Photograph, page 25
“It’s weird, isn’t it?” Kate said when we finally disentangled ourselves. “I didn’t know, and yet I knew. Right from the beginning, I knew. There was some kind of connection between us. I couldn’t have told you what it was, but I sensed it as soon as I met you.”
“I felt the same way.”
We held hands, staring at each other, rain pouring over us, the day fading to night. I felt guilty about how much tragedy it had taken to bring two sisters together. How much death, loss, and grief had been thrown in the paths of so many people to guide us to this moment on the road. But here we were.
“She knew,” Kate said. “She knew all along.”
“Knew what?”
“My mother. She knew who you were. It wasn’t an accident that she moved to Florida, so close to where you and your father were. She wanted to keep an eye on you. To make sure you were safe. And it wasn’t a coincidence that she came to you to ask you to figure out who she was. She wanted to see you again. More than that, she wanted to see if you remembered her at all.”
Yes. Jesus, yes. Kate was right. She was right about all of it.
“Did you?” she asked me. “Did you remember anything? Did my mother feel familiar to you when you met her?”
“No. I’d like to say yes, but there was nothing.” I thought back to Faith Selby sitting across the table from me at the Beachside Bar. “I remember she seemed to be looking at me strangely, looking for—something—in my eyes. Now it makes sense. But I didn’t know her.”
“It was a long time ago. You were just a little girl.”
“Yeah.”
“There’s still so much we don’t know. All the details of what really happened.”
“And one person has the answers,” I said.
Kate nodded. She knew who I meant. “Can you talk to him about this? Are you ready for that?”
Good question.
Was I ready for that? Was I ready to confront my father about the events of one night twenty-six years ago? Maybe this was what it took to bridge the gap between us. Oh my God, Dad, I know so much more about you now than I did before. I know the secret you’ve kept from me your whole life. I know you had an affair, a one-night stand. Is that when things began to go wrong between you and Mom? Is that when you realized you didn’t love her the way a husband should love a wife?
Because that night, you met Lara Lovell.
“I’ll call him,” I said.
I checked my phone. Life had changed in a couple of decades. Even if it felt as if we were in the middle of nowhere, the good folks at Verizon weren’t far away, because I still had three bars of signal from some nearby tower. I dialed my father’s number. To his credit, he answered on the first ring as soon as he saw it was me.
“Shannon,” he said without me saying a word. “Thank God! I’ve been worried sick. I’ve been calling and calling, and you wouldn’t pick up. I even stopped by the hotel, and they said you’d left. Where did you go? Where are you?”
I had him on speakerphone. I heard that honey voice, so male, so strong, so smooth, so filled with concern. I thought about saying, I’m here with your daughter, Dad. Your other daughter. Kate. Did you even know she existed?
But I didn’t say that.
I said, “I’m outside a town called Devil Creek, Michigan.”
There was a long, long silence between us, nothing but empty air. It went on so long I could have believed he’d hung up on me or we’d lost the connection. But that wasn’t true. He was still there.
When he finally spoke, I heard something in my father’s voice that I had never heard at any other moment in my life.
Fear.
“I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but you need to get out of there, Shannon. You need to leave right now. Get in your car and go. Every second you’re in that town, you’re in danger.”
He told me the story.
He told us the story, although he didn’t know Kate was there. She indicated with a quick shake of her head that she wanted to stay in the background. I understood. This wasn’t the way to meet your father for the first time. We sat in my SUV with the rain coming down. I explained to him about Faith, about Lara, about the photograph, about what I knew of the past.
He took it from there, going places he didn’t want to go.
“It was the oil,” he said. “The oil light on the Impala went on. I had to pull over. I always kept a spare quart in the trunk, but it had leaked, and it was empty. We were stranded. I think that was about nine o’clock. It was already getting dark, and the rain was coming down hard. I had no idea exactly where we were, but we were on a pretty deserted stretch of road. You’d been sleeping in the back seat, but you woke up. You said you’d had a bad dream, and you were scared.”
