Read The One I Left Behind Online
Authors: Jennifer McMahon
“I’m Detective Berr with the Brighton Falls Police Department.”
“Yes, of course. I remember you, Stuart.”
“Is there somewhere we can talk?”
Lorraine stepped outside, closing the door.
“Oh my God, was that Charlie’s dad?” Tara’s breath was hot in Reggie’s good ear.
Reggie couldn’t answer. She stood frozen in silence.
“We’ve gotta find out what they’re saying,” Tara said, standing on tiptoes to look out the window at the top of the front door. Lorraine and Detective Berr were standing in the yard. “Come on, let’s go out the back and sneak around the house. We can hide in the bushes.” She tugged on Reggie’s arm, but Reggie couldn’t move, so Tara let go and ran off toward the kitchen. Reggie watched her go, then slowly, with leaden legs, walked back into the living room and took a seat on the couch beside Charlie.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“Your dad’s here.”
“What?”
“He’s outside, talking to Lorraine. Tara went on a recon mission to see what she could find out. She probably thinks he’s gonna arrest Lorraine or something.”
Was he? Or was he here to tell her they’d identified the hand?
Charlie stood up.
“Please don’t,” Reggie said, reaching for his arm and holding it a little too tight. “I think we should just wait here. Can we do that? Can you just wait here with me?”
Charlie nodded, looking down at Reggie’s hand on his arm, probably wondering if he really had a choice.
“Reggie, there’s something you should know. Something my dad told me, but he made me swear not to tell anyone, because it’s like confidential police stuff.”
Reggie nodded, waiting.
“Tara was caught breaking into Ann Stickney’s apartment a couple days ago.”
“What?” Reggie pictured the photo of the fresh-faced, smiling college student that had appeared on the front page of the
Hartford Examiner
after her body was found.
“Ann’s roommate came home and found Tara in the kitchen. I guess she’d picked the lock. The roommate found her just sitting there, eating a bowl of cereal. They aren’t going to press charges or anything.”
“Why didn’t she tell us?” Reggie asked.
Charlie shrugged. “Why would she? I mean, it’s kind of a screwed-up thing to get caught doing. Nothing to go around bragging about.”
Reggie opened her mouth to tell Charlie about the little doll shoe Tara carried that she’d stolen from the first victim’s house, but she couldn’t do it.
Instead she turned on the TV and watched a car chase that seemed to go on forever. She set the remote back down on the coffee table and noticed a safety pin there. She imagined picking it up, opening it, running the point across her skin.
In ten minutes, Tara was back. She grabbed the remote and hit the mute button, standing in front of the TV. Behind her, one of the cars had crashed and was in flames.
“It’s her,” she announced. Her eyes, ringed with smudgy kohl black makeup, were open wide. She looked like an excited panda bear. “The hand belongs to your mom, Reg.” Tara’s mouth trembled a little, and Reggie was sure she was suppressing an excited smile.
Everything started to spin and Reggie closed her eyes.
“How do they know for sure?” Charlie asked, his voice low and serious.
“Fingerprints,” Tara explained. “I guess Vera was arrested once or something and they had her prints on file.”
“Arrested?” Charlie said.
Reggie remembered going with Lorraine to pick her mother up from the police station. What had she been arrested for?
Reggie stood up and walked down the hall.
“Reg,” Tara called after her.
“Leave her,” Charlie said.
Reggie went through the front door in time to catch the taillights of Stu Berr’s car moving down the driveway. The door to the garage closed with a quiet thud, signaling that Lorraine had retreated to her fly-tying workshop. Reggie followed, walking up to the door, not sure what she was going to say, but knowing she needed to find a way to make her aunt tell her everything: what Detective Berr had said, why the police had had Vera’s fingerprints on file.
She’s my mother
, Reggie planned to say.
I have a right to know.
She put her hand on the doorknob and was about to turn it when a sound stopped her. It began as a low moan and worked its way up to the fierce howl of an animal in pain. Reggie let go of the doorknob and stepped sideways, peeking in the small window. Her aunt was doubled over, hands clenched into fists, screaming. When she straightened herself, she began flinging everything off her workbench: tiny hooks, feathers, thread, wire, and tools all falling to the cold cement floor. The hideously deformed stuffed trout watched from the far wall, his glass eye dull. Reggie took a step back, then turned and ran back to the house, knees wobbly, chest aching.
