Whatever Remains (38 page)

             
“Jade, please!” Alicia grabbed at her arm, urging her out into the rain. “I don’t know – I don’t – oh
God
, please
hurry
!”

             
She snatched her slicker off its peg. “I’m coming,” she said to Alicia. “Lead the way.” Before she followed, she turned back to her mom. “Call 9-1-1,” she said. “Ask for an ambulance, then ask for the police,” she said in a low, tight voice. “Ask to be patched through to Detective Kaiden.” Then she stuck her arms through her jacket, flipped up the hood, and followed Alicia out into the rain.

“So what are you
gonna do?” The whiskey was taking the proper, tightass edge off Jeremy’s voice, his words running together. He shoved the ottoman aside with the heel of his square-toed yuppie shoe and stretched his legs out, pinning Ben with a doubtful look. “Am I gonna have to look at your ugly mug across the table every morning? You gonna move in and protect our Jade from all the scary teenagers rattling gates?” He smiled humorlessly.

             
Ben frowned. “That’d be none of your business.”

             
“Aw, come on. And after I spilled my stupid guts to you?” He shrugged. “I guess you’ve got places to be. Non-criminals to beat up.”

             
“Hey, that kid had it coming,” Ben retorted. Robbie Bowles had been trespassing, if nothing else. They were lucky the kid hadn’t sued the department, but still, he’d been completely within his rights as a detective to…

             
Ben bolted upright in his chair, drink slopping over the rim of the glass and down his hand.

             
“Whoa,” Jeremy said. “That wasn’t
that
good of an insult.”

             
“Shut up.” Realization streaked through him, hot and certain: his concrete proof that turned Trey’s muddy oil portrait of Alicia Latham’s past into a super-focused HD photo. The thing that had been bugging him, that logic leap, closed up tight, evidence turning a theory, a statistical probability, into solid fact.

             
He was fumbling his cell out of his pocket as Jeremy asked, “Um, kindly what the
hell
is going on?”

             
Ben ignored him. “Trey,” he said on an exhale when his partner answered. “Remember that kid I hauled in? Robbie Bowles?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “The night of Heidi’s murder, he said he saw Mrs. Redding going into the house. He saw
a woman
. But she was out of town with her other two sons.”

             
Trey sucked in a breath. “Oh, shit.”

26

S
he plugged up her ear and dialed Ben as they hit the drive. Alicia was in front of her, jogging, wet sweater flapping. Down below, the barn lights were on, bright as day against the night.

             
Ben answered on the second ring. “Come home now,” she whispered into the phone and disconnected, dropping it in her jacket pocket.

             
Oh, God
, she thought to herself.
Oh, God…
Her heart knocked against her tender ribs like it meant to smash them to bits; her legs had gone to jelly.
This is a bad idea. This is an awful, terrible idea
. But she kept walking, on brick-heavy feet, rain slapping against her hood, because whatever Alicia was – whatever secrets lay hidden beneath her bad dye job – Jade wanted to believe that if it were Clara in trouble, someone would go out in the rain for her. This wasn’t about Alicia and the lies she’d told; it was about Grace. And if by some chance she was walking into a trap straight from primetime TV, she wasn’t walking into it unprepared.

             
Water ran down the drive, flooding across the grass, flattening it. Lightning streaked, turned the world to white, and the farm was an apparition of silver fields and black boards. Jade pulled her jacket tight and quickened her steps, breathing in air that tasted like ozone.

             
Alicia reached the open front doors of the barn – Jade had left them only a crack; now they were flung wide – and staggered through, her silhouette dangerous against the buttery light. Jade’s breath caught at the sight of it. She swallowed down a surge of pain in her side and pressed ahead, stepping in out of the rain.

             
Red. There was so much red. Amid the restless stamping and head-bobbing of the horses, a low, awful whine rose up from the floor. A floor that ran red.

             
Blood. It was blood.

