And She Was (42 page)
Authors: Alison Gaylin
Trent hit pause and turned to Brenna. “You get it?”
“She bares her soul. Shares her secrets.”
He nodded.
“And people pay for this.”
“Big-time.”
Brenna shook her head. “Weird.”
“Well, the Coke bottle thing helps . . .”
“When did she go missing?”
“Six months ago.”
“And the client?”
“It was a third party.”
“Who was the third party?”
“A PI. Lula’s manager hired him.”
“And the PI’s name is . . .”
“Brenna?”
“Yes?”
“Can I ask you something?”
“As long as you’re not asking me in order to avoid my question.”
“Seriously.”
“Okay.”
Trent cleared his throat. “When I first showed you Lula Belle . . . you . . . remembered something, didn’t you?”
“Yeah.” Strange how
remembered
could be such a loaded word, but in Brenna’s world it was. Since she was eleven years old, she’d suffered from hyperthymestic syndrome, a rare disorder which allowed her to remember every minute of every day of her life, and with all five senses, whether she wanted to or not. It came, her first psychiatrist, Dr. Lieberman, had recently told her “from the perfect storm of a differently shaped brain and a traumatic experience”—
storm
, as it turned out, was a good metaphor, seeing as how the syndrome had descended on Brenna, battering her mind into something so different than it had been before. She had two types of memories now: the murky recollections of her childhood and the vivid, three-dimensional images of everything that had happened from August 22, 1981 to the present.
Brenna could recall, for instance, what she had for breakfast on June 25, 1998 to the point of tasting it (black coffee, a bowl of Special K with skim milk, blueberries that were disappointingly mealy and two donut holes—one chocolate, one glazed). But her father, who had left her family when she was just seven, had existed in her mind only as strong arms and the smell of Old Spice, a light kiss on the forehead, a story told by her mother, years after he’d gone. He wasn’t whole in her head. She couldn’t clearly picture his face. Same with her older sister Clea, who had gotten into a blue car on August 21, 1981 at the age of sixteen and vanished forever. Clea’s disappearance had been the traumatic event that had sparked Brenna’s perfect storm—yet ironically that event, like Clea herself, was stuck in her fallible presyndrome memory, fading every day into hazy fiction.
Brenna had known that would happen—even as a kid on August 21, 1982, the anniversary. . . .
Sitting at her bedroom window with her face pressed against the cool of the screen, glancing at the digital clock blinking 5:21
A.M.
and chewing grape Bubble Yum to stay awake, her throat dry and stingy from it, trying with everything she had to remember the car, the license plate, the voice of the man
behind the wheel . . .
Brenna shut her eyes tight and recited the Pledge of Allegiance in her head—one of the many tricks she’d figured out over the years for willing memories away.
“So?” Trent said.
She opened her eyes and took a breath. “What was your question again?”
“What were you remembering when you looked at Lula Belle?”
“Not much—a gesture,” Brenna said. “On October 23, Maya and I were in Niagara Falls on vacation, remember?”
He gave her a look. “I can remember four months ago.”
“Well, we were on the
Maid of the Mist
, and there was a girl on the boat who tapped on her lip three times, just like Lula Belle did at the start of the tape.”
“What did the girl on the boat look like?”
“Probably in her twenties. Red hair. She was leaving the boat with her boyfriend and she had mascara running down her face,” Brenna said. “She looked like she wanted to die.”
Trent’s eyes widened.
“I know what you’re thinking, but we
all
probably looked that way,” Brenna said. “We were getting hailed on. It was freezing and windy and everybody was seasick and Maya was about ready to call Child Protective Services on me for taking her on that boat in the first place.”
“Still,” he said. “It could have been Lula Belle you saw. Two months after she went missing. On that boat with some jerkoff. Praying to be saved from him . . .”
“Hell of a coincidence.”
“Happens all the time.”
“Trent, it was just a gesture. Do we have any idea what Lula Belle looks like?”
“No.”
“What about this third party? Do they?”
“Nope.”
He shook his head. “Her own manager doesn’t even know what she looks like. He lives in California. Never met her face-to-face. He maintained her site, made the checks out to cash, sent them to a P.O. Box . . .”
Brenna sighed. “In that case,
I
could be Lula Belle.”
“Oh man, that would be so awesome.”
Brenna’s gaze shot back to the frozen image on the screen. “Do we at least have her full name?”
“Uh . . . no.”
“What about her Social?”
He shook his head.
“So let me get this straight. All we have on this woman is a fake name, a fake accent, a P.O. Box, and a very obvious skill-set.”
“You think her accent’s fake? Really?”
“Trent.”
“Yeah?”
“Why did you accept this case?”
He picked at a fingernail.
“Trent.”
“I’m a fan, okay?”
“Oh, for godsakes.”
“I know, I know . . . I mean, I never heard of her before yesterday, but I can’t get her out of my head. I can’t stop watching her. I don’t even care what her face looks like or how old she is . . . It’s like Errol said—she gets under your skin and stays there.”
