Tell Me You're Sorry (42 page)

“Well, you're right, I am worried about you.” He touched her arm. “I mean, you've probably figured it out by now. I think you're pretty cool.”

Alison smiled at him. Then she saw something out of the corner of her eye. “Oh, there's the bus! Listen, after I talk to my dad, I'll give you a call. Meanwhile, please, just wait for me at the hotel. Okay?”

He nodded.

The bus pulled over to the stop. The door made a
whoosh
as it opened. A few people filed out.

Alison put her hand on Ryan's shoulder, then leaned in and kissed him on the lips.

When she pulled away, he looked startled. But he was smiling.

“I think you're pretty cool, too,” she said. Then she stepped onto the bus.

Alison scanned her bus pass, and then took a seat near the back. She waved at him as the bus pulled away. She kept staring out the window—until she was too far away to see him anymore.

As the bus started over the West Seattle Bridge toward the city, she heard her phone ring. It was a text from her father:

The midday sunlight snuck through the closed curtains in the Metcalfs' house. Inside it wasn't dark, just dim and a little gloomy. Nikki sat on the stairs to the upper level. On the foyer floor, Mark Metcalf lay unconscious.

She was reading the text that had come up on Mark Metcalf 's iPhone:

Getting to her feet, Nikki ambled into the kitchen and set his phone down on the counter. She'd already cut off some sections of rope, and found a roll of duct tape. She had everything laid out on the breakfast table.

She'd made up her mind this was going to look like a robbery gone haywire. It had worked well for the Croton job—and allowed her and her partner to help themselves to any valuables. The police would find the Metcalfs and their houseguest bound and gagged in the big utility room downstairs.

Grabbing the tape and some pieces of rope, she returned to the front hallway. Mark Metcalf didn't stir or groan as she stripped off his suit jacket. In his wallet, he had nearly eighty dollars in cash—along with his credit cards. Nikki tossed the wallet on the floor. She'd go through it more carefully later.

It was a struggle, but she managed to roll him over onto his stomach. But then she felt like a contortionist. She had to hold one of his hands behind his back with her knee while bringing the other hand around to tie them together.

She hated doing this alone.

“Get the knot good and tight,” she could almost hear her father saying.

Nikki remembered that afternoon, twenty-seven years ago.

She remembered her father's gardening tools on their bathroom floor after he'd finished in there. He'd merely rinsed everything off. She could still see drops of water and blood on the various shears and the saws. Crimson smudges marred the bathroom tiles. Blood got trapped in the corners between the top of the tub and the walls. Even the white soap bar in the dish had pink swirls on it.

Four big, bulky green lawn bags sat on a tarp her father had laid out on the hallway floor. He didn't use twist ties to seal them up. He used rope—and he had her help him. She didn't see him load the bags, but she knew what was inside them.

“Remember, this isn't your sister anymore,” he said. “She's already on her way to Judgment. These are just bones, tissue, and body parts.”

Only hours before, those dissected body parts had been her living, breathing, beautiful, sweet older sister.

Their father had been asleep when Selena had snuck home just before dawn. Nikki and her older sister shared a bedroom—and a double bed. Selena sat on the bed and shook her awake. She looked terrible. She said she'd been at the beach with Dick Ingalls and his friends. Selena told her everything. At eleven years old, Nikki was both fascinated and repelled. The four boys from the country club had gotten Selena drunk and talked her into doing all sorts of sinful, perverted, sexual things. But Selena admitted that some of it had excited her. She'd enjoyed the attention—for a while.

“Then I heard one of them egging on his friend, who was on top of me,” she explained. “And all at once, I felt so dirty—and used. They'd all been inside me. We didn't have any kind of protection, either. I panicked. I suddenly got so scared . . .”

Selena said the boys had surrounded her at the end of the pier. She was terrified they all would want to take turns with her again. She fought them off. But then one of them pushed her into the lake. She had a horrible bruise forming on her left hip from where she hit a little shelf off the jetty. For a few moments she'd had the wind knocked out of her. But she stayed underwater and frantically swam for the shore. She just needed to get away from them.

She was also dead certain one of them had already started something. “I'd rather be dead than be pregnant right now,” she whispered. “And I can feel it in my body. It's already happening.”

Curling up on the bed, Selena told her about the rest of the night.

While the boys argued on one end of the pier, she swam to the shore. She hid in the woods bordering the beach. Naked, shivering and scared, she waited it out. At a certain point, one of the boys said, “No one will miss her.”

“When I heard that,” Selena whispered, “I suddenly hated all of them.”

She and Selena were still talking when they heard their father wake up. He always coughed and hacked for about ten minutes every morning.

They kept quiet—until after he'd had his coffee. They could smell it brewing in the kitchen. They heard him stomping around some more, and figured he was about to head off for the country club.

But then his footsteps seemed to change course, and it sounded like he was coming right to their door.

It creaked open. With the hallway light behind him, his face was swallowed up in shadows. “I could hear you talking in here,” he said evenly. His voice was flat and cold. “I heard everything. By the time I get back from work, I want you out of this house, Selena. You're not my daughter anymore.”

Then he closed the door.

Nikki listened to him lumbering down the hall. After a few moments, the front door slammed shut.

Dirty and sweaty, with her pretty blue dress full of sand, Selena fell asleep crying on the bed. Nikki held her and stroked her hair.

When her sister wasn't up by noon, Nikki tried to wake her. “C'mon, Selena, get up!” She shook her shoulder. “You've got to pack some things and find a place to stay—at least for a few nights. If you're not gone when Daddy gets home, he's going to kill you . . .”

