Lisa Gardner - Catch Me

“I think I had to forget,” I told my sister honestly. “I think it was the only way I could remember how to live again.”

“She killed you,” Abigail said. “She stabbed you with a knife. I saw that, too.”

“There was fire.”

“You do remember!”

“I remember blood and flames and thinking it was strange to feel so cold.”

“She tried to burn the house down.”

“After stabbing me?”

“Yes. She’d gotten you first, but I didn’t see that part. She’d come back upstairs for me, then we were in the kitchen and she had the matches, and I couldn’t get away. She was going to burn us alive, but you appeared behind her and you hit her over the head with this heavy old lamp.”

“I did?”

She peered at me, and I was rewarded with a trace more uncertainty in her eyes. “You really don’t remember?”

“I wish I did. I would like to remember hurting her. Mostly, I feel like I’ve spent my entire life trying to learn how to be me. That she crawled into my head when I was too young to fight back and it’s taken me twenty-eight years to find my own thoughts, to be my own person. Our mother was crazy, Abigail. And we were too little to fight her. But we’re grown up now, and she’s dead. She doesn’t have to call the shots anymore. We can be ourselves. We can finally win.”

“I tried to kill her that night,” Abigail murmured, as if I hadn’t spoken. “You were dead, I thought. And she was waking up and I couldn’t survive without you. I knew that, Charlie. Even back then, I knew I wasn’t that strong. So I picked up the lamp, and I was going to hit her. Except, next thing I knew, she kicked my legs and I fell to the floor, and while I was lying there, she picked up the lamp and whacked me with it.”

I jolted. I felt a shiver…no, a shock wave…move through my entire body. For a moment, I wasn’t sure if it was the insulin nose-diving my blood sugar level, or the seismic shift of a long-buried memory.

“I watched you die,” I heard myself whisper. “I…she…she killed you. With the lamp. I remember that. And I couldn’t move. I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t raise my arm, yell, beg, nothing. I was stuck on the floor, feeling so cold and so hot. And screaming on the inside. I remember that. Feeling my whole body scream and scream as you fell down and she got up, but no sound came out. Nothing happened. I screamed, and there she was with the lamp, raising it up, bringing it down. Killing you.

“I’d kept you safe for so long, Abby. You have no idea. The nights I fled with you through the woods, or shoved you under the bed, or hid you in the crawlspace. I’d failed with the others. Hadn’t been smart enough, strong enough. But with you…by the time you were three or four, I remember thinking I’d done it. I’d saved you and you were mine, and I loved you. I loved you , Abigail.”

My voice wavered, broke. My body started shaking uncontrollably while my thoughts scattered, flew apart, refused to come back together. Losing it. Blood sugar plummeting. Confusion, disorientation. Grief. Genuine grief. My baby sister had died. And in the crazy way my mind worked, I hadn’t remembered it, but I had known it. I believed I had watched Abby die and that had broken me in ways no doctor had been able to put back together again.

“But I didn’t,” Abigail said. Her own hands were shaking, the gun unsteady. I should move, take advantage.

I couldn’t get my legs to respond. Instead, I reached for the wall, feeling the world lurch again, desperate for balance.

Hadn’t practiced for this, I thought. Hadn’t prepared for this complication.

“I lived ,” Abigail continued, her voice hoarse, both accusing and mournful. “She took me away and it was terrible and awful and I prayed for you every night, Charlie. You were my big sister and you’d promised to save me and I prayed for you. Night after night after night. Then I was ten, and the first man, and it hurt . I cried and begged for you to save me. But you never came. You never saved me. Instead, I turned fourteen, and sold myself to a professional pervert just to get out. Except it wasn’t quite enough, so I had to kill him. Except that wasn’t enough either, so I had to track her down and kill her, too. I thought I’d feel better then. But it turned out, that still wasn’t enough.”

I stared at my sister. “You killed our mother?”

“Of course.” She smiled. “Tell me when.”

“January twenty-one. You killed her January twenty-one.”

“Yes. Finally, you understand. I used her own pillow and did it just the way she taught me.”

I wondered if I should feel horrified. I wondered if I should feel grateful. “But…it should’ve been over then. That should’ve been enough.”

“Of course not, because that still left you. The one who never came. The one who never saved me.”

“But I didn’t even know you were alive!”

“Yes, you did.”

“No, I didn’t. How could I have?”

“Because she would’ve told you.”

Abigail turned and thrust her finger at Aunt Nancy, who was now fully awake and staring at both of us.

“I’m sorry,” my aunt burst out. “Charlie, I’m so sorry!”

Just as Frances suddenly lunged out of the wingback and, with an unexpected roar, hurtled herself at Abigail.

The gun went off.

I fell to the floor.

Screaming. Frances, Aunt Nancy, Abigail.

“SisSis,” Abigail’s voice. My little sister, calling for me.

“SisSis!”

I grabbed the can of frosting, which was rolling across the floor, and started to crawl.

D.D. WAS LOSING HER MIND.

5:02 P.M., Saturday, January 21.

No sign of either Charlene Rosalind Carter Grant or Detective O.

Several uniformed patrol officers had cruised by Charlie’s Cambridge rental the hour before. No lights were on, no landlady answered the door. Grovesnor, of course, was scoping out all local contacts connected to her job. Charlene, however, was not due to work again, nor had she contacted any of her fellow officers.

That left the aunt with a house in northern New Hampshire and a hotel somewhere in Cambridge. D.D. had outreached to the New Hampshire State Police, who’d checked in with the B &B. Nancy Grant wasn’t there, and the young lady who served as her assistant claimed she hadn’t heard from her today and wasn’t expecting her home until at least tomorrow.

D.D. followed up with a credit check, discovering a recent charge at a low-budget motel in Cambridge.

She was driving there now, not because she thought she’d find Charlene magically hiding beneath the bed in her aunt’s hotel room, but because D.D. needed something to do.

Night had fallen. The sky was pitch-black, thermostat plummeting. It was January 21 and D.D. would be damned before she had another murder on her watch, in her city. Not gonna happen. She was forewarned and forearmed.

She found the motel easily enough. One of those late-seventies nondescript places, built in a double-decker horseshoe pattern around a central parking lot. Bit more snooping, and she’d identified Nancy Grant’s vehicle, then a room up on the second story.

Three minutes later, D.D. stood in the open doorway of the room, frowning. The office clerk, who’d let her in, appeared equally unsettled.

“Maybe she left,” the little bald Asian man said.

“Maybe.”

D.D. walked around the room, not touching anything. Sure enough, no luggage, no toiletries, not even a wrinkle on the bed. If Aunt Nancy had slept at all, then she’d cleaned up her own motel room after herself.

Which, in the next instant, gave D.D. a long, snaking chill up her spine.