Stay With Me: A Brenna Spector Novel of Suspense Read online

  “She had a gift for destruction that ran through her veins. You said she got it from Dad. You told Maya that, Mother. Why did you tell a young girl that her own aunt was evil?”

  “Because it was the truth.”

  “How could you say that?”

  “She killed Bill Edwards,” Evelyn said.

  “What?”

  “She stabbed him to death and left him in his own car. That nice young man. With a lovely wife and so much to live for.”

  “Did . . . did Clea say why?”

  “She blamed it on drugs, Brenna. Bad acid or something.” She took a breath. “She wanted me to take her back, to lie for her. She said, ‘You covered up for Dad when he killed himself. Why not me?’ You see, no one knew that she and Bill had been involved. He’d left his wife a note and disappeared a full month before he came back for Clea.”

  Brenna stared at her mother.

  “There are some things you can’t help your child with, Brenna,” she said. “Even the most loving mother has to draw the line somewhere.”

  To Brenna, it felt as though she was looking at a different person. Someone she thought she had known from birth and whose every facial expression hung in her memory—every snide comment, every smile, every flicker in the eyes from the past twenty-eight years. But still, Brenna hadn’t known what was behind any of it. You never really know someone until you see what they’ve been hiding. Brenna hadn’t known her mother at all.

  “I couldn’t call the police,” Evelyn said. “She was in Tennessee where they had the death penalty and what she had done was surely deserving of it.”

  “So you didn’t tell,” Brenna said quietly. “You didn’t tell anyone. You rid your house of traces of her. You got rid of the evidence. You hoped she’d found a new identity, a new life. ”

  “Yes.”

  “You thought, that way, she could start again.”

  “I swore I’d never tell anyone and I didn’t intend to. I stopped bothering the police, Detective Carlson. I was relieved when they closed the case. I hoped and prayed you wouldn’t find her, what with your line of work and that memory . . . My God, when I heard you found that man she’d been with all those years ago . . . I prayed it would stop. I wanted it all to go away. I wanted for her to stay away . . .”

  “Mom.”

  “I even tried looking for her myself. I thought, if someone finds her, let it be me, not Brenna. I was thinking of you. You have to understand.”

  “Mom, look at me.”

  Down the hall, Brenna heard the bathroom door open. She stayed focused on her mother, on her tired, scared eyes. “Why are you telling me now?”

  “Because, honey. I saw the news story about Maya. I saw the mug shot . . .”

  “Oh my God.”

  “She colored her hair. She was wearing contacts. She was drunk and on drugs and had aged twenty-five years, but I knew, Brenna. Just like I knew when I was hiding in my bedroom five years ago, I knew that voice. I didn’t want to admit it, even to myself. But a mother knows, Brenna.”

  “No . . .”

  “Sophia Castillo,” Evelyn said quietly. “That’s your sister. That’s Clea.”

  21

  “Why haven’t you killed me yet?” Maya said.

  Sophia took off the Yankees cap, ran her hand through Maya’s dark hair. So much like her Robert’s, and yet this girl was not like him at all—not stoic, strong Robert. Robert never cried—a little man at ten, twelve, thirteen. He hadn’t cried when he had said good-bye, even though she’d known how much he wanted to. She had seen it in his eyes.

  Maya, on the other hand. Maya wouldn’t stop. She was sobbing now, like a baby, but worse. Babies cry when they need something—food, sleep, diaper change. You fill that need and they stop crying. But Maya wasn’t crying out of need. She was crying over something she’d seen happen—the weakest type of crying. “You’ve been such a disappointment, Maya,” she said.

  Maya stopped crying. Just like that. She gave Sophia a look, wide-eyed, as though Sophia had just performed some sort of shocking magic trick. It made Sophia think of a time long ago, when Robert was just one week old and she was attempting, in vain, to nurse him. He wouldn’t latch on, no matter how hard she tried. Robert was shrieking from hunger, and Christopher kept asking Sophia if she was okay until, finally, it all got to her—the futility, the failure, the incessant wailing of a baby whose need she couldn’t fill . . .

