Into the Dark (30 page)

“I’m not Lula Belle.”

Brenna stared at her, the rest of her breath coming back . . . “You’re not?”

Then who is?

Diandra said, “He needed her?” Her voice was like a child’s, so sad and small.

Brenna heard sirens outside her building, the rush of feet up her stairs as the officers
opened the door. It must have taken longer, but it felt like moments, time moving
the same way time moves in dreams: the officers pulling Diandra off of Brenna, dragging
her across the room, Brenna’s eyes seeking out Maya, then finding her, hands untied,
gag off, rushing toward her, hugging her. She couldn’t hug her hard enough, Maya whispering
into her hair, “Im sorry Mom. I know I’m not supposed to let anybody in, but she sounded
so friendly and she said she was—”

“It’s okay, honey.”

“She said she was Clea.”

Brenna pulled away. She stared across the room at Diandra, pushed against the coffee
table as a female officer secured handcuffs and a male read her her rights. Her jaw
tightened.
She said she was Clea
.

Brenna put her arms around her daughter again and held her close. “You did good,”
she whispered. “You did good, honey.”

T
hree cops started to lead Diandra toward the door. Brenna approached her, the girl,
this poor, dumb, misguided girl watching Brenna through those angry red scratches,
her eyes hard and bitter.
She’s not Lula Belle
. “Is Trent okay?” she said.

“Yes.”

“I’m glad.”

Brenna nodded, waiting.

“I spent the night with Gary once,” Diandra said. “He was drunk. He didn’t know I
was awake and I guess he felt guilty, and I saw him. He was reading that diary and
crying. I saw him put it back, and when he was asleep I stole it. And I took it home.
I just wanted to understand him better.”

The officers stopped moving and watched her, one plucking tentatively at a notepad
and pen.

“I read that diary to my boyfriend Shane,” Diandra said softly. “I acted it out for
him. ‘Do a Southern accent,’ he said, and I did, and he said it was the best performance
he’d ever seen. He said, ‘Let’s make this into art.’ Our art. But I said no. I made
him put it back. I was dumb. He found someone else.” She gave Brenna a sad smile.
“They say the best art is fueled by passion,” she said. “Shane hated Mr. Freeman for
stealing me from him. So he found another girl and made his art with her, and boy,
did the two of them ever fuck with Gary’s mind.”

“Who was the girl?”

“I have no idea,” she said. “That’s why Shane and I were in Niagara Falls. We heard
she’d gone up there and we knew you were up there too and we thought maybe she wanted
to tell you . . . Shane wouldn’t give me her name.” She closed her eyes. A tear seeped
down her cheek. “He said he wouldn’t let me hurt her.”

“Diandra,” Brenna said, as the cops started to guide her out the door. “Why did Gary
Freeman have my sister’s diary?”

“Ask him,” she said “He’s at Sixty-sixth and Second Ave. Apartment 2518. Ask him about
the Murder Mile.”

“The Murder Mile?”

“It’s from some old song,” she said. “It’s what your sister called Route 666.”

Brenna’s jaw went lax.

“Ask him how your sister spent her eighteenth birthday.”

T
rent had been waiting outside Brenna’s apartment with more cops, and when she and
Maya finally got through being questioned, she asked him to bring Maya back to Faith’s.
“Do me a favor, Trent,” she said. “Don’t tell her and Jim about this.”

“No, right, please don’t,” Maya said. “They’ll freak.”

Brenna knelt down next to her daughter. Looked into her eyes. “Are you okay?” she
said.

“Mom,” Maya said. “You saved my life.”

Brenna looked at her face, and remembered it at six months old,
Dora the Explorer on the TV behind her, singing with the map. Brenna spoons strained
carrots into her mouth. “Yummy,” Brenna says, and Maya starts to laugh. She spits
out a mouth full of carrots and her laugh sounds like bells. It’s the most beautiful
sound Brenna has ever heard.
October 8, 1996, thirteen years almost to the day from when Hildy Tannenbaum lost
her only child. She brushed a lock of hair out of Maya’s eyes and kissed her on the
forehead, just as she used to do, every night, when she was a baby.
“A kiss on the forehead keeps the bad dreams away.”
“Do me a favor,” Brenna said. “Don’t ever ever let anyone into the apartment that
you don’t know again—no matter who they say they are. Or I will ground you until high
school graduation.”

Maya laughed a little.

“I’m not kidding.”

“Okay,” she said. “Okay.”

Trent started to lead her away.

“Remember!” Brenna called out. “I’m meeting with a client, and that’s why you’re bringing
her!”

