Page 17 of Last Seen

Chapter Ten

In the kitchen, pouring a glass of water, Halley has a moment of sheer dislocation—everything is different, and now she has to go chasing demons from the past. She is hooked, though.

She’d be hooked if this were a sample case being taught in one of her old classes or a case coming through the lab.

That it’s her mother and sister? There is no way she can look away.

She sees another email, from Ivan. It’s sent from his personal account, not the lab. She debates opening it, but her curiosity gets the better of her.

Dear Halley,

I’m sorry everything happened the way it did yesterday. I had no choice. The press release was not appropriate. You have my full support if you plan to file suit against the company for wrongful termination. I will be on your side, I promise. I think you have a case.

IH

A wave of relief flows through her. Well, that’s .

.. helpful. She wonders if Ivan, too, is being pushed out of the very lab he built, if there is more going on there than she’s aware of, but the lure of her mother’s murder is stronger right now.

She’ll deal with DC once she’s solved this conundrum to her satisfaction.

Bolstered, she opens Theo’s email and downloads the attachment.

She writes him back three separate emails, varying degrees of “Thank you for your help, your concern, your love,” then finally decides there is nothing to say that she hasn’t already.

She deletes the drafts and opens the document instead.

The computer whirs for a while, then images begin to fill the screen.

The text is dry. Formal. Familiar. She’s read plenty of autopsy reports before.

She sees her mother’s name. Her weight. The body is that of a well-nourished adult female. The body is sixty-five inches and one hundred fifteen pounds and appears to be the stated age of thirty-five.

The body.

Her mother was elegant, well proportioned, lithe. A skier, a dancer, a runner. She had great legs, calves the shape of hearts, tight tendons in her ankles—two traits Halley has also inherited. She wasn’t an athlete like her mom, though. She’s softer. Rounder. More lush, as Theo calls it.

Three gaping stab wounds are present on the midsternum, measuring 2.5 inches in length, 2 inches in length, and 3 inches in length, with clean, regular margins. External contusions to the knees and elbows are present. A patch of hair is missing from the skull.

Perforation left ventricle . . .

Pericardial sac 600 ml of clotted blood ...

Previous injury to the abdomen, healing hematoma 13 cm ...

Murder . . .

New words come. A shriek. Halley shuts her eyes and listens to the memory.

“How could you do this to me?”

“Cat, honey, I love you.”

She opens her eyes and scans the rest of the report. It is basic, straightforward, and the most painful thing she’s ever experienced.

Cat stabbed Susannah three times in the chest. Halley thinks about how hard that is to do—was her mom down on the ground? Standing? Did the first wound happen standing, and the last two when she was down?

She tries to visualize it from the drawing, the almost childlike outline of a body with three lines designating the three stab wounds.

It’s too bare bones. She needs to get back to the screaming, shrieking voice.

That’s how she’ll know the truth about what happened.

She has to access the memories of that day.

She can imagine a million things, and none of them will be accurate until she sees the actual crime scene photos, reads the analysis, and puts herself back in the scenario. Maybe then things will become clear.

Halley scrolls through everything Theo sent, but nothing else shakes free. Her head is starting to hurt again, and a glance at the clock shows it’s past midnight. She needs to rest.

Using the ancient poker they found at the annual swap meet when she was eight, she smacks the embers of the fire so they’ll die out and goes to bed. Ailuros is already there, on his back, waiting for her to rub his belly.

She does, frustrated. How can she remember the swap meet as if it happened yesterday, and not remember seeing her sister kill their mother?

Growing up, she was enamored of the seasonality of her home, but now, the April winds are too loud, the air too cold.

The darkness too dark. The cat jumps from the bed and startles her from a light doze.

She tries to get back to sleep but is thwarted by her own brain.

It’s hammering away on the reality of her new circumstance, trying to comprehend what it all means while her heart concurrently breaks.

She tosses and turns, staring at the ceiling of her childhood room, painted black and plastered with pinpoint glow-in-the-dark star stickers and thin strips of barely visible green tape.

A representation of the stars and constellations that she knows as intimately as the back of her hand and, oddly enough, exactly mimics the sky outside right now.

There is Arcturus, and Betelgeuse, and Pollux.

Sirius, and Canis Major. Hydra. The Big Dipper. Orion.

She maps the night skies and listens to the trees whispering their secrets. How is she supposed to move forward with her life, her plans, when the entire past has been a lie?

Her scientific brain chimes in. It’s not really a lie. Your mom is dead regardless. That philosophical conundrum makes her sit up in the bed and wrap her arms around her knees, like she used to when she’d had a nightmare. There will be no sleeping tonight.

She has a proper argument with herself, just to pass the time.

Mom’s been gone all this time—does it matter how she left this earth?

God, yes. Of course it matters.

She was taken away. That’s a fact. She dies in either scenario.

But my sister didn’t die. I’ve loved Cat my whole life, mourned her for twenty-eight years, missing the very idea of her, and now? How do I love someone who’s done such a horrible thing? How do I turn off the emotions, harden my heart toward her, go from love to hate?

How could Cat have done such a thing? What drove her to murder the one person who had openly adored her? Yes, they fought; yes, there were tensions in the house because of the new stepfamily and the usual teenage brattiness. But when push came to shove, Susannah would die for Cat.

Did die for Cat.

It’s this last thought that drives Halley from the bed and back downstairs to the computer. She takes a seat. Ailuros is nowhere to be seen, and she realizes she misses him. “Kitty? Where are you?”

