something?”
“Yes, she’s definitely mouthy.”
“Good for her. She sounds like a teenager.”
“Yeah, but . . .”
I groan at her hesitation. “Joylene, I don’t have time for this. It’s the middle of a workday. Spit it out.”
“Okay.” Her voice is harder now, sick of my shit. “Everyone says she’s a cold-blooded little bitch just like you always were.”
I freeze, but my heart beats faster, harder. Just like me. Is it possible? My condition does run in families, especially if you throw in hardship and a healthy dose of instability. “Cold-blooded how?”
“She’s a little . . . I don’t know. I guess she’s a little spooky. But that’s no reason to throw a child away! Wesley loves her. Or he used to, anyway. We moved to Moore, and he hasn’t seen her in a good three years, maybe four. But when she was little, she was more wild than spooky.”
Spooky. Her chatter fades in my ears as my pulse fills my head. Ricky has a daughter who’s a spooky, cold-blooded bitch just like I am. Is it possible? A little Baby Jane out in the world?
I settle back in my chair and cross my legs. “All right, Joylene, let’s start from the beginning. Tell me everything you know.”
CHAPTER 4
She doesn’t appear sixteen in her picture. Not even close. She’s a weak-looking thing, scrawny and pale, and my first instinct when I find her photo online is to dismiss the whole story entirely. She’s nothing like me. Look at her.
But her eyes stop me. It’s a school photo, the cheap blue-gray background a dead giveaway, and she doesn’t seem pleased to be sitting for a forced portrait. Kayla’s dark-blond hair is parted in the middle and falls in a flat line a couple of inches past her shoulders. Her white skin is dotted with freckles and her thin mouth is set in a stubborn line, nostrils flared, as if she’s refusing the command to smile.
Everything about her is unremarkable, maybe even pitiful. Everything except the eyes. A dull green, they’re fixed on the camera, and if they were sad or scared, she’d look every inch the neglected child she likely is. But there’s no fear there. No sorrow. There’s nothing. Just a slight sheen of moisture and the cold emptiness of deep space.
“Hello, hello, hello,” I whisper to my missing niece. She does look a little like me after all.
I turn on my laptop camera and pose for a humorless full-face shot, just as Kayla did. We don’t resemble each other in any other way. I have dark-brown hair cut in a fringed bob, and my face is a nice, full oval without the bony angles of hers. But the spooky eyes? Yeah. Those are the same.
I can cover it up by smiling, crinkling my eyes into little half-moons of happiness. But that takes effort to pull off, and Kayla clearly doesn’t give a shit.
Is my niece a sociopath?
Joylene said the girl had been in a little trouble before but nothing huge. A couple of fights at school. A few items shoplifted from the grocery store. Or maybe more than a few.
“What kind of society calls the police on a child for stealing food?” Joylene huffed. But we all know what kind of society does that. Our kind. And Kayla had known it too, and she hadn’t been afraid to try it. Maybe she wasn’t as weak as she looked.
There are no details about her disappearance online. Just her birth date and description and the day she was seen last, on a website about missing and endangered children. Kayla was last seen four weeks ago, just as Joylene explained. She didn’t know too much beyond that. “Your mama says she must have run off. I called the police, and they said they’ve filed a missing-person report but had no reason to believe she was at risk. They sounded bored about the whole thing.”
“And Kayla’s mother?”
Joylene snorted. “She won’t even call me back. Your brother says no one has heard from Kayla, and he can’t do shit from jail, so to leave him alone. The end. No one cares, Jane. I can’t get any information from CPS or the county or the police because we’re not related.”
Joylene came to the wrong place looking for concern, but I still find myself fascinated as I google my niece’s name. Did she just run away? God knows, I considered it a hundred times, knowing I’d be better off without my shitty family weighing me down. But in the