But they were already engaged in another conversation, Trent saying, “So what’s this
I hear about you not liking Bieber anymore?”

Brenna headed back up to her apartment. She waited until she was sure Trent and Maya
were far enough away not to see her leaving it again, checking the window, just to
make sure.

Then she went to her desk, removed her pearl-handled letter opener, and headed outside
to grab a cab uptown.

“D
eeDee?” Gary Freeman said when Brenna knocked. He opened the door a crack, and Brenna
fell in on him, catching him off guard, knocking him to the ground and holding the
letter opener to his neck.

He looked into her eyes. “Oh . . .”

“You thought she killed me.”

“No,” he said. “I knew she couldn’t.”

“She killed all those others.”

“They were men, Brenna . . .” His eyes were calm, the pupils slightly dilated. “Men
get stupid around her.” Beads of sweat formed on his upper lip, and he didn’t look
like his pictures. He looked drugged and hollow and lost. “My God,” he said. “Your
eyes are just like your sister’s.”

Brenna held the knife closer, anger barreling through her. “What did you do to her?”

“She was beautiful,” he whispered, Brenna thinking,
The past tense. Oh my God, he used the past tense . . .

“I could kill you.” She said it very quietly. “I could do it easily. I know the police
and I’m kind of a hero in this city after the Neff case. So if I told some cops I
slit your throat in self-defense, even if it was in an apartment that’s not my own
. . . even if it was right here”—she moved closer to him bringing the blade up, under
his chin—“they’d believe me.”

“Do it,” he said. “Please.”

She closed her eyes, her stomach churning. Such sadness crossed his face. It grabbed
at her. It felt familiar.
Keep it together. Stay here
.

He said, “Is DeeDee dead?”

“Who?”

“Diandra.”

“No. She’s with the police.”

His face fell. “She’ll tell everyone. My wife . . . God, my wife and kids will be
humiliated. I’ve let so many people down.”

She stared at him, Diandra’s voice in her ears. Poor Diandra, who had thrown out her
whole life for this shell of a man. “
Mr. Freeman loves me more than anyone.”

“Gary,” Brenna said. “I need to know about the Murder Mile.”

“Oh God.”

She inhaled sharply. “You said it yourself. Everyone is going to know. Why not tell
the one person it means something to.”

“I closed that door.”

“Look into my eyes, Gary.”

“God.”

“I have a daughter who looks just like her. Will she ever see Clea face-to-face?”

“Stop.”

“Look at my eyes,” she said. “She used to call me weirdo. She tried making pancakes
for breakfast one time when she was ten and burned them and set off the smoke alarm.
The first time she kissed a boy, she told me it was like sucking the inside of an
overripe tomato.”

He averted his eyes. “You loved her.”

“I still do,” she said. “Did you kill her, Gary?”

He drew a long, shaking breath. “The Murder Mile was Route 666 in Utah. I’d picked
your sister up hitchhiking a week earlier, in Portsmouth, Virginia. She told me she’d
been on the road, alone for a month. She’d ditched the guy she’d been traveling with.
She said she didn’t like him anymore.”

I’ve been with him for three weeks and I don’t like him anymore. He keeps looking
at my neck like he wants to bite it, and sometimes I could swear he’s got fangs. . . .

Brenna looked at him. “You went to Louisville, Kentucky next.”

“Yes. And then Nashville and then Cleveland and then Pine City, Utah.”

“Lula Belle’s PO boxes.”

“Yes. I remember them all. They went in reverse of our trip—Clea’s trip. I didn’t
. . . I didn’t tell you Utah because I didn’t want to remember Utah.”

“It’s where your trip ended.”

“Yes.”

“Did you kill her?”

“It was an accident.”

“Is she dead?”

“I . . . I don’t know.”

She stared at him, some of the anger returning. “How can you not know?”

“Clea and I were young. We loved to party. One night, I got us a whole bunch of black
beauties. Did you ever know what those were?”

“Speed.”

“Yes. We were drinking Jack Daniel’s and I took about six black beauties. Clea took
the same and . . . well, she was a lot smaller than me. She started . . . she had
some kind of seizure.”

“Did you call the hospital?”

“No.”

“Nothing at all?”

He grabbed the hand that held the knife. His grip was surprisingly strong. “I was
starting classes at School of the Moving Image, and I had an internship at William
Morris, he said. “I . . . I couldn’t . . . l was scared. I was young and selfish and
scared.”

“Did you do anything? Drop her off somewhere or—”

“I left her in our motel room. I paid in cash. I drove away.” He started to sob. “It
was her eighteenth birthday.” Brenna stared at him, her anger building.

