The One I Left Behind (28 page)

“Excellent,” Charlie said. “Maybe she can tell you something helpful.” It was silly, really, but Reggie appreciated the reassurance. It was good to have another semi-sane person on board.

“Come on,” Reggie said. “I’m in my old room.”

Charlie whistled when he walked in. “It’s like stepping into a time machine.” He gaped wide-eyed at the walls and bulletin board. “Nothing’s changed.”

“Wait,” Reggie said. “This is the best part.” She pulled open the closet door, revealing her old 1980s clothes, still on hangers. “Lorraine didn’t get rid of a thing. I doubt she ever even came in here after I left.”

“God, is that sweatshirt with shoulder pads? You could probably make some good money on eBay with this stuff,” Charlie said.

“You’re funny. Give me a hand with this, will you?” Reggie said, shoving the screwdriver between the sash and windowsill and prying. She could practically hear George’s voice in her head:
There’s a right tool for every job.
Shut up, George.

Charlie pushed up on the window while Reggie pried it from below, and at last it gave and opened for them.

“Air!” Reggie said, delighted, taking a deep whiff of autumn.

Leaving the window open a crack, Reggie plunked herself down on the bed and started pouring over the contents of the memory box she’d left on top of the rumpled quilt. “I saved all this stuff after my mom disappeared. Nothing all that useful, really. Matchbooks she’d brought me from restaurants and bars, little notes she left, a copy of Vera as the Aphrodite Cold Cream girl . . .”

“Nice bird,” Charlie said, picking up the small carved wooden swan.

“Uncle George made it for my mom. He gave it to her just before she disappeared.”

“What’s this?” Charlie said, picking up the cutout picture of Ganesh, the elephant-headed god.

“Nothing,” Reggie said. “It’s silly, really. I cut it out when I was a kid. It reminded me of my father.”

“Your father?”

“Or who I imagined my father might be. My mom called him Tusks. It was kind of a family joke, but it was all I had to go on.”

Reggie reached into the cigar box and pulled out the ring she’d tucked there last night, and showed it to Charlie. “A wedding ring, I think. My mother had it in her coat pocket when I picked her up in Worcester. Check out the inscription.”

Charlie held the ring up so that he could read it. “Wait. Isn’t that—”

“The day Vera’s hand showed up on the steps of the police station.”

Charlie blew out a breath. “But what does it mean?” he asked.

He may have looked like his dad, but he sure didn’t have old Yogi’s powers of deduction.

“Probably what we’ve always suspected—that if we can find the guy my mom was going to marry, we’ve got our killer.”

“So did you find any new leads about who Mr. Right might be?”

“Not a new lead, exactly,” Reggie admitted. “More like taking a new look at an old one.”

Charlie nodded. “Tell me.”

Reggie reached under her mattress and pulled out Tara’s copy of
Neptune’s Hands
.

“Look, Tara underlined a few passages with a purple pen. I found a purple pen on her bedside table in the room she was staying in, which makes me think she just did it. Anyway . . . one of the things she underlined was a passage about one of the suspects, this guy named James Jacovich. The name didn’t ring a bell with me, but listen to this.” She looked down at the passage and read aloud, “ ‘Jacovich was reportedly one of Vera Dufrane’s on-again, off-again boyfriends. He was a small-time coke dealer who went by the name Rabbit.’ ”

“Okay,” Charlie said, raising his eyebrows in a questioning way.

“My mom talked about him a lot. She told me he was a director, that he had all these connections. She’d been involved with him for years. She said he was a genius, but half crazy with a bad temper.”

“Did you ever meet him?”

Reggie shook her head, then looked back down at the book. “It says here that they picked him up and arrested him for DUI two days after her hand was found. You know why the cops stopped him to begin with?” Reggie asked, hearing the excitement in her voice.

“Why?”

“For a busted taillight. He had a tan Impala with a bashed-in left taillight, just like the car I saw my mom get into at the bowling alley!”

“Wait, he’s involved with her, has a temper, and has a car that matches the one Vera got into the night before her hand showed up. Why’d they let him go?”

Reggie shook her head. “It turned out he had a great alibi—the night my mom went missing, he was at his court-appointed NA meeting, then ended up spending the night on his sponsor’s couch. The sponsor was a reliable member of the community, according to the cops, so Jacovich was off the hook. And it also says the police couldn’t find any evidence or connect him with the other murder victims either.”

