I Have a Secret (A Sloane Monroe Novel, Book Three) (19 page)

At the end of the article, I clicked on a link and was sent to the FBI’s National Crime Information Center.  The page contained two photos of Ivy, both taken as a teenager.  Her wavy blond hair fell past her shoulders, but that wasn’t what stood out the most.  It was her eyes.  The same piercing baby blues Alexa had.  In the photos, Ivy was around the same age Alexa was now—they looked like twins.  The more I stared at the photo, the more the girl staring back didn’t remind me of a killer.  She looked like a scared young girl looking for a way out.  

Under the remarks section, it stated Ivy had dropped out of high school and was working at a local yogurt shop at the time of her disappearance.  I scrolled down the page until I came to a section called THE DETAILS.  It stated the following:

Ivy West left her home in Lancaster, California on the morning of February 21, 1992 for her job at the local yogurt shop in town.  Her co-worker reported she never showed up for work, and she didn’t return home that evening.  West’s parents stated she took the bus every day, but the bus driver was certain she wasn’t at the bus stop when he arrived to pick her up.  She was last seen wearing a white t-shirt, jeans, and Keds shoes.  She also had on a gold heart-shaped locket which she always wore on her wrist.

 Had Ivy used the money from Rosalind to skip town forever, and if so, where had she been hiding all this time? 

The town of Lancaster was forty-seven miles up Tehachapi-Willow Springs Road.  The drive itself offered plenty of scenery to passing motorists.  The Tehachapi Wind Farm provided one of the most spectacular views with its showcase of over a thousand windmills, also called wind turbines, hovering some five hundred feet in the air.  Passing the big white pinwheels was something even a person like Giovanni wouldn’t soon forget.   But as fascinated as he was, nothing prepared him for what came next: The Willow Springs International Raceway. 

“It’s wonderful to see something this amazing out here,” he said.

“When I tell people where I grew up they can’t even pronounce it, let alone understand what compels a person to live here.  Most aren’t aware we have places like the raceway and Edwards Air Force Base in the area.”

The conversation switched to trains and the history of the Tehachapi Loop and didn’t wrap up until we reached our destination at 592 Lakeshore Road.  My expectation of the living conditions we’d find was blown when we drove up.  Instead of a single-wide manufactured home in a rundown trailer park, I found myself looking over an immaculately kept Victorian charmer. 

In the front yard, a woman raked leaves into a black plastic bag.  She spotted us and leaned her rake against the tree.

“Can I help you with something?” she said.

“Mrs. West?”

She shook her head.  “No, Anne Thomas.”

“Sorry,” I said, “I was told Ivy West’s parents lived here.”

“They used to—not anymore though.  I bought the place a few years back.”  She rested her hands on her hips.  “You should have seen it.  This is what two years of renovations looks like.  I never thought this house would ever come alive again, but I can’t complain about the way it turned out.”

I looked at Giovanni.         “I guess we came all this way for nothing.”

Anne removed the rubber gloves she was wearing and swished her fingers back and forth in the air allowing them to dry.  

“If you don’t mind, can I ask why you’re interested in the West’s?” she said.

“I was just trying to get some information.”  I reopened the car door.  “Thanks for your time.”

 “Hold on a second.  What kind of information?”

“It’s probably best not to discuss it unless it’s with Mr. or Mrs. West.”

“Mr. West has been gone for years now, so you won’t find him.”

I leaned on the car door.  “How do you know?”

“Because…I’m Mrs. West’s sister.”

Giovanni and I shared a look like maybe the trip hadn’t been a waste of time after all and then we walked over to where Anne was standing.

“Where is Mrs. West?” I said. 

Anne swung her finger back and forth between Giovanni and me. 

“I’d rather know who you two are first if you don’t mind.”

“I’m a private investigator looking into the disappearance of your niece, Ivy.”    

 “You’re wasting your time,” she said.  “Ivy’s been gone so long, no one cares anymore.  Why bother?”

“I have my reasons.  Can you tell me where I might find your sister?”

She winked and said, “Come with me.”

We followed her inside the house and over to the fireplace.  She titled her head toward the mantle.  “There she is.” 

“She’s dead?” I said.

Anne nodded.  “Car accident, been two years now.”

“I’m sorry.”

She shrugged.  “We were never that close, to be honest.  But I guess I had the best relationship with her out of everyone in the family.”

“Would you mind if I asked you a few questions about Ivy’s disappearance?”

She shrugged.  “Fine by me—but I don’t know much.”

“Did you know Ivy was pregnant?”

“Her parents wanted her to have an abortion, but she was determined to have that baby.  Planned on raising it herself, too.”

“And no one thought it was strange when she didn’t come home with it?”

“Ivy spouted off one thing one day and something else the next.  Said she changed her mind at the last minute—didn’t want to talk about it.  We assumed she gave it up for adoption.”

“And none of you were with her when she had the baby?”

“When she refused to get an abortion, her parents said they didn’t want anything to do with it.  Truth was, they didn’t have the money to take care of Ivy, let alone a newborn.  I wanted to be there for her, but I didn’t even find out she’d had it until after the baby was born.”

“Did she ever say who the father was?”

“All Ivy said was she didn’t know.  Could have been any number of guys.”

Up to that point, Ivy’s aunt had been a straight shooter, and there was nothing in her body language to indicate she was lying. The more I thought about Ivy, the more I felt for her, which made me uneasy.  Why was I sympathizing with a possible cold-blooded killer?  Some weird nurturing instinct had taken root inside me, and I had the sudden urge to find her and give back the life that was so hastily taken away.

