What You Don't Know, page 6
* * *
Kiki Downs: It’s the same thing that happens to so many of these groups. If we’ve heard it once, we’ve heard it a million times. Musical tastes change, the group wants more creative control, the producers and the label want to keep the formula going. And the money. The money is always a problem. Always. Bad contracts, bad management deals, bad royalty rates. Same song, different girls.
* * *
Jenny Valentine: Gwen left when her contract was up. Blair and I did one album as a duo, which sucked. I got a solo deal and I jumped at it. Blair stuck around and they brought in a new producer, two new girls, but to me it was just dead.
* * *
Gwen Majors: Blair was kind of funny that way, though. She was never what I would call ambitious. I mean, she wasn’t driven by money, or fame or success or any of that. She wasn’t like me and Dreena or Jenny, even. Singing, performing, that’s all we ever wanted. But Blair, you know, she didn’t grow up thinking she was gonna sing her way out of the projects. But she’s loyal. I’ll give my girl that. To a fault.
* * *
Kiki Downs: And to everyone’s surprise, out of the box, this new lineup scores a number one pop hit with “Morning.” First pop number one in Captivate’s history. This thing sold millions upon millions upon millions. Was the number two bestselling song of the year. Won all kinds of MBTV Awards, USA Music Awards. Even got nominated for a Grammy.
* * *
Jenny Valentine: Yeah. Nobody saw that coming.
* * *
Chrissy Lennox, Captivate 1993–1996, Oscar-nominated Actress, President, and CEO, CL Entertainment: That was about the time Blair met Malcolm.
11:55 a.m.
Had she made contact with the police?
Farrah had hit the button. She knew she’d hit the button just as he knocked the phone out of her hand.
She’d replayed those dizzying seconds over and over and had convinced herself that, yes, she had most definitely hit the panic button and the police had been alerted and were on their way to rescue them.
She hoped. God, how she hoped.
One thing she was sure about was that she never should have come home.
Of course, then her parents would be here by themselves. She couldn’t live with that.
Her captors legs were crossed and he was hunched over on his knees, one hand cupping his elbow, the other slung across the opposite shoulder. He gnawed on his lips as his bottom leg jiggled and he rocked back and forth in the chair. Panes of sweat glistened on his cheeks. That awful BO floated across the room, pricking her nose. She had to fight to keep an impassive face, to force herself to resist looking at him. She didn’t want to make eye contact. She didn’t want him or his creepy friend in that cheap ass suit staring at her. She didn’t want them to get the wrong idea and think she was interested. She didn’t want that seriously unhinged girl putting a bullet in her brain because she thought Farrah was looking at her man or something.
Farrah shifted her own weight a little, grateful for the barrier of the royal purple patch of area rug between her bum and the hard floor. He’d tied her hands around the doorknob of the closet with a belt he’d found hanging on a hook inside. He’d also stuffed her mouth with one of the pink and white checked bootie socks she’d discarded last night as she crawled into her king-sized bed, tired after the long drive, blissful over not having to be confined to the twin bed of a dorm room for a few days. She wanted to tell him it was useless to gag her. This was a quiet street, boasting a handful of soundproofed houses, shrouded in trees. No one would hear her screams.
No one would hear any of them.
All week, Farrah had looked forward to the weekend. For the first time in nearly a month, she had some time on her hands to catch up on life. Laundry! Cleaning! Groceries! Errands! That must mean she was an adult or close to it anyway. She’d actually wanted to do all that stuff.
She’d been in such a hurry to jet out of town Friday afternoon, it hadn’t occurred to her until she reached West Lafayette that at the very least, she could have brought the laundry home this weekend—her mother would have done it. Her mother loved doing laundry. Anything domestic. Anything with cleaning, scrubbing, washing, disinfecting, or sanitizing—Blair Gilbert was your girl. Woman. She had to stop thinking of women as girls and men as boys. At least that was what her Gender Roles in Literature professor kept telling her.
Sheree had started harassing her about a week or so ago about this surprise party she was putting together for Phoebe’s twenty-first birthday. It would be a night to remember. Epic. Something they’d be talking about in ten years. Farrah couldn’t imagine she’d be talking about anything to do with Phoebe in ten years. Not if she kept acting like a stone-cold nutjob. The awesome girl Farrah had met in Jack and Jill when they were gangly nine-year-olds, existed now in fleeting glimpses. She cried about everything. Indecisive. Mopey. It was that boyfriend. He brought out the worst in her, though Farrah probably wasn’t really one to talk. Except she hadn’t let things drag on with Theo for years, so she could feel superior about that. And Farrah had a good guy now. Eddie. The kind of guy she should have been with all along.
Sheree had promised Phoebe’s boyfriend wouldn’t be there because he was on reserves duty this weekend, so it would be safe to come and wouldn’t it be great for everyone to hang out together like the old days? The promise of spending time with Phoebe—the old Phoebe—had lured Farrah home. It would be fun. Laundry! Cleaning! Groceries! Errands! could wait until next weekend. They’d laugh, they’d dance, they’d remember, for a few drunken hours anyway, why they were friends, why they loved each other.
So, she hopped in the car last night and came home.
