The Prettiest One: A Thriller (10 page)

He shrugged, swallowed the last of his beer, and stood. As he headed for the kitchen, he said, “Like I said, I figured you were . . . well, maybe not running from something, but you were trying to move on from something that you didn’t want to talk about. Maybe an abusive relationship. Maybe trouble with the law. Whatever it was, I didn’t care.”

He returned with a beer for himself and handed a second to Caitlin. He didn’t have a third for Josh. He straddled the chair again and took a swig of his beer. “No, I didn’t care about whatever past you might have had. By that time, I was hooked.” He smiled.

Caitlin took a sip and realized that both men were watching her . . . Bix amused, Josh far less so as he eyed her beer.

“What?” Caitlin said to her husband. “It’s good.” She held her bottle out toward him. “Want to share mine?”

“Thanks, no,” Josh said. “So then what?” he said to Bix like a federal agent interrogating a suspected terrorist.

“Then,” Bix said, looking at Caitlin, “you needed to start a life outside of this apartment. A life here in Smithfield. I didn’t know where you were from, but if you were going to stay here—which we both wanted—you needed a few things. There were steps we had to take.”

“Like what?” Caitlin asked.

“Well, you wanted to trade in your car, we had to find you a job, get you a driver’s license, buy you—”

“I didn’t have a driver’s license?” Caitlin asked.

“If you did, you didn’t show it to me.”

“If you had one,” Josh said, “it would have had your real name on it.”

Caitlin lifted her purse from the floor where she’d set it and zipped it open. She slid her driver’s license out of her wallet and looked it over. Instead of her New Hampshire license, this one was issued by Massachusetts. It had her picture on it, showing her with her new short red hair. It also had Bix’s address. And the name Katherine Southard. She told Josh what she was looking at. “How easy is it to get a new driver’s license with someone else’s name on it?” she asked Bix.

Bix smiled. “Easy enough if you know the right people. One of my friends does IDs. Good ones, too. Licenses, real Social Security numbers, even credit cards if you need them. Passports are hard. He’ll make you one and it will look good, but I wouldn’t use it to try to leave the country . . . or worse, to get back in. But his stuff will fool most people, including a lot of cops.”

“You have a friend who makes false IDs?” Josh asked.

Bix nodded.

“Why am I not surprised?”

Bix shrugged. “Anyway, he does nice work, like I said.” He kept his attention on Caitlin. “So we set you up with an identity as Katherine Southard, which I’d sort of suspected might not be your real name, but I didn’t give a damn about that.”

“This explains why the trooper didn’t have a problem with my license or the car registration,” she said to Josh, looking at the license in her hands. She realized that she’d never looked at it when she handed it over a couple of hours ago. “Because they match. They both have Katherine Southard’s name, along with this address.” She looked at her picture on the license. “And I’d already cut my hair and dyed it red by the time this picture was taken, so what the trooper saw when he looked at me matched my photo.”

“Yeah,” Bix said, “you changed your hair the first day you were here, after the night we met. You said you felt like a change. Was it just a coincidence that it also would make it harder for someone to recognize you? Again, I didn’t care.”

“Why would you?” Josh asked. “You pal around with criminals. That’s probably how all the women you meet behave.”

Bix ignored him. “I liked you as a blonde,” Bix said, “but I was A-OK with red, too. Besides, you said it was . . . what was the word you used?” He thought for a moment. “You said it was
right
. That you were
supposed
to be a redhead.”

“What does that mean?” Josh asked.

“I have no idea,” Caitlin said. “Maybe I always secretly wanted to be a redhead.”

“Wait,” Josh said to Bix. “You said you had to trade in her car. She had a car?”

“That’s the way trades work.”

“Caitlin . . .” Josh began.

“Yes?”

“Well, your car . . . the day after you disappeared, it was found abandoned in the parking lot of a strip mall across town. It was one of the main reasons people thought you were . . . that something had happened to you.”

“Really?” she said. “So whose car did I drive here to Smithfield? And how did I get it?”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“THE NIGHT WE MET,” Bix said, “you followed me home from the bar in a crappy old Dodge Charger.”

