The Prettiest One: A Thriller (26 page)

“Hell, Bix, you might have killed him,” Josh said.

“That’s ‘glass is half-empty’ kind of thinking,” Bix said. “I also might
not
have killed him. I like to think of it that way.”

“Damn it, Bix, if the police find out we drugged—”

“Relax. I don’t take drugs, never have, but I have friends who used to, and I know a thing or two.”

“There’s a huge shock.”

“Four isn’t gonna kill the guy, not even with an Oxycodone. He’ll sleep for a few hours and wake up nice and rested. With any luck, he’ll forget to even call the cops when he does.”

Josh shook his head. “Still,” he said, “we’re getting short on time, Caitlin. You should keep things short if you can.”

“Understood.”

Bix turned the Explorer onto Attleburn Road and, with Caitlin scrutinizing every house they passed on both sides of the street, eased the car along until she finally pointed to a small house and said, “There it is.”

Bix pulled to a stop. The Bigelson cottage, it was not. It wasn’t in complete disrepair, but it was ten years past needing a paint job, and the lawn was in urgent need of attention.

“You sure?” Bix asked.

“It was light blue when I lived here, but that’s definitely it,” Caitlin said.

“That house
is
light blue,” Josh said from the backseat. “Or it used to be, anyway. It’s faded to almost nothing now.”

“Think anyone’s home?” Caitlin asked.

“I know a great way to find out,” Bix said.

Caitlin nodded. “I’ll do this by myself, okay, guys?” She knew they would protest, so she added, “If anyone’s home, they’ll be more likely to talk if it’s just me.”

Without waiting for them to agree, she stepped out of the car. She stood for a moment looking at the house where she’d lived for just two years. She remembered it a little, remembered playing with a ball in the front yard. There were far fewer weeds back then, and a few more flowers. And as is always the case when one visits a place from one’s youth, everything looked far smaller than Caitlin remembered it being. She walked up the uneven brick walk trying to remember if she had been happy here. She honestly couldn’t remember any truly happy times, but neither did she have specific bad memories of this place. She was okay with that balance.

She rang the bell and waited. She rang again and the door opened to reveal a small, thin woman in stained sweatpants, a faded floral top, and cheap sneakers. She had a beverage in a glass in one hand, and Caitlin couldn’t tell if it was alcoholic but wouldn’t have been shocked to learn that it was. The woman looked vaguely familiar.

“Yes?” she said, and the harshness of her smoker’s voice was startling.

“My name is Caitlin. I used to live here.”

It took a little convincing, but the woman eventually allowed Caitlin to come inside. Caitlin gave a quick wave to the guys in the car and followed her host through a house that reeked of decades of stale cigarette smoke. The interior was dark, as every shade and curtain was drawn mostly closed. Caitlin wondered why anyone would choose darkness over the light but knew that this woman may have had very good reasons. As they walked through the hallway, past the living room, past a bathroom, and into the kitchen, Caitlin tried to remember living in these rooms. They were marginally familiar, but her memories of that time were as dim as the light inside that house.

They sat at a table with a scratched Formica surface, a half-full ashtray in the center. The woman didn’t offer anything to Caitlin, for which Caitlin was thankful. She also didn’t light up a cigarette, for which Caitlin was also grateful.

Without bothering with small talk, Caitlin told the woman who she was and why she was there. She explained that this had been her foster home from the time she was three years old until she was five. Mrs. Goldsmith—that was her name, and it definitely sounded familiar to Caitlin—had been listening fairly attentively, but now, something changed in her eyes.

“You said your name is Caitlin?”

“That’s right.”

Mrs. Goldsmith nodded to herself, and Caitlin knew that the older woman recognized her, or at least realized now who she was.

Though the house held little in the way of memories for Caitlin, either good or bad, it was nonetheless not a pleasant place to be. Caitlin wanted answers to some very specific questions, and then she wanted out of there.

