Amanda nodded. “Today.”
After the two hugged goodbye, Amanda watched Carolyn disappear from the kitchen, then turned to dump Carolyn’s coffee in the sink. As she watched the coffee swirl down the drain, she felt her conviction sliding away with it. If Carolyn could be there at her side all the time, that would be one thing. Though it was hardly strength if you had to rely on someone else for it. Carolyn was right;sheneeded to do something. Besides, it was one thing to ignore the calls and even the following while Case was away, but what about when he got back? Amanda wouldn’t allow this to continue. For the sake of her son, she could not.
Upstairs, Amanda passed by the front bedroom windows on her way to take a shower. She spotted something on the sidewalk down below, in front of their gate. Something purple and low to the ground.
Amanda squinted, but was unable to make it out. She headed back downstairs, chest growing tight. These days, there were no good surprises. She checked out the window before she opened the upstairs door to be sure there wasn’t somebody out there waiting for her. With no one in sight, she stepped out on the stoop. It was chilly, especially for June, and Amanda shivered as she made her way down the frontsteps to the gate, barefoot. There on the ground was a huge bouquet of lilacs, wrapped in violet tissue and tied elegantly with natural twine.
Lilacs were Amanda’s favorite flower. She’d planted them in large pots at every house she and Zach had ever lived in, including in the small backyard of the brownstone, where they had promptly died.
Without touching the flowers, Amanda stood up and looked around again. Maybe someone had left them there for safekeeping while they ran back to retrieve something? But they were not lilacs by coincidence. And the sidewalk was empty in either direction.
Oh, God, why had she let Carolyn leave?
There was a card. Amanda held her breath as she bent down, hands trembling, to pick it up, hoping it would be made out to someone other than her. She squinted as she tugged the card out of the envelope.
Amanda, thinking of you. xoxo
Lizzie
JULY 8, WEDNESDAY
The office of the Hope First Initiative was in a gritty converted factory. It was hard to imagine elegant Amanda there, and so I pictured her wearing white gloves, her hands hovering over the handrail as she glided up the cracked stairs. Amanda probably glided everywhere. I believed this even though Zach had already told me that Amanda came from a poor background, and I’d already read myself about her addicted father and her being raped by some boy who’d then made her go watchMarley & Mewith him. It was amazing how I could conveniently disregard all these tragic details so I could return to my initial impression of rich, beautiful Amanda: that she was a woman to be envied, even when she was dead.
What an awful person I was.
At least self-loathing wasafeeling, though. I’d been disturbingly numb since I’d found the earring. There were many ugly explanations for my husband having some other woman’s earring in his bag: an affair, a prostitute, a stripper. Out of these, an affair seemed the only real possibility. Sam had a genuine aversion to anything that even hinted at exploitation.
At least, as far as I knew.
There were innocent explanations, too. Sam could have found the earring on the street or in a café; he was holding it so that hecould launch a search for the rightful owner … But Sam had always been a big believer in the “Leave it, they’ll come back for it” school of thought. I couldn’t see him picking up a stranger’s earring. Was I too quickly jumping to the worst-case scenario this time? Maybe. After all, I’d had a lot of experience being blindsided.
Ironically, I might have had some actual answers, had I not deliberately avoided confronting Sam. After spending the rest of the night upright and awake on the couch, I’d left while he was still sound asleep. I’d parked myself at Café du Jour near Hope First to check in on my other cases. Everything had taken a back seat to Zach these last few days, and I needed to catch up. It turned out the DOJ was filing charges against three members of the battery manufacturer’s board. Paul wanted me to have a joint motion to dismiss ready to go. I’d never been so grateful for such tedious work.
When I was finished, I saved the motion document and pulled one of Amanda’s journals from my bag. What I really needed was her most recent one—but I’d have to go back to Zach’s to look for that. In the meantime, I couldn’t stop reading the older ones. It was a compulsion now, like gawking at somebody else’s car accident to distract from your own wreckage.
Finally I got to an entry that made clear what had happened to Amanda all those years ago was even worse—so much fucking worse—than I’d ever imagined.
March 2004
I watch the cross on the living room wall and pray that little Jesus will tug himself down and help me. So far he hasn’t. But maybe it has to be your cross. This one was on the trailer wall when we moved in.
He always does it there in the living room. Right under the cross. On the rough yellow couch. Maybe out there it’s easier for Daddy to pretend he’s not really doing it.
But he is. Little Jesus knows.
As I climbed the steps to the Hope First building a half hour later I still felt sick. Amanda’s father had raped her, repeatedly. When she was twelve. Raped as a child and now she was dead. It was horrifying. All of it. My phone buzzed with a text, when I was almost at the door, snapping me out of my numb haze. It was Paul’s friend from the DA’s office, Steve Granz:Wendy Wallace. Sorry.
That was it. The whole text. While the name didn’t mean anything to me, evidently having Wendy Wallace assigned to prosecute Zach’s case was not good news, at least as far as Steve was concerned.
I quickly googled Wendy Wallace as I pressed the buzzer for the Hope First Initiative. “Three Heirs to the Throne” was the first article that popped up. I tapped on it and skimmed. As Zach’s public defender had mentioned, there was indeed a high-profile contest brewing for a handpicked successor to the Brooklyn DA. In Brooklyn, the real race was always the primary, since no Republican stood a chance, and Wendy Wallace, the Homicide Bureau’s chief prosecutor, was one of three leading contenders. The knock against her was that she lacked name recognition, but a case like Zach’s would solve that problem. Her name would be all over the papers, even better if that coverage were strategically timed to maximize her involvement. This was surely the reason the most salacious details hadn’t yet been in the papers.
“Hello?” A crackly voice through the intercom. I’d forgotten that I’d even rung the buzzer. “Can I help you?”
“Lizzie Kitsakis,” I said. “Zach Grayson’s attorney.”
Such a long silence followed, I started to wonder if she’d heard me.
Finally, there was a buzz. I pushed through the two sets oflocked doors and into the polished lobby.