“I only cared about myself. Not her. She was . . . She kept twitching and she went
pale and she passed out and . . .”

“You left.”

“She wasn’t breathing.”

“You left her for dead.”

“I called the motel from the road. They checked the room. It was empty. I don’t know
what that means,” he said. “I don’t know if someone . . . got rid of her or . . .
or if she left by herself.”

“Is Clea Lula Belle?”

“I kept her diary,” he said. “I kept it with me to remind me to be good. To remind
me to use that second chance.”

“Tell me.”

“I married Jill and I was good to her and I never drank, never drank for twenty years.
I lived a good life.”

“
You left my sister for dead, that isn’t a good life!
” Hate coursed through Brenna’s veins, her skin growing rigid with it. Gary’s grip
grew tighter around her wrist. “No,” she said. “Tell me whether Lula Belle was Clea.
At least give me that.”

Gary stared into her eyes, his grip going lax. “I didn’t know who Lula Belle was,
but I hoped she was Clea.” He said it in his old voice, his kind voice . . . “Man,
Brenna. You should have seen my face when I got that first download. It was like . . .
like being with an angel.”

He smiled, and then his grip tightened. She tried to pull away, but he was stronger,
drawing the blade across his own throat. So much blood and there it was, done in an
instant, the human body so frail, so fragile. Just as her sister had been.

“You don’t deserve this,” Brenna shouted. She grabbed her phone, called 911. “Suicide
attempt!” she yelled into it, but he was gurgling and twitching, leaving her even
as she spoke. By the time she’d given them the address and hung up the phone, he was
no longer breathing. She put her hands over the slit throat. She tried CPR. Nothing.

First Clea. Now me. You left us both.

She heard sirens outside. The second set of the evening. Brenna didn’t move. She stared
down at Gary Freeman. At his eyes, wrenched open. She didn’t try to close them.

Epilogue

One week later

“S
o why
didn’t you call me?” Morasco said, as he pulled up to the curb on City Island,
just in front of the post office.

It was the eighth time he had asked Brenna that in
about as many days. She was tired of answering him, but it still made her
smile.

“I’m in a knife fight, I don’t think,
Hey, I should invite Nick Morasco
,” she said. “Anyway,
you’d probably show up wearing the entirely wrong thing and embarrass me.”

“Not fair.”

“Yes, fair. Tweed and stilettos do not mix—and I’m
not talking about the heels, though that’s pretty much a glamour-don’t, too
. . .”

“Don’t you even know the rules?” He got out of the
car, went around to her side, and opened her door before she could get her hand
on it.

“Excuse me?”

“The rules, Brenna. You’re the lady PI. I’m the cop
boyfriend. I’m supposed to save you in the end.”

She grinned at him. “You just said you were my
boyfriend.”

“Okay, okay.” He sighed. “This is going
nowhere.”

They were on their way into the post office for a
reason, which—like the manila envelope Morasco had handed her yesterday—was
something they’d chosen not to talk about.

“Here’s the thing,” he had told her, yesterday
morning, in bed. “I don’t want to keep secrets from you. But I don’t want to
force them down your throat, either.”

“So where does that leave us?”

Morasco had slipped out of the bed, gone into his
top dresser drawer, and pulled out the envelope, that ache in his eyes, that
pity she’d come to hate . . . “This is from Grady Carlson.”

“Oh . . . God . . .”

“He gave this to me a week ago. He died
yesterday.”

“What is it?”

“A secret.” He looked at her. “Your secret. Do what
you want with it.”

Last night at her apartment, Brenna had cracked
open the envelope. She’d seen police papers. She’d seen her father’s name. And
she’d ended it there, closing the envelope. Slipping it into her desk drawer
and
moving away from it, like a bad memory.
Some other
time
, she had thought. Not now. There was too much going on now. And
though she knew—she knew deep down where she’d inherited her gift for
destruction, felt it in the awful rush of blood to her skin with every Lula
Belle viewing (
She knows. She knows it all
. . .)
—she couldn’t turn over that rock and look at it. She
wasn’t ready for the confirmation . . .

“Daddy took his gun, and he
put the barrel of it right there at his temple, and he pulled the trigger
and his whole head exploded . . .”

Brenna shut her eyes tight.
Not now
.

Morasco raced to the post office door, opened it
for her.

“If you don’t stop being such a gentleman,” Brenna
said, “I’m going to stop having sex with you.”

He let go of the door, fast.

“That’s better.”