She told Mrs. Goldsmith about Darryl Bookerman. The woman said she recalled something about that story, but it was a long time ago. Caitlin agreed that it was. She said she had come to ask just one question: Why hadn’t Mrs. Goldsmith and her husband—Caitlin’s foster father at the time—called the police when Caitlin went missing? According to retired detective Jeff Bigelson, Caitlin had been missing overnight, yet the police never received a missing person report on any child matching her description.

Mrs. Goldsmith looked away. Then she stood and walked to the kitchen counter and picked up a pack of Marlboros from beside the telephone. She shook out a cigarette and lit it with a disposable lighter. She stood there flicking her ash into an ashtray she kept on the counter despite keeping another one on the table just a few feet away. Finally, the woman spoke.

“I wanted to call the police,” she said in her throaty smoker’s growl. “But Harold wouldn’t have it. He figured you had just run away, like so many kids do. He said he did it when he was a kid and he found his way back home. He said you would, too. That you’d be fine. And it looked like he was right. You look okay to me.”

Caitlin didn’t want to be confrontational because the woman could ask her to leave at any moment, but that wasn’t enough for her. Not nearly.

“I was only five years old, Mrs. Goldsmith. A five-year-old girl alone, away from home.”

“Like I said, things came out okay. You look fine now, anyway . . . though I remember you as a blonde.”

“Darryl Bookerman abducted me. Took me and those other two girls. He kept us for an entire day. One of them, he abused. The other . . . well, they never found her.”

The woman took a long drag on her cigarette. “I guess you were pretty lucky, then,” she said, though her tone was less harsh than it had been.

“I was. The thing is, I can’t understand why you wouldn’t have called the police. Sure, I was just a foster child, but you were supposed to take care of me.”

Mrs. Goldsmith looked out through a crack in the curtains over the sink for a while, then turned to face Caitlin. “Like I said, I wanted to call, but Harold, my husband—he died eight years ago—he didn’t want to. He figured that if the police found out we lost you, they might come and take our other foster kids away. We had a few at that time, you see, and we needed every one of them just to get by. We were worried they’d take them all away and not let us have any more, either. So Harold figured we should wait a couple of days, see if you turned up, and if you did, no harm, right?”

“And if I didn’t?”

“We’d call the police then.”

Caitlin took a moment to process that. She had been little more than a commodity to this couple.

“We never mistreated you or anything,” Mrs. Goldsmith said.

That, at least, was true.

“So what happened?” Caitlin asked. “I just showed up here again after being gone for a night?”

The woman hesitated. “Actually, you were gone for a few days.”

“A few? How many?”

“Four or five, I think. Probably just four.”

“Just four?” Caitlin echoed.

Mrs. Goldsmith shrugged her bony shoulders and ground out her cigarette in the ashtray. Immediately, she lit another. Caitlin had never been a smoker, but she thought it probably would have been easier if the woman had lit the second one directly from the first, but perhaps this way she was able to fool herself into thinking that she wasn’t a chain-smoker. She seemed good at fooling herself.

Mrs. Goldsmith said, “We got a call from someone at some church or something. They had an orphanage there. They said that someone had brought a little girl to them a couple of days earlier. The girl said her name was Mary or Sue or something, I can’t remember what it was. They began to process her or whatever they did back then, but suddenly, on the second or third day, the girl changed her story. Said her name was Caitlin Goldsmith and she lived on Attleburn Road. They looked us up and called us. But when Harold got there to pick you up, people from the foster-care program were waiting.”

As they should have been,
Caitlin thought but resisted the urge to say.

“We lost you,” Mrs. Goldsmith said. “We lost all of you. You never came back again, and they came and took the others away. It worked out just the way Harold was afraid it would.”

Caitlin wouldn’t swear to it, but it sure looked to her like Mrs. Goldsmith was glaring at her accusatorily, as though all of that were Caitlin’s fault.

“They said they’d find you new homes and that we were through as foster parents.”

