The Pretty Ones (17 page)

Or maybe it was because Nell had initiated this chain of events herself—something that, up until now, she had nothing to do with at all. Linnie Carter's death had come as a shock. Mary Ann Thomas and Adriana Esposito had sent her into a panic. But Harriet Lamont's murder was all her idea. If anyone had been surprised by the suggestion, it was Barrett. Though his surprise had quickly melted into a full-on grin.

The Sullivan siblings were going to have themselves a proper family outing. It seemed as though the last time they had gone anywhere together, it had been to bid their dead father farewell.

But now, sitting among the scratchy pine branches with her eyes fixed on Harriet Lamont's lovely whitewashed home, Nell was starting to lose her nerve. Who was she kidding? She wasn't brave like Barrett. She was a spineless office worker who didn't have two friends to rub together. A social outcast who was happy to read the same book over and over in a silent apartment rather than go out to places like the Cabana Club.

She was invisible.

A figment of her own imagination.

Nell Sullivan did not exist.

“Barrett.” She whispered his name, but despite her hushed tone, he shot her an angry look.

Shut your yap.
He didn't have to write it. She could read his scowl.
Someone might hear you.

Nell bit her bottom lip and looked down at her hands. “I don't think I can do this. I mean,
you
can do this. You need this. She deserves it . . .” Her whisper tapered off to nothing.

The bitch deserves it,
she thought.
Putting me down, making me feel like less of a person.

Barrett could spend months cutting down every girl in Rambert & Bertram, every alleyway kill increasing his chances of being caught. But if you took down the queen, you destroyed the hive. If Lamont was dead, all those pretty, brainless sheep would realize that even the powerful could be killed. That even leaders were susceptible to destruction. They would learn that their tall shoes and fancy clothes, their pretty faces and perfect hair, didn't count for a damn thing. If someone wanted them dead, they were dead. It was a perfect lesson to jam down their throats, but that didn't mean Nell could stomach watching her boss get killed.

“Maybe you should do it on your own.” She whispered the suggestion, breathing it out from the corner of her mouth. “Don't you get it? I'll just screw it up. And we
can't
screw it up. If something goes wrong, she might see us, and then . . .”

And then it would all be over. Done. And Barrett wouldn't be the only one they carted off to prison. They'd appear side by side on the news, the bloodthirsty Sullivan siblings. Everyone would gasp.

He was such a quiet boy.

She was such an unremarkable nobody.

Such a mouse.

Nobody ever suspected that
he could . . . that she would . . . that her brother had . . . oh dear, oh my, oh goodness, oh God.

But her protest didn't sway Barrett's resolve; it only made him more determined to have her accompany him inside. They just had to wait for the front-room lights to snap off. And would it be so bad? Nell was yearning for excitement, for some sort of change, and what bigger change could someone make than to become a member of a murderous duo? They'd be like Bonnie and Clyde, drifting from city to city, from state to state. She'd pick up an odd job here and there to make ends meet, while he hunkered down in cheap roadside motel rooms to write. That, and murder had its financial advantages. Heck, she had Lamont's check tucked into the pocket of her skirt, and surely such a fancy dame had cash and jewelry they could pawn.

It would be great.

Exciting.

They'd be inseparable.

Bound by blood.

“Fine,” she whispered, “I'll look for things we can sell while you go after Lamont. You
do
understand that we'll have to leave after this, right?” She shot him a look, desperate to see acknowledgment in his eyes. “We can't stay in Brooklyn if we do this, Barrett. We have to go, make a better life somewhere else, or they'll figure it out.”

Barrett stared at her with an expressionless face, and for a moment Nell was afraid that he was going to laugh. Was she acting crazy? Was she being completely paranoid? Did Barrett think blowing out of New York was a stupid idea?

No. She wasn't nuts. This was all part of the plan, part of what
had
to be done. She hadn't considered it before, but maybe making the life she wanted included getting out of Brooklyn. Getting out of New York. Possibly leaving the entire Eastern Seaboard behind.