“Do you know anything about the day Ivy went missing?” I said.

“My sister called me, crying.  Said she thought Ivy’d run off because they’d had a horrible fight the night before.”

“What about?”

“Ivy came home rambling about how she felt the stress they put on her about getting rid of the baby hurt the baby in some way.  I didn’t see how it mattered since she decided not to keep it.” 

Or killed it.  At least in Ivy’s mind.  It made sense.  If only she knew.

I had a hunch Jesse had been the master of secrets, perhaps concealing even more than Rosalind.  So I returned to his place again, but this time, I didn’t care how long I had to wait.  When he came home, I’d be there.  

Taped to Jesse’s front window was a vinyl sign suggesting the house was being monitored by some kind of security company.  But on a scale from one to ten, the home fell in the too-old-and-rundown-why-bother range.  And I imagined a burglar would view it as a waste of time.  There were two possible scenarios: One, I broke in and found out the sign was nothing more than a prop, or two, I broke in and an alarm went off, thereby alerting Jesse and various others of a possible break-in.  Either way, I was past the point of giving a damn.  I was going inside. 

Jesse’s front door was locked when I tried it, but the back door wasn’t.  One twist of the knob and I was in.  And unless the alarm was silent, nothing happened.  The inside of his house was even smaller than it appeared on the outside.  And brown.  Everything from the bedding to the dusty cobwebs in the windows was a different shade of brown.  From the looks of things, he’d knocked out the wall to the only bedroom and turned the place into a studio adorned with beer bottles and football-player bobble heads.  It was every man’s dream and every woman’s worst nightmare. 

I poked around in a few drawers, but only found proof of Jesse’s minimalist lifestyle.  There were no notes, scraps of paper or anything to tell me more about him than I already knew.  Even his closet was bare except for the essentials. 

Once I was confident my snooping skills provided all there was to see, I plopped down on the sofa and waited.  An hour went by, and then two.  Somewhere between drifting off to sleep and the third hour, headlights beamed through Jesse’s windows signaling my wake-up call.  A car door slammed shut, and footsteps shuffled up the front stairs.  A key was inserted into the door and the living room filled with light.  

Jesse took one look at me and made a growling sound that sounded more animalistic than human.  

“Uh, surprise?” I said.

“Uh, breaking and entering?  You ever heard of it?”

The swelling on his bruised face had gone down—a little, but not a lot.

“Been caught a few times,” I said.  “You’re looking at a pro.”

“Yeah—well, I don’t know how you got in here, or...”

“Back door,” I said and pointed.  “You really should lock both doors when you leave and keep your, uh, security system turned on.  That’s some high tech piece of cardboard you got there.”

He wasn’t amused.

“Look,” I said, “you wouldn’t answer my texts or my phone calls.  What else was I supposed to do?  I have a home somewhere else, and I’d like to get back to it one day.”

He turned his back to me.

“I’m not leaving until you answer my questions,” I said.

“If I wanted to answer them, I would have called back.  What does that tell you?”

“I need information, Jesse.  Tell me what I want to know and I’ll never bother you again.”

He opened the fridge, grabbed a Dr. Pepper and hovered for a moment like he was trying to make a decision. 

“Ask your questions, but it doesn’t mean I’ll answer ‘em,” he said.  “It just means I want this over with and you gone.”

It was better than nothing.

“Did you know about Alexa?”

He plopped down on a recliner and snapped the tab back on the can of soda.  “You’re gonna have to give me a little more,” he said.

“All right.  Did you know about the other woman?  Alexa’s
real
mother.”

He flicked the metal cap on the Dr. Pepper several times with his fingernail and then said, “Yes.”

“How did you know her?”

“I was the one who introduced them.”

“At the party?”

He raised a brow.  “How’d you know?”

“Doug, Nate, Rusty—they’re all dead and you’re alive.  What do you think that means?”

“Nothin’.  It doesn’t mean a damn thing.”

“The four of you passed Ivy West around like she was a bucket of popcorn.  And why not—it was fun, right?  Until she showed up a couple months later pregnant, looking for the baby daddy.  I’d guess the fun and games were over at that point, right?”

Jesse sprung from his chair and leaned over me like he wanted to bend me over his knee and teach me a lesson.  “I wanna know right now who you’ve been talkin’ to, Sloane.”

“No!”

“Yes!”

“Back off me, Jesse.”

“Or what?”

“Come closer and find out.”

He let out a deep belly laugh and wagged a finger at me.  “You’re funny, you know?  Not many girls out there like you anymore.”

“Last time I checked I was a one-of-a-kind.”

He backed a couple feet away and towered over me, arms folded. “So now what?”  

But he wasn’t looking at me when he said it.

I glanced at a shrine of beer bottles lined up in a row on a corner bookcase.  “Why do you keep staring at that bottle?” I said.

“I aint starin’ at no bottle.” 

“You were,” I said.  “The one in the middle—the BUD LIGHT.”

I took a step toward the bottle, but before I could grip it in my hand, Jesse had something pointed at me, and it wasn’t his finger.  

“Why’d you have to come back here, Sloane?  You’ve stirred up nothin’ but trouble.”

I remained still and calm, contemplating my next move.

“So now what—you’re going to shoot me because I know too much?” I said.