Caitlin nodded.

“We never mistreated you,” Mrs. Goldsmith said again. “You or any of the others.”

Caitlin nodded again and stood. She thanked the older woman and said that she would be able to find her own way out. As she passed one last time through the dark house, she couldn’t help but recall the sunny times she’d spent in her next home, with her next foster parents, the ones who ultimately adopted her and gave her their name and loved her the way parents are supposed to love their daughters, right up until their untimely deaths in a car accident when Caitlin was twenty.

Caitlin opened the front door and didn’t bother to turn to take a last look at the place as she closed the door behind her and breathed in the clean air outside. She walked back toward the car. Even though she didn’t yet know why the Bogeyman . . . or was it Bookerman? . . . was on her list or who One-Eyed Jack or Bob were, she had to admit that she was starting to get some answers. So far, though, she didn’t like the ones she was getting. Not at all.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

ON THE WAY BACK TO Smithfield, Bix listened while Caitlin filled Josh and him in on her conversation with her foster mother from years ago. Bix hadn’t even known that she had lived in foster homes. Then he reminded himself that he didn’t really know that much about her at all, at least not the real her.

Caitlin said, “After I escaped from Bookerman’s house, and after I told the story to the guy who called the cops, why didn’t I go back to my . . . to the Goldsmiths’ house? How did I end up in an orphanage? And why did I give them a fake name at first, before finally giving them my real name a few days later?”

“You know what I think?” Bix said.

“I can guess what you think,” Caitlin said. “And I bet Josh is thinking the same thing. Because that’s what I think, too.” After a pause, she added, “It sounds like I might have had a little dissociative fugue way back then.”

“It seems to fit,” Josh agreed. “If they really can be triggered by traumatic events, I’d certainly say that what you experienced qualifies. You don’t remember anything from Bookerman’s house or the days in the orphanage, so the amnesia is there.”

“And it seems I established a new identity for a while,” Caitlin said, “calling myself by a different name for a few days before apparently coming out of the fugue and giving them my real name and the street where I lived.” She paused. “So, it looks like this is something of an issue for me,” she said sadly. “I wonder if there have been any other instances of fugue states during my life. I don’t remember any.”

“Well,” Bix said gently, “I’m not sure you would, Katie.”

“I mean, I don’t ever remember waking up in a strange city or learning that months had gone by without my knowing it. No gaps in time that I can’t account for.”

“Even if you’ve experienced them before,” Josh said, “they’re still quite rare. You may have had only the two. They’re probably only triggered in you by really, really traumatic events.”

“Which makes me wonder what sent me into a fugue state seven months ago.”

They fell silent until Bix said, “I keep wondering how you ended up in Smithfield.”

“Yeah,” Caitlin said. “Why would I want to come back here, of all places?”

“It’s hard to say why you would have fixated on such a terrible event from your life,” Josh said, looking at Caitlin, “but maybe after experiencing something truly traumatic seven months ago after you left our house—whatever it was that threw you into a fugue state—you found your way back here because it’s a place you subconsciously associate with traumatic events.”

“Armchair analysis,” Bix said.

“Got a better theory?”

“That’s possible, I suppose,” Caitlin said. “We’re filling in some of the blanks, anyway, even if I’m not actually remembering anything. We know now where the red hair comes from, and the name Katherine Southern/Southard, though I confused the spelling.”

“Well,” Bix said, “we may know where those things
come from,
but not
why
you took the name or
why
you dyed your hair red.”

Caitlin was nodding her head slowly, as though working something through. “I must have heard Kathryn’s name back then, either while we were in that shack or before, on the playground. And because of what we shared, what we . . . went through, it makes sense that I might feel some deep connection to her. And if Josh is right and I somehow . . . tapped into feelings about this place, maybe her name and hair color bubbled to the surface. As for why I would go so far as to take that name and dye my hair, though . . . I can’t even guess.”