And She Was (41 page)

He nodded. “I guess Iris walked in on him and Lydia. He says he tried to talk to her, but accidentally pushed her down the stairs.”

“
He promised to protect me always . . .”
Brenna whispered.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“You know it’s weird,” he said. “After Wright confessed, he looked different. It could have just been my mind playing tricks, but I swear something happened to his face.”

“How did he look?”

He turned to her. “Human,” he said.

Brenna nodded. A newly arrived group of uniforms was moving toward Lydia’s body. She stared at the face. The eyes were like panes of black glass, wide open and calm.

Epilogue

22 days later

A
family vacation in Niagara Falls at the end of October in the middle of a cold snap wasn’t the brightest idea Brenna had ever come up with—far from it, in fact. She blamed it on the mood she’d been in on the day she planned the trip—an unseasonably warm October 16, exactly one hour after telling an elated Sarah Stoller over the phone that she and Trent had found her mother, Elizabeth, alive and healthy, at Benedictine Hospital in Kingston, New York.
“How on earth did she get to Kingston?” Sarah had said. “Never mind. I’m wiring you a bonus. No, no. I mean it. I’m so happy, I feel like I’m ten years old again.”

Brenna had then received the call from Tim O’Malley, still recovering at Sisters of Charity Hospital in Buffalo, asking Brenna if it would be at all possible for her to come visit, and that had clinched it. Two hours and forty-five minutes and a few phone calls later, Brenna was picking up Maya at choir practice, telling her, “Guess what? We’re going to Niagara Falls in two weeks!” To which Maya had rolled her eyes so far back into her head, Brenna feared they might actually stick like that. “We’ll freeze to death,” she had said.

And as the two of them huddled now in their hooded plastic ponchos on the
Maid of the Mist
on the very last day of its season (which probably should have ended a week earlier), the liquid ice that Niagara Falls had now become raining down on the boat like something out of
King Lear
, a chill wind biting their raw, red noses, making their ears feel as if they might snap off any minute, Brenna had to admit . . . the kid may have been right.

She tried, “The falls are a beautiful color, aren’t they?”

“You know what?” Maya said. “Mars is a beautiful color, too. But that doesn’t mean I want to be dropped on Mars with nothing to protect me but a plastic raincoat.”

Brenna shook her head. She started to say something more, but the words faded, her mind reeling back to the previous afternoon, to sitting in Tim O’Malley’s hospital room, the antiseptic smell pressing into her sinuses as she watched him—two sad eyes staring out from a mass of white cloth. He had just been through his first operation to heal the scars he’d incurred in the group home fire. He was head-to-toe wrapped in bandages (“Like my Halloween costume?” he had quipped) and yet still Tim O’Malley wanted to see Brenna. He wanted to see the woman who had “finally given Iris a proper burial.” He wanted to talk to her. There were things he wanted to say.

Brenna had come to the hospital with such a long list of questions: What had Meade said to Tim at three on the night of September 29, when he’d stolen into his room, put a gun to his head, and forced him to set himself ablaze? How did Tim feel about Lydia now? Did he mourn her? Did he forgive her?

But as it turned out, Tim hadn’t wanted to talk about any of that. “I heard you lost your sister,” he had said, just as Brenna was sitting down.

“I’m still hoping to find her.”

“Yes,” he had replied. “That’s the way I felt about Iris, right up until two years ago.”

His words hang there. She starts to ask, “Is it easier or harder now, without all that hope filling your mind?” but then she notices the white envelope in his lap. He holds it out for Brenna to take. The envelope is sealed. Brenna looks at him. “Should I open it?”

He nods. The bandages rustle. “It’s from Carol Wentz. Read the envelope.”

Brenna does. It is postmarked September 25 and there is a note:
Please give to Lydia.

“Millie kept it for me all this time. Never opened it herself . . . She’s a real friend, you know? A real friend.”

Brenna opens the letter, and reads.

Dear Lydia,

I am sure you never expected to hear from me, but I feel compelled to write. I have wondered for years what happened to Iris, and now I know. Tim told me. I have seen the pictures and the map. Rest assured, they are in a safe place. I will never tell.

While you may think I am writing to condemn you, I am not. I am writing to make a confession of my own.

I was angry with your daughter. I know that sounds strange—she was only a child and I barely knew her—but on the day of the Koppelsons’ barbecue, I had a brief exchange with her that touched something within me, something ugly and mean. Later that day, I saw her and little Maggie Schuler across the street from my house. They had wandered off and were clearly lost. I saw them both, but I saved only Maggie. I scooped Maggie up in my arms, took her back to my home, and called her parents. I acted as if Iris hadn’t been there at all—as if she was invisible. By the time I reconsidered and looked out of my window again, Iris was long gone.

I’ve seen her face a million times since then. She comes to me in dreams and she asks me why. I am never able to give her an answer. At first, I thought it was because of what happened between you and Nelson on those train rides. But that was never the reason. I’m afraid I simply didn’t like the way she asked me for a juice box.

With deepest apologies,

Carol Wentz

Tim says, “Is there anything in that letter that I need to know?”

Brenna looks up at the bandaged face. She stares into the dark, lost eyes and she sees the eyes of his only daughter. “I don’t think so,” she says.

The boat was docking now, everyone stumbling to get off. Brenna watched them as they passed—a pair of elderly women with hunched shoulders and wet noses, holding each other’s hands. A little boy, weeping against the side of his exhausted mother. A shell-shocked young girl, her mascara dripping, tapping at her lip, her boyfriend clutching her shoulder so tightly his fingertips were white . . . All of them with secrets, all of them with shame and regret and at least one mistake they wished with their whole hearts they’d never made—even if that mistake had simply been getting on this boat.

Brenna turned to her daughter. “You were right,” she said.

