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Oh. Please. No.
She stumbled away, her boots slipping on the steep, wet sidewalk, her insides nearly frozen. Not paying attention to where she was going, she seemed almost swept away by the throng that crossed the street, some people babbling in excitement, others shocked into silence, one man already wearing a red and white Santa hat. Everything seemed out of sync and discordant, surreal.
When she finally looked up at a street sign, she realized she’d walked blocks away from where she needed to be, which was the parking garage where she’d left her car. Shaking, she wondered if she could drive; as her head cleared, she decided she had no other choice.
It may not have been Didi. It probably wasn’t. There are tons of Marilyn Monroe impersonators, even here in the city. Don’t freak out. Remain calm. Didi’s probably still out there.
She was walking toward the parking structure now, breathing more deeply, as the incline was steep. From the corner of her eye, she caught a movement, and for a second she thought someone was following her. She glanced quickly over her shoulder, saw no one lurking in the shadows, but sensed hidden eyes observing her.
You’re imagining this!
Swallowing back the stupid paranoia, she felt her heart knocking a little faster, her skin prickling in apprehension.
There’s no one following you. There never has been. For God’s sake, Remmi, get a grip.
You’re just freaked out because of the tell-all book just published about Didi’s life and disappearance, the interest it’s stirring up.
The book . . . It had just landed in stores and on the Internet. Why anyone would want to publish a book about a small-time celebrity impersonator, Remmi didn’t understand, but there it was, and surprisingly, people were interested in the mystery surrounding her disappearance. Somehow, Didi Storm was achieving the fame she so desperately wanted now, twenty years after she’d walked out the door, never once looking over her shoulder.
Had she died that night?
Been kidnapped?
Or just decided she didn’t need the responsibility of a teenager and infant son?
Remmi didn’t know, even though she’d asked those very questions of herself a million times over. There were other questions that kept her awake at night, that burrowed into her brain with tiny painful claws.
Why did Seneca leave?
What did the midwife/nursemaid want with Adam?
Did she know where Didi was and return the boy to her?
Were she and Didi in cahoots?
Why—
“Stop it!” she said aloud and startled herself as well as a woman jogging in the other direction. Cell phone in hand, earbuds engaged, eyes flashing a quick anger, the woman made a wide arc around Remmi and breezed by without breaking stride.
Remmi watched her disappear around a corner, then did a quick sweep of the steep sidewalk and street behind her. No one looked out of the ordinary. No one ducked into a doorway to avoid being seen. No one was following her.
She started hurrying uphill again. She had to think, to reason, to figure out if she should go to the police. At that thought, she felt herself shrink inside. Her history with the cops wasn’t exactly stellar. Far from it.
She remembered finally going to the police three days after Seneca had left her. She’d hung out at the house. Waiting. Hoping. Praying. But no one had returned. Not her mother, nor Seneca, nor her infant siblings. She was alone. She’d broken down and called Noah again, and that time, she’d gotten his stepfather on the phone.
“He ain’t here!” Ike Baxter had growled. “But if you find him, tell him I’m lookin’ for him, the worthless piece of thievin’ shit. And when I find him, he’d better watch out. I’m finally gonna give that kid what’s been comin’ to him. Lyin’ little prick.” Then he’d slammed the receiver down.
Remmi had never called back.
She’d found addresses and phone numbers in her mother’s small book and called a number that was just listed as M&D—Mom and Dad, she figured, and dialed, but the number was out of
service, and what would she say to the grandparents she’d never met anyway? “Hi, I’m your long-lost granddaughter.” What would be the outcome? To move someplace over fifteen hundred miles away with strangers? People who would force her to go to a new high school and try to blend in with kids who had known each other all their lives? No way.
She’d considered her original plan to head to San Francisco, but scrapped the idea and finally, hating herself, had walked into town and to the police station, where she’d found herself talking to Detective Bud Kendrick, who didn’t believe much of her wild tales about her mother—not that she could really blame him. If she was being honest with herself, she had held back parts of the truth, though she’d admitted to what she’d seen in the desert through the slit in the back seat of the Cadillac.
Kendrick, a tall man with a shock of coffee-brown hair, thick eyebrows, and a nose that looked as if it had been broken, was built like a football player, and a plaque on the wall had indicated he’d been “All League” at a high school in Idaho. His office was neat, a computer monitor taking up a lot of real estate on his desk, and he surveyed her with cool, calculating eyes as his partner, Lucretia Davis, a thirtyish black woman in a slim skirt and pressed blouse, had hovered near the doorway, as if she expected Remmi to bolt, and listened while Kendrick fired the questions. For some reason, he seemed to have it in for Remmi from the start of the interview. Or maybe he was just one of those perpetually angry men like Harold Rimes, her mother’s employer, the kind of guys with a chip on their shoulder that only got bigger as they aged. Whatever the reason, Kendrick seemed to think Remmi knew more than she was telling, which, of course, she did.
“You heard shots and an explosion and saw a ‘fireball’ from a hiding spot in the back of a specially equipped old Cadillac? That’s what you’re saying?”