A bad dream.
I wondered what it was about.
Was that the first time I saw Jenny Curtis in Angola?
“I was thinking we’d have to spend the night out there,” my father continued. “I knew we’d be fine—it wasn’t winter, we weren’t in any real danger—but still, it wasn’t good. Then I saw headlights behind us. Another car came by. I didn’t know if they’d stop, but I held you in my arms and flagged it down. I figured a man with a little girl looks a lot safer to a stranger than a man alone. The car pulled off the road ahead of us, and a young woman got out. She didn’t seem to care about the rain. She came up to me and asked if she could help. She told me her name was Lara.”
My father stopped for a while. I listened to him breathing. Remembering.
“I don’t know what to tell you, Shannon. I don’t know how to explain it to myself. Your mother and I had been married for four years. I loved her. I reminded myself every day how much I loved her. But I don’t know, maybe if you have to keep telling yourself something in order to believe it, then it’s not really true. I’m a practical man, Shannon. You know that. I’m a scientist. I don’t get carried off by emotions. But I stared at this woman with her wet hair and her smile, and I swear, she took my breath away. I’d never experienced anything like it. I’d never felt a sudden attraction so strong. And it wasn’t just me. I saw it in her eyes, too.”
He paused, letting me absorb this. No doubt he was wondering what I would say.
“Go on, Dad,” I said, trying without success to keep a chill out of my voice. I loved Kate, I loved my father, but I’d also loved my mother. And I knew that night was the moment when her life began to go south. That moment on the road was at least partly responsible for her not being with me today.
“Things would have been very different if she’d had oil in her car,” he continued. “I would have gotten the Impala going, and she would have gone her way, and we would have gone ours. But she had no oil, and it was after eleven o’clock by then, and there weren’t any stores open anywhere near us. So she offered to drive us to Devil Creek. That was the next town of any size. We could get a room at the motel, and the next day, we could buy oil and she would take us back to the Impala. She said she was going to be taking a teenage girl home with her in the morning, so she’d have to pass close to the car again anyway.”
I waited, still not saying anything, still not reacting.
“We were about an hour outside Devil Creek at that point. You fell asleep in the back seat again. Lara and I talked as she drove. Conversation with her came so naturally. We could have talked for days. I shared things with her that I’d never shared with your mother. She did the same with me. It was like we were soulmates. The connection between us was that quick, that strong. I don’t think like that; it’s not who I am. But that night in the rain, I had a glimpse of another side of myself. It was only one night, but I still remember how good it felt. And afterward, when Lara was gone, I retreated into the surgeon’s shell again. I guess I shut out your mother along the way.”
“Lara took us to the motel,” I pushed him, ignoring his confession and feeling heartless that I was resisting any kind of empathy.
“Yes. It was after midnight when we got there. We parked, and we kept talking. You slept through all of it. She told me about the teenage girl she was trying to help and what was going on with her. How she’d witnessed a triple homicide. It was shocking, that kind of violence in a small town. Lara was nervous about what she should do. She was afraid if she did the wrong thing, she’d put the girl in more danger. So she decided that the best thing was to get the girl out of there. Hide her. And then figure out who in authority she could trust to go to for help. But she was very conflicted, and she wanted advice. We talked our way through it together, her and me. Being part of something so extreme with her—I don’t know, it made us feel even closer.”
More silence.
I waited.
“Finally—it must have been almost one thirty—we knew it was too late for us to get another room. The lights were all off, the office shut down. Lara offered to let us share her room. She said you and I could take one bed, and she’d take the other. We woke you up, and you said you were thirsty and wanted a Coke. There was a pop machine right nearby. Your mother would never have allowed something like that—no caffeine so late—but I gave you a dollar. You already liked to do it yourself. I stood nearby, and Lara was at the car, watching both of us. She had her camera around her neck, and she took your picture. She told me afterward that she wouldn’t share it with anyone, but she said it was such a perfect image, you, the motel, the rain, the lights. Then we went into her motel room.”
