The Mirror and the Mask (19 page)

“Of course.” Coming to her senses, Cordelia nearly knocked her sister down rushing into the hall. “Is Hattie with you?”

“Hattie?” said Octavia. “Why would you think I'd bring her? This isn't about Hattie. It's about me and my crumbling marriage.” Swinging her hips like a fashion model, she undulated into the loft. She wore a mink coat over a beaded black camisole, black wool slacks, and open-toed sling-back spikes. She dropped her mink on one of the sofas and draped herself over a chair by the newly installed wet bar.

Cordelia watched all this, stunned. She felt faint. Waving air under her nose, she leaned against the door to steady herself.

“You don't look well,” said Octavia. “Something wrong?”

“If you're here, who's taking care of Hattie?”

“The nanny, of course.”

Of course. “Is she a good person? Trustworthy? Kindly? Loves kids?”

“I assume so. Radley hired her.”

“You
assume
?”

“Hattie's fine, Cordelia. But her mother's marriage isn't.”

In Cordelia's opinion, Octavia was an amalgam, but one with a theme. She'd taken her moral imperatives from two sirens of literature—Becky
Sharp, the manipulative, amoral anti-heroine of Thackeray's
Vanity Fair
, and the amoral, manipulative, deceptive, and ultimately mad Lady Macbeth.

“Why do you think I give a rip about your marriage?” said Cordelia, pressing her lips together in order to keep from strangling on her own exasperation.

Octavia continued on as if she hadn't heard the comment. “You're my sister. You've got to help me think this out.”

“After what you've done?”

“Done? What have I done?”

Cordelia felt seasick, or airsick, or carsick, or just plan giddy and dizzy. “I must be dreaming.”

“Well, if it's a dream, it's a nightmare. Now come in here and sit down. Sit.”

The scene was pure David Lynch—the juxtaposition of the banal with the grotesque. Cordelia had always hated David Lynch movies. Now she understood why. They felt too much like home.

 

With a frigid midnight wind wheezing through the porch screens, Jane opened the kitchen door and let Mouse, her brown Lab, back into the house. He trotted behind her to the living room, where she'd built a fire. As the wood snapped and blazed in the hearth, she resumed her seat on the rocking chair and picked up her second brandy of the evening. Mouse curled up on the rug at her feet.

“You haven't met Annie,” she said, confiding, as she often did, in her dog. “The whole situation has me mystified.” She took a sip, mulling over what she'd learned from her Internet search. “On the one hand, Annie seems so decent, so likable. But she's secretive. And, as much as I hate to say it, she hasn't been telling me the truth.”

Mouse stretched out on his side, gave a deep sigh.

“You still listening?” asked Jane.

His tail thumped the rug a couple of times.

“Good. Now, here's the real story. Annie's birthday is October ninth. She turned eighteen at the beginning of her senior year in high school. Two weeks later, she applied for a driver's license in Boulder, Colorado. That means she never graduated, even though she said she didn't leave home until she had. She did earn a degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2005, so she must have gotten a GED somewhere along the line. Now, here's the really troubling part.

“Annie was picked up for prostitution three months after she arrived in Boulder. It's a class 3 misdemeanor in Colorado. Since it was a first offense, she got off with a hundred-dollar fine. But she was picked up again eight months later for the same thing. That time, she was fined five hundred dollars. And then, a year later, she was arrested a third time. Again, for prostitution. She paid another fine but also had to serve a month in jail. After that, her record is clean.”

Jane looked down at Mouse and saw that his eyes were closed. “That's okay, boy. You don't know her.”

Jane had learned something else in the last couple of days. Background searches were frustratingly silent about everything you really wanted to know. Had Jack molested Annie as a teenager? Was that part of the reason she'd fallen into prostitution? Was she still a prostitute? She did work at a resort in Steamboat Springs, but it was part-time. Jane doubted she earned much money.

“How much pressure does it take before a young mind fractures?” she asked Mouse, watching his sleeping eyes flutter. “Who
is
Annie Archer?”

Nolan would tell her to back off, leave it alone. He might be right. Humans were never simple. Or logical. And there was never just one. Of anyone.

 

 

 

C
urt was still asleep the next morning when Annie left for a meeting with Jack. He'd had a rough night, tossing and turning, unable to get much rest. They held each other for a long time, but Curt never tried to take it any further. Around one, they got up to watch TV in the living room. Annie went back to bed an hour later, but Curt stayed up, drinking directly from a bottle of Maker's Mark. As far as she could tell, he rarely fell asleep, unless he was dead drunk, until the early morning hours.

It didn't take a doctorate in psychology to see that Curt was in trouble. He was erratic, dependent on alcohol to mellow his moods. He refused to talk about what was bothering him, except to say that he felt empty. But he was quick to point out that Annie's presence in his life made him feel less alone. In just a few days he'd gone from offering his place as a pad to crash, to pleading with her never to leave. He didn't seem to understand the pressure he was putting on her.

Jack was waiting for her at a table by the windows when she walked into Dunn Bros coffeehouse around ten. She could tell he was
having a serious problem with his face. He didn't know how to arrange it. It was actually kind of funny, watching him move through various emotional postures—from sternness to anger to concern to hurt to affection and back to sternness again. She ordered an espresso, suppressing a smile as she waited by the counter for it to come up. She had on sunglasses, so she could watch him easily, her head toward the barista but her eyes on him. All the while, Jack sat at the table running through his rather limited gamut of emotions.

“You're late,” he said as she approached.

She took off her sheepskin jacket and hung it on the back of the chair. “You're early.”