“T
HE COPS AREN’T GONNA
do shit,” Tara was saying when Reggie walked back into the living room. Tara caught sight of her and said, “I’m sorry, Reg, but you know it’s true. If we want to find your mom, we’re gonna have to do it on our own.”
“Right,” Reggie said, trying to swallow the lump in her throat back down. “And how are we supposed to do that?” She looked back down at the safety pin, her skin feeling prickly, almost like it was begging for her to pick the pin up and open it.
“We go to the places where you know she hangs out. We look for the theater she’s been rehearsing at and find some of her friends. Someone’s bound to have seen her. Someone’s gotta know who this guy is she was planning on marrying.”
“Don’t you think my dad and the other cops have already tried that?” Charlie asked.
“No doubt. But come on, who’s gonna talk to cops? You’re Vera’s daughter. Her friends will talk to you. I’m sure they will.” Tara’s eyes were bright and glittering. She fingered the hourglass charm around her neck. “Your mother deserves our best shot, Reg. So do the other victims—Andrea, Candace, Ann.” Tara reached into her pocket and fiddled with something. Was she still carrying around that doll shoe? Did she have something new in there as well—a little trinket picked up from Ann’s apartment?
It scared Reggie a little—how
consumed
Tara had become with all of this. But deep down, she believed Tara was right—the police were not going to catch this guy. They’d had their chance and failed three times. And this time was different. This time, it was her own mother’s life at stake.
“I don’t know the name of the theater—it’s down in New Haven somewhere. I know the director’s name is Rabbit. He lives around here, I think. I know that sometimes they drive back and go to the bars on Airport Road. My mom’s bag is always full of matchbooks from those places—places like Runway 36 and Reuben’s.”
Tara nodded. “So we start there.”
When Vera Dufrane’s hand was identified, the police began questioning boyfriends, past and present. The one they immediately zeroed in on was forty-six-year-old James Jacovich. Jacovich was reportedly one of Vera Dufrane’s on-again, off-again boyfriends. He was a small-time drug dealer who went by the name Rabbit.
Jacovich had recently been released from prison, where he’d been serving a two-year sentence for selling cocaine to an undercover narcotics officer. He’d gotten out early for good behavior and on the condition that he would live in supervised housing and take part in a drug treatment program.
On June 21, the day after Vera’s hand was discovered on the steps of the police station, Jacovich was picked up and charged with driving under the influence—the violation of the conditions of his release meant a one-way ticket back to prison. Jacovich was driving a tan Impala with a broken taillight, just like the car Vera Dufrane’s daughter had witnessed her mother getting into the day of her disappearance, and similar to the one described by Candace Jacques’s coworkers.
The police held Jacovich overnight, questioning him. In the end, they could find no solid evidence linking him to the Neptune crimes.
“I had an alibi,” Jacovich told me when I sat down to interview him at the West Hills Correctional Facility, the July after the murders. He was a tall, thin man with nervous, watery brown eyes. “I was at a court-mandated NA meeting the night Vera got taken,” he explained. “I was with my sponsor after. I was having a tough time, see, and he let me spend the night on his couch.”
What about Candace Jacques, Ann Stickney, and Andrea McFerlin? Did he ever have any contact with any of them?
“The only things I know about any of those ladies are what I read in the paper. I never met any of them.”
October 21, 2010
Brighton Falls, Connecticut
R
EGGIE WAS ON HER
back in a cave, someplace dark and airless. Her hands and feet were bound. A bell was ringing, quietly at first, then louder, like the clattering warning of a railroad crossing—the train is coming, stay back.
She thrashed her way into a sitting position, opened her eyes. Her watch said 8:00
A.M.
Reggie squinted at it, then around her childhood bedroom, up at the water stains on the ceiling.
She wondered what Tara was looking at right now.
Down the hall, Vera’s bell was ringing.
Reggie was on top of the covers, still dressed, the contents of the memory box strewn out on the quilt around her: matchbooks, photographs, the wooden swan George had given Vera just before she disappeared.
Neptune’s Hands
lay open on her lap. She must have drifted off around four in the morning, eyes and brain fuzzy.