  Sophia had lost it. She’d burst into tears. And like magic, like this, Robert had stopped crying. He’d given her the same look Maya was giving her now, and Sophia realized how similar their faces really were . . .

  Anyway, Robert had stopped crying and latched on at last. Can you believe this, Christopher? Sophia had said, her baby boy nursing away. One week old, and already I’m guilting him into doing things.

  She’d only been joking, of course. He hadn’t done it out of guilt, or love, or anything else other than need. The purest need. The need to survive.

  Sophia looked at Maya—at the cruel trick of genetics that was Robert’s face and Brenna’s face and their mother’s face and Sophia’s own. A combination of cells, creating enough of a likeness to pull at Sophia’s heart, to make her believe that, in time, this girl might need her, that this hostage she’d taken might recognize Sophia in the way that her own mother had not, even as she crashed around her living room, begging her to come out, to look at her, to see what she’d done to her firstborn child . . .

  How naïve had Sophia been to believe that, at some point, Maya might stop crying and look at her, really look at her? That she might say, I know you. I need you?

  Sophia recalled the dream she used to have—about dying in the arms of a movie hero, a firefighter. In the dream, the firefighter begs her not to go. Stay with me, he says. The way they always do in movies. Did people really say that to the dying, or was it just a Hollywood cliché? Was anyone really that poetic, that romantic, when trying to keep someone alive?

  Sophia hadn’t thought about that dream for years, but it had been on her mind throughout this adventure—the idea that, no matter how much she destroyed the rest of her life, she could still have a death that was perfect and true. How in that moment of leaving this world, there would be someone with her who could give her what she wanted: to feel needed, forever.

  But Maya wasn’t Robert. She never would be. She had similar genetics, yes. But she wasn’t family, not really. When Sophia put out the big light, Maya couldn’t be the one to hold her, to beg her to stay.

  As Sophia pulled away from the curb, she noticed the cell phone, clipped into the driver’s side visor. She grabbed it. Knew he was lying. And she knew, too, how this adventure had to end.

  She turned to Maya, who was staring at the phone, that same shock still scrawled across her face. “Are you ready?” she said.

  “Sup?” said Trent, as Brenna and her mother stood staring at each other, Brenna unable to move, to breathe. “Listen, I almost forgot,” he said. “Detective Morasco called. Guess you weren’t answering your cell . . .”

  Brenna’s phone vibrated SOS in her pocket.

  “Nothing important. Just wanted to know what was going on . . .”

  She pulled it out, looked at it. The text was from a number she’d never seen before. She opened it up, read the first line.

  This is from Sophia Castillo . . .

  “. . . get you anything, Mrs. Spector? Maybe a cup of coffee . . .”

  Do not tell anyone about this text . . .

  Brenna read on, willing herself not to cry out, not to shake or drop the phone or go ghost white, hoping with all she had that her body wouldn’t betray her.

  “Where are you going,” Trent asked, for she was already at the closet, yanking her coat out, putting it on.

  Brenna said, “Don’t leave.” Her gaze darted from Trent to her mother. “Eit
her one of you. Stay right here until I get back.”

  “Brenna?” said her mother.

  “Where are you going?” Trent said again.

  Brenna didn’t answer. She was already out the door, she was on the sidewalk, rushing the five blocks to her car with Trent’s question stuck in her head and the bag of Clea’s clothes in her arms, that moment replaying in her mind . . .

  “Where are you going?” Trent asks after her as she hurtles toward the door. She grabs her purse from her desk, then, the tired old grocery bag, the mold smell of Clea’s clothes wafting up, Clea’s journal pressed into her side. I’m going to see my sister, she thinks. And she will give me back my daughter. And she hurries down the stairs, out the front door, into the present.

  Maya’s abduction was the top story on the local news. Faith and Jim sat on the couch, watching it, just as, a century ago in this same spot, they’d watched Faith’s interview with Ashley.