That earned a slight smile. He'd always liked spunk.

Once she was settled, her sunglasses resting next to her espresso, he put his elbows on the table and leaned toward her. “I'm sorry, honey. I hurt you and I deserve your anger. I should have tried harder to find you.”

Conciliation. Interesting move.

He nodded out the window. “Nice wheels over there.”

She looked. “Which one?”

“Across the street. The black Cadillac Escalade.”

“Is it yours?”

“No,” said Jack, sliding the title and the keys across to her. “It's yours. It's a V-8, with a Bose sound system, interior leather and wood trim, and it's OnStar ready.”

“You sound like a car salesman.”

“It's a beauty, isn't it? Just a little gift to show you how happy I am that you're back in my life.”

“Are you?”

“Absolutely. But, honey, I need to know what else you want from me. The car's just the beginning. Like I already said, I want to make it up to you. But you've got to tell me how.”

“Okay.” She folded her hands on top of the table. “Tell me the truth.”

“About what?”

“My mother.”

“What about her?”

“How she died.”

He shifted back in his chair. “You know how she died. A heart attack.”

“What caused it?”

“How the hell should I know?”

“She was a meth addict.”

“Who told you that? Where are you getting all this ridiculous information? That I stole from Glennoris. That your mother took meth.”

“From a friend.”

“From that Lawless woman? You shouldn't hang around with people like her. She's a notorious dyke, in case you didn't know.”

It never occurred to her that he'd have her followed, but it shouldn't have come as a complete surprise. “My mother was doing meth when she died. It was in the toxicology report submitted with the autopsy. Death records don't lie, Johnny. Did you get her hooked on it? You took out that insurance policy on her knowing you could send her to heaven or hell anytime you wanted. How'd it work? Did you give her an extra bump the night she died? Meth causes heart attacks if you take enough.”

“You're way off. That's bullshit.”

“Oh, and by the way, I found out Mom died at home, not in a hospital.”

“Of course she died at home. Where'd you get the idea she died in the hospital?”

God, he was good. He could twist just about anything and make it come out the way he wanted. Simple denial worked like a charm
when you were backed into a corner. She'd have to remember that. “You play with people, Johnny, try to confuse them. But you're not confusing me. I know what you told me. I saw my mother changing before I left, but I figured it was all my fault.”

“Look, honey, if your mom was doing meth, she wasn't getting it from me.”

“You didn't notice something was wrong when she got fired? When her personality started changing?”

“I knew, sure. I kept telling her to go see a doctor, but you remember what she was like. She refused. Absolutely flat-out refused.”

“And Susan. You murdered her, too. You found out about the affair she was having.”

His frown deepened. “I didn't know—not until yesterday when the police asked me about it. Susan was a high-priced whore. I should have seen it years ago. I'm too gullible.”

“You're the victim, all right. Poor Johnny. But you get even. With my mom. With Susan.”

“That's just crazy, honey. But if it's what you think, then we're back to my original question. What do you want?”

“
The truth
.”

He played with his coffee cup, rubbed the back of his neck, gave himself some time to think it over. “Okay, okay. So I gave your mom the meth. I was selling it back then, making a bundle, too. The drug was pretty new; nobody took it very seriously. It was a great high, and it was fairly cheap compared to other drugs. Your mom loved it. I mean, I didn't force her to take it, but I could always count on it to make her feel, you know . . . in the mood. What's not to like about that? It took the edge off, made her happy, made her feel beautiful. She lost a bunch of weight and thought it was fantastic.”

“Were you using it?”

“Nah.”

“Were you selling cocaine, too?”

“Too dangerous. But the meth sales made me a ton of money. Your mom was happy and so was I. You know how strapped we were back then.”

“Mom knew you were dealing?”

“Hell, no. Well, not at first. But later, yeah. By then she didn't care, as long as she got hers free of charge.”

“And the night she died?”

He ran a hand over his unshaven face. “She took too much. Simple as that. I came home and found her in bed. She wasn't breathing.”

“I don't believe you. You wanted that insurance money so you could get out of town. You planned to clean out the joint bank account you had with Glennoris. You were going to put together the biggest bankroll you could and then disappear. My mom wasn't part of the picture.”

“No, Annie, listen to me. This is the absolute truth. I swear. Your mom and me, we couldn't afford the condo any longer because she wasn't working. We were planning to move to one of the places I was rehabbing. She was sick. I did push her to see a doctor, but she wouldn't go. When she died like that, out of the blue, I panicked. I thought the cops would figure out I was dealing again, so after the funeral, before they could put together a case against me, I got out of there. I had to disappear. And yes, okay, I did take the money Glennoris and I had in that bank account, but I was scared to death. You may not believe it, but I loved your mom, more than any other woman I've ever known. You asked for the truth and that's it.”

Annie looked down at her espresso, fingering the tiny handle, forcing back the urge to toss it at him.

“Stop judging me for a second and listen. It's hard for me to admit it, but when it comes to personal things, I've always been a complete screwup.”

“A screwup?” He was letting himself off way too lightly. Under other circumstances, she would have challenged him harder, but she
had a specific reason for asking for this meeting. She'd needed to hang on to a shred of his goodwill. Jane was right. Jack was a danger to her. If he thought she was about to tell the police what she knew, he'd react to protect himself. She needed to buy herself some time because she didn't want to leave yet. She had three big reasons: Jane, Curt, and Sunny. Also, if the police were about to arrest Jack for the murder of his wife, she wanted to be around to watch. Hell, she wanted a front-row seat.