The Last Good Day of the Year (28 page)

Abby starts to cry. “I don't know if I
ever
deserved it, to be honest with you. I was a horrible kid. You can't even imagine the things I used to do. It's a miracle I'm still alive. My teenage years must
have been hell for her. My dad sure as heck never paid much attention to me, not once I started getting older, but I always had Darla, even if she wasn't Mother of the Year. She wasn't perfect, but she was all I had, and it was better than nothing. Some of us have to take what we can get, wherever we can get it. Not every girl has parents who love her the way parents are supposed to love their kids. I miss her every day. I wish she'd call or write me a letter—anything at all. I'd just like to know that she's okay, wherever she is.

“So after she left,” Abby continues, “my dad told me to box up the rest of her stuff and either throw it away or take it to Goodwill. He didn't care which, he said; he just told me to get rid of it. But I couldn't do it. Not with everything. I put some of her things in a box and took it up to the attic. I'd never even been up there before; I'd never had any reason. It's just a bunch of beams and insulation. But my father used to go up sometimes, and I didn't want him to know that I'd kept any of her stuff. He would have been furious with me. So I was walking around on the beams, trying to find someplace to tuck the box away where he wouldn't see it, and I saw this little rectangle cut into the drywall. I can't believe I even noticed it. I could barely make out the lines; they were almost impossible to see, and they really just looked like part of the drywall more than anything else—like a seam or something.

“I kind of tapped it a few times to see if it was loose, and it was. Once I'd pried it away, I looked through the hole, and I could see into the Souzas' attic.

“The holes went all the way across. There was another one on the opposite wall, leading to your attic”—she nods at Remy—“and one more going to yours,” she says, looking at me and Gretchen.

My sister has obviously heard the whole story before. She listens quietly, her face stony and blank.

“I kept trying to convince myself there must be a good reason for them. I didn't want to think my dad had anything to do with it; I was hoping he didn't even know about them. So I put them all back into place, and then I hid Darla's stuff. I was about to leave—and that's when I saw the backpack.” She swallows. “It was Frank's backpack. He was always carrying it around with him. I unzipped it to look inside, and I found Turtle's bear.”

It feels as though all the air has been sucked from the room. I can barely breathe.

“So what did you do after that?” Remy glances toward the stairs as if he's afraid Ed can hear us. “Did you confront your dad? Did you ask him why he had Frank's book bag?”

“No. I didn't say anything.”

“But you must have done something, right?”

“There were other things in the backpack. It wasn't just the bear. There were things that made me think my dad might have been the one who hurt Turtle.”

“What kind of things?” Remy's the one asking questions now; I don't think I could speak even if I tried. My mouth feels as dry as sandpaper.

“There were pictures of her sleeping. Dozens of them. I guess he'd been sneaking into your house at night through your attic.”

I feel like I'm going to throw up.

“He's a bad person.” Abby wipes her eyes. “But he's my dad,” she whispers, her whole body trembling. “How could I tell anyone? He's my
daddy
.”

I remember Ed Tickle slipping handfuls of Altoid mints to Turtle whenever he saw her. The same Ed Tickle who built the playhouse in Remy's yard. I remember how he helped us look for my sister, passing out fliers and joining the search parties as they assembled into a single line at the edge of the woods. They lined up shoulder to shoulder to trek through the forest, one measured step at a time, so they wouldn't miss an inch of ground.

“But why was everything in Frank's backpack?” Remy's knuckles are white, his fingers squeezing my hand.

“I think,” Abby begins, “that Frank was in the playhouse on New Year's Eve. It wouldn't have been the first time. He used to sleep there sometimes. I guess it was nicer than his motor home. I only know because Darla told me the night before she left.

“I think my father saw Steven in his costume and had an idea. I think he dressed up—there's a Santa suit in our attic—and kidnapped Turtle from your basement, and I think Frank saw him do it. Maybe Frank tried to stop him, and my dad had to kill him.” She swallows. “I think the backpack is a souvenir. Just like the bear.

“When Gretchen got the letter from Davis a few months ago, she came to see me, to confront me about what I knew and when I'd known it. I told her everything. Then we waited until my dad left for work the next day, and I showed her the attic. I showed her the backpack.”

Abby is trembling; she looks as if she might fall over any second. “Go get it,” she tells Gretchen.

My sister walks to the kitchen and opens one of the cabinets. She pulls the backpack down from a high shelf, brings it into the living room, and hands it to me.

“Look inside,” Abby says.

As I unzip it, she continues speaking. “I kept thinking about how my dad had been in such a good mood around Christmas last year. Now I knew why.”

The first thing I see in the backpack is a wrinkled brown paper bag filled with something soft. I'm too afraid to look inside on my own, so I turn it over and dump the contents onto the rug.

It's hair. Piles and piles of long, red hair.

“It's Kate O'Neill's hair,” Gretchen says. She stares at me. “And when she looked again at the photos of Turtle sleeping, Abby realized one of them was missing.”

Ed Tickle abducted Kate O'Neill. Her family lived about ninety minutes south of us in Virginia. He stopped by to drop off Turtle's picture, either on his way there or back, even though it was a huge risk. Because it was
worth it
to him. Because he's the monster in this story; not Steven Handley or Frank Yarrow.

“We waited until the weekend, and then we poisoned his soup,” Gretchen tells me softly. “But he didn't die.”

She looks at each of us, one at a time, before her gaze comes to rest on my face. “He's up there right now, Sam. Breathing. He's in a lot of pain. He's hurting real bad.” Her eyes start to well up and spill over. “We have to finish it soon. You can help us, Sam.”

