The Prettiest One: A Thriller (2 page)

He nodded. “Okay, where have you been?”

She said nothing for a moment, looking lost in thought. Finally, she said, “I really can’t tell you.”

“Seriously?” he asked, his voice rising just a little despite his effort not to let it. “I understand you were upset with me when you left, but you’ve been gone for seven months, and you can’t tell me where you’ve been?”

Caitlin opened her mouth to reply, then seemed to realize that she had no idea what to say.

CHAPTER THREE

“WAIT,” CAITLIN SAID. “WHAT? Seven months?”

That made no sense to her. For a moment, she thought her husband might be putting her on. But he looked so . . . stunned. And serious. Then she wondered if something could be wrong with him, like he’d had a stroke or something. Finally, she had to consider the possibility that there was something wrong with
her
instead.

“What, Caitlin?” Josh said. “You just lost track of time? Somehow seven months just—”

He stopped. His eyes widened.

“Is that blood?” he asked.

Caitlin looked down. Her low-cut, tight-fitting sweater was maroon, so it was hard to see the darker red splotches. But they were there. At her stomach. On her sleeves. She also now saw smaller reddish-brown spots on the thighs of her dark jeans. She looked back up at Josh.

“Jesus, Caitlin,” he said, moving quickly to her. “You’re hurt.”

“I don’t . . . feel hurt.”

“My God, what the hell happened?”

“I . . . I don’t know.”

He touched her arm with a quick, comforting hand before slowly, gently lifting her sweater. He was wincing before he even got a glimpse of what lay beneath. Caitlin kept her eyes on his face, not wanting to see whatever wound she’d suffered. Josh’s wince disappeared and a frown took its place. Still holding up her shirt, he peered at her sides, then her back.

“There’s nothing here,” he said. “I don’t think it’s your blood.”

She wasn’t all that surprised. She hadn’t felt injured. Of course, that begged the question—

“So whose blood is it?” Josh asked.

She wished she knew.

The shower seemed to clear Caitlin’s mind a bit. She stood with her head down and let the hot water wash over her, allowed the steam to work its way into her. She was tired, but she no longer felt drugged. When she stepped out of the shower, she found that Josh had left her favorite flannel pajamas on the vanity, the ones with drawings of teacups all over them. After she dried off, she slipped into them and they felt wonderful.

She turned to the sink, used a corner of her towel to clear the steam from a little circle in the mirror, and nearly screamed.

The person looking at her from her reflection wasn’t Caitlin.

She backed away, bumping into the wall behind her.

After a steadying breath, she stepped forward and looked again at the mirror, but the steam had already reclaimed it. She used the towel to clear another spot, then sucked in another breath, a deeper one, and looked.

Who the heck was that?

Where was her blonde hair? Who had dyed it red?

And if she hadn’t still been so confused when she’d washed her hair in the shower moments ago, she likely would have noticed then that it was a good four inches shorter than she’d always kept it. No longer shoulder length, her hair now fell just below her ears.

Caitlin leaned closer to the glass and studied her face. It was thinner. No one would ever have called her overweight in the past, and she still looked healthy, but she could see in her cheeks that she had dropped some weight. She ran her hands down her sides. Five pounds gone, maybe ten, which, when you started at 123, made a difference you could see. Where had the weight gone?

Where had the
time
gone?

Josh said she’d been missing for seven months.

Seven months.

When Caitlin walked out of the bathroom, Josh was sitting on the bed, waiting. As soon as the door opened, he came to her, wrapped his arms around her, and hugged her as though he never planned to let her go. She hugged him back and it felt good. He kissed her damp hair. She breathed in his scent.

After the longest, most meaningful embrace of her life, Caitlin said, “I need tea.”

Downstairs, she sat at the kitchen table while Josh made her tea with honey and lemon; then he followed her into the living room where she curled up in a corner of the sofa. Josh sat beside her. Not at the other end, but right beside her.

“Feeling okay?” he asked. He looked like he was trying to be casual about it, but Caitlin could sense him studying her. That was natural, she supposed, under the circumstances.

“I’m okay,” she said, though it was only partly true. Physically, she felt fine. Mentally? Less so. She took a sip of tea, her hands wrapped around the oversize mug.

“While you were in the shower,” Josh said, “I bagged up the clothes you were wearing. I also went out to the car in the driveway and found a gym bag on the front seat.”

He nodded to a little black canvas bag on a chair across the room. Caitlin looked at it. It seemed familiar.

“Thanks,” she said.

“Ready to talk?” he asked softly, still watching her intently while trying to appear as though he wasn’t.

She shrugged. She wasn’t sure how much she could say. She didn’t know anything.

“Okay,” he said, “I’ll start. When you left seven months ago . . .”

“Has it really been that long?”

“It has.”

My God.
“I don’t remember it, Josh. Not a moment of it.”

He frowned, then smiled uneasily, and it felt to Caitlin as though he were trying to gauge her honesty.
Well, why wouldn’t he?
This was crazy. After looking into her eyes for a long moment, he dropped his gaze to the tabletop.

“Honey . . .” he began, his voice different. Sad, maybe. He started to say something else, then stopped.

Her heart sank. He didn’t believe her.

