You Don't Want To Know (9 page)

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Authors: Lisa Jackson

BOOK: You Don't Want To Know
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“A lot,” Ava said as she walked into her room and shut the door behind her.
“Oh, God, Ava, I'm such an idiot!” Tanya said. “It's nothing . . . just dirty socks and underwear, a little inconvenience. I mean, after what you've been through . . .” She let that thought slide and added, “You know, I'm just so, so sorry.”
There was a click on the line, as if someone else were trying to reach her. Ava ignored the call. “It's okay.” But it wasn't. They both knew it.
Leaning against the door to her room, she felt the weight of her loss dragging her down, but she couldn't go there, not today, not when she was finally feeling proactive. “I was just hoping we could get together for . . . coffee, or lunch, or maybe drinks. Whatever.”
“I'd love it! Anytime . . . well, I'd have to work it in. You know, between the salon hours and the kids' schedules and everything else. That'll be a trick. With school, soccer, and—if you can believe it—ballet for Bella, it seems like I'm in the car half the day. You should see my gas bill!”
Hauling children to their activities, it sounded like heaven to Ava, but she didn't voice it. She said, “You're the busy one these days, so you name the time.”
“Okay . . . let me see . . . I've got my appointment book and personal calendar on my computer . . . so how about . . . Oh, gee . . . there's a chance I can meet you tomorrow. I've got an hour for lunch, but it would have to be late, like two or two-fifteen? Is that okay? I've got a cut and color that might run longer than it should.”
“Works for me.”
“Okay, just stop by the shop.”
“Twoish. Got it. Bring pictures of Bella and Brent.”
“Got 'em in my station already. Yeah, I know, I'm one of
those
moms.” She laughed and Ava relaxed a little.
“See you then.” She was about to click off when Tanya's voice stopped her.
“Wait! Hey, Ava, this entire conversation has been all about me. What about you. Are you okay?”
There was that damned question again.
“I, uh, heard what happened the other night,” Tanya added in a rush. “Is everything all right?”
“Right as rain,” she said quickly as she heard footsteps on the stairs, then added under her breath, “I'll tell you all about it when we get together.”
“Promise?”
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Knuckles rapped on her bedroom door.
Good God. Again
?
“Cross my heart,” she whispered automatically as she disconnected. Growing up, they always said those three words when they weren't joking. It was their unwritten rule that whenever either of them said
Cross my heart,
it meant that whatever they were saying was the God's honest truth. Then to the door, she yelled, “I'm coming,” as she clicked off her phone while simultaneously flinging open the door.
Jewel-Anne, seated in her chair, fist raised as if to knock again, was planted on the threshold, her wheelchair blocking the doorway and making it impossible for Ava to pass.
“Your breakfast's getting cold,” she stated flatly. Her doll, a redhead with green eyes, tucked into a special bag that was snapped to the side of her chair, seemed to stare up at Ava with her thick-lashed eyes. Jewel-Anne flipped out one of the earbuds of her iPhone, held firmly in her other plump hand.
“I already told Virginia I'd be right there,” Ava said a tad testily.
“I just thought you should know.” Jewel-Anne was prim today, supercilious as ever. “And Trent texted me. He said he's trying to reach you, but you won't call him back.”
“He didn't—” She remembered the private number on her cell's tiny screen. “So he couldn't get me and called you?”
“I guess.” As if disinterested, she shrugged a shoulder.
“Why?”
“Maybe because you didn't answer and he knew he could get hold of me.” Jewel-Anne said it as if Ava were a bona fide idiot. There was a lot of that going around these days. Too much, in fact. “He's got a new phone number,” she added, then rattled it off.
Having delivered her message, Jewel-Anne flipped her hair over her shoulder, then pressed a button, reversed, and turned her wheelchair deftly on the landing before whirring away. “You're welcome,” she called over her shoulder as she passed by the nursery . . . the closed door to Noah's room.
Ava shook her head as she made her way downstairs again, read the menu on her phone, and called the number she had for Trent.
Sure enough, she got a disconnect message.
