Page 12 of Last Seen

Chapter Seven

Halley

Halley wakes with a start. The cat is heavy on her hip, snoring.

She has a migraine hangover, a strange echo of pain lingering in her temple that makes her head feel hollow.

It takes her a second of dislocation to put it all together.

She is home, in her childhood bedroom, in Marchburg. Her mother was murdered.

Murdered.

It’s so fantastical a thought her mind pushes it away.

She doesn’t have many memories of her mom.

They’re more sensory details now. A soft voice reading a bedtime story.

The way her arms felt around Halley’s little body, encompassing and warm.

The scent of Chanel No. 5 brings back the winter she took Halley sledding and she tripped over an exposed root and fell down the hill, sliding on her back.

They’d laughed and laughed. The funeral, rain making the back of her neck cold.

There are a few videotapes, moments she memorized as a little girl but put away as she got older because she could see how much pain it caused her dad.

She doesn’t know where they are. Her dad made everything disappear except for the photograph of her on the mantel.

Her mother is leaning forward, trying to take the camera from him, her eyes sparkling and her smile wide.

Halley looks so much like her mother now it’s painful to look at the photo at all.

Halley knocked it off the mantel once playing Arthur pulling Excalibur from the stone, and the glass cracked.

They tried to change the frame, but by then the photo paper was fused to the glass and began to peel apart, so they left it.

The crack goes right through her chest. It’s like her heart was broken, too.

Her mother is dead, and her sister is missing.

Still alive, a stubborn little voice says. Missing, but there is no body.

Fifteen years, though. That’s a long time. She could be anywhere. She could be in a lake, or a field, or the woods. She could live three streets over and Halley wouldn’t know.

Her next thought is of her dad. Anger spikes through her.

She hasn’t ever felt this way toward him.

They are pals. Friends. He’s her best friend.

He’s always been her favorite sounding board.

Even after she married Theo, he was her first call when things went right—or wrong.

Except yesterday. You didn’t call him to tell him the truth, now did you?

But now she knows he’s a different person than she thought. He’s a liar.

She rolls over and sees the time—visiting hours started an hour ago.

She jumps in the shower, winds her wet hair into a bun. There are plenty of groceries, but she’s still nauseated from the headache and cooking is too much trouble. She fills Ailuros’s bowl, then pours herself some cereal and peels a banana, scarfs them down while the coffee is brewing.

She decants the coffee into her favorite battered thermos, adds cream and sugar for extra energy, and jams on her sunglasses—her eyes are still sensitive to the light.

She drives the Jeep to the hospital, her tote bag with the explosive details she’s learned on the seat next to her, a rattlesnake coiled and waiting to strike.

Her dad looks worse today than yesterday. Asleep, his mouth slack, she can see the bruises coming up along his cheeks and forehead. He will be loopy from the drugs when he wakes. She backs out of the room, and the nurse on duty intercepts her.

“Good morning. You must be Halley.”

“I am.”

“Like the comet,” the nurse says. “I’m Tonia. The physical therapists were in to see him, so I gave him a shot from his pump. OT will come later today. You might want to be around for that.”

“OT?”

“Occupational therapy. They’ll talk about whether he can go home or if he needs inpatient rehab. Do you have stairs?”

“Oh yeah.”

“Well, they may decide to try IPR for a week, until he can get around without issue.”

“How long will he have the device on his leg?”

“Awhile. Six to eight weeks. But don’t worry, he’s not going anywhere until we get him loaded up with medicine. He needs IV antibiotics and painkillers. He’ll probably be here for a week, maybe ten days, before you’ll have to decide about taking him home or going to rehab.”

A small part of Halley breathes a sigh of relief. “I feel bad to say it, but good. I don’t know that I can handle him like this. He looks so ... hurt.”

“He is hurt. That was a bad fall. But he was chattering away this morning, telling me how he named you after Halley’s Comet.”

“Tell me he skipped the rest?”

“Nope.” She grins. “Halley for the comet, Leia for the princess in Star Wars . It’s funny, you look a little like Carrie Fisher.”

“I look like my mother,” she says, feeling that new spark of rage surge up in her body. She grew up with the inside-joke names and a face that belonged to a woman who is practically a stranger. That is how much Halley remembers of her mom.