Finally, he nodded, seemingly to himself, and said, “You were gone more than half a year.” When he looked up again, his eyes were wet. “I thought you were dead, Caitlin.
Everyone
thought you were dead.”

He took a big, shuddering breath. Caitlin reached out a hand and held one of his.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t imagine what you’ve been through.”

Heck, she couldn’t even imagine what she herself had been through.

“You really don’t remember any of it?” Josh asked.

She shook her head. “It’s terrible. I looked in the mirror upstairs and didn’t recognize myself. I came home covered in blood. Whose was it? What the hell happened to me?”

“What’s the last thing you remember?”

She tried to focus her thoughts. There was a parking lot. And . . .

“I found a car,” she said.

“The one out front? Whose is it?”

“I have no idea. But I found the key in my pocket, and when—” A terrible thought came to her. Her hands shook and she nearly dropped the hot tea in her lap. “Do you think . . . do you think the blood came from whoever’s car that is?”

“Caitlin . . .”

“Do you think I could have—”

“No,” he said quickly. “Of course not. Not you, Caitlin. No way.”

“But—”

“Not you, honey. I don’t believe it. I just don’t. So let’s forget about the car for a second. You got in it; that’s all we need to know right now. What then?”

“I saw a sign for I-91 and drove home.”

“Where were you? What town?”

“I’m not sure. I . . . don’t remember. I feel like I might have known when I started driving, like I’d seen some signs, but somehow I’ve forgotten them already. My mind is . . . not really clear yet. I know I drove north, though.”

He nodded. “Okay, but what about before you found the car? What’s the last thing you remember?”

She shook her head. “Nothing.”

“Caitlin,” Josh said gently, “you remembered where you live. You remembered me. Anything else?”

She nodded. She wasn’t thinking straight at all. Of course she remembered things. She remembered almost everything from before, actually. She remembered her mother’s singing voice and the fact that her father was never without a roll of peppermint Life Savers in his pocket. She could easily recall various Christmas mornings over the years. She remembered her first and only cigarette, and high school dances, and losing her virginity to Charlie Granger, and getting her driver’s license, and meeting her college roommate, and listening to her college boyfriend’s horrible rock band. She remembered the terrible day she learned that her parents had died in a car wreck when she was twenty. She remembered meeting Josh at a Starbucks, and him asking her out when they ran into each other two weeks later at a different Starbucks. She had no trouble remembering their first date, their first night in bed, their wedding. She remembered her job in the real-estate office and Josh trying in vain to talk her into buying a spectacularly ugly bulldog puppy when they moved into this house.

She remembered all of that. But the last seven months were apparently just . . .
gone
. It was as though someone had taken the story of her life and torn out an entire chapter.

“What’s the very last thing you remember?” Josh asked. “The absolute last thing before you found the car?”

She closed her eyes.

“I bought a new purse. A yellow one.”

She opened her eyes.

“That’s right,” he said. “You showed it to me. That was a week before you went missing.”

She closed her eyes again. He was right. She remembered now. She bought the purse on a Wednesday. She’d gone to the gym after work and on the way home stopped at a little boutique she had been meaning to check out. “I remember having an argument with Frank at work. I thought he was trying to get a bit too cozy with one of my clients.”

“You told me about that. It was a couple of days before you disappeared.”

She kept her eyes closed and concentrated. “I remember falling on a run and cutting my ankle on a rock.”

“Yeah, that was a pretty bad cut. I patched you up when you got home. That was the night before you . . . left.”

She looked down at her bare ankle and saw a faint scar, all healed. “I remember . . . I remember fighting with you.”

He was quiet for a moment. “That’s right,” he said somberly, nodding. “We argued and you left. You were mad and you left and then you just . . . didn’t come home.”

“I can’t remember what we were fighting about,” she said.

He shrugged, smiling sadly. “It was so long ago now. But whatever it was, it got out of hand. I remember that. And when you didn’t come home, I had to wonder if . . . if something terrible had happened to you. You were just . . . gone.” He shook his head.

He looked so sad that she put down her mug and kissed him. Then she rested her head on his shoulder, closed her eyes, and felt the night begin to fade from her mind.

Where does seven months go?

CHAPTER FOUR

HE WAS LITERALLY TWICE CAITLIN’S size and smelled like rotting garbage. His skin was the pale white of a fish’s belly. His bald head was bumpy and scarred. His dark little eyes were too far apart. His hands were freakishly strong. He was the Bogeyman. And he grabbed at her and clawed at her, trying to drag her down into the ground. “I’ve got you, my pretty Caitlin,” he said, and his breath stank like dead things.

It was the same nightmare she’d had since she was little. Only this time, when she awoke, he didn’t disappear right away as he always did, as he had for more than two decades. No, this time, though she was awake, she could still see his eyes, feel his hands on her, smell the fetid odors that clung to him.

But morning had come and those things began to fade.

She’d had the nightmare so many times over the years, so very many times, but its frequency didn’t diminish its power one iota. His eyes . . . his hands . . . his rotting smell.
Pretty Caitlin.

She was lying on the living room sofa. She disentangled herself from the furry throw blanket Josh had evidently draped over her sometime during the night, and which she had apparently twisted around herself during her nightmare flight from the Bogeyman. She took a few calm, steadying breaths.