Dead Ringers 1: Illusion (3 page)

Even if the blow resulted in a concussion, though, it doesn’t explain my memory gap. It’s typical not to remember the accident. Not so typical to have no recollection of the following forty-eight hours.

“I didn’t write that text. Someone must have gotten hold of my phone and sent it.”

“Why would anyone do that?”

“So nobody would realize I was missing and come looking for me.” I can tell Becky doesn’t buy that explanation. “C’mon, Becky. Why would I ever go skiing with Roxy?”

“Her father went to prison when she was a kid, too.” Becky repeated the story that Roxy had told everybody. “She thought it would be good for you to get away for a few days.”

“Roxy’s lying.”

“We’ve been over this already, Jade. Why would she lie?”

Maybe Roxy was disguised as the clown.
Except that doesn’t sound right. What possible motive could she have? She was involved, though. Somehow.

“I don’t know why Roxy’s lying.”

“Do me a favor, okay?” Becky rubs her hand up and down my arm. “Don’t mention the evil clown to anybody. People are already talking. You can’t give them more ammo.”

I shrug her hand off my arm. “About me being crazy? You think I’m crazy, too, don’t you, Becky?”

“No! Of course not. I just think...” She pauses and the corners of her mouth turn down. “I just think you’ve been under a lot of stress.”

“Hey, is everything all right over here?”

My head whips around at the voice of Maia Shelton, who’s closing the distance between us. Like Becky, Maia has been my friend forever. Unlike Becky, she can’t keep a secret. She spends all her waking hours on the strip, either at her job at the arcade or hanging out at the carnival, collecting the news of the day and then freely sharing it.

“I heard something about a bloodcurdling scream.” Maia tosses her beautiful black hair, which cascades down her back almost to her waist and is adorned with one of the chrysanthemums she’s taken to wearing. Today’s flower is purple.

Becky sends me a warning look, then says, “People scream all the time at a carnival.”

“The funhouse is too lame for screams,” Maia declares, waving a dismissive hand. “So, spill. What’s going on?”

It’s time I entered the conversation with the truth. Seems to me I heard somewhere it was the best defense. “It’s nothing. I just got spooked by the clown in the funhouse.”

Maia balances her hands on her curvy hips and tosses her hair again. “Oh, come on. You’re not afraid of clowns. Last year for Halloween you dressed up as that killer clown from the Stephen King miniseries. I can’t think of the name, but you know the one.”

It
. I’d read the book, too. Not his best work.

“I saw the two of you huddled over here,” Maia continues. “You were talking about something important. I can tell.”

Becky telegraphs me another silent message to keep my mouth shut.

“We were talking about the clown,” I say.

Maia blows air out her nose. “Bullshit! You think I can’t tell when you two are hiding something from me?”

“What would we be hiding?” I ask.

“How should I know? You won’t tell me.” Maia huffs out another breath. “Fine. See if I care.”

She spins on her heel and stalks away, flipping us the bird as she goes.

Becky waits until Maia is out of earshot before she turns troubled eyes to me. “I’m serious, Jade. You can’t say anything about an evil clown to anyone, not just Maia. If you do, people are gonna think you’re like...”

Becky’s voice trails off, but I know what she means.

I can’t afford to let people think I’m like my mother.

When Becky pulls her little red Honda Fit into my driveway three hours later, my head hurts from trying to figure out the mystery of what happened to me. Not as much as it hurt that night in the forest, though. That pain was extraordinary.

“You’re like a million miles away,” Becky says.

“I’ve got a lot of things on my mind.”

“Things you should never, ever tell anyone,” Becky says. “We’re clear on that, right?”

“Crystal.”

She doesn’t need to worry about me spreading tales tonight. My two siblings are too young to understand what I can’t grasp myself, and no way would I tell dear old mom anything.

I thank Becky for the ride, get out of the car and shut the door. The porch light is on, shining on the hanging baskets of geraniums that make the ranch house appear a little less modest. I use my key and slip inside before the flying bugs surrounding the porch light can follow me. Quickly I punch in the security code on the alarm system my mother had installed before she abandoned us.

Tonight the bowels of the house are dark. Good. Everybody’s asleep.

Something brushes against my leg. I cry out and jump back. Yellow eyes peer at me in the darkened foyer. Our black cat Beelzebub and not Jack Nicholson wielding a bloody knife like he did in
The Shining
.

“Jesus, Bee. I had a rough enough night without you trying to give me a heart attack. Don’t you know an evil clown could be after me?”

I strain my ears for the sound of stirring but hear only silence. Slipping off my shoes, I pad barefoot into the kitchen and open the refrigerator without bothering to turn on an overhead light. The cold air feels good on my clammy skin.

Yogurt or leftover pizza?

“Like I really have a choice if I don’t want to weigh two hundred pounds,” I mutter.

But if I gained a lot of weight, it might be tougher for somebody to snatch me off the street a second time. I grab the pizza, head for the family room and turn on a lamp. Light bathes the room, illuminating the empty sofa, the coffee table my stepdad found at a flea market and refinished and the woman in the recliner.

Her eyes are open and staring directly at me.

I swallow the scream before it starts. The woman in the recliner is my mother.

She’d walked into the house without even knocking about a week ago. She didn’t apologize or explain why she hadn’t once in twenty-five weeks given us a call to say where she was. She acted like she’d never been gone, taking my little sister Suri shopping, making Julian whatever he wanted for dinner. After a few days, Aunt Carol returned home to South Carolina.

“Why are you sitting in the dark?” I demand.

