Lisa Gardner - Catch Me

In response, her older sister tightened her grip. “It’s okay.” Her breath left her in a soft, hiccuping rush. “Everyone has to die sometime, right? Be brave. I love you. Be brave…”

Her older sister’s grip weakened. Her hand fell to the floor and the little girl sprang for the phone, dialing 911 just as SisSis had taught her, because they’d known it might someday come to this. They just hadn’t thought it would be so soon.

The little girl gave her mother’s name and address. She requested an ambulance. She spoke clearly and without emotion, because she had practiced for this, too. Together, she and her older sister had prepared, planned, and strategized.

Their mother wasn’t crazy about everything: Everyone did have to die sometime, and you always had to be brave.

Task completed, the little girl released the phone and raced back to her sister. But by the time she returned, SisSis didn’t need her anymore. Her eyes were closed, and nothing the little girl did made them open again.

Her mother stirred on the floor.

The little girl looked at her, then at the old brass lamp.

She lifted up the heavy lamp, thin arms straining, eyes watching how the silvery beams of moonlight gleamed across its dull surface.

Her mother moaned again, regaining consciousness.

The little girl thought of lullabies and matches; she recalled soft hugs and hungry nights. She remembered her older sister, who had genuinely loved her. Then the little girl clutched the top part of the shadeless lamp, stood above her mother’s body, and one final time, hefted its weight into the air.

MY NAME IS CHARLENE ROSALIND CARTER GRANT.

I live in Boston, work in Boston, and in four days, will probably die here.

I’m twenty-eight years old.

And I don’t feel like dying just yet.

IT STARTED TWO YEARS AGO, with the murder of my best friend, Randi Menke, in Providence. She was strangled in her living room. No sign of a struggle, no sign of forced entry. For a while the Rhode Island cops thought maybe her ex had done it. I guess there’d been a history of domestic assaults. Nothing she’d ever told me, or our other best friend, Jackie, about. Jackie and I tried to console ourselves with that, as we wept together at Randi’s funeral. We hadn’t known. We just hadn’t known or of course we would’ve done…something. Anything.

That’s what we told ourselves.

Fast forward one year. January 21. The anniversary. I’m at home with Aunt Nancy in the mountains of northern New Hampshire, Jackie’s returned to her corporate life as a VP for Coca-Cola in Atlanta. Jackie doesn’t want to mark the occasion of Randi’s murder. Too morbid, she tells me. Later, in the summer, we’ll get together and celebrate Randi’s birthday. Maybe we’ll hike to the top of Mount Washington, bring a bottle of single malt. We’ll have a good drink, have a good cry, then sleep it off at the Lake of the Clouds AMC hut.

I still call Jackie on the twenty-first. Can’t help myself. Except she doesn’t answer. Not her landline, not her work line, not her mobile. Nothing.

In the morning, when she doesn’t show up for work, the police finally give in to my pleas and drive by her house.

No sign of a struggle, I will read later in the police report. No sign of forced entry. Just a lone female, strangled to death in the middle of her home on January 21.

TWO BEST FRIENDS, murdered, exactly one year and roughly one thousand miles apart.

The locals investigated. Even the FBI gave it a whirl. They couldn’t find anything definitive to link the two homicides, mostly because they couldn’t find anything that was definitive.

Bad luck, one of the guys actually told me. Sheer bad luck.

Today is January 17 of the third year.

How much bad luck do you think I’m going to have on the twenty-first? And if you were me, what would you do?

I MET RANDI AND JACKIE when I was eight years old. After that final incident with my mother, I was sent to live with my aunt Nancy in the wilds of New Hampshire. She came to fetch me from a hospital in upstate New York, two relatives, two strangers, meeting for the first time. Aunt Nancy took one look at me and started to cry.

“I didn’t know,” she told me that first day. “Trust me, child, I didn’t know or I would’ve taken you years ago.”

I didn’t cry. Saw no purpose for the tears and didn’t know if I believed her anyway. If I was supposed to live with this woman, then I’d live with this woman. Not like I had anyplace else to go.

Aunt Nancy ran a B &B in a quaint resort town in the Mount Washington Valley, where rich Bostonians and privileged New Yorkers came to ski during the winter, hike in the summer, and “leaf-peep” in the fall. She had one part-time helper, but mostly my aunt relied on herself to greet guests, clean rooms, set up tea, cook breakfast, provide directions, and all the other million little odd jobs that go into the hospitality trade. When I came along, I took over dusting and vacuuming. I could spend hours cleaning. I loved the scent of Pine-Sol. I loved the feel of freshly polished wood. I loved the way I scrubbed the floor again and again, and each time, it looked pretty and fresh and new.

Cleaning meant controlling. Cleaning kept the shadows at bay.

First day of school, Aunt Nancy personally walked me down the street. I wore stiff new clothes, including black patent Mary Janes I polished obsessively for the next six months. I felt conspicuous. Too new. Too fresh out of the box.

I still wasn’t used to all the noise and clamor that came with “village” life. Neighbors, everywhere I looked. People who made eye contact and smiled.

“Your tea set is tarnished,” I informed my aunt, one block from my first ever school. “I’ll go home and polish it for you.”

“You’re a funny child, Charlene.”

I stopped walking, my hand rubbing my side and the scar that still itched sometimes. I had more scars, spiderweb fine, on the back of my left hand, let alone the ugly surgical mark on my right elbow, burn marks on my right thigh. I was pretty sure other kids didn’t have such blemishes on their bodies. I was pretty sure other children’s mothers didn’t “love” them as much as mine had sworn she loved me. “I don’t want to go.”

My aunt stopped walking. “Charlie, it is time to go to school. Now, I want you to march through those front doors. I want you to hold your head high. And I want you to know, you are the bravest, toughest little girl I know, and none of those kids have anything on you. Do you hear me? None of those kids have anything on you.”

So I did what my aunt said. I walked through those doors. I kept my head high. I slid into a desk at the back of a room. Where the little girl on my left turned and said. “Hi, I’m Jackie.” And the little girl on my right turned and said, “I’m Randi.”

And just like that, we were friends.

BUT I NEVER TOLD THEM EVERYTHING.

You know what I mean, don’t you?

How sometimes, even with best friends, even with the sisters of your heart who laugh with you and cry with you and know every single minuscule detail of your first crush and final heartbreak, you still can’t tell them everything.

Even best friends have secrets.

Take it from me, the last one standing, who’s spent the past two years learning most of our secrets the hard way.

WE GREW UP IN THE LAST DAYS of real childhood. Spending our summers running wild in the woods, where we built tree forts out of downed limbs and had tea parties featuring acorn soup and pinecone parfaits. We raced leaf boats down eddying streams. We discovered secret swimming holes. We wired soup cans with twine in lieu of cell phones.