The nurse must sense the change in her emotions, because she pats her on the arm.

“Don’t worry. The drugs can make people gregarious. It can also make them very distraught. So if he starts hallucinating, don’t be too shocked. It happens on these high doses of intravenous morphine. We’ll get him weaned off as quickly as possible. Any other questions?”

Halley shakes her head. “I’m sure I’ll have plenty the second you walk away. This is the first time we’ve had any sort of major hospitalizations, outside of me knocking out a tooth when I was eight.”

“Well, he adores you, so you being here is going to get him right as rain in no time.”

Yeah. He adores me so much he lied about how my mother died.

She doesn’t say that aloud.

He’s still out cold, so Halley busies herself with a group text with her friends back in DC.

After running out of their town house like her hair was on fire yesterday, she owes them a little explanation.

She met Stephanie and Arlo back in the days when she and Theo were an unshakable unit, and they did all the things two couples with lots in common did.

They are worried about her, about how quickly she left, but there was a party last night at the Corcoran, and everyone’s dragging around feeling sick.

Happily, it seems they did not find out about her fall from grace at work.

Which makes her wonder, albeit briefly, how Theo heard so quickly. Why was he on the website to see the press release, anyway? She’d been so shocked she hadn’t asked.

She assures Stephanie and Arlo things are fine with her, and that her dad is going to be okay soon. She doesn’t confide in them about anything else, not yet. This feels too big to share with anyone until she has a better idea of what’s actually going on.

Anyway, how do you tell a group text that your sister murdered your mother?

She does call Theo for the promised check-in, and is relieved when his voicemail comes on. She leaves a dutiful message and tells him she’ll be in touch when she knows more. That should suffice for a few days. She can’t deal with all this at once.

Then she stews. Frets. Probes her black-hole memory banks, frustrating herself that she can’t find the answers there.

Her dad comes to an hour later. He stares at her blankly before saying “You’re real, aren’t you?”

“Um ... yes? As real as I can be.”

He huffs out a relieved breath, eyes drifting to the ceiling. “I thought you were a ghost.”

“Well, that’s not disturbing at all.”

“I dreamed of you, Halley. You were alone, and you were crying. I did everything I could to find you, but it was dark, so dark. I’ve never seen such darkness. Thick and alive, like the deepest reaches of space.”

A chill parades down her spine. She can imagine it too well, and it’s creepy.

“Heads up, Dad, you’re on some pretty heavy-duty drugs, so chances are your thoughts and dreams are going to be messed up for a while.”

He nods and looks at her searchingly. His voice is soft, and he seems more with it. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about your mother. You shouldn’t have found out like this. Though what were you doing in my dresser?”

“Looking for the insurance card. Hate to say it, and this is not an ‘I told you so,’ but your infallible vertical filing system failed. There’s nothing from the insurance company.”

“You were looking at home. Of course there isn’t. In my office, at school.”

“Oh.” She sits back. Why she hadn’t thought of searching his work desk, who knows. “You neglected to tell me which desk, I think. I assumed home.”

“Sorry.”

“I’m sorry, too. I promise I wasn’t snooping.

I’d just looked everywhere else and thought maybe you’d left it in your pants pocket.

The envelope was in the Galileo book, I was flipping pages and it fell out.

I looked ... Well, that part, I was snooping.

But Dad ... Why didn’t you tell me? I can’t believe you’ve been hiding this from me. ”

There is a long pause. “I didn’t want you scared, looking over your shoulder your whole life.”

“Scared of what?”

“Your sister. The situation. The whole thing.”

“The whole thing. Can you back up a little, though? I’m trying very hard not to lose it over here, and you’re not helping.”

“Raise my head, will you?”

She presses the button on the hospital bed, and he grimaces as everything shifts. She lets him gather his thoughts and push down the pain. She presses a pillow deeper under his neck and gives him a drink.

“Thank you. Cat ... Hell, where do I even start?”

Halley takes a seat in the brown pleather chair by his bed. It squeaks at her presence.

“How about at the beginning? Since the ending is so confused for me now, maybe there’s more you haven’t shared. You met Mom, you got married, she already had a kid ...”