City Island always triggered memories for
Brenna—and it didn’t help that it was essentially unchanged in twenty-five
years, a sleepy sea community with the same fake fishing net restaurants, the
same quaint little homes and narrow streets leading right up to private beaches
on the bay, the same maritime museum and the same library and so many of the
same people as had been here, living life, when Brenna was growing up here and
her sister’s disappearance was the talk of the town.

The sight of the elementary school—which went all
the way through eighth grade, still—had been enough to set Brenna to remembering
that first school assembly with Clea missing, September 7, 1981—and it had only
been Morasco, making some joke about the lobster place across the street, that
had brought her back.

It was good to have him here, she decided. Because
for all his jokes about rescuing “the lady PI,” she needed him now, and not for
knife fights. She needed him to rescue her from her memory, from her
past . . .

The post office brought back memories, too, of
course, but for now, the present was more important. Morasco made for the large
mailboxes against the wall as she clutched it in her hand—the key Hildy had
given her. Morasco had been the one to come up with the idea, based on the final
details Diandra had provided this week while confessing to the murder of Shane
Smith, which were as follows:

Gary had never known about Shane stealing and
copying Clea’s journal. But Diandra had. As soon as she learned, via Gary, of
the Lula Belle videos, she knew Shane was behind them—and she was livid. She
longed for a day when she could get back at her ex-boyfriend for exploiting The
Most Gifted Man She Had Ever Known, just because he was jealous she had slept
with him.

When Gary had received the phone calls from RJ and
begged Diandra to stop him from going public with his knowledge, she saw her
opportunity—and readily agreed. Back in contact with Shane, she convinced him
to
hack Lula Belle’s private e-mail, lure RJ into meeting him, and kill him in
order to preserve the “great art” he’d been creating with the mystery woman he’d
replaced her with. She’d wanted him to kill Lula Belle, too—lest she spill the
beans to Brenna —but though they tracked both Lula Belle and Brenna up to Canada
in late October, they couldn’t find Lula. And Shane chickened out—refusing to
give Diandra Lula Belle’s real name.

Diandra had let her anger get the best of her.
He didn’t deserve to die
, she told officers.
Though Hildy Tannenbaum clearly had reason to feel differently.

At any rate, over dinner at his place last night,
Morasco had said to Brenna, “If Lula Belle knew her e-mail was compromised,”
he
said, “what’s the safest way she could have gotten ahold of RJ?”

Brenna had replied, “His PO box.”

And that’s why they were here. “Hey,” Morasco said.
He was standing in front of a mailbox. RJ’s mailbox. Number 35.

Brenna made her way over to it, her hands shaking,
sweating around the key.

She unlocked the mailbox.

There was a package inside, addressed from
Montreal, postmarked October 20. No name on the return address. Brenna’s heart
pounded.

Lula Belle, are you my
sister?

She opened it—pulled out a stack of Xeroxed
handwritten pages. She recognized the handwriting
. Clea’s
handwriting
. “Oh my God,” whispered Brenna. She held her breath,
hoping.

“There’s a note,” Morasco said.

He spread it out in front of them, and they both
read:

Dear RJ:

I hope this finds you well. I’m sorry we
never got a chance to hook up for this interview. I remain disillusioned with
Shane and his “art”—and I think your project is worthy and important. But I’m
sorry to tell you, I must leave town. It’s for happy reasons, actually—I got
a
role on a soap in Montreal. I don’t know if you know this, but I speak fluent
French, so the part is perfect for me. Plus, I will get a regular paycheck, I
don’t have to hide my face, and I no longer have to keep anyone’s secrets.

At any rate, good luck
with your documentary. I’m sure it will be really great. Again, I’m sorry we
never got to meet up in person, but I hope the enclosed is of
help.

All
best,

Lula Belle
. . . aka Mallory Chastain

“Mallory Chastain,” Brenna whispered, her heart
sinking a little.

“Not Clea.”

She shook her head. “I know her.”

“How?”

“I saw her in one of Shane Smith’s films
. . . Well, her eye anyway.”

He sighed. “All those people, thinking she’d gone
up to Canada to talk to you. But actually, she’d just gotten a soap opera
part.”

“Irony,” Brenna said. But she really wasn’t
thinking about it. She was too busy reading the first paragraph of her sister’s
journal:

I just finished
reading the Diary of Anne Frank. My mom thinks diaries are lame. She thinks
they reveal too much about you, but I don’t think so at all. I think they
can keep you company when everyone else lets you down. I think they can hold
your memories for you while you’re off making new ones. I think they are a
way of living forever—which probably explains why Mom hates them so
much.

Anyway, Anne named her
diary Kitty, and I want a Kitty, too. But since that name is taken, I’m
going to call you something else. Something pretty.

I’m going to name you
Lula Belle.