Out of the corner of her eye, Farrah watched her captor watch her from his perch on the plastic turquoise desk chair that only moments ago, she’d hurled at him in a wild, desperate attempt to slow him down. He just stared at her, leaning one elbow on the white wood desk that Farrah decoupaged with slivers of multicolored tissue paper when she was twelve.
She never should have come home.
Her arms burned. Prickles of pain shot down the sides of her neck and zigzagged across the top of her shoulders. She scooted closer to the door so she could push it against the wall and lean against it. He bolted out of the chair and rushed toward her.
“What you doin’?” he asked as he loomed over her like a giant stalk.
Farrah propped up her knees so her elbows could rest against the hilly surface, relief momentarily racing through her aching shoulders. She grunted a little to indicate the motion made her feel better.
His eyes flickered understanding and he cast his gaze to the floor. “Oh … okay, all right … well, don’t try nothing. ’Cause I’ll shoot you.”
She didn’t say anything, just stared at him.
“You hear me? I said I’ll shoot you.”
She nodded.
He stood, gawking at her a few more moments, waiting. Satisfied she wasn’t going to make any sudden moves, he backed into the chair again, resuming his folded-over position, his gaze penetrating her. She focused on the wall in front of her and the ancient Adam Lambert, Lady Antebellum, and Kings of Leon posters splashed against the lilac walls—an altar to the experimental musical tastes of her adolescence, the embodiment of suburban teenage angst—the corners flopping and curling into themselves, the faces alternately scowling and smiling down at her with preening smugness. Every time she was home, she was seized with a frenzy to rip them down, paint the walls a soothing eggshell, and replace them with tastefully framed prints of flowers or boats, or arty black and white photographs. Anything to signal to herself that she was an adult. Then again, this room was probably supposed to stay a shrine to her childhood. Arty and tasteful might not belong in this room. Besides, she’d always prided herself on being the oasis of grungy color amid the island of white, gray, and watery sea green floating across the rest of the house.
Farrah bit her bottom lip and ventured a quick glance at him. His gaze pointed to her and only her. The chair squealed like a pig beneath the weight of his incessant rocking and a deep hum rumbled from his body. He dragged his forearm across his forehead and she could swear drops of sweat dribbled down to his lap in big fat plops. Under normal circumstances, she might have felt a little bad for him.
The humming stopped. The chair continued to squeak and his breathing became heavier. Louder. Deeper. His BO seemed to explode around him and she half expected to see vapors rising from his skin. Her head throbbed from the mixture of oppressive heat and his stench. Farrah stole a glance at the window, wishing she could open it to let fresh lake breezes waft into the room.
He continued to stare at her. She continued trying to look at anything but him. She strained her ears to hear anything from the other rooms. That Cookie girl had dragged her mother toward the master bedroom and Daddy—where was he? Farrah’s own flop sweat pooled in her underarms. They shouldn’t have left him with that other dude—T or Tree or whatever his name was. He seemed crazy. And it didn’t seem like it would take much for that Cookie girl to pop off.
Still, if anyone could get them out of this, it would be Daddy. He was super smart and could negotiate with anybody. A charmer. Smooth operator. She’d seen him put what she called his “Malcolm Moves” on car salesmen, neighbors—police even—during the handful of times through the years he’d been stopped for DWB. Of course, if they didn’t recognize him the minute the window came down, he’d just lay the Malcolm Moves on them and it wasn’t long before panties and boxer shorts were dropping.
Daddy would figure this out. He’d save them.
Thank God he’d been here when this all happened. If her mother had been the one to open the door, if it had only been her mother here to deal with this … well, the two of them would have been dead from the jump. She loved her mom, for sure, but she could be totally batshit sometimes. Talk about popping off. Too blunt for her own good. Overly sensitive and emotional about the dumbest shit. Her mother wasn’t malicious. She just acted first and thought later.
Farrah wiggled around again, twinges of discomfort poking her knees, the skin behind them slick with sweat. She continued to squirm around in an effort to relieve the distress.
The piercing throb of her cell phone sliced through the silence of the room. They both gasped. The guy sprang out of the chair like a jack-in-the-box and instinctively, Farrah leaned forward to grab the phone wedged in the corner across the room.
He ran over and snatched up the phone as it chimed with a text message. Her heart leapt, revived. If this guy kept her from answering her phone, that could help. If enough time passed, maybe whoever was texting her would get suspicious or ticked off about why she wasn’t returning the message. Maybe they’d call other people wondering what was going on with her.
What if it was Sheree? That would be awesome. She hoped to God it was. If Sheree didn’t get a call or a text back within seconds, she’d start psycho-dialing, psycho-texting. She was exactly the type to sound an alarm and get everyone all worked up about “OMG, Why Can’t We Reach Farrah?”
“What’s your code?” he asked as he fumbled with the phone, trying to unlock it.
She gave him a dumbfounded look and it seemed to take him a few seconds to realize she couldn’t say anything.
He hesitated a moment as his eyes flipped between her and the phone, as if contemplating whether it was worth yanking the sock out of her mouth to get her password. He glanced toward the door, panic washing over his face.
