so long ago. Her gaze locked onto Kate’s face—as if the sheer force of her stare would bring Kate to her.

Kate approached her client, briefcase in hand. The late morning light, streaming in through the glass, did little to warm the steel accents and angular structure of the room.

It did little to soften the ravages of the disease on Frances Sloane’s face.

“Hello, Frances,” Kate said, her voice unnaturally loud.

“Hello.”

Her client’s bravado from earlier in the week was not in evidence. Kate couldn’t put her finger on it, but something had changed. Was she regretting her decision to fight this battle in the public forum?

Or had she sensed Kate’s uneasiness at being in her home?

As Kate neared her, she realized that Frances’ eyes appeared suspiciously wet. “I saw Kenzie yesterday. First time in seventeen years.”

Whoa
. Kate lowered herself into a chair.

She thought of her half-empty coffee cup in her car. She wished she had finished it.

She kept her voice neutral. “How is she?”

“She seems happy. She is a tattoo artist now.”

“Really.”

Kate was surprised—and yet she wasn’t.

Kenzie had grown up with all the trappings and privileges of her parents’ success. And had consistently thrown it in their faces. Becoming a tattoo artist was entirely consistent with Kenzie’s behavior.

She had been the figurative Painted Lady of their school.

Was this another carnivalesque choice?

Or a true career?

“She’s very successful,” Frances added.

“Good.” The faintest hint of nausea uncoiled in Kate’s stomach. With the exception of the orange she had been slicing when Nat called, she had skipped breakfast in her rush to get ready, and now regretted it. She opened her briefcase and pulled out a notepad. “I wanted to run a few points by you. Key messages for the audience.”

“I know what I want to say.”

“Just in case—”

“I know what I want to say.”

Kate smiled. “Good. Then I’ll just have one more look at my own notes before Nat arrives.”

She kept her head bowed, flipping through her speaking points, staring hard at the lines she had scrawled after her shower this morning. The words were weighty. She knew they could change lives.

But it was no use.

Her gaze kept drifting to the back porch.

Damn it.

The memories that had been crowding at the gates of Kate’s subconscious now surged through the barrier.

Kate was getting bored. All around her, kids were obnoxiously drunk. And Tim Roth, one of the more popular guys on the school hockey team, would not leave her alone. At first, she had enjoyed his attention. Until she discovered that he was not interested in having a conversation.

She edged away, looking for her sister. She wanted to go. Now.

Behind her, a group of kids huddled together on the back porch. She knew what they were doing.

Then she saw her sister in the center of the group.

Imogen’s brown hair fell in a gleaming wing across her face. Another girl leaned toward her, her hair molten copper. The way the girls huddled over the table reminded Kate of how she and her sister would crouch on the sidewalk to peer at a ladybug so many years ago. But they weren’t young children anymore. They were in high school. And this wasn’t one of nature’s wonders at which Kenzie Sloane and Imogen gazed so hungrily.

Her sister’s hair lifted in the breeze as she bent over and cut a line of coke.

The drunken antics of the partygoers around Kate took on an obscene quality.

So that was why her sister had been so irritable.

So remote.

So unlike the Imogen she’d taken care of for so long.

Imogen’s shoulders rose as she inhaled sharply through the rolled five-dollar bill.

She was only fifteen.

And yet, this wasn’t the first time. It was obvious from the ease with which Imogen cut the line, the intensity of her gaze. She wasn’t scared or nervous.

She was hungry.

Desperate.

Her sister’s shoulders relaxed as soon as she got her fix. Kenzie leaned close to her and murmured something in her ear. Imogen flung back her head and laughed. It was shrill, manic. Kenzie doubled over, tears streaming down her face. Then another girl joined in.

The laughter grew raucous. Her sister lifted the rolled bill in the air in a victory salute. She bent over the table.