When Remy and I leave Abby's house, Gretchen comes along with us. She brings the backpack. The three of us drive to the police station, where we sit in a bare, chilly room and tell our story to Officer Bert. He's the same policeman who listened as we said Steven Handley's name over hot chocolate in my kitchen a decade ago. We tell him about Abby's dad. We show him the backpack, and the red hair stuffed into the brown paper bag.

By the time police get to Point Pleasant, Ed Tickle is dead. The official cause of death is asphyxiation. He choked on his own vomit in his sleep.

This is how the story ends for him: his own daughter wouldn't pay for his funeral. He's buried in a cemetery a hundred miles from here, among the bodies of other men and women who went to their graves without ceremony—wards of the state who died alone in
prison; nameless vagrants who will forever be known as John or Jane Doe; and people like Ed, whose families had no interest, for whatever reason, in purchasing a casket or gravestone or even saying a final prayer for their dead relatives. His grave, I'm told, is marked only by strictly functional coordinates etched into a small metal placeholder. If someone wants to dig up the land to make room for a strip mall in a hundred years, they won't get much resistance from any surviving relatives.

This is how the story ends for Steven: two days before Turtle's funeral, he walks out of the state penitentiary as a free man and feels the sunlight on his face, unobstructed by prison bars or guards or barbed wire fencing, for the first time in over a decade.

This is how the story ends for Gretchen: she goes back to Texas, where Mike Culangelo has been waiting for her all summer. She doesn't call or write.

Here is how the story ends for Abby Tickle: she is gone by the time the police get to her house and discover Ed's body in his room. Since then, plenty of well-meaning strangers have called in supposed sightings of Abby to the local police, none of which have turned out to be useful. People claim they've spotted her in coffee shops and strip malls from West Virginia to San Antonio. A local librarian swears Abby served her a beer at a bar in Cancun. They're all wrong, probably.

Here are some facts for you, along with some lies. You tell me what's true. Put the pieces together and see if they fit.

In the early morning on New Year's Day, 1986, two eyewitnesses
saw Steven Handley kidnap Turtle Myers from her basement while her parents celebrated above them.

Betsy “Grandma Bitty” Mitchell died in her sleep after a miserable decline into paranoid dementia. The first sign that something was wrong came when the otherwise rational woman grew convinced that someone was sneaking into her bedroom at night and spying on her as she slept. Her family knew she was imagining things: they always locked their doors at night, and Betsy's bedroom was on the second floor. How could a person get in and out without there being any signs of a break-in? It would have been impossible.

Turtle Myers died ten years ago; her remains have never been found. Some people think there's a chance she's still out there, alive, maybe with Darla. Nobody knows what happened to her, either; nobody even knows her real last name.

Before we left Abby's house, Remy and I followed her and Gretchen upstairs into Ed Tickle's bedroom. He was alive, but barely. His face and clothing were caked in vomit from the poison that had been building up in his body all summer.

We watched Abby force his mouth open and tilt a cup of undiluted antifreeze down his throat. When he tried to resist, Gretchen helped Abby hold his head steady. Once he'd swallowed the last of it, Abby held her father's mouth shut while we waited for the poison to do its job. We watched him gag on his vomit when it came rushing up his throat, but we didn't help him. We watched his face turn blue and the skin beneath his eyelids swell with fluid. His mouth was messy with throw-up and spit, and his lips were purple.

We watched him die, and then we waited with his body for an hour in order to give Abby a head start.

Jane is fifteen. She lives with her mother, who sells Mary Kay and loves her only daughter more than anything in the world. Sometimes Jane dreams about a different life, with a different family. In the dreams, everybody calls her Turtle, or sometimes Tabitha. Some mornings after she wakes up, it takes her a while to figure out which life is real and which one is a dream. Sometimes she wonders whether they are both equally false. If she wakes in the middle of the night and goes down the hall to her mother's room, her mother turns on the light and gets her a glass of water. She tells Jane that she worries too much.
Don't let your dreams scare you
, she says.
Everything is fine. I'll never let anybody hurt you. Tomorrow will be a better day
.

Wouldn't that be nice?

This was a difficult book to write. I never could have done it without the support, ingenuity, and general
goodness
of so many people. I don't know how or why I've been so lucky, but please know that I feel enormous gratitude and love for you all.

Emily Easton: The first time I met you in the flesh, we were at a dinner for the Walker/Bloomsbury folks to kick off the NCTE conference in Orlando. It was my first conference as a published author. I was terrified. Your kindness put me at ease that evening. When you became my editor, I was, once again, terrified by your knowledge and assuredness. I wouldn't take back a second of the time we spent working together. I learned a
lot
from you. Thank you for being tough on me! Thank you for pushing me, even when I resisted! Thank you for your confidence in my work! I'm a better writer because of it.

Laura Whitaker: You're a fabulous editor. I love working with you so much; I hope I didn't make you too crazy as deadline after deadline passed with each draft “basically finished” on my end, while I imagine you were ready to track me down and physically force me to wrap it up more than once. Your “put-the-skin-on-the-exposed-flesh-and-bone” analogy became my mantra during the last few months of revision. Thank you for putting so much time and energy into this inherited project.

Andrea Somberg: You've been my agent for, what, ten years? I'm still going to keep thanking you in every book, since none of them would have seen the light of day without your hard work.

All my dear friends: Mary Warwick, Penny (Sasha) Dawn, Alisa Shetter-Zisman, Jennifer Merck, Amanda Warman, Sameer Naseem, Mallory Warman, Scott and Patty Warman, Cheryl and Dennis Kenna. My late grandparents, Oliver and Mary Alice Kern: I miss you both very much. My daughters, Estella and Esme … I adore every last one of you, with all my heart.

Thanks also to Lisa Bevington, for your inspirational thoughts on the mass delusion that afflicts all children: Belief in Santa Claus.

Breathless
Where the Truth Lies
Between
Beautiful Lies

Copyright © 2015 by Jessica Warman

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