Somehow, between the time Caitlin walked out of her house in Bristol, New Hampshire, and the time she arrived in Smithfield, Massachusetts, she had acquired a car, albeit a junky one, according to Bix. Caitlin didn’t remember it at all.

“When we realized you’d be sticking with me,” Bix continued, “we knew we had to get rid of it. You never said so, but I knew it wasn’t yours. So I tossed the registration, dumped a few things from the car into a box in case Katie might want them, and took the car to a friend of mine.”

“Another friend?” Josh asked. “Let me guess . . . he traffics in stolen cars.”

“But he’ll give you a fair deal. We came home with that Skylark out there, which was a lot nicer than that piece-of-shit Dodge. And seeing as he and I are friends, I got a steal.”

“Literally, I’m sure,” Josh said. “You know a lot of shady characters, Bix. Are you some kind of criminal?”

“No,” Bix said, shaking his head, “but a lot of my friends are.”

“What is it you do, then?”

“Whatever I have to.”

Josh shook his head and Caitlin stepped in. “Do you remember the name on the registration you took from the Charger?”

He shook his head. “Didn’t seem important at the time. He wasn’t getting the car back, whoever he was. I didn’t need to know his name.”

Caitlin frowned. Bix had thrown out what could have been an important clue. Damn. An opportunity lost. Still, there was a lot Bix could tell them.

“Please go on,” Caitlin said.

“What else do you want to know?” Bix asked.

“Everything. What I used to do. What I liked. Any friends I made. Everything you can think of about me . . . about us.”

Bix nodded. He seemed to be thinking.

She added, “Anything you say might spark a memory, Bix. Even a small memory, something minor, might get the dominoes to start falling.”

“You want to hear about us?”

“Among other things.”

“If you want me to talk about us,” Bix said, keeping his eyes locked on Caitlin’s but pointing at Josh, “then
he
either keeps his mouth shut or he goes outside and sits on the porch.”

“He’ll be good,” Caitlin promised for Josh. She looked at her husband, who shook his head in resignation.

Over the next several minutes, without Josh’s occasional interruptions—for which Caitlin couldn’t really blame him—the information flowed faster and more freely. Caitlin learned a lot, but nothing she heard created a spark to ignite a memory. According to Bix, after Caitlin was equipped with a new appearance, a new used car, a new identity, and some new clothes that Bix had paid for, it was time for her to get a job. Bix had another friend—at this, Josh chuckled under his breath—whose cousin was willing to hire her to wait tables and pay her off the books, which they thought was a good idea given her phony identity documents. So Caitlin worked her hours, Bix did whatever Bix did to make money—he was not terribly forthcoming about that—and, if he was to be believed, they fell in love.

At that, Josh was unable to contain a scoff, and Bix turned to him. Instead of being angry, he smiled.

“You don’t believe me?” he asked.

“That she was in love with you?” Josh said. “No, I don’t. It may have seemed that way to you. Maybe she even enjoyed your company, for some reason I couldn’t possibly imagine. But she couldn’t have been in love with you. Not really.”

“Yeah,” Bix said as he rose from his chair. “You’re probably right.” He grabbed a couple of the empty beer bottles and headed to the kitchen. A moment later he left the kitchen, but instead of returning to the living room, he headed down what appeared to be a hallway.

“You think I hurt his feelings?” Josh asked without seeming the least bit concerned that he might have done so.

“You are being a bit rude,” Caitlin said. “He’s trying to help us. Besides, think about it from his point of view. Up until a little while ago, he and I were in love.” The look on Josh’s face made her rephrase that. “I mean, he
thought
the two of us were in love. One minute, we’re a happy couple in his mind, the next he finds out I’m married to another man and I don’t even remember him. That’s got to be hard, right?”

Josh mumbled something Caitlin couldn’t make out.

“I’m sorry, Josh,” she said. “I know this can’t be easy for you. It’s not easy for me, either. Bix knows . . . things about me. He has intimate memories of the two of us that I don’t have. It’s almost like I was roofied or something,” she said, referring to Rohypnol, the infamous date rape drug, “but the effects of the drug lasted half a year.”