She was about to try the number Jewel-Anne had rattled off, one of the few memory skills that hadn't abandoned her in the past few years, but as she reached the first floor, the phone rang in her hands. “Hello?” she said, reading the caller ID message of “private caller.”
“So you
are
alive,” Trent teased.
“Against my own best efforts, some people think.”
“Ah-ah-ah, careful. I might be one of those.” But he chuckled in amusement.
“Probably are.” Of all of her cousins, Trent, Ian's twin, was the one with whom she felt the most connected. Trent, “the sane one” as he referred to himself, was half an inch shorter than Ian, but what he lacked in height, he made up for in looks and personality. “The lady slayer” he'd called himself in high school, and his self-aggrandized opinion of himself hadn't been far from the truth.
Just ask Tanya.
Or several other of her friends in high school. “So, I'm fine,” she insisted, and let him think what he wanted. No doubt he got reports from his half sister and twin about her “condition” or whatever it was they called it. “Piper already called me.”
He groaned. “Stepmommy Dearest.”
“Exactly.”
“Let me guess. She acted as if she were worried sick about you.”
“That's about it in a nutshell.”
“But I don't have to worry about you?” he asked.
“Why don't you be a freethinker and assume that I'm
not
insane.”
“Where's the fun in that?”
“Huh.”
He laughed and they talked as she walked the length of the foyer to the back of the house and the solarium, which offered a wide view of the stables, fields, and hills surrounding Neptune's Gate.
“Just take care of yourself,” he said as the conversation wound down, and she walked into Wyatt's office. Cradling her phone against her shoulder, she snagged a pen from the cup on his desk and scribbled Trent's new phone number onto the palm of her free hand. “Remember, Ava, you're living in a nest of loonies.”
“Funny, that's exactly what they all think I am.”
“Then you fit right in.”
“Don't think so,” she said with a laugh.
“So prove them wrong.”
I will,
she thought as she hung up, then transferred his number into the contact list in her phone. But first she had to prove it to herself.
CHAPTER 9
A
va dutifully ate a quick breakfast of congealing fried eggs, cold bacon, and toast soaked in butter, all washed down with coffee. Afterward, she grabbed an apple and a banana from a basket on the morning room sideboard, then hurried up the stairs to her room again.
More clearheaded than she had been in weeks, she dug around in her closet, found her laptop, and settled herself in a chair by the window. What she needed to do was figure out where everyone had been the night of Noah's disappearance. She'd wondered about it often enough in the past but hadn't had the strength or presence of mind to figure it out.
Of course, the police had done something similar, but Sheriff Biggs and his underlings hadn't tried too hard, she thought, because they'd worked under the supposition that Noah had wandered outside and drowned. After cursory statements from everyone in the house, a search by officers and volunteers of the island and divers who had scoured the waters of the bay near Neptune's Gate's private dock, they'd decided that her son had slipped off the dock and drowned, his little body carried out to sea with the tide.
Except that the tide had been coming in at the time he'd been discovered missing.
She'd checked.
But no one had listened to her, and she really couldn't blame them—she'd been a maniac: frantic with fear, wild with desperation to find her son, and suffering a breakdown in the process . . .
No wonder no one took her seriously. In the ensuing two years, she hadn't given up faith that her baby would be found, but her fractured mind hadn't been able to focus or concentrate.
Until now. She glanced to the bedside table and the tiny cup holding the pills Demetria had picked up from the floor and placed on the table.
Tranquilizers to calm her.
Antidepressants to lift her spirits.
She carried the container into the bathroom. Once more she threw the meds down the toilet, but this time she made certain they all flushed away. She supposed the intensity of this headache might be from stopping the pills cold turkey, but she didn't care; she'd suffer through the withdrawals or whatever they were.
Once satisfied that there was no trace of the pills left, she returned to the bedroom, drank down half the water in the glass, and left the empty pill cup on the table, not that anyone would believe her, but she went through the motions anyway. Next, she quickly braided her hair away from her face so that it wouldn't get in the way as she typed and dived into her project.