Rolling over on her back, Selena reached out and took hold of her hand. She placed it on her flat belly. “Feel that, Nikki,” she whispered. “It's a baby, growing inside me. I just know it.”

Nikki pulled her hand away. She went to her dresser and retrieved her Miss Piggy bank. She emptied it out and counted thirty-one dollars and some change. Selena had said last night that she'd left her coin purse in Dick's car. She would need some money for wherever she was going. Nikki started to rummage through Selena's dresser for clothes to pack.

“Please, leave me alone and let me sleep,” her sister groaned.

Selena finally crawled out of bed at three-thirty in the afternoon. Their father would be home in less than an hour. And here she was, still in her dirty, wrinkled blue dress. But she didn't change clothes or shower. Instead, she sat down in the rocking chair by their window.

Nikki was frantic. She was convinced their father would beat Selena within an inch of her life. She imagined how he might even hurt the baby.

“Listen, let me just sit here for a while longer,” her sister said with a strange smile on her face. “Why don't you go wait for him outside? Come in and let me know when you see his truck coming down the block . . .”

“But that won't give you enough time!” Nikki argued.

Selena took her hand and squeezed it. “Don't worry. He'll forgive me. Just you wait and see. Now, scoot.”

Nikki started for the bedroom doorway. She glanced back at Selena, who was gazing out the window. Nikki wondered how she could act so calm.

She did just what her sister told her to. She waited outside for forty minutes—until she spotted their father's old pickup rumbling down the street. Then she hurried back into the house and ran to the bedroom. Selena wasn't in there. Nikki noticed the bathroom door was closed. She pounded on it. “Selena, he's coming! Hurry up!”

There was no response.

She turned the handle. It was locked.

Ten minutes later, when her father kicked open the door, they found Selena's blue dress in a heap on the tiled floor. A section along the hem touching the puddle of blood had turned purple. Her sister looked as if she were asleep in the tub. The water was scarlet. One arm was draped over the bathtub's edge. The blood on the floor came from the slash marks on her wrist.

Her father said he didn't want any medical examiner discovering Selena had been promiscuous. No one had seen her come back from the beach. No one knew she'd come home last night. No one would ever know what she'd done.

He went down to his truck and fetched his gardening tools.

Nikki still remembered him carrying the shears and saws into the bathroom. “You're not to come in here,” he said. Then he shut the door.

That night, after he came back from burying her sister's remains in the woods by the golf course, her father poured himself a glass of whiskey. He sat down at the kitchen table and drank half of it in one gulp. “I'll bet right now those bastards are getting drunk somewhere, bragging and slapping each other on the backs.” He broke down and sobbed. “And meanwhile, my poor little girl . . .”

Nikki realized he didn't blame Selena anymore for what had happened. He blamed those boys from the country club.

Her sister had been right. He'd forgiven her after all.

And as long as those boys were guilty, her dead sister remained innocent.

“Get the knot good and tight.” She imagined her father's voice again as she tied the rope around Mark Metcalf 's ankles. She tore off a piece of duct tape, and firmly pressed it against his mouth.

Jenny's cell phone beeped.

With a sigh, Nikki straightened up and pulled it out of her pocket. It was just a tonal reminder that she had an unread e-mail—from Jenny's friend in San Francisco. Her calls and e-mails were becoming a major nuisance.

“Oh, give up already, will you?” Nikki muttered. She was about to delete the e-mail, but then decided to take a quick look at it:

 

 

 

“Oh, no, no, no,” Stephanie whispered, staring ahead at the standstill traffic on 880. The highway looked like four endless trails of parked cars, their brake lights glowing steadily. She didn't see an exit sign anywhere up ahead, either—not that she knew any other way to the Oakland Airport.

She'd been hoping to make a 3:50 flight to Seattle, with a connection that got her into Spokane at 8:05. That would have left her plenty of time to rent a car, drive to Ben and Erica's cabin, and then talk to the local police.

Slowing down to a stop, she impatiently drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. At least no one had gotten out of their cars yet. But there were the usual jerks who drove on the shoulder, trying to get a little farther ahead of everybody.

She'd hoped to call the Spokane police from the cabin, or at least near there, while on the way. She'd planned to report that a friend had been abducted in the vicinity by someone in a camper, trailer, or truck. She couldn't imagine a call from the Oakland Airport or Sea-Tac getting the same emergency response over in Eastern Washington. And once the police found out who she was, she seriously doubted they'd set up any kind of stakeout at the cabin site based on a hunch from the “presumed dead” crazy woman. Everything hinged on her being there and timing the 9-1-1 call so the police took it seriously.

A few people were honking their horns. Traffic didn't budge.

Her cell phone rang. Snatching it off the passenger seat, she checked the caller ID and switched it on. “Hello, Carroll?”

“Hi, Stephanie,” she said. “I got an answer. It's the quickest response time I've gotten from her in nearly three weeks. It's an e-mail, just like you predicted. She says her boyfriend knows someone in Spokane who can swing by the cabin tonight. No problem, she said. She wants me to send the directions as soon as I can—along with where to find the key.”

Stephanie bit her lip. She would have been thrilled they'd taken the bait—if only she weren't stuck in traffic right now. She hadn't budged an inch since stopping a few minutes ago. The next flight with a connection to Spokane would probably get her in there around ten o'clock. That was cutting it close.

“Did she give any indication when exactly her friend might be ‘swinging by'?” Stephanie asked.

“No,” Carroll replied. “By the way, are you flying out of San Francisco or Oakland? They just announced on the radio there's a backup on the 880.”