“I was waiting for you,” she says.

Her speech is slow and measured, without inflection. It’s impossible to tell if I woke her. She always sounds like that, which I figure is a side effect of her meds. I might feel sorry for her if she hadn’t stopped taking them last year and wrecked our lives.

“No need for that. I can take care of myself.”

She says nothing but continues to stare at me. She’s in a long-sleeved flannel nightgown much too warm for a summer night. Her shoulder-length hair is brown with no trace of red, her green eyes are wide set and her lips plump. Supposedly we look alike, but I don’t see it.

I pick up the remote, switch on the television and sink into the sofa. On screen Drew Barrymore is sobbing into the phone. I instantly recognize the movie
Scream
. I’ve seen it a half-dozen times, but anything is better than having a conversation with my mother.

Long minutes pass. The pizza is cold, but I can barely taste it. The girl on TV is screaming because—surprise—no one ever survives the first five minutes of a slasher flick. I try to ignore my mother, who hasn’t even shifted in her seat. Why won’t she go to bed and leave me alone?

“Your father left a message on the answering machine,” she announces.

“Stepfather,” I correct for like the millionth time. My real father took off before I was born. My mom claims she doesn’t even know where he is.

“He’d like for you to visit him.”

She makes it sound like they’re divorced and he’s inviting me to spend time with him. Like Maia’s father, who has a million-dollar home with a tropical waterfall pool at the Estates at Ocean Breeze.

“Have
you
visited him?”

“Not yet.”

“I’ll leave the visiting to you then.”

On television, Drew Barrymore grasps for her killer’s mask. It’s already too late.

“I talked to your Aunt Carol on the phone tonight. She said you haven’t seen your father since he was arrested.”

Not quite true. I’d gone to an arraignment where I’ve since found out hardly anybody pleads guilty. Leave it up to my stepdad to dare to be different. It is true, however, that I’ve never been to the maximum-security prison where the judge sent my stepdad at the sentencing hearing. I haven’t read the letters he writes me, either. They end up in the trash.

“What’s your point?” I ask.

“Five months is a long time for a father and daughter to go without seeing each other.”

My mother was gone for longer than that. My palms hurt, and I realize I’m clenching my hands and the nails are digging into my skin. “Yeah, well, he should have thought of that before he got himself arrested and landed us here with you.”

Silence. Utter and complete except for the gasps from poor, dying Drew on TV. Definitely not a bloodcurdling scream. Hard to pull that off with a few dozen stab wounds. The knife comes up again. The television screen goes dark before the killing blow. My mother has the remote in her hand.

“Hey! I was watching that. What gives?”

“You obviously have something you want to say to me.”

“Nope.”

“I think you do.”

Why is she making an issue of this now? Since she moved back to Midway Beach, I’ve made no secret of the way I feel about her. If she’s in one room, I’m in the other. I speak to her as little as possible.

“Trust me,” I say under my breath, “you don’t want to hear what I have to say.”

“Try me.”

I let out a noise that sounds like a laugh but isn’t. Far from it. I sit up straighter, rising to the challenge. I’ve been holding in the anger for so long that maybe it is time I had my say.

“Since you asked for it, I’ll give it to you straight. I wish you hadn’t come back. I know somebody has to take care of Julian and Suri, but it shouldn’t ever be you.”

She looks wounded, but I harden myself against her, thinking of all the nights I cried myself to sleep after she left, thinking of how hard it was on my stepfather without her around. All because she’d refused to accept help for her problem.

“You sound angry with me,” she says.

“Ya think?” I know blood doesn’t really boil, but it feels like a hot rush through my veins. “Now why would I be angry at a mother who didn’t care what happened to her family? You must have known money would be tight.”

My stepfather worked as an MRI tech at the hospital, a decent job for a single man but not so much for a family man supporting three children.

“I didn’t think your dad would try to rob a liquor store.”

“That’s on you.” My voice is rising and I can’t control it. “It never would have happened if you hadn’t abandoned us!”

“You make it sound like I wanted to go.” Mom sounds impassioned, nothing like the woman who’s been on such an even keel since she returned. She leans forward in the chair, her eyes bright. “But I had to leave. It was the only way to protect all of you.”

“From what? Your
enemies
?”

Mom had her condition well under control until last year when she crashed her car and insisted she was speeding because
they
had been chasing her. After the accident, she had the security system installed. She used to stand at the window for hours, peeking through the curtains into the street to make sure her enemies weren’t out there.

One night, I’d heard my parents arguing about her meds through the thin walls of the house. I’d prayed she would get back on her regimen. Instead she’d packed up and left when nobody was home.

I can never forgive her for that.

“You never had any enemies, Mom,” I continue. “You would have known that if you hadn’t gone off your meds.”

Wrinkles form between Mom’s brows. “I never went off my meds.”

“Yeah, right.” I am sick of people lying to me. “I heard you two arguing. You wouldn’t listen to him.”

“That’s not the way it was.”

“So you didn’t leave because you thought someone was after you?” My eyes are trained on her, looking for I don’t know what. Foam frothing from her mouth, perhaps?

“Well, yes, but—”

“So there’s nothing left to talk about.”

“You’re wrong. I already mentioned I spoke to your Aunt Carol tonight.”

“So?”

“She told me more about what happened to you in February.” Mom wrings her hands the way she used to when she was standing at the window keeping guard. “I’m afraid, Jade.”

“Of what? Your enemies coming after me?”

She shakes her head, the movement almost frantic. “No, Jade. I’m afraid you’re a paranoid schizophrenic. Like me.”