“What?”

She pushed a lock of hair out of the huge blue eyes—not Clea’s blue eyes but Maya’s, Maya’s wet yellow hair, Maya’s confused little frown. “You were right about the Maid of the Mist. You were right about Niagara Falls,” she said. “You are right about a lot of things.”

Maya broke into a smile. “It’s about time you figured that out.”

Brenna smiled back. In this moment at least, she was glad for her memory.

Author’s Note

H
yperthymestic Syndrome is real, but quite rare with only a handful of cases known to exist since its first introduction in medical journals in 2006.

The condition has been described as perfect autobiographical memory—the ability to call up any date of one’s life and remember it, in full, with all five senses. Though some with hyperthymestic syndrome can compartmentalize these memories, keeping them tightly locked within a type of mental filing cabinet, others—like Brenna—find themselves plagued by frequent, random intrusions of the past. As one subject, interviewed by researchers at UC Irvine put it, “It is like a movie in my mind that never stops.”

For me, that concept calls up so many questions: With the past so vivid in your mind, how can you fully experience the present? How can you move on from an event—whether tender or traumatic or even mundane—without the ability to let at least some of it go? How can you put things in perspective when they’re all sharing equal space in your mind—your wedding day, the moment you heard that a loved one had died, the cornflakes you had for breakfast on June 12, 1995? How can you forgive and forget if you simply can’t forget?

In creating Brenna, I tried to answer those questions as best I could, while keeping in mind that memory is also a blessing—our only way of truly holding on to those we care about.

February 5, 2011

She’s only a shadow, a silhouette stretching provocatively on a computer screen, revealing scandalous details of a life story that most likely isn’t true. Yet when private investigator Brenna Spector is hired to find missing webcam phenomenon Lula Belle, her perfect memory tells her she’s seen this mysterious young woman before, and at a time when she may have been in terrible danger. As Brenna comes closer to tracking down the real Lula Belle, she discovers shocking truths about her own past—and the disappearance of her sister Clea—that will change her life forever.

Read on for an excerpt from the thrilling sequel to

And She Was

Coming Winter 2013

from HarperCollins Publishers!

S
he wants to die.

The thought flew at Brenna Spector like words on a passing billboard—there for just an instant but solid, real. Brenna was staring at the image on her assistant, Trent La Salle’s, computer screen—their latest missing person, if you could call what they were looking at a person. She was more a shadow, standing behind a scrim, backlit into anonymity—all limbs and curves and fluffy hair, but no detail, no color. No face. It looked as though she was naked, but you couldn’t even be sure of that. But then she tapped her lower lip, the shadow-woman on the screen. She tapped it one, two, three times . . .
and the thought flies at Brenna as she looks into the girl’s watery eyes for an instant, just an instant, with the chill wind in their faces and the boat creaking beneath them, everything so icy-wet, so cold it burns . . .

“She’s so freakin’ hot,” Trent said.

Brenna came back from the memory, fixing her gaze on the screen once more. “Uh, Trent? She’s a
silhouette
.”

“Hey, so are those chicks on truck mud flaps?”

Brenna rolled her eyes.

“You’ll get it when you see more.”

As if on cue, the shadow-woman began stretching her body into a series of suggestive yoga poses—a slow backbend, followed by the sharp V of the Downward Facing Dog, a seamless shift to standing, after which she reached down, grasped her right ankle and pulled her leg straight out and then up, until her knee touched the side of her head.

“See?” Trent said.

With shocking ease, she yanked her leg, stole-like, around her shoulder. Her voice was a soft Southern accent, drifting out of the speakers like steam. “I’ll bend any way you want me to.”

Trent nearly fell off his chair.

“I get it, I get it.” Brenna grabbed the mouse and hit pause. “Who is she?”

“Lula Belle.” He said it the way a nun might say the name of a saint. “She’s an artist.”

Brenna looked at her assistant. He was wearing a black muscle tee with a deep V-neck, the Ed Hardy logo emblazoned on the front in glittery red letters. His hair was spiked and gelled to the point where it could probably scrape paint off the side of a bus, and, Brenna now noticed for the first time, he was sporting a new tattoo: a bright-red lipstick print, hovering just above the left pec. Trent’s definition of an artist was, to say the least, dubious.

“A
performance
artist,” he said, as if he’d been reading her mind. “She’s on the web. You can download her, uh, performances.”

“She’s a webcam girl.”

“No.” Trent pointed to the screen. “Lula Belle isn’t about porn. I mean, you can get off to her for sure, but . . .”

“But what?”

“Here—I’ll show you.” Trent moved the cursor, fast forwarding the screen image. Brenna watched the shadow twist and bend, watched her drop into splits and pivot, throw her pelvis over her head and somersault backward to standing, watched her pull up a stool and straddle it, legs spread wide as a Fosse dancer, watched her produce an old-fashioned Coke bottle from somewhere off camera, tilt her shadow-head back, touch her shadow-tongue to the tip, then take the bottle down her throat all the way to the base, all of this inside of twenty seconds.

Brenna said, “Well, I guess you could call that an art.”

“No. Wait.” When Trent hit play, Lula Belle was on the stool, legs crossed, fingers twisting in her hair. “Listen.”

“ ‘. . . You know that little soft part of your head, Lula Belle? Right next to your eyebrow? That’s called your temple. Daddy took his gun, and he put the barrel of it right there at his temple, and he pulled the trigger, and his whole head exploded.’ That’s how my mama told me. I was just eight years old. ‘Do you understand Lula Belle?’ she asked me, and my heart felt like someone had taken a torch to it, melted it down to liquid right there in my chest. But I knew I couldn’t cry. I wasn’t allowed to cry. Mama didn’t . . . she didn’t take kindly to tears. . . .”