“But God, Reggie, there’s the broken taillight!”

“There’s that. But then last night, I remembered something. You know Candace Jacques, the waitress?”

Charlie nodded. “Neptune’s second victim.”

“Well, remember how I said my mom took me to meet her once? You know what one of the first things she said was? She asked my mom if she’d heard from Rabbit lately.”

“So?”

“So, the way Candace said it like Rabbit was this mutual friend. So he’s connected to not just one, but at least two of Neptune’s victims!”

“You think he’s still around?” Charlie asked.

“One way to find out,” Reggie said. “I used my phone to do a search online and didn’t come up with anything. But I thought it couldn’t hurt to visit some of the places out on Airport Road. I was thinking of heading out there later on, seeing what I can find out.”

Charlie nodded. “A lot of them are closed down now, but Runway 36 is still going strong. I’ve got some appointments, but I can be here by six to pick you up.”

“Are you sure?”

“Hell yes.”

“Six o’clock, then,” Reggie said. She knew they were both remembering what searching the bars twenty-five years ago had led to.

She could see it so clearly: Sid crumpled on the pavement, Tara reaching down for him, her hand coming away bloody.

Reggie’s cell phone rang and she jumped. Jesus. Maybe she hadn’t needed all that caffeine. Reggie looked at the display on her phone: Len.

“You need to get that?” Charlie asked, standing. “I can show myself out.”

“No,” Reggie said, turning the ringer off her phone and slipping it back into her pocket. “I’ll walk you out.”

They passed Vera’s room and saw she was awake.

“Hey, Mom, do you remember my old friend Charlie Berr?”

Vera peered at Reggie in the doorway. Then slowly her eyes moved to Charlie, who was a step behind her.

He moved through the door. “A real pleasure to see you again, Miss Dufrane,” he said in a jovial, real-estate guy voice. Reggie saw something change in Vera’s eyes, like a shade being pulled down. Then there was nothing but pure panic as Vera opened her mouth and began to scream.

Chapter 30

June 21, 1985

Brighton Falls, Connecticut

A
IRPORT
E
FFICIENCIES WAS A
single-story row of cinder block units, painted a blotchy and peeling Pepto-Bismol pink; the walls were stained from years of car exhaust, drunken urination, God only knew what else. It glowed hideously bright in the security lights around the parking lot.

“Cozy,” Tara said.

“By the week or by the hour,” Sid said, winking at her.

Charlie was in the backseat beside Reggie, sulking.

“Do you think your mom really has a room here?” Tara asked, turning to look at Reggie.

Reggie couldn’t bring herself to answer.

“I think it’s pretty fucked up if she does,” Tara said, leaning forward and twisting a chunk of hair into a more pointed spike, angling it down over her left eye. It looked like a horn.

The three of them piled out of the Mustang and went into the motel’s office, where they pushed a buzzer and waited for a grizzled old man to emerge from the doorway behind the desk. He eyed them suspiciously.

“Yes?” He was wearing brown polyester pants and a pea-green sweater covered in stains. His false teeth slid and clacked as he spoke. Reggie detected the faint odor of urine coming from his general direction.

“I’m looking for my mother. She’s a resident here. Vera Dufrane?”

The old man was silent, gazing dully at each of them in turn. He played with his teeth, pushing them forward with his tongue, out past his lips, then sucking them back into place.

“These are my cousins,” Reggie continued. “It’s urgent we find her. There’s been a death in the family.”

Dentures reached under the counter and produced a key, which he slapped down on the Formica desk.

“You can go ahead and clean out her stuff. What you don’t take goes in the Dumpster tomorrow. She’s two weeks behind. Been here on and off for five years now and never missed a week’s rent.

“Called last week, all apologies, said she’d be coming by to square up and clean the place out, but she never showed. A detective showed up yesterday, demanding to be let into her room. That’s the last thing I need is the cops snooping around—it’s bad for business.” He pushed his teeth out, then sucked them in—his own punctuation mark to show he was all done talking.

Reggie took the key, attached to an orange tag with the number 8. The tag had something like petroleum jelly on it, and Reggie realized it must have come from the old man’s hands. She wiped the orange tag on her jeans, thanked the man, and led the way out of the office. Stopping in the doorway, she turned back to ask one final question.