The room felt hot and stuffy. She needed to get that window open. She’d bring in some tools later, see if she could loosen it.
“Coming, Mom!” Reggie shouted, grabbing the book and stashing it under her mattress, like a kid hiding porn. Her back ached and her skull was vibrating with names and little details—the men her mother dated: Rabbit, Sal the photographer, Mr. Hollywood; the bars her mother frequented, places Reggie hadn’t thought of in years, places whose very names conjured up the smell of stale beer and cigarette smoke: Reuben’s, Runway 36, Silver Wings—she had matchbooks and paper coasters from each of these places. She thought of the bar her mother had taken her to the day she lost her ear, the place with the spinning stools where they’d met the Boxer.
Did you know I was the Aphrodite Cold Cream girl?
Want to see a trick? Buy me a drink and I’ll show you.
She could see it so clearly, her mother’s perfect hand holding the egg the bartender had given her, her nails a gory red against the white of the shell.
Reggie blinked, running her fingers over the latex folds of her prosthetic ear. She stopped at her bedroom door, which was slightly ajar. Hadn’t she fallen asleep with the door locked last night? She was sure she had. An unnerving feeling wormed its way through her as she stood with her hand on the knob.
The bell jangled harder, faster.
“Coming!” she called.
She pushed open the door and practically ran into Lorraine. “Shit!” Reggie yelped. “You scared me.”
“Sorry,” Lorraine mumbled, looking startled herself. She was in her old flannel nightgown, gray hair down and tangled-looking. “I was just going for your mother.”
“I got it,” Reggie said. “You go try to sleep in a little.”
Reggie walked down the carpeted hall and into the bedroom, where her mother flailed a brass bell through the air with her left hand.
“Good morning,” Reggie said, smiling down, rubbing sleep from her eyes.
“He’s here,” her mother wailed, voice shaking, eyes panicked as a mouse in a trap.
“Where?” Reggie asked, instantly awake, skin prickling from the rush of adrenaline.
“Under the bed.”
Reggie drew in a breath, got down on her hands and knees, and peered under the bed.
“There’s nothing, Mom,” Reggie said, feeling her body relax.
Vera laughed, a terrible wheezing sound. “That’s just what Old Scratch wants you to think.” She shifted around in the bed, looking impossibly small under the covers.
Reggie turned and did a quick sweep of the room. The closet door was closed. She opened it slowly, standing off to the side. Nothing. Only a few old dresses on hangers and the smell of mothballs.
“Let’s get a pillow behind you,” Reggie said, going back over to the bed. “You don’t look very comfortable. Hand me the bell.”
Reggie took the brass bell, and something else fell out of her mother’s hand. A tiny scrap of paper fluttered down onto the covers.
“What’s this?” she asked, picking it up from the damp tangle of sheets. It was a small square of newsprint, neatly folded. Reggie opened it up to discover the article from yesterday’s
Examiner
:
HAS NEPTUNE RETURNED TO BRIGHTON FALLS
? The edges neatly cut.
“Where did you get this?” Reggie asked. “Did Lorraine give it to you?”
Reggie looked back down at the article and saw that at the very bottom of the page, someone had printed a message in blue ink, using neat block letters:
REGINA WILL BE NEXT
She took in a gasping breath, as if stung.
Vera shook her head. “He did.”
“Mom, for God’s sake, who is ‘he’? Who are you talking about?”
“There was a crooked man and he walked a crooked mile,” Vera whispered.
Reggie’s whole body was vibrating with panic like a tuning fork. She heard footsteps creeping in the hallway, moving toward them. She looked for a weapon and picked up the lamp on her mother’s bedside table.
“Thought I’d see if I could lend a hand,” Lorraine said as she came into the room in her fluffy terry cloth robe. “Trouble with the light?”
“I’ll be right back,” Reggie said, setting the lamp down, hurrying past her aunt, down the halls and downstairs to the kitchen, still clutching the newspaper clipping. The table was cleaned off and she went for the recycling bin next to the garbage can.
“Are you okay?” Lorraine asked. She’d followed Reggie down to the kitchen and now stood, looking perplexed as Reggie pawed through junk mail, juice bottles, and tuna cans.