“
Errol?
”
“Crap. I didn’t mean to say that out loud.”
“Errol Ludlow? He’s the third party?”
Trent’s face went pinkish. He bit his lower lip and stared at the floor like a shamed kid. “Yes,” he said finally. “Errol Ludlow Investigations.”
Brenna stared at him. “No.”
“He said you were the best around at finding missing persons—that’s why he wanted to hire you.”
“No, Trent. Absolutely not.”
“He wants to let bygones be bygones and—”
“
No!”
Trent looked close to tears.
Brenna hadn’t intended to say it that loudly, but she wasn’t going to take it back either. In the three years that Errol Ludlow had been her boss, he’d put her in serious danger four times. Twice, she’d been rushed to the hospital. Her ex-husband had made her promise to quit and then one time, three years after Maya was born, Brenna had made the breathtakingly stupid mistake of taking a freelance assignment from him; it had ended her marriage for good. Brenna couldn’t let bygones be bygones. Trent should’ve known that. There were no such things as bygones in Brenna’s life—especially when it came to a king-size jackass of a bad memory trigger like Errol Ludlow.
“No, Trent,” she said again—quieter this time. “I’m sorry you’ve grown attached to this girl’s silhouette, but we can’t take this case.”
Trent started to say something—until Ludacris’s “Moneymaker” exploded out of his jeans pocket, interrupting him. His ringtone. He yanked his iPhone out of his pocket and looked at the screen. “My mom.”
“Go ahead and take it,” Brenna said.
Trent moved from the office space area of Brenna’s 12th Street apartment, past the kitchen, and into the hallway that led to the living room. Brenna glanced at the shadow on-screen caught frozen, one delicate hand to her forehead—the swooning Southern Belle. “Sorry, Lula.” Brenna wondered why Errol had accepted a missing person in the first place. From what she knew, he only handled cheating spouses.
Work must be tight.
She clicked play. Lula Belle arched into a languorous stretch that seemed to involve every muscle in her body and sighed, her voice fragile as air. Brenna watched her, thinking about what Trent had said.
She gets under your skin and stays there . . .
Was Errol a fan, too?
“I miss my daddy,” Lula Belle said. “He was the only person in the whole world could stop me from being scared of anything.” She turned to the left and tilted her head up, as if she were noticing a star for the first time. “I used to be afraid of all kinds of stuff, too,” she said. “The dark, ghosts, our neighbor Mrs. Greeley—I was sure she was a witch. Dogs, spiders, snakes . . . even cement mixers, if you can imagine that.”
Brenna’s eyes widened. She moved closer to the screen.
“I somehow got it in my head that those cement mixers were like . . . I don’t know, giant vacuum cleaners or something. I thought they could suck me in through the back and mix me in with all that heavy, wet cement and I’d never be able to get out, wouldn’t be able to breathe.”
“Me too,” Brenna whispered.
“But my daddy, he made everything better. He got me a nightlight. He protected me from mean old Mrs. Greeley. He told me those dogs and snakes were more scared of me than I was of them, and he was right. But the best thing my daddy did. Whenever we’d be driving and I’d see a cement mixer, he’d sing me this song . . .”
No . . . It can’t be . . .
“I don’t know whether he’d made it up or not, but it went a little like this . . . Cement mixer/Turn on a dime/Make my day ’cause it’s cement time/Cement mixer, you’re my pal/Ain’t gonna hurt me or my little gal . . .”
Brenna’s breath caught. She knew the song—knew it well enough to sing along. She knew it like the blue leather backseat of the white Mustang her dad had called the Land Shark, knew it like the strong hands on the wheel, the smell of Old Spice, and the voice—the deep, laughing voice she loved, but couldn’t hold on to.
“It’s okay, Pumpkin, it won’t hurt you, it’s just a bus for building materials.”
Dad.
“Just like the one that takes the big kids to school, only this one is for the stuff they make the playgrounds out of . . . Cement mixer/Turn on a dime . . .”
“You know what my daddy called those cement mixers?” Lula whispered to the camera. “He called ’em school buses. For playground ingredients. Isn’t that funny?”
“Man, I’m gonna miss her,” said Trent, who was back in the room.
Brenna turned to him, fast. “We’re taking the case,” she said.
ALISON GAYLIN is the author of the Edgar®-nominated thriller
Hide Your Eyes
, as well as its sequel,
You Kill Me
, and two stand-alone novels,
Trashed
and
Heartless
. A graduate of Northwestern University and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, Alison lives with her husband and daughter in upstate New York.
www.alisongaylin.com
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Excerpt copyright © 2013 by Alison Gaylin
AND SHE WAS.
Copyright © 2012 by Alison Gaylin. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition MARCH 2012 ISBN: 9780062096296
Print Edition ISBN: 9780061878206
FIRST EDITION
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