  They were showing footage of Faith’s morning announcement—again made a century ago, back when Faith thought she was talking to the strange person who had called her, when she thought she was appealing directly to Renee Lemaire and not some silly high school boy. When she thought that she could do something.

  When she was able to think.

  “Maya is five-eight and 120 pounds,” Faith was saying on the TV. “She has waist-length blonde hair and blue eyes and she was last seen wearing a bright blue coat with brass buttons . . .”

  Jim stared at the screen. Faith gazed at his profile, the light from the TV flickering in his eyes. He’d barely spoken since they got home, yet in some ways she had never felt closer to him. She could read his mind, now that they shared this awful feeling.

  Maya’s high school picture appeared on screen alongside that of her abductor—the mug shot they’d seen this morning. Sophia Castillo with her greasy hair and her wild eyes. Something out of a “Crack Is Whack” campaign.

  “. . . Rappaport and the NYPD are urging anyone who may have seen these two to call this tip line. Castillo is considered extremely dangerous, and is already responsible for one death since Maya’s abduction . . .”

  “Two,” Jim said.

  Faith nodded.

  “Maybe more.”

  “Please.”

  “Faith.”

  “Yes, honey?”

  She turned to find him facing her, his eyes thick with tears.

  “I don’t know if I can live without her.”

  She took his hands in hers, and tried to think of something, anything, but the only thing on her mind was the image of Maya, running through the freezing rain, Maya getting into that blue car and closing the door and disappearing forever. How could she comfort Jim, how could they comfort each other when they were both feeling the same hopeless rage, the same budding grief . . . When they could read each other’s minds?

  Faith put her arms around him. They held on to each other like two people drowning—neither one able to save the other, but neither wanting to die alone.

  An hour later, the TV was off. Faith was in the kitchen, waiting for water to boil, listening to Jim’s voice, on the phone with Nick Morasco. “No,” he was saying, “the tip line has really been pretty worthless, unfortunately . . . yeah . . .”

  She heard the click of the phone as, from the bottom of the pot, the first bubbles forced their way up to the surface. She had used the pasta maker. She’d kneaded dough to make homemade pasta because kneading dough and feeding it into the machine and turning the crank were all things she could do. When she dropped the homemade pasta into the boiling water, her stomach growled. She hadn’t eaten since . . . She couldn’t remember when. She needed to eat. So did Jim. This was something they could do. Eat.

  She felt Jim watching her and looked up from the pot to see him in the doorway. He stood there so stiffly that for a moment, he looked like a shamed young boy, which made her think of Miles. It made her gut clench up. Miles could have saved her. At the very least, he could have done something more than the stupid things that he did. She slipped the wooden spoon into the boiling water, broke up the pasta. “Did Nick say anything?”

  He shook his head. “He was being questioned all day. First by Internal Affairs, then for the criminal investigation into Carver’s shooting,” he said.

  “Technicalities,” she said. “A waste of time.”

  He nodded. “He was hoping we might have news.”

  “What about Brenna?” It still felt weird to say her name to Jim, but it was getting easier.

  “Nick said he hasn’t been able to get hold of her. Trent said she’d run out, and she’s not answering her cell.”

  “Weird,” she said.

  “She does that sometimes.”

  “Does what?”

  “Disappears . . .”

  Faith didn’t know what that meant. She wasn’t sure she needed to know. Not now, anyway.

  “The pasta is done,” Faith said. Almost a pun. The past is done.

  She turned the gas off and opened the cupboard that held the colander. When she was bending down to grab it, she heard a knock on the door. She shook her head. Concerned neighbors. There’d been a parade of them this morning after the show, with more showing up in spurts throughout the rest of the day, all of them so well meaning, but all so torturous, with their worried eyes and their We’re praying for her, and Is there anything I can do? One woman—someone Faith saw in the elevator maybe once every couple of months—this woman had actually said, “I’m so sorry for your loss.” It had been all Faith could do not to haul off and punch her.

  The evening news had brought a few more, with Jim politely showing them out and Faith hiding in the kitchen, unable to take it. No doubt this was more of the same. “Jim, can you?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  Jim headed for the door, as Faith poured the pasta through the colander. She heard him say, “Yes?” And then, “Oh my God.”

