Out of Luck Read online

  Both Rochelle and Felicia were naked, and as they’d been trained to do, they’d started without him. His erection bounced to life as the striking blonde looked up from Rochelle’s abundant breast and ran her tongue over her lips.

  He paused a few feet from them, and the two beauties curled off his oak desk and strode toward him holding hands.

  The murky waters that’d threatened to tip him into a pitiful depression just ten minutes ago abated the second Felicia lowered to her knees in front of him.

  Chapter 4

  Three weeks of interrogation by Detective Chapel had them no closer to finding Charlene’s father’s killer. All it had done was fill the giant corkboard in Incident Room Four with cards detailing snippets of Charlene’s transient life. Chapel was a very patient man, and other than the occasional flicking with his pen, he remained relatively silent. Charlene had already spent hours spewing random memories of her father, or Peter, or whoever he was. Yet despite Chapel’s accusatory gazes, she was adamant that her life had been perfectly normal.

  Normal…it was such an ambiguous word.

  What was a normal family anyway?

  Was it the couple with the two young children in which the wife knew her husband was having an affair with his boss?

  Was it the newlyweds who’d raced off to have an abortion after discovering they were pregnant?

  Was it the family of six who had both sets of grandparents living in trailers in their front yard?

  Was it the middle-aged American man who’d ordered his young Thai wife over the Internet, then produced a set of triplets?

  Was it the lonely wife who spent every night nursing her baby while praying her husband would return from Iraq in one piece?

  Charlene had met every one of these supposed normal families. What she and Peter had was a loving, supportive, nurturing father-daughter relationship.

  So what if nearly every six months of her life they’d moved hundreds or even thousands of miles to settle in a new town?

  So what if their total assets could fit into three suitcases, two of them being hers?

  So what if Charlene never finished school?

  None of that mattered.

  What mattered was that they loved each other. Peter taught her respect and love. He taught her how to cook the best pancakes in the world and how to avoid a brain freeze when eating ice cream. He was there when she needed advice about the boy in the school band with the plump raspberry lips. He was the responsible parent who took her into Macy’s to buy her first trainer bra when she was thirteen. No topic was ever off limits, and he was the best father Charlene could have asked for.

  She refused to believe Detective Chapel’s ludicrous claims.

  Charlene stood and strolled to the board. They’d pinned the cards in a time line, with her most recent memories on the far right, and each day Chapel and his fellow officers had coaxed her back further. With each story she told, they added another card to the time line. Each afternoon, while she returned to her empty apartment and wondered what the hell she was going to do next, Chapel’s team would search for evidence to corroborate her stories.

  A witness. A document. A record of some sort. Friends, coworkers, iconic places, bus companies, rental properties. Even names of restaurants they’d frequented and what she’d recalled either of them eating.

  Some of the cards had pictures attached to them, like the elderly woman who’d shown her how to feed the rescued cats when she volunteered at the animal shelter in Boulder City, Nevada. Thankfully Mrs. Pierce had remembered her too. As did the young woman in Hot Springs, who’d been the same age as Charlene, who spent every night trying to stop her baby from suffering from colic. In the photo, the poor woman still had bags under her eyes that made her look middle-aged.

  Some of the cards, however, had a big red question mark, indicating that more evidence was required. After a couple of weeks listening to Charlene rattle off certain unique details about each town, Detective Chapel expressed his surprise at her level of recall.

  “It’s a game we play. We did play.” A pang of sorrow twisted in her heart.

  Chapel cocked his head and frowned.

  “Dad and I played a memory game. He’d say something that we’d done, like the time my flip-flop fell into the water when we sat on the pier over the ocean, and I’d have to guess the town where that happened. Then it’d be my turn to try to stump him. It was a fun way to remember all the things we did together.”

  The twisted look on Chapel’s face confirmed his turmoil. Everything Charlene said indicated she’d lived a wonderful life, yet the stoic detective was still adamant she was a kidnap victim. It ate away at him. It ate away at her. And as the days rolled on and he was no closer to proving his theory, she grew more tired of the accusations.