             
And then the tableau rushed up through her shock and touched a part of her brain that recognized it for what it was. In the middle of the barn aisle, Grace laid spread out like a little doll, like she was making snow angels, arms wide, head thrown back, legs frozen mid-stride. And fresh, slick wet blood stained the concrete, covered her tiny white hands…the knife held loosely in her little fingers. It was the knife they left up in the loft, to cut open hay bales, an old crappy kitchen thing they’d threaded with baling twine and hung up on a nail. Its serrated blade was slippery crimson. The slices in Grace’s wrists gapped black and arched, like eyebrows.

             
“Gracie! Oh, Gracie.” Alicia threw herself down across her daughter, hands sliding in the blood.

             
That was when Jade realized the whining sound was coming from Grace, and it spurred her into action. “We have to stop the bleeding,” she said, common sense taking hold of her. She snatched two clean towels from the tack room and dropped to her knees at Grace’s side. “Move.” She gave Alicia’s shoulder a shove and clamped a towel down tight on each of Grace’s wrists, pinning the towels over the wounds. “Mom’s calling an ambulance.” She glanced up at Alicia; she was rocked back on her heels against the front of Atlas’s stall door, staring through a curtain of fallen hair. “What happened?”

             
Alicia stared at her, blinking, and then burst into noisy sobs.

             
“Jesus Christ…” Jade looked at Grace’s face, searching for signs of life. The whining had stopped, but her eyes were open slits, lashes flickering, lids twitching. Her mouth was open, breath whistling between her lips. “Grace.” She couldn’t feel a pulse through the towels. “Grace, can you talk to me?”

             
Alicia wrangled her tears with a monstrous hiccupping sound and cried, “She slipped out the back door! I chased her, but it’s dark and raining and…oh God! She tried to kill herself!” She banded her arms tight around her middle and rocked, shoulders thumping against the stall door. “I can’t believe…I just can’t believe…”

             
Neither could Jade. Anger slid through her, spread and warmed, burning hot at the base of her throat. An anger that quickly became rage, clouded with disbelief, heavy with contempt, shimmering with fear. “Why would she try to commit suicide?” she asked through her teeth.

             
Her tone snapped Alicia’s head back. “W-w-what?”

             
“How the hell am I supposed to believe an eight-year-old ran way, climbed up in my loft, got down the knife, and slit her own wrists?”

             
Something dangerous flickered through Alicia’s eyes, there and gone again, and Jade felt her body coil in response. “How am I supposed to know?” Alicia shouted, voice choked with tears. “H-her sister was
murdered
!
Nothing in this fucking world makes any sense
!”

             
“You’re right,” Jade said, fear edging out her ire. She went clammy and cold all over, gooseflesh erupting down her arms. “Lots of shit doesn’t make any sense.” Grace made a mewling sound and she tightened her hands on her slender wrists, praying the ambulance came quick. And that Ben and the cops came quicker. “It doesn’t make
any
sense that you would hurt your own children, but here we are.”

             
Alicia’s face twisted, and Jade knew; she knew, down to her bones, that the woman had cut her daughter’s wrists to stage a suicide. She’d killed her other daughter. Jade wasn’t a cop, didn’t have shred one of physical proof, but she
knew
. Call it mother’s intuition; call it a lifetime of reading animals. Tonight, the animal across from her was Alicia Latham, and she was a hyena killing her own offspring.

             
The knowledge passed between them, over Grace’s trembling body, and Jade felt the air shift; felt something wild and hideous turn loose right there in the sanctity of her beloved barn.

             
All pretense of distress wiped clean, Alicia’s features hardened into a mask that was made of all the same parts, but looked nothing like the original face. The pushy neighbor, the fellow single mother, the woman who’d eaten at her table only a few nights before was gone, a monster left in her place. Her lips skinned back off her teeth and she
hissed
. Her hands came up, curled into claws red with Grace’s blood, and she lunged.

             
Jade was ready. She threw herself back, breath catching as pain exploded in her ribs. She hit Merry’s stall door and crabwalked sideways, blood oily beneath her hands. Her eyes flashed up to Alicia’s – they were full of hate – and then flicked above, drawn by movement, as Atlas’s sleek head came streaking over the top of his door. Jade watched, stunned, as the gelding sank his teeth in Alicia’s shoulder.