He hesitated.
I knew what was coming next. So did Kate. I wondered if he might hide it, might skip over that part of the story, but he didn’t.
“It started out the way we planned. You and I got into one bed, and Lara got into the other. We undressed in the dark; we couldn’t see each other. Caffeine or not, you fell asleep again right away. But I couldn’t sleep, and neither could Lara. We didn’t talk, because we didn’t want to wake you up, but we both knew we were still awake. There was this electricity between us, and I think we were wondering who would admit it first. I didn’t plan for it to happen, Shannon. I wish I could tell you I felt guilty about it, but I didn’t. Lara whispered something from the other bed. An invitation. And I went and joined her there. It was quiet, it was passionate, it wasn’t like anything I’d felt before. Not with your mother, not with anyone. Afterward, we lay in each other’s arms, and I knew I had a big problem. Because this was the woman I was supposed to be with in my life. Not your mother. This woman, this stranger. I’m sorry, Shannon. You wanted honesty. This is it.”
I sighed. “It’s okay, Dad.”
I let him off the hook, because I knew how this story ended. His dreams with Lara were about to die. His little girl was about to kill them. Me.
“Around three o’clock, I woke up,” he went on. His voice had an emptiness about it now, which made it even more horrifying. “The motel room door was open. You were gone. So was Lara. I rushed outside, and as I did, there was a gunshot from an empty lot behind the motel. The next thing I knew, I saw Lara running toward me with you in her arms. She told me to get back inside, quickly, now. When the three of us were in the room, Lara said she’d awakened and saw that you weren’t in bed. She went outside in a panic and saw you behind the motel. As she ran that way, that’s when the first shot came. She came around the corner, and the teenage girl—Dawn—was on the ground. Dead. There was a man not far away. He was pointing the gun at you. He was going to kill you. You were staring right at him. Lara grabbed you, and the man fired and missed. Her showing up must have spooked him, because the man ran. That’s when Lara carried you back.”
My father, the surgeon, the rock, still sounded shaken all these years later.
“Lara said we needed to go. Leave. Get away immediately. You’d seen the killer, Shannon. I didn’t know if you could identify him, but it didn’t matter, because whoever he was, he knew you’d seen him. You were in mortal danger. Lara had already told me about these people, their ruthlessness, the victims they’d murdered. She said we were lucky because no one knew you and I were there. We weren’t on the motel registration log—only Lara was. So we packed up in a couple of minutes, and we left before the police could get there. We drove a few miles outside town and stopped there, and at first light, when a gas station opened, we picked up a quart of oil. Lara drove us back to where we’d left the Impala. She made sure we got the car started, and then you and I continued south, and she headed home. I never saw or heard from her again after that. She told me never to look for her. It wasn’t safe.”
So he didn’t know.
He didn’t know about Kate.
Next to me, Kate shook her head again. It still wasn’t time.
“Did you tell Mom?” I asked quietly.
“Yes. I did. I told her everything when I got home. Everything. I won’t deny it put a knife in our relationship. Things were never the same between us after that. But we had to stay together, Shannon. For your sake. If a killer was looking for you, I wasn’t going to leave you alone. Your mother agreed with me.”
That was what he’d meant days earlier. About the two of them putting me first, ahead of their own happiness. About wanting his daughter to be safe and cared for and protected.
“Did I tell you about the man I saw?” I asked.
“No, and I didn’t ask. You were so young, Shannon. Your mother and I both told you it had been a bad dream. We wanted you to forget what had happened. We didn’t want you to remember anything about that night.”
“And I didn’t,” I said.
It all went away.
Until the assault.
I understood now what my mind had done. Violence in my real life begat violence in my dreams. I began to relive my past every night when I closed my eyes, that terrible moment as a three-year-old when a killer pointed a gun at my face and the gun went off. It was real.