  Faith headed out of the kitchen and made for the door. She saw Jim’s back before she saw who he was hugging. But she knew, in the tears that spilled down her own cheeks, in the emotion bubbling up through her. Oh please, please, please, please let this be real.

  She heard “Daddy,” before she saw the sheared-off hair, the red sweatshirt, the closed eyes, before she saw the tearstained face buried in Jim’s shoulder, the face of Maya. Maya looked up when she saw Faith and threw her arms around her, both of them weeping, unable to stop. Maya was here. Maya had come home.

  Brenna’s phone trilled when she was on City Island Bridge. She glanced at the screen. Morasco. “I’m sorry, Nick,” she whispered. “I can’t talk.” She put the phone back on her lap, let the call go to voice mail, kept driving. Strange. On other drives to City Island, Brenna could barely focus on the road for all the memories that barraged her. She’d turn on the radio to flood them out. She’d plug in Lee the GPS and listen extra closely to the suave Australian voice, mispronouncing “Ditmahhhs Street” and “City Ahland Boolevahd” and all the other street names of her youth, making them into different places, exotic spots that didn’t trigger memories at every turn.

  She’d sometimes call Trent and get him to talk to her, to describe whatever idiotic thing he was doing at the time, just to keep her thoughts in check, her eyes focused on the road as it was now, not then.

  But this time, she didn’t need to do any of that. She remembered nothing, the present situation overshadowing everything she’d lived before. She was going to see her missing sister and bring home her missing daughter, God she hoped that was going to happen . . .

  Maybe it wasn’t that strange.

  She was on the island now, passing the Lobster Box where she’d had her first date with John Berger on May 24, 1984. But the memory didn’t stick. She passed the Star of the Sea Church, where on June 4, 1997, she’d served as maid of honor at her best friend Carly Davis’s wedding to Gran
t Stratton, and the library her mother had stormed home from on April 5, 1986, telling Brenna she was never going to talk to Ruth the librarian again. She passed the Mariner’s Museum, behind which she’d smoked her first cigarette with Beth Purdy on August 8, 1985. But none of it held. She didn’t feel the burn from the smoke in her chest or smell the stargazer lilies from her bridesmaid’s bouquet or hear her mother’s indignant voice, cursing Ruth’s treachery.

  She could remember it all, of course, but only in passing—her senses weren’t involved. Brenna turned off City Island Avenue, onto Carroll Street, her palms sweating, her lip trembling as she edged toward her mother’s house, where her sister had asked she come alone, tell no one, or else. This is a serious warning.

  Brenna saw the Neptune statue first, and at the same time, her phone vibrated. A text. “Okay,” she whispered. “Okay . . .” She stared at the house, a chill running up her neck. There was a large, street-facing window that her mother had always hated. It throws too much light into the kitchen, Evelyn would complain. It hurts my eyes when I’m having my morning coffee. The window had been bashed in. A pile of shattered glass sparkled in the flower bed, the window gaping open as though beaten up and in shock.

  Clea hadn’t needed to do that. Brenna’s mother kept her spare key in the same place she always did, the plastic rock in the bed of impatiens on the left side of the front door. It’s still there, Clea. You could have checked. You didn’t have to break Mom’s window in, it must have made such a sound . . .

  Brenna swallowed hard. She thought of her mother’s voice, the sadness in it. A mother knows . . . she had said. She stared at the smashed-in window, the cold air rushing in. She felt sorry for her mother, for the first time in a long while.

  In Brenna’s line of work, there was an adage—one she felt compelled to bring up to most clients before beginning an investigation: Be careful who you look for.

  No one is perfect. Some of us are less perfect than others. Still others are better off as memories than they are in the flesh, and these people are better left unfound. It was a fact of life, but Brenna had never thought it would apply to the one missing person who had filled her thoughts for three decades, the person who had guided her life and her decisions and her mistakes, my God, so many terrible mistakes . . .