             
Alicia screamed. Jade scrambled to her feet, hand going down in the pocket of her jacket. “Alicia.” Her voice was in tatters and she didn’t care. She glanced at Grace, the bloodstained towels on her wrists, the weak roll of her small head. Then at Alicia, the naked panic in her eyes as she lurched away from a still-snapping Atlas and staggered upright, clutching her shoulder. Atlas had taken a chunk of sweater with his teeth; the exposed skin of her arm was red. “The cops are on their way,” Jade said, hoping it would buy her some time, hoping she wouldn’t have to fall back on her last resort. There was already too much blood in her barn.

             
Her eyes went to Grace – who knew how much time she had; the bleeding needed to be
stopped
, damn it – and were forced back to Alicia, to the hideous detachment in her eyes.
Hurry, Ben, hurry
.

             
Alicia hissed again, and said, “I thought we were friends!” It came out a wail, plaintive, like a child’s. “You’re supposed to be my friend!”

             
“Yeah? Well you’re supposed to take care of your daughters.” Jade curled her fingers tight around the grip of Jeremy’s snub nose .38 and pulled it from her pocket, hand shaking as she leveled it on Alicia. “Not another step, Alicia.”

             
The wind howled up high in the eaves; the rain drummed on the tin roof, a static roar. Atlas pinned his ears and pawed his stall door, making a fruitless reach for Alicia, teeth snapping together. The other horses spun circles in their stalls, snorting, blowing. Jade thought she heard a sound, far up the drive, just the lowest rumble, maybe an engine. She asked herself: could she? Could she really do it? Her hand steadied.

             
“I trusted you!” Alicia screamed, and she lunged.

             
Jade pulled the trigger.

27

B
en was climbing out of his car when he heard the shot, and his stomach leapt up and got stuck under his heart. He palmed the grip of his .40 and settled it in both hands, leading the way into the barn with it and to hell with the consequences. In that instant, in the rain, the gunshot still ringing inside his skull, he wasn’t a cop who’d been kicked off a case; he wasn’t charging into an investigation that was no longer his; he wasn’t even a concerned citizen. He was one big leaping tangle of nerves, electric with terror, desperate to get to his girl.

             
He swept through the barn doors…and stumbled to a halt.

             
His brain, so well trained to disengage and catalogue a scene, did what it was supposed to. The sight of Jade alive enabled him to take a giant mental step back and assess.

             
There was blood everywhere. Jade knelt over a small, limp form – a child. Was it…? It was Grace, he saw, her hair too light, her frame too tall to be Clara. Jade held the girl’s wrists, red-stained towels beneath her hands. She glanced up, eyes white-ringed and wild, hair falling across her face. Behind her, lying in the aisle, clutching her arm and howling, was Alicia.

             
He saw. He labeled the pieces. But he couldn’t process for shit. He’d walked in on a dozen sordid, traumatizing scenes in his career, but never one that stunned him to stupidity the way this one did.

             
Jade looked up at his face. “The ambulance should
be here
,” she said in a voice that belonged on someone out for a Saturday stroll. “You have to get out.”

             
He blinked and stepped toward her.

             
“Ben,” she said more forcefully. “You have to leave – ”

             
He found his voice. “What in the
fuck
happened here? Is she…?” He dropped to a crouch at Jade’s side, pushed her hair back off her forehead, searching her eyes. “Whose blood is that? Are you hurt? Where – ”

             
“
Ben
. Listen to me. They’ll be here any minute and they can’t think you were involved. You’ll lose your job.”

             
“Fuck that.” She was right, though. Under his galloping pulse and his incredible panic, he recognized what it would look like to be found in the middle of this. Jade would be okay – she was defending herself – but he’d be off the force. He should leave.

             
The blood, though…

             
“You shot her?” he asked, eyes going to Alicia. She sounded like a cat in heat, blood pouring between her fingers, her face something from a Stephen King novel. “You
shot
her?”

             
“In the shoulder,” Jade said in a crisp little voice. “She’ll live.” He scanned her face, stunned all over again. “What? You think Jeremy’s dad never took me along on those hunts?”