“Do you see why you need to leave that place, Shannon?” my father asked me. “If the killer is back, if he’s still looking for you, then you can’t stay in Devil Creek. It’s not safe. You need to do what we did all those years ago. Get out of there, and don’t look back. Come home.”
I thought about it.
I really did.
But it was too late to run. Even if the killer didn’t realize that I was the girl he’d been hunting all these years, he already knew who I was, and he’d decided that I was a threat. I was closing in on him the old-fashioned way, not by digging into my memories, but by following the clues.
“I’m sorry, Dad. If it’s not safe for me here, it’s not safe anywhere. Not now. I have to see this through.”
“Shannon, if I lose you—”
Were those tears I heard in the voice of Martin Wells? It was hard to believe, but my father was crying.
“You won’t. I promise.”
I wished I had more faith in my ability to keep that promise, but I didn’t tell him that. He silently wept on the other end of the phone.
“Dad, tell me one more thing,” I went on before hanging up.
“What is it?”
“Did Lara tell you what Dawn saw at the Daugherty house? Did Dawn know who the killer was?”
There was another long pause between us. Then he continued.
“No. She didn’t know. She never saw him. But she couldn’t talk to anyone about what had happened. Not her parents. Not the police. She didn’t know what to do. That’s why she reached out to Lara.”
“Why couldn’t she tell anyone?” I asked.
“Because Dawn saw someone else there. As she was running away, she saw a lookout standing guard at the scene. Someone was staked out on the road to give a warning to the killer if anyone else showed up. If Dawn told the police, it would destroy her family, and she couldn’t do that. You see, the person she saw—the accomplice in the murders—was her brother.”
THIRTY-TWO
Kate sat on one of the motel beds. I sat on the other. Outside our room, darkness had fallen across Devil Creek. It was late, and the motel was silent except for the rain that refused to stop.
“Maybe your father is right,” Kate told me. Then she thought about it and corrected herself. “Our father.”
“Right about what?”
“Maybe we should quit. Go home. Leave town tonight. Now. The only people who know that you’re the girl in the photograph are you and me. You could talk to the police from the road. You could tell them the trail went cold, and there’s nothing more for you to do.”
“I don’t like running away.”
“I know that, but sometimes running is the best choice. If you give up, there’s no reason for the killer to follow you.”
I shook my head. “That won’t stop him. He’s going to keep coming after me whether I quit or not. I’ll never be safe.”
Kate frowned. “Why, because he’s your twin shadow? Is that what you think? Look, Shannon, I don’t know what’s real and what’s not. I’m the one who wondered if Dawn dying and me being conceived on the same night somehow meant we shared one soul. But things have changed. Don’t you see? The connection I felt wasn’t with Dawn; it was with you. We’re sisters. It was the two of us being brought together.”
She was right.
Of course she was right. Believing in fairy tales made no sense, not for a practical woman like me, not for the daughter of a surgeon. But I didn’t feel practical at that moment. I felt caught in a strange game, playing with forces bigger than myself. There were so many things I couldn’t explain.
“What about Jenny Curtis?” I asked.
“Jenny Curtis may not be what you think.”
“She was real. She was murdered.”
“Yes, okay, she was a real woman who got killed, but that doesn’t mean her death had anything to do with you. Shannon, I know you don’t want to hear this, but Maro could be a fraud. She plants a story in your head while you’re under hypnosis, and then she takes you through the scenario she just told you about. When you look it up online, you find out that Jenny Curtis is real. Wow! The psychic was right! So you keep coming back for more, and sooner or later, she starts charging you a lot of money to find out what else is hiding in your head. Other past lives. It’s a con, Shannon. People like Maro are really good at it. But now we know that your visions, your nightmares about the man with a gun, were all about what you saw as a child. It was never a repressed memory. It was never about you being killed in a past life.”