After a moment, Josh sighed. “I’m sorry, honey,” he said. “Yeah, it sucks to hear that guy talk about . . . the time he spent with you, but I keep forgetting how terrible it must be to have no memory of a significant chunk of your life.”

“Are you mad at me?” she asked.

“For what?”

“For . . . whatever I did with him. For everything he and I . . . for all of this,” she said, taking in the room with a sweep of her hand.

He dropped his eyes and said nothing for a moment. When he looked up again, his eyes were sad. “Caitlin, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I made you ask that question. Of course I’m not mad. None of this is your fault. You didn’t mean to lose your memory. You didn’t choose to come here. To take up with that guy. No, I’m not mad. I’m not real happy about the way this is playing out,” he added, “but I’m definitely not mad at you.”

She smiled at him gratefully.

“What’s that they say about pictures?” Bix asked, walking into the room. He had a large picture frame in each hand, maybe twenty inches by twenty. He’d obviously taken them down off a wall somewhere. Caitlin could see that each was a collage comprised of several photographs. “Something about them being worth a thousand words?” he added, dropping one frame onto Josh’s lap and handing the other to Caitlin.

Part of Caitlin was afraid to look down at the frame, afraid to see the pictures. But that part of her had no chance against the part that needed to see them. She looked down. The first photo she saw was of Bix standing at the edge of a lake with Caitlin on his back, piggyback style, her arms around his neck. Bix was smiling. Caitlin thought she looked—she had to admit it—happy. In the next photo, Bix stood behind Caitlin, his arms wrapped around her this time. She was laughing hard, her head tipped back against his chest. In the third picture, Caitlin sat beside Bix surrounded by a crowd. Maybe they were at some sort of sporting event. She had her head resting on his shoulder, her mouth set in a sweet smile.

They were all like that, all nine pictures in the frame. In each, the happiness displayed on her face was genuine. In a few, she was positively beaming. She was also more heavily made up than she had been for most of her life—the part of her life she could remember, that is. But what was most evident from the array of photos was that Caitlin looked as though she had been truly happy with Bix. She glanced up and saw Josh staring down at the picture frame in his hands. He looked up, and she knew he had seen the same thing she had. She dropped her eyes to the photos again and focused on the images of Bix. There was no mistaking it—the man in the pictures was a man in love. She raised her eyes and saw him watching her. He threw her a quick wink and smiled, but Caitlin imagined she saw an underlying sadness in it.

Caitlin could doubt it no longer. She and Bix had been in love. Somehow, although she already loved Josh, she had fallen in love with another man . . . and she couldn’t remember a second of it.

“And this is where the magic happens,” Bix said, pushing open a door to reveal a bedroom. When Josh saw the double bed and rumpled sheets, he wanted—for the tenth time in the last hour—to punch Bix in the face.

“Come on, Bix,” Caitlin said. “Is that necessary?”

Josh tried to keep his eyes off the bed. It was bad enough for him to see the pictures of Caitlin—his wife, for God’s sake—captured forever in moments of domestic bliss with another man, moments that she should have shared with no one but Josh. He noticed two picture hooks on the otherwise empty walls.

He felt so, so sad. And terrible. He wished to God he had followed her out of the house that night, convinced her to come back inside and talk things out. Still, a small voice in his head, one he wasn’t proud of, wondered—even if she had been angry with him when she left—how much she could have ever truly loved him if she could run off and fall in love with another man in literally a matter of days. But he told that voice to shut up, reminded it that none of this was Caitlin’s fault. If anything, it was his fault for giving her a reason to leave that night, thereby setting everything in motion. Besides, she hadn’t been in her right mind for the past seven months. In a sense, it was almost as though it wasn’t really Caitlin at all who had taken up with Bix . . . though it sure as hell looked like her in the pictures. No . . . he refused to blame her. He knew she loved him, even if she might have forgotten it for a while. And, despite all that had happened, he would never stop loving her back and trying to be worthy of her love.