The phone rang. It had to be Sheree. Farrah groaned and began knocking back against the door and kicking her feet out in front of her. He licked his lips and hit the reject button, seeming to breathe a sigh of relief at having made a decision.
“Who’s Sheree? Why she keep calling and texting you?”
She kept looking at him. He walked over to her, leaning down until they were eye-level. Don’t flinch at the stench. Don’t flinch at the stench. The rhyme almost made her laugh. Almost. She struggled to keep from inhaling. Inhaling made her eyes water. She gulped and shrugged.
The phone jingled again. An agitated groan pushed past his lips. He jerked the sock from her mouth. “Why does she keep calling?”
“I don’t know,” she panted, the lie slipping easily from her mouth. “If I don’t answer, she might keep calling.”
He blinked. “Shoot,” he mumbled, standing up. “I need to talk to T.” He shoved the phone in his pocket and undid the belt enough to slip it off the doorknob, but not enough to free her hands before he yanked her toward the door, flinging it open. Farrah inhaled the fresh, cool air of the hallway, taking in huge gulps.
He stood in the middle of the hallway, calling for Cookie, who swung open the door to her parents’ room, irritation spreading across her face, her mouth open, ready to say something. He hustled Farrah down the hallway.
“Here.” He shoved Farrah toward the girl. “Watch her. I have to talk to Tree.”
“He said we should keep them separate. He said—”
“I ain’t got time for this,” Dio said, turning his back on her. “Do whatever you got to do.”
Cookie scowled for a bit before pushing Farrah into the bedroom, slamming the door shut behind her.
Phone Call
Saturday, April 1, 12:23 p.m., CT
Tree: Yo. Yo! Where you at? I been calling you, texting you—
* * *
Look, we got a problem. A big one. Malcolm was here. And that, uh, uh, Farrah, the daughter or whatever. Now, you said they wasn’t gonna be here, that it was just supposed to be Blair and now everything is all fucked up.
* * *
So, listen, you need to call me back and tell me what you want me to do.
* * *
Okay. Call me back.
* * *
Call me.
Something’s Wrong
Lieutenant Dimitri Cora: Blair and Malcolm Gilbert were expected at a charity event in the city on Saturday night, while Farrah Gilbert had plans to meet up with friends at a surprise birthday party, also in the city.
* * *
Sheree Moore, Friend of Farrah Gilbert: Farrah was supposed to meet me at my boyfriend’s apartment in Bucktown and we were all going to Uber to the party.
* * *
Bridget Johnson: My sister and I talked almost every day. Except that Saturday morning, we talked for literally thirty seconds. I’d meant to call her earlier that morning but got busy, so by the time we connected, she had to go to her hair appointment, run errands—plus it was always a chore to get Malcolm out of the house to go golfing, so she didn’t have time to talk.
* * *
Guy Sledge: In seven years, Malcolm Gilbert never missed a tee time. Never. He’d be late on occasion. Malcolm was notorious for running late, but never so late they’d give our time away or anything (Laughs). Of course, if that had happened, he just would have talked his way onto the course.
* * *
Sheree Moore: I texted Farrah on Saturday morning. Nothing. I called, left a message. I called her again later in the day and her phone just kept going to voicemail. I thought maybe she got sick or something.
* * *
Kip Sellers: We were all at the club by eleven thirty and no Malcolm. Eleven forty-five, still no Malcolm. I text him. No response. I call him. No answer. Don, I remember (sighs, shakes head), Don kind of joked, “Well, maybe he’s dead.”
* * *
Guy Sledge: We kept the tee time, played skins. I thought—well, I figured something important must have come up, like maybe Blair got sick and he had to take her to the hospital or something. I tried calling him a few more times on my way home from the club, but still, no answer. Eventually, it started going to voicemail.
* * *
Lieutenant Dimitri Cora: Blair Gilbert had a hair appointment at a salon in Evanston at twelve-thirty. According to her hairdresser, this was a standing, bi-weekly appointment and she missed it for the first time in fifteen years. In fact, even though this was a regular appointment, Mrs. Gilbert was in the habit of calling to confirm every Friday morning, which she did at eleven on the morning of March thirty-first.
* * *
Guy Sledge: I wound up showering at the club and meeting my wife and some friends for dinner, so I never even made it over there. I tried calling him again early on Sunday, but it went to voicemail. I got busy later that day and thought perhaps I’d try again on Monday.
* * *
Verona Scucci, Edge Salon, Blair Gilbert’s Hairdresser: I start psycho-dialing her. Like redial, redial, redial. No answer. Just rings and rings. I go and stand outside the shop, see if I can see her coming down the street, running late. Nothing. I get on my phone, start Googling her, Googling her husband. Maybe they’ve been in an accident or something. It’d be all over the news if they were. Nothing. I probably spent a good half hour calling and texting her and nothing. I gotta tell you, I went home that night feeling sick to my stomach. I was gonna call the police, but my girlfriend she says to me I’m getting too involved, stay out of it, whatever it is, it’s her business, she’ll call me on Monday (Shakes head). My Grandma June says, she always says to me, go with your gut. And normally, I do. Except this time. Except this one time.