She remembered the night that her life had changed forever. The Christmas holidays had been in full swing and the house filled with people—those who worked at Neptune's Gate as well as those guests who had been invited to be a part of the festivities. Ava started listing everyone who had spent the night as well as those who had just dropped by. One by one, she placed their names on a legal pad with a pencil she'd found in the desk drawer, but she couldn't be certain that she'd recalled everyone, not with the way her memory was these days. Nonetheless, she transferred the list onto her computer.
Her fingers moved awkwardly over the keyboard at first, the keys feeling unfamiliar, but she kept at it, typing carefully, making mistakes and corrections until muscle memory took over. “Just like riding a bike,” she told herself, and soon she was in the rhythm of it, creating columns of names, relationships, where each person had claimed to be when Noah disappeared. She'd gone over it with the police again and again but had been so brokenhearted she hadn't been able to do much more than grieve.
Now she looked down at the spreadsheet she'd compiled. Would it help?
No way to tell until she tried.
Three hours later, a headache throbbed behind her eyes as she sat in her desk chair. She rotated the kinks from her neck and stared at the chart and timeline she'd created on her computer, one made primarily from her own recollections and conversations with others over the past few years.
She could see the house as it had been that night. . . .
The foyer had been festooned with fir garlands winking with white lights and threaded with gold ribbon. A twenty-foot tree had stood at the base of the steps, its boughs laden with winking lights, ornaments, and red bows, its upper branches nearly reaching the second story of the open stairway.
A steady stream of Christmas songs had been playing from speakers located all over the house, familiar notes audible only when the din of conversation, laughter, and clink of glasses had receded.
The mood had been festive, the only moment of sadness when, at dinner in the dining room, Ava had glanced to her right, to the seat her brother, Kelvin, had always occupied at family gatherings. Of course he was missing, his chair occupied by Clay Inman, who was an associate of Wyatt's, a junior partner in the firm. Inman's family lived somewhere in North Carolina, if she remembered right, and he'd had nowhere else to celebrate the holidays. He'd innocently taken Kelvin's chair. No one save Ava, or perhaps Jewel-Anne, who had caught her eye at one point during the meal, had seemed to notice.
By nine o'clock, Noah had become cranky and she'd carried him upstairs, rocking him a bit and placing him in his crib.
“No,” he'd objected, and pointed a finger at the twin bed that had been delivered just that week.
“I don't know . . .”
“Big bed, Mommy!”
“Okay, okay.” She'd given in, a mistake she'd regretted immediately. “But you go to sleep.”
She'd tucked him in and waited in the rocker as he'd closed his eyes, feigning sleep. Then he'd opened one eye again.
“Sleep,” she'd repeated firmly, and settled into the rocker.
Twenty minutes later, he'd given it up and was breathing regularly. Ava had gotten up from the creaking rocker, leaned over the twin bed, and whispered, “Merry Christmas, big guy,” as she'd brushed his dark curls from his forehead and planted a gentle kiss upon its soft skin. “I'll see you in the morning.”
He'd offered up the ghost of a smile though his eyelids were closed, sooty lashes lying upon his cheeks. She remembered stopping at the door and looking over her shoulder to double-check that his blanket was covering his body and the night-light was glowing softly under the window situated between his crib and bed.
Her heart ached as she thought of that last, final glimpse she'd had of her son. The pain was palpable and she picked up the pencil again, twisting it anxiously as the memories rolled through her brain.
She'd been in a hurry.
Satisfied that Noah was asleep, she'd left his door ajar as she'd walked out of his room. Then she'd gathered the skirt of the red dress she'd bought for the occasion and hurried down the stairs to join her guests. She remembered pausing on the landing, thinking she'd heard Noah call “Mommy?” but as she'd waited, straining to listen, his little voice hadn't drifted to her over the cacophony of sounds rising from the first floor, and she'd told herself she'd imagined it.
“There you are!” Wyatt had called up to her, and she caught sight of her husband standing at the foot of the stairs, a drink in his hand as he grinned up at her. “We've got guests!”
