Except in a casket, I’d never seen a dead body before.
I looked away, casting my mind anywhere other than to what I just saw, and it set to thinking, Where had I heard the name Malorie?
“Get up to the house, baby,” Bohannan ordered, it was brusque and still pissed, but edged with gentle.
All that was going on, and he was worried about me.
I took Polly’s hand. “Let’s go.”
I got her up to the house. I got her a cup of coffee and a cinnamon roll.
She ignored both, sat at the bar and stared at the counter.
I busied myself with coffee mugs and making another pot just in case, wiping down counters and cleaning out a tin I’d made the rolls in that had been emptied.
I did not look outside.
It took time, the deputies and other folks who had come weren’t done, and an ambulance had arrived, when Bohannan, Jace and Jess came in.
Bohannan immediately put the folder down on the bar, opened it and started sifting through it.
But with great care.
His tone was soft when he asked Polly, “This chronological?”
“I don’t know. He hid it from me,” she said, sounding almost robotic.
“There aren’t any envelopes in here, Polly.”
She lifted her gaze from the counter to him.
“I looked everywhere. The first one came in, I open his mail, I saw it. It was addressed to the station, but attention to you. I’d opened it and read it before I saw that on the outside. I took it to him, asked him if he wanted me to call you. He said no. He said it was some crackpot, giving us the run around. But that was when he demanded the mail be brought directly to him. I should have known then, Cade.”
He absolved her. “A lot’s been going on, Polly.”
She rejected his absolution. “Still should have told you. I know better. And I got a real bad feeling when I saw that folder.” She indicated it with her head. “He was looking at it when I came in one day. When he saw me coming, he shoved it in the drawer he always keeps locked so I can’t see what’s in it. I know it sounds like I’m defending myself, but the truth is, he’s always hiding stuff from me. I learned a long time ago to focus on the boys, not his dysfunction. The boys want to do good, he’s got his own agenda. If I focus on the boys, they can do a little good.”
“I understand,” Bohannan said.
She nodded, but she didn’t look convinced of the movement.
“After we got the call today, I went in and jimmied that drawer. That’s what I found. Went through everything in his office so I could be sure to get it to you if it was pertinent. But that’s all I found.”
“That’s okay, Polly. We’ve got this and this is good. But you saw that first envelope?”
“Yes.”
“Attention me?”
“Yes.”
“Postmark?”
“Misted Pines, Cade. I checked that after I saw what was inside.”
Bohannan nodded.
“I read them. He’s messed up in the head, Cade, real bad.”
“Yeah, he is, sweetheart.”
“And he’s out there…”
“Where’s Pete?”
“He’s at the diner.”
“We’ll call him, and he can come get you.”
“I’m okay, hon.”
“We’ll call him.”
Bohannan jerked his chin to Jace.
Jace peeled off, pulling out his phone.
Bohannan closed the folder.
And for now, that was that.
It took more time for everything to be wrapped up outside. Pete, who was obviously Polly’s husband, came to get her (yes, Pete and Polly Pickler, he was maybe two inches taller than her, and when he arrived, he only had eyes for her—they were adorable, I already knew I loved them).
And when it was just the four of us, that being approximately point-oh-two seconds after Pete’s car started pulling away, Bohannan again opened that file.
He scanned the first piece of paper, set it aside.
The next, set it aside.
Then he picked up a coffee mug that was sitting on the counter, turned and side-arm threw it with great might across the kitchen.
It crunched through the wood of a cabinet, and I heard some plates breaking.
“Dad,” Jace said quietly. Both he and Jesse were positioning for lockdown.
Bohannan turned back to the file and said to it, “Dead girl at my pier, he left her for me. Told me he was gonna do it right…” he stabbed a piece of paper with his finger, “fucking…” he stabbed it again, “here.”
Oh my God.
I closed my eyes.
I saw her.
Malorie.
They’d closed her eyes.
So I opened mine.
Thirty-Two
Invisible
Humans are animals.
As such, we adapt.
We’re also individuals.
As such, how we do that is unique to every one of us.
I’d learned how to read people, to quickly but carefully observe every nuance I could gather in order to construct the full visual of their puzzle, and then behave accordingly, because I grew up in a house without love.
My mother didn’t have a good relationship with her parents, so they were in my life, but not deeply. My father left before I formed memories of him, and his parents hated my mother and weren’t thrilled she had me, so I had no memories of them either.
She did not beat me, though there were times I wished she did.
I wished she did because I could understand that as a crucial flaw in her character. Everyone knew it wasn’t right to physically abuse a child.
She fed me. She clothed me. She didn’t leave me alone to fend for myself. When she wasn’t around to watch over me, I had keepers.
She was also an ambitious woman. She worked to get ahead. We were not wealthy, but by the time I hit double digits, we lived in a relatively decent condo in a neighborhood that wasn’t great, but it also wasn’t as terrible as the ones we’d been in before. A condo that, even if it wasn’t much, it was decorated to impress.
As for me, I was “normal.”
I had friends. I was always pretty, so I was relatively popular. I liked school, I liked to learn, and I did well there. I dated. I lost my virginity at the age of seventeen to a boy I liked very much and had been seeing for some time. It was the worst sex of my life, and there was a bit of pain, but it was my choice, and it didn’t mark me or turn me off future interludes.
But I lived in the world, so I knew that a mother was supposed to love you. Care, not only for you, but about you.
And I did not have that.
So I found ways to adapt.
One of those ways was to watch TV, which was why I became an actress. A decision I would later realize was a mistake, not only because it wasn’t my true calling.
Another way was to read, a lot. This didn’t only take me away. I was naturally a dreamer. I would understand about myself years later that I was born to be a writer not only with the way I consumed books nearly all my life, but also with the way my mind sought stories.
This was one of the few things I had from my mother. She often bought me books, and I was grateful she did, even if I grew to understand she did it because she knew she wouldn’t have to put up with me if I was in a book.