Something She's Not Telling Us - Darcey Bell Page 0,88

this is so urgent. A kidnapped daughter is an emergency. Wanting to return a misplaced cell phone is not.

Charlotte is lying to Ruth’s mother. Ruth’s a liar, and now she’s turned Charlotte into one too.

The woman says, “Wait. Is everything okay? Has something happened to Naomi?” She must have heard an off note in Charlotte’s voice.

“No, not at all.” Charlotte’s proud of how quickly she’s thinking. “She’s fine. She said she was going to her grandparents’ house in Hoboken, and I’m going to be passing right near there today. I could just swing by and drop off her phone. We live in Montclair, which isn’t far away.”

Her knowledge of New Jersey must be coming from God. Charlotte has no idea if Hoboken is anywhere near Montclair. “I know how inconvenient it is, trying to function without your phone. Ruth—I mean, Naomi—must be having a hard time—”

The silence lasts so long that Charlotte says, “Hello? Are you there?”

“Are you sure you’re friends with her? How good a friend?”

“Pretty good?” Why does that sound like a question?

“Because the truth is: Naomi’s grandparents have been dead for ten years. She told you they were alive? How typical.”

Charlotte’s hand is shaking as she types: Grandparents dead 10 yrs.

Rocco’s grown alarmingly pale, but Charlotte needs to focus.

“Let me guess. I’ll bet she’s told you that her grandparents are angels who treated her like the princess she is. I bet she told you that they’re totally responsible for her health and happiness. Her sanity. That they saved her from her cruel witch of a mother who abandoned her. Am I right?”

Charlotte has a bad feeling about where this is heading, but she has to tell the truth. Or whatever version of the truth she knows.

“She speaks about her grandparents so lovingly—”

“My parents were monsters from hell, both of them. One summer, I made the mistake of leaving Naomi with them because I was having some personal problems. And when I returned to collect my daughter in the fall, I learned that every time she’d talked back or annoyed them in any way, every time they caught her in a tiny white lie, they’d lock her in the basement, which—or so Naomi told me—was crawling with enormous wolf spiders.

“By then I’d learned not to believe her, but my parents said she was telling the truth. About the spiders, anyway. My parents weren’t even the tiniest bit embarrassed. They said they’d been trying to teach her a lesson, to make her behave like a lady. A little lady, they said. Sometimes they starved her for days until she begged for food and water. My father drowned her cat, and I’m pretty certain he made her watch the cat die. And my God, the way my parents died—”

“I’m so sorry. I don’t mean to pry, but how—”

“It’s no secret. It was in all the papers. My father dragged my mother down into the basement and locked them in. He shot her and then he shot himself. He died instantly, but it took her longer.”

“That’s terrible,” says Charlotte. “I’m so sorry.”

“Then you must be sorrier than I am. The terrible part was that it made it damn hard to sell the house. At least Naomi got some of the money when they finally closed. Some payback for what she went through.”

“I must have misunderstood,” says Charlotte. “She always talks about going to their house. She says she still goes there all the time—”

“Oh, no,” says the woman. “I hope not. Not again.”

“Not what again?”

“My parents’ house sat on the market for a very long time. Given how hot that neighborhood suddenly was, it should have sold in a flash. Or so the real estate agents kept telling me. That neighborhood being ‘hot’ was beyond my imagination. But anyway, a murder-suicide house is a tough sell.”

Charlotte’s daughter is missing, and this woman has shifted from Bible stories to real estate.

“During the time the place sat empty, Naomi was picked up by the cops for loitering near the house. The real estate agents had to change the locks. Supposedly she harassed—or threatened or something—some people renovating one of the brownstones down the block. The neighbors got nervous. Naomi called me from the police station. That’s what it took to make her get in touch with me. I think she blamed me for her grandparents’ deaths, just like she blamed me for everything. But of course I had nothing to do with it.”

It crosses Charlotte’s mind that maybe the woman isn’t telling the