“She’s getting married, you know. My mom. Did you ever meet the guy?”

The teeth were pushed forward, out past his cracked, yellow lips as the old man laughed. Reggie’s face reddened, her left ear burning, and she looked down at the floor.

“There are lots of men,” he wheezed, trying to catch his breath. “Hard to keep track, if you know what I mean. And we got lots of residents. I don’t keep up with all the comings and goings. I can’t even say for sure when Vera was here last.”

“But in the last few weeks? Anyone special around since then?”

Dentures seemed to consider this.

“Nope. Last few times I saw her, she was alone. There was a light-colored car parked outside of her door a few times. That’s all I can tell you.”

Reggie nodded her thanks, said she’d drop the key off when they were done.

I
T TURNED OUT
R
EGGIE
didn’t need the key after all—the door had been left unlocked. She knocked first, just in case, then held her breath and pushed the door open.

Room 8 was wrecked. Not unkempt wrecked, but typhoon wrecked. There were clothes everywhere. Drawers pulled out and tossed on the floor. Broken bottles of perfume, gin, brandy, and Colt 45. The mattress was on the floor. The one chair in the room was tipped over and gutted, foam rubber padding bleeding out. Reggie’s first thought was that this couldn’t possibly be her mother’s room. But then her eyes fell on a single stained white leather glove mixed up in the heap. And the smell of the perfume was unmistakable: Tabu.

“Jee-zuss!” exclaimed Tara. She stepped inside, walked into the center of the room, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath. “Something horrible happened here,” Tara said.

“For Christ’s sake,” Charlie said. “Would you put your psychic antenna down?”

“Let her do her thing,” Sid said. “Maybe she’ll . . . I dunno, pick up on something useful.”

Reggie was immediately sorry they’d come. Being in this room felt like looking at Vera naked, passing the picture around to her friends for shits and giggles.

“You think the cops did this?” Sid asked.

“No way!” Charlie said.

The smells of spilled booze and stale perfume hung in the air like invisible smog. Reggie’s head spun with the sweet, sour scent. Sure she was gonna puke, she hurried to the bathroom, retched into the toilet, but nothing came up. She noticed a roach scuttle along the wall behind the toilet. She’d never even seen a roach before. It was as hideous as she’d imagined. She could practically hear its legs on the stained tile floor, scraping like tiny bones.

“You okay, Reg?” Charlie called.

“Fine,” Reggie said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “Never better.”

She stood and looked around the bathroom with watering eyes. The mirror on the medicine cabinet was smashed, the sink full of large silver shards. Seven years’ bad luck for some poor bastard. The shower curtain had been ripped off the rod and lay torn in the mildew-stained tub. Vera’s makeup had been strewn across the floor: mascara, tubes of lipstick, rouge. Reggie picked up a powder compact, opened it, and smelled the sweet, talcy smell, stared at her reflection in the tiny round mirror.

“Where are you?” she asked. “And what were you ever doing here?”

No answer. Only the reflection of a skinny girl with hair that was too short and a right ear that was slightly paler than the left.

She snapped the compact closed. Reggie swung open the broken-up door of the medicine cabinet and looked inside. Only a bottle of aspirin was left on the shelves. That and a safety pin. She picked up the safety pin, opened it, and touched the sharp tip to her thumb. Reggie noticed a wadded-up towel on the edge of the tub. Looking closely, she saw that it was smeared with dark reddish brown stains.

Blood.

Her mother’s? Neptune’s? Someone else’s?

Reggie’s stomach churned. She shoved the tip of the pin down into her thumb. Then she pulled it out and did it again.

“Reg?” Charlie called. “You find anything in there?”

“Nope,” she said, closing the safety pin, dropping it into her pocket.

She stepped back into the other room, a combination bedroom and kitchenette. Sid was smoking a cigarette. Charlie had the door to the minifridge open and found only a couple of shriveled limes in it. There were two unwashed glasses in the sink. The other dishes were put away in the cupboard, which had been decorated with a paisley patterned contact paper. Very 1970s. None of the dishes matched. Reggie recognized a plate from home: ivory with delicate green vines decorating the edge.