             
Over the rain, the sound of an engine reached them.

             
Jade had never looked more beautiful than when she said, “Go wait out there. I got this.”

The rain had slackened. The drive and its crown of trees, glazed with water, flared bright in the revolving discs of red and blue lights. There was a macabre
sort of comfort in those lights; they signaled that the bleeding was staunched. The hemorrhaging fear and desperation were bandaged up, the squawk of police radios and
snap-snap
of paramedic kits closing a comfort against the harsh, raw night. 

             
Up at the top of the drive, the first ambulance, carrying Grace, cut on its siren and pulled out onto Iris Lane. Alicia was sitting in the other, being attended to. Jade didn’t want to look at her; she glanced away, toward the white van coming down the drive, a big boxy ghost through the last pattering of rain. That would be the crime scene techs, here to snap pictures. Two uniformed officers stood under the trees, talking into the radios pinned to their shoulders. Trey was studying her barn floor and taking notes, looking like a kid cramming for a test, scratching at his hair and frowning.

             
And flanking her, both her guys. Neither of them touched her, both of them looked half-afraid she’d crumble to pieces if they spoke to her, but she could
feel
them there, and that counted more than any words.

             
When he was done in the barn, Trey walked out to them, head ducked against the drizzle, hair crystal with mist. “I hate to ask this.” He cut a glance toward Ben. “But I’m gonna need you to come in and give an official statement about what happened. Ma’am. Jade.” He might have blushed. “Sorry.”

             
She nodded and pulled in a deep breath. “I can do that.”

             
“I’ll drive you,” Jeremy offered, voice tight. “Your mom can stay with Clara.”

             
Again, she nodded.

             
Ben touched her arm. “I’m gonna ride in and watch them have a go at Alicia. I wanna hear this.”

             
Which meant, she knew, that he would relay it all to her. That later that night, and in the nights to come, he would try to help her sort out what had happened right in her own backyard, the impossible monstrosity of it all. She shot him a grateful look through the dark, his eyes bright with the blue and red of the emergency lights. A shadow jumped on his face, a muscle in his cheek twitching. She wanted to reach and lay her hand against his jaw, ask him why he was still this angry, in the aftermath, but instead, she said, “The gun I used was one of Remy’s. I didn’t want to carry one of yours in case I had to…Well, I knew that could complicate the investigation,” she told him, and followed Remy up to his car.

When he was seven, and Chris was just four, Ben’s father let him stay up and watch
The Thing
. The original, black-and-white, slow-moving monster version: an expedition stuck in the snow, cut off from the world, picked off one at a time by a bad guy who was so obviously the bad guy…It was thrilling to his seven-year-old imagination. He loved monster movies after that; he devoured them, nightmares be damned. He loved them right up until he enlisted in the Corps, and then he learned that monsters didn’t always look like monsters. They didn’t shuffle and groan and walk with arms outstretched. They weren’t hideous and twisted and terrible to look upon. They were young and old, beautiful and plain, bombastic and withdrawn, obvious and elusive. They were children and spouses and siblings and parents. They lived shoulder-to-shoulder with mortals, biding their time, sharpening their claws.

             
And sometimes, they wore the mask of a single mother, and lived next door to his girls, and murdered their own children in the name of whatever sick fantasy held them in thrall. Ben didn’t like monster movies anymore; he was watching one right now through the one-way glass of the interrogation room.

             
The paramedics had cleaned up Alicia’s arm, swathed it in bandages that were lumpy with gauze pads. Someone had found her a clean t-shirt – a Cobb PD softball uniform shirt – and her hair was drying on its own, frizzy and red-brown with a line of gray roots showing down her part. The rain had washed away her makeup; the screaming had left her eyes puffy, but they were dry. She’d long since stopped crying. All that was left was her face, lined and sagging and impassive. She might as well have been at a café, waiting for her food to come.

             
Beside him at the glass, Rice stood with his hands in his pockets, looking a thousand years old. “PTA mom gone serial killer. That’ll fuck with your head, won’t it?”