“I know, I know. I was just putting the baby to bed.”
She hurried down the rest of the stairs and said good-bye to Inman and a couple of others who had gathered near the front door, slipping into coats, scarves, and gloves before being ferried back to the mainland.
The guests came and went and she engaged in small talk and made certain that the drinks were flowing, the candles remained lit, each guest was involved in a conversation, the music never died, and her smile was clearly in place. For over an hour, no one checked on Noah. She'd had the baby monitor set up, an audio system with remote speakers in their bedroom as well as the den and morning room. They'd installed a video monitor as well, but the camera had been angled toward the crib; it hadn't been redirected toward the twin bed because Noah hadn't moved to it yet.
Both had proved useless. That night the audio monitor had been muted by the noise level of the party, and the camera had offered no clues. It wasn't outfitted with a tape, and even if it had been, it was unlikely with its limited view that any image would have shown.
The guilt that had been with her since that night was still her companion.
How many times had she wished she'd returned to her son's room?
How much mental self-flagellation and anguish had she borne thinking that she'd ignored her child when he'd called for her, when he'd needed her most? That one, stupid decision might have been the difference between . . .
She closed her eyes for a second and felt her throat thicken with the tears that were always just under the surface. No. Crying wouldn't help. Neither would railing at the heavens.
She knew.
She'd already tried those two tacks and had beaten herself up for ignoring her heart and rushing back to Wyatt and the party . . . .
“God help me.” Her fists clenched on either side of the keyboard and she lowered her head.
Concentrate.
Don't let the heartache overcome you.
And yet the pain was always there, scraping at her soul, reminding her that it was her fault he'd gone missing. Her damned fault.
And now you have to find him.
No one else will.
Swallowing hard, her eyes burning, she set her jaw and forced her thoughts again to that last night.
The party had wound down early, a little after eleven, but for the most part, those who had remained in the house were still hanging out downstairs. Wyatt had been in his study, sharing a glass of rare Scotch with Uncle Crispin, father to the bevy of Ava's cousins.
Trent and Ian had been playing billiards in the rec room that was located half a floor down from the main living area, and their sister, Zinnia, had stepped through the French doors to the garden to take a call on her cell. Through the half-open door, they'd felt the cold of winter and heard her chewing out her most recent boyfriend, the guy who'd refused to spend the holidays on “some fuckin' rock in the middle of nowhere.” He'd ended up jetting off to Italy, which royally pissed off Zinnia. Fueled by several Irish coffees and a temper she'd never learned to control, Zinnia had let the boyfriend, Silvio, have it, according to both her brothers.
Aunt Piper had kicked off her high heels and was reading in the sitting room while her son, Jacob, had walked outside to smoke a cigarette on the front porch. Ava remembered catching a glimpse of him through the window. His body had been in shadow, but the tip of his cigarette had glowed red in the darkness.
Jewel-Anne had already gone upstairs for the night; she was the only member of the family who'd admitted to being on the second floor, though she'd sworn she never went near Noah's room. Later, she said she was certain his door had been shut.
Ava remembered leaving it slightly ajar, and it was heavy enough not to have blown closed. Someone had to have shut it on purpose.
“Who?” she whispered as she wrote it on the legal pad and circled it, over and over again. Next to it, she wrote
WHY?
Sheriff Biggs and his detectives had thought there was a chance Noah had gotten out of bed himself and wandered down the long hallway to the back staircase, therefore avoiding being detected by anyone downstairs. From those steep back steps, the authorities surmised, he could have climbed upstairs to the third floor or even to the attic, though a search of the upper floors had found nothing. The police had then surmised that the boy could have gone to the kitchen and out the back door in a moment when all the staff were elsewhere or just didn't notice him. There was the chance, too, that he'd wandered around the basement, but, like the attic, a search of the underground rooms had provided no clues to Noah's whereabouts.
Of course, there was the chance that Noah had been abducted, though in the following days, no ransom call or note had been received, and Sheriff Biggs had fallen back to his original theory that the boy had wandered outside and gotten lost.

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