But what if Barrett shook his head and refused? What if, despite it all, he told her that she could go if she wanted, but he was staying in Brooklyn because he had found a girl? What if he brought that girl back to their apartment and locked Nell in the closet and made her listen, listen, listen to her own headboard bang against the paper-­thin apartment wall, hot tears searing her cheeks, Barrett's name sputtering past her lips in broken whispers as their mother cried out in ecstasy, as their father rotted in his coffin, as her brother fucked a girl, if only to remind Nell that it could never be, would never be her?

Barrett's hard glare softened. He shook his head at her, as though reading her mind.

They aren't going to figure it out.

No, they wouldn't. Because Barrett knew what he was doing. He didn't make mistakes.

But she had to go inside with him, if not to make sure he was okay, then to prove to him that she loved him more than anyone else. To prove that she was willing to do anything to keep him close.
She'd watch him slaughter her supervisor if it made him happy, if it made him whole, if it made them one.

Lamont's front light blinked off.

Both Nell and Barrett turned their attention back to the house, staring at the darkened windows. They would wait another half hour, and within the passing of those thirty minutes, Nell would convince herself that this was no longer a choice. This was something she
needed
to do, if not to prove her love to her brother, then to confirm that she was the opposite of what she'd been raised to believe herself to be.

She wasn't worthless. She was strong.

She wasn't a burden. She was an accomplice.

Barrett sprang from behind the branches of the tree and dashed across the street without so much as a nod of warning. Nell gasped when he broke away from her. Before she knew what she was doing, she was stumbling across the road, trying to catch up to him, if only to avoid being left alone. She dashed around the side of Lamont's house, mimicking his movements. She kept close to the clapboard and ducked beneath the windowsills, just in case someone still lingered in the rooms beyond the glass.

When they reached the back-door steps, Barrett froze, then shot a look over his shoulder at Nell. His expression was incredulous, as though Nell had just sucked in air and screamed, alerting the entire neighborhood to their whereabouts. Nell shook her head, not understanding why he was looking her that way. It was then that her gaze faltered on a pet flap cut into the bottom of the back door. She stammered into the silence, not having even considered the possibility of a dog. And what if Lamont had a husband? What if he had a gun? Nell just about choked on those details, things that hadn't crossed her mind until it was far too late.

But before she could picture Barrett getting mauled by a rabid Doberman or being shot by a man in his pajamas, Barrett rolled his eyes at her stupid mistake and motioned for her to come forward. Sure, there might be a dog, but at least getting in the house would be easy. And yeah, there might be a spouse sleeping inside one of the rooms with a pistol at arm's length, but as soon as Barrett wrestled the gun away, the Sullivans would be more dangerous than ever.

Nell exhaled and crouched in front of the pet door, expecting the flap to stay put, kept in place by an interior plastic locking cover. But the thing gave way as soon as Nell brushed her fingers across it. Lamont had left it unsecured.

Crazy.
Barrett's face was easy to read.
You'd think there wasn't a serial killer on the loose.

Nell nearly bellowed out a laugh, but covered her mouth with her free hand, trying to contain her sudden pang of amusement. She stuck an arm inside the house, shoved her shoulder up against the top of the pet door, and, after a few seconds of fumbling for it, threw the lock.

Barrett edged into the kitchen, not touching a thing. It was Nell who, in passing, pulled a knife from the butcher block on the kitchen counter. She wasn't sure whether Barrett had brought any sort of weapon. Better safe than sorry—that's what their father used to say.

Nell slunk through Lamont's kitchen, searched for a dog's water bowl, for chew toys or a bag of dry food or a pet bed. The pet door was big enough for her to unlock the door without much trouble, meaning the dog was big enough to attack an intruder. But there were no signs of any animal, be it a dog or otherwise. Lamont probably bought the place with the doggie door already installed and never bothered getting it replaced. Again, Nell was struck by the urge to laugh. If that was true, it was a fantastic bit of luck; that bossy hag of a supervisor could just as easily have left the door wide open for them to come in.

