“I barely have time to do laundry. Do you really think I’ve kept up with anyone from that period of my life?”
Andrea tried again. “If you had any information, it could be an anonymous tip or—”
“Hon, get the wax out of your ears, okay? I don’t know anyone. I haven’t stepped foot near the farm in twenty years.” Ricky was finally satisfied that the phone was clean. “I’ve got a permanent restraining order against me that says I can’t go within twenty feet of Nardo without being arrested. During the divorce, Dean came after me so hard that I barely held onto the diner. Thank God the house was in a trust or I would’ve been homeless.”
Andrea could see that she was scared. “Dean helped Nardo finance the divorce?”
“Dean helps Nardo with everything. He lives on the farm rent-free. Nardo doesn’t even get a paycheck which, believe me, fucked me over real good during the divorce.” Ricky sounded more bitter about Wexler than she did about her ex-husband. “That farm is a goldmine, and all Dean does with the money is use it to buy people or to fuck them over. He runs it like a dictatorship. No one tells him what to do.”
Andrea could tell Ricky was just getting started.
“What Dean is doing to those girls—I promise you on my life it wasn’t like that when I was there. Nardo’s a sick fuck, but he’s not that sick. And I never saw anything beyond exploited labor. I assumed that ended when Dean negotiated a settlement with the government.” Ricky used her sleeve to wipe her eyes. She had started to cry. “I know I said I’m a coward because of how I treated Emily, but if I had seen something so—so disgusting? Evil? Whatever you want to call what they’re doing over there. There’s no way I would’ve kept my mouth shut.”
“I believe you,” Andrea said, but only because that was what Ricky needed to hear. “As a woman, I’m outraged, but, as a Marshal, I need a legal justification to open an investigation.”
Ricky wiped her eyes again. “Jesus, I really wish I could help you.”
Andrea could feel the woman’s helplessness. “I heard the mother of one of the girls attempted a rescue.”
“Crazy bitch tried to kidnap her own daughter.” Ricky forced out a laugh. “I don’t know what I’d do if my kid was living at that place. Not that we ever had kids, thank God. The only reason I married that asshole was because he had money. And then a year later, his father lost it all and he’s wrapped up in the Cult of Dean. Jesus, if I didn’t have bad luck, I wouldn’t have any at all.”
Madonna’s “Holiday” started playing on Ricky’s phone. She tapped off the alarm, but she didn’t move. Instead, she wiped her eyes again. Her jaw worked. She was weighing her options, trying to decide how much was too much to say.
Finally, she told Andrea, “I’ve never really thought about it before, but maybe because you brought up Emily, and then we started talking about Dean and …”
In the silence, Andrea could hear the dryer beeping to signal the end of the cycle. Ricky must have heard it too, but she was clearly still debating the risks. The woman was twenty years out from her divorce, and yet part of her was still afraid of what Dean Wexler could do to her.
Ricky wiped her eyes again. She cleared her throat.
“I never looked at it this way before,” she said. “But the shit that’s happening at the farm is the same shit that happened to Emily Vaughn forty years ago.”
OCTOBER 21, 1981
Emily sat on the floor in the very back of the school library with her forehead resting on her knees. She could not stop crying. She had a pounding headache. She hadn’t been able to sleep the night before. Her legs kept cramping. Her stomach kept turning. Her thoughts kept ricocheting between Ricky telling her that their friendship was over and Blake placing Emily’s hand on his thing.
Had the twins always been that cruel, or was Emily simply stupid?
She found a tissue in her book bag and blew her nose. Laughter filled the front of the library. She hunched down against the wall. She didn’t want anyone to find her back here. She’d skipped chemistry. She never skipped class. Not until this week. Not until her entire life had been thrown into turmoil.
It was the stares of her classmates that Emily could not abide. In the hallway. From the back of the chemistry lab. Some of them had been pointing and giggling. Others had looked at her as if she was the most disgusting creature they had ever laid eyes on. Ricky had a big mouth, but Emily knew it was Blake who had started the rumor that she was pregnant, because the pointers and gigglers and most of the blatantly hostile stares had come from the boys. Not that Emily’s current state was a rumor, because the word rumor implied an uncertainty or lack of truth.
No matter the source of the salacious information, whether it was Blake or Ricky or even Dean Wexler, Clay clearly knew that she was pregnant. Emily had seen him this morning as she was walking past the row of downtown shops. Clay was alone, smoking one last cigarette before heading across the road to school. Their eyes had met. There was no mistaking that he had seen her. Even from a distance, there was the flash of recognition in his features, the twist of his mouth into a quick grin. Emily had started to wave her hand, but his grin had melted away. He’d tossed the cigarette into the gutter, then turned on his heel like a soldier on the parade field and walked in the opposite direction.
So much for Clayton Morrow styling himself as a rebel who shirked the norms of the religiously bankrupt modern American society. He might as well have traded his Marlboro for a pitchfork. Or maybe he was running away from his own mistake.
Clay?
That was the first word she had written down in her Columbo notes. The more Emily talked to people, the more she thought that it really might be him.
Would that be so bad?
Emily had always liked Clay. She’d had embarrassingly sweaty dreams about him before. And sometimes when he was close, or he looked at her a certain way, she’d felt a rush of what could only be called desire. Clay had told her that nothing was going to happen, and she had accepted that, but maybe Emily had come onto him the night of The Party. And maybe Clay had been so stoned that he’d given in against his better judgment. Her father had said that teenage boys had a hard time controlling themselves. Emily had been thinking all along that she was somehow the victim, but maybe she was the aggressor.
Was that possible?
Emily used the back of her arm to wipe her tears. Her skin felt raw. The bruise on her neck where Dean Wexler had grabbed her had started to turn an angry, dark blue. She took a deep breath. She found her Columbo Investigation tucked deep inside her purse.
The notes she had recorded from her interaction with Ricky and Blake yesterday were smeared by her own tears. They had both been equally disgusting in their own unique ways. Emily shuddered when she thought about Blake moving her hand to his lap. His slick tongue in her ear. She shuddered a second time, her hand going to her ear as if his gross tongue was still there.
Emily closed her notebook. She had practically memorized the three different transcriptions. Dean Wexler had said that Nardo and Blake were inside the house that night. Blake had also told her that he and Nardo were in the house. Using Cheese’s Columbo logic, she had two people telling the same story, which likely meant that they were both telling the truth, which meant she could eliminate Dean and Blake.