He ignores her.

Halley searched on Google for her sister earlier and found the article and the missing persons report, but nothing more.

She decides to try a few new parameters, and this time scores an article that was written about Catriona in a long-form magazine, actually only a few years ago.

Not wanting to wait until she can get to the library in the morning and read it for free, she pays the subscription fee to access the article, heart in her throat.

It’s not so much about her sister, she realizes, reading, but about the failures and successes of the juvenile justice system in general.

It is unsatisfying, especially because it is so open ended, discussing the need for forgiveness and understanding for juvenile criminals, how there need to be massive reforms, and doesn’t detail Cat’s crimes at all, other than identifying her as a success story of the system. A success.

But it does leave Halley with one tantalizing piece of information.

While Cat was in juvie, her sister applied to and was accepted into Harvard.

Did they know her sister went to jail for murder? And let her in anyway? Was she part of some sort of rehabilitation program? Did she graduate?

Halley starts digging. This is quantifiable information. If Cat got out of the system in 1993, there’s a time frame to look at. Harvard’s archives are accessible, and while the Facebook alumni pages are private, some of the members of the groups are listed. She goes through them one by one.

It is nearing dawn when she finds a name that rings a bell.

Tyler Armstrong. Class of 1995.

Tyler Armstrong.

Where has she seen this name?

She scrambles back to the missing persons notice. Scans it. The narrative is brief. No names are listed. Just a phone number to call if there is information.

It’s too late—too early—to call the number, so she plugs it into the reverse directory and comes up blank. But the area code is 6-1-7—that’s Boston.

It’s not out of the realm of reason that her sister had friends in Boston, especially if she went to Harvard. She probably lived there, maybe after graduating.

She searches “Boston Missing Persons” plus “Catriona,” and there’s a hit. A long-out-of-date WordPress mommy blog has a very serious entry about a friend of a friend’s ex-wife going missing. The friend of a friend is named Tyler.

Halley is going mad trying to put together the pieces.

She tries looking him up on Facebook, but there are about forty Tyler Armstrongs.

It’s not a unique name. But when she puts in “Harvard” plus “Tyler Armstrong,” she sees an entry.

The face is unfamiliar, but the city he’s from is not.

Nashville, Tennessee, is listed as his hometown.

Her hometown, too. But her memories of Nashville are so fuzzy, she can barely recall her life there.

She’s going at this wrong. Maybe she needs to put herself back in the setting.

Over the years, she hasn’t thought much about her childhood in Nashville.

It’s a fun connection—it seems like everyone she’s ever met knows someone who lives in Nashville.

But Halley hasn’t been back. Plus, she was so little.

Losing her mom and Cat was so traumatic.

She remembers the feelings of pain and loss, but nothing detailed.

She closes her eyes and thinks about their house.

Goes for sensory details. It was on a quiet tree-lined street in an area called Belle Meade.

It was a cottage, white brick, near the golf course, with a grassy backyard and a gray patio.

There was a yellow plastic slide. She fudges in a sliding glass door—there was a door from the backyard to the living room, but it could easily have been something else—and enters.

Inside ... Her room is pink. Back to the living room.

The carpet soft under her bare feet. There is a thick slab of dark wood above the fireplace, and she turns—blackness slams her mind.

It’s unrelenting obsidian, like staring at an empty chalkboard. There is nothing else.

Interesting.

Wondering if she should look into some sort of memory regression therapy, she moves her child self outside the cottage.

She can remember a spring day, with forsythia blooming.

Halley was in first grade at the church school down the street from their house.

Cat, a decade older and infinitely cooler, went to West End School.

She had her driver’s license and was newly in charge of dropping off and picking up Halley.

She remembers there were arguments about it, but Cat showed up every day, on time.

It wasn’t until she picked up her friend, too . .. Damn, what was that girl’s name?

She gets up and stretches, her poor brain feeling as strained as if she’d just taken the hardest final of her life.

She runs in place for a few minutes. Pretty girl.

Buck teeth. Buck teeth ... They called her Bucktooth .

.. Tracy, that was her name. She had a bunch of siblings, and she was nice to Halley because her brother was a friend of Cat’s.

And his name was ... “Tyler!” she shouts triumphantly. “I will be damned.”

Tracy and Tyler Armstrong grew up on the same street as Halley and Cat.

She gives her left shoulder a little punch, a “Well done, you,” then grabs an old, half-used spiral-bound notebook from the junk drawer.

She needs to start keeping track of all this information, and this is how she’s been trained to think.

Exploration of the smallest details, from start to finish, documented.

It doesn’t hurt that she has a very good memory, not quite photographic but remarkable enough that she rarely has to write things down.

That’s also something she needs to explore, because if her memory is so clear from the time they get to Marchburg on but so vague about the most traumatic event of her life, then something is wrong.

It’s almost like it was interfered with, the way she blanks out every time she thinks back to the accident. The murder, now.

She glances at the clock. It’s almost six.

The sun is up. Despite the lack of sleep, she feels jazzed and decides to start the coffee and launch herself into the day.

She can nap later, after the FedEx comes and she’s visited her dad in the hospital.

She has the distinct feeling he might know more than he’s letting on.

Then she needs to call the mystery number on the missing persons report, and Harvard and the Boston police department, and track down Tyler Armstrong.

Leave this to the professionals, Halley, her mind says.

Shut up, she tells it.