Successful, but stupid,
Nell thought.
Probably slept her way to the top.

Creeping through the living room, Nell allowed her attention to drift over Lamont's various trinkets. There was a crystal table lighter like the one she had in her office. It was perched on top of a few magazines in front of the TV. A smattering of porcelain figurines depicting Rockwellian children and cherubic angels dotted various pieces of furniture. Those reminded Nell of their grandmother's house, though they never did visit much. The walls sported framed still-life paintings. One was of a bowl holding a bushel of red apples, a single green one among the others.
You aren't like the other girls.
Another was of a vase full of sunflowers. They weren't the kind of paintings you could buy secondhand; more like student work, maybe by a high school–age kid with the fleeting hope of becoming the next da Vinci. Or maybe Picasso, like Linnie Carter's cubist face.

Nell leaned in to read the signature on the apple painting. A pair of initials: LL. The year next to the initials read '73. It was there, beneath the apple painting, that Nell spotted yet another detail she had failed to consider. Poised on top of a side table among a few figurines and a wicker basket full of waxed fruit was a framed photograph. In it, Harriet Lamont hugged two girls who looked strikingly similar to her. One looked about Nell's age, while the other was younger, maybe ten or eleven.
Daughters,
she thought.
Harriet Lamont has daughters.

Struck by the detail, Nell reeled around, searching for Barrett, and for half a second she wanted to scream.
No, we can't do this. She has a family. We'll find another mother figure, someone else.
But that half second was long enough to let that sliver of perfection embed itself beneath her skin—a festering splinter of unrivaled faultlessness. Because what mother
didn't
have a family?

Only their own.

Nell squeezed her eyes shut against the slow bloom of familiar pain opening up behind her right eye. She clamped her fingers around the hilt of the knife she'd drawn from the butcher block and continued through the darkness of the house. Barrett climbed the stairs ahead of her. They were silent beneath his feet, as though he had somehow become weightless, but they breathed an occasional groan beneath her shoes.

Every time the risers whined, Barrett shot her a wild, wide-eyed look.

Shut up!
he screamed without sound.

Quit your crying,
Faye Sullivan hissed into her ear.
Or I'll give you something to cry about!

More art lined the upstairs hall. On one side, mountain scenes and the high-rise buildings of New York City. A stream cutting through a forest of aspens. On the other, a child's renditions of a more human experience. A group of crooked friends holding hands in a crooked circle. A house with puffs of chimney smoke and pink cotton-candy trees behind a white picket fence. A picture of a two-dimensional girl and boy, both seeming as though they should have been closer together, yet they had been drawn unnervingly far apart.

Cry for the rest of your life, Nell. But you do it in your room. I don't want to hear it, you understand me? You're alone, and
so what?

She looked away from the drawings, a pang of something indefinable twisting her insides into tight, springlike coils.

There was something wrong with this house.

Something haunted.

Something that was drawing out her own forgotten ghosts.

Her father with blood dribbling down his face.

Her mom with a short-handled baseball bat held fast in her hands.

Her brother sleeping on the couch in his wet bathing suit, not the least bit disturbed by their mother's high-pitched screams or the way she bolted from room to room, in search of something, before grabbing the phone and yelling into the receiver.

Help, please help!

Nell standing silent, motionless on the threshold of the open back door.

Oh God, oh God, oh God, someone help me!

Nell regarded the dark hall, her eyes stopping on the little girl who stood in her open bedroom doorway. She looked like a phantom in her pale pink ruffles. A figment of Nell's imagination? Was this girl a reflection of what she had once been? Young and unspoiled, innocent with untamed hopes. All at once, Nell wanted to rescue her childhood ghost from that house, wanted to save herself from the inevitable fate that awaited her. The girl's blond hair framed a milk-white face, her eyes wide with choking surprise. That pretty face, the brilliant hair, the girlish flounce of her rose-colored sleeper. The sadness that had unspooled within Nell's chest settled into cloying disgust. Because who would she be saving? This girl was already tainted. She was destined to become just like the others. No, this girl was not a figment. She was real.