to be any different? Hayden loves our mother. He visits her in prison and knows I don’t. He still believes she cares. I don’t.
We get out of the Taurus. I look through the window in the garage door. Monique’s car is there.
“Does she have another car?” Ronnie asks.
“Did you find more than one vehicle registered?”
“The Caddy is the only one I found. That’s the one Crime Scene is looking for at the scene. They didn’t find a car there?”
“Let’s go inside,” I say. I use the key Gabrielle provided and unlock and open the door. That triggers a memory of the first time I saw Monique in person. She answered the door with a look of hesitation. Her hair looked like spun gold and she was wearing big diamond earrings. I recognized her immediately. I’d seen her picture in the newspaper articles I’d found when researching the death of Leanne. Her work with the advocacy group was the way I found her address the first time. I called them and arranged to meet with Monique.
This is all like a replay of the past. I hear Ronnie’s shoes echo on the gleaming hardwood floors, just as I’d heard Monique’s designer shoes as she led me to a cozy seating area in a corner of the elegant great room. The room is larger than the last two houses my family had lived in. Larger than the entire apartment I live in now. For a moment I taste the amazing almond cookies she made. She gave me coffee with them. I had been eating fruit and granola bars since the day I’d gone on the run. I wanted to get a proper meal, but back then I couldn’t because I was running out of time.
I feel that same sputtering urgency now.
“What’s wrong, Megan?”
“I was just thinking how hard this must be on Gabrielle,” I lie.
“What are we looking for?”
“You start in the bathrooms. See if you can find a hairbrush, a toothbrush. Anything with DNA for the lab. I’ll start in the kitchen.” I don’t say I know that’s where Monique spent a lot of time with her laptop and drinking tea.
“I wonder where the bathroom is in this place?” Ronnie walks down a hallway and out of sight.
Eighteen
Ronnie is off looking for the bathrooms. There are probably three or four. She should be busy for a while.
I go into the kitchen and remember a conversation I’d had with Dr. Albright in one of my first therapy sessions. The session comes at me in words and pictures, like a movie. I’m sitting on her couch, breathing in the scent of the flowers in the tall vase.
This time, calla lilies.
Tell me more about Monique, Dr. Albright says.
Her deep-blue eyes are full of concern. Her daughter is dead, I tell her. I’m pretending to be a reporter, asking questions that I know are causing her pain. Mrs. Delmont looks at me closely and asks, “Are you all right, dear?” I wonder what it is that she thinks is wrong with me. I’m good at hiding my emotions. “Excuse me?” I ask in the kindest, most nonthreatening, attitude-free manner in which anyone could ever utter those words.
She looks at my hands. “You’ve chewed your nails to the quicks.” My hands are in my lap. My fingernails are nearly gone. I didn’t realize that I’d been gnawing them to the point of oblivion. I wonder what other ways my anger, anxiety, fear and need for revenge was manifesting itself. I felt I was changing in ways that I both reviled and welcomed. Chewed nails are on the reviled side of the T-chart that makes up my life’s pros and cons. “It’s just this story,” I lied to Mrs. Delmont, and notice one of my fingertips is still wet. I wonder how I could be so unaware of myself. What is wrong with me?
Mrs. Delmont says, “It’s been a long time since Leanne was taken from me, but it still hurts deeply. I try to keep busy. I try to help, but in my mind I still see my Leanne and her father on the sailboat, smiling, having the time of their lives. She went missing from the marina and I play that day over and over.”
I assure her that she’s not alone, that all homicide survivors feel that way. But as the words tumble from my lips, I notice her face tighten. I was trying to be thoughtful, but it came off as condescending. I quickly came