             
Ben frowned at the slim ghost of his reflection, staring through it at Alicia as she picked at something beneath a fingernail and made a bored face. “She’s not a serial killer,” he said.

             
“Well, let’s let the shrink figure that one out for us.”

             
Ben made a noncommittal sound; he wanted to know every last sinister why of it all. He wanted to crack open Alicia Latham’s head and see what she kept inside it, no matter how disturbing. He needed to understand how this had happened, so he could keep it from happening again.

             
“I talked to the hospital,” Rice said. “The girl’s gonna make it.”

“Good.”

“The cuts were shallow – they don’t think she meant for her to bleed out.”

             
“How sweet.”

             
The door to the interrogation room opened and Trey entered, two Styrofoam cups of something steaming balanced in one hand, yellow legal pad and pen in the other. He looked harried, clumsy, and about eight-years-old. Coffee dribbled down the cup rims as he shut the door and he cursed softly. Alicia’s lips twitched in what might have been a hint of a smile.

             
Rice sighed. “Can he handle this?”

             
“Yeah,” Ben said, and hoped it was true.

             
The intercom was on, and in the observation room, they heard Trey say, “Evening, Mrs. Latham,” as he settled the coffee – spilling again – on the folding table between them and tore off a sheet of yellow paper to ineffectively blot up the mess. He made a face, crumpled up the soggy paper and left it in the middle of a coffee puddle. He sighed, plopped down in his chair, graceless and unaffected as a child. The pad slapped onto the table. Despite the camera filming away up in the corner, he had a microcassette recorder for the interview and frigged with the thing for a good three minutes, making all the appropriate frustrated facial twitches, scowling. He was in track pants, sneakers, and had a coffee stain on his white t-shirt, under his jacket. Ben could have kissed him for his performance; it was gorgeous.

             
Alicia’s smile widened, turning up at the corners. “Take your time,” she said sweetly. “I’m not in a hurry.”

             
The sound of her voice was like fingers going down the back of Ben’s neck; he suppressed a shudder.

             
“Yeah, I’m sorry,” Trey said. “This damn thing…ah, here we go.” He laid it flat and hit record. He gave the date and time. “Detective Kaiden interviewing Alicia Latham Griggs.”

             
The sound of her married name flattened her smile; her eyes tightened in the corners. Before Trey lifted his head and offered a reassuring grin, her gaze moved over him like she was deciding her odds of stabbing him in the throat with his own pen and busting herself out. But Trey said, “Okay, let’s get started,” and her smooth indifference was pulled back into place.

             
“This won’t be hard,” Trey said. “I want us to start by going over what happened tonight.” She nodded. “You went up to Jade Donovan’s around what time?”

             
If she was surprised by the question, she hid it without flaw. “It was…” She squinted in thought. “After eight, I think? Sometime around eight.”

             
“And you walked up to the backdoor from the barn?”

             
“Yes.”

             
“Did you take the driveway, or go through the grass?”

             
“The grass.” She made a half-reach for her coffee. “It was raining and it was so wet, but that was the shortest way to the house. And Gracie was…” She trailed off, hand going to her bandaged shoulder, fingers probing lightly.

             
“Did they give her anything for pain?” Ben asked.

             
“Just some aspirin, I think.”

             
Damn
. That took a hell of a lot of focus, controlling pain like she was doing. Then again, it took a hell of a lot of focus to pull off what she had so far.

             
“Are you feeling alright?” Trey asked, concern sounding authentic in his voice. “Do you need anything?”

             
“I’m fine,” Alicia said, and picked up her coffee.

             
“You’re sure? Okay, well, if you start to feel too bad, let me know.”

             
“He’s a little kissass, isn’t he?” Rice asked.

             
“Okay…so.” Trey jotted something on his pad. “It was eightish. What happened when you got to the door?”

             
Alicia took a deep breath and let it out in a rush; she blinked, but her eyes were dry. “Jade – Jade came to the door. The poor thing; her face is a God awful
mess
, all those bruises. And the pain meds have to be messing with her head – I don’t take them, myself; they make me all loopy. I know she didn’t mean to do what she did. We’re friends, you know, and she was just – ”