  Her eyes scanned the years written in a thick black Sharpie at the top of the board. It was like one of those charts she’d seen in a classroom somewhere that documented the evolution of man.

  This time line documented the evolution of Charlene.

  She’d been dreading the day they arrived at her early childhood. Today was that day.

  As she perused the cards, inching along the wall as she went, Chapel silently waited with the everlasting patience she’d learned to appreciate. The oldest memory on the board at the moment was her eighth birthday. Her father had taken her to the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle. They’d formed a fake band called Restless Natives and had dressed up to pose for a photo. She remembered giggling herself stupid at the wild wig and silver-studded leather jacket her father had worn.

  Sighing, she wondered where that photo had gone. If she knew, the card for her eighth birthday wouldn’t have a big red question mark. Charlene choked back the knot in her throat and turned to Detective Chapel. He was leaning against the table, his hands in his pockets, and the kindness in his eyes nearly reduced her to tears.

  When their gazes met, her chin dimpled. They’d arrived at the moment she’d been dreading for weeks. It wasn’t that she didn’t remember further back. Quite the opposite actually. But every slice of that memory betrayed the perfect life she’d been describing for weeks.

  “Charlene.” The way Chapel said her name, with a pleading, knowing intonation, confirmed he knew she was hiding something.

  She let out a shaky breath. “May I have a moment, please?”

  “Of course, I’ll grab us some of that crappy coffee.” Chapel slinked out the door, leaving her to her documented life.

  She squeezed her eyes shut, covered her face with her hands, and tried to make sense of the images that’d been playing across her mind for over two decades. It was always the same nameless faces. Always the same emotions. Always the same meaningless details. Ever since she was six, she’d been denying they were real. Just the figment of a child’s overactive memory, she’d reasoned. Simply confusion between reality and fiction, maybe from a movie or conversation she’d overheard.

  They weren’t, though. Every blink of that night was true. She knew it.

  But the implications were devastating.

  She was still of two minds over whether or not to reveal those images when Chapel returned with the steaming mugs.

  “Here you go. Take a seat.”

  He sat opposite her and wrapped his hands around his mug. “Take your time.”

  She nodded and lowered her eyes, not wanting to see the optimism in his gaze. It was obvious Detective Chapel believed he’d reached the precipice between speculation and confirmation. He just had to tip her over that edge.

  His certainty only increased the guilty tendrils inching up her spine.

  She sipped the bitter coffee, and the sting on her tongue perfectly represented the dread prickling her thoughts. Plonking the mug on the table, she let her breath out in a big huff. “I’ve always believed it was a dream.”

  He nodded but remained sile
nt. She liked that about him. Chapel had immense patience. Maybe it was the perfect interrogation technique, as it was difficult not to fill the empty void with words. Words that would eventually reveal details. Details that would put Chapel on the path to answers.

  Her only hope was that the answers were not proof of his shocking accusations.

  She prolonged the silence, trying to work out the chronological order of that night. In her mind’s eye, it’d always been a jumble of mixed-up images. Like a broken film on an old movie projector. Half a picture. A word or a shout. Night. Day. Silence. Screaming. Stillness. Bedlam.

  “What were you wearing?”

  His words surprised her, and she blinked at him.

  “Do you remember?”

  Charlene stared at her fingers, picking at a flap of loose skin near her thumbnail as she went back to that night. She’d never thought about her outfit before, yet she could remember it perfectly. “It was a yellow dress. Pale yellow, like whipped butter. It had four little white daises that’d been sewn onto a panel here.” She indicated across her chest. “I loved that dress because I could put my hands in the pockets on my hips.”

  Chapel smiled, and she did too. It was a nice memory, one that she hadn’t recalled until now. But her mind wandered to what he’d do with that information. They probably had a database of kidnap victims and what they were wearing when they were last seen. The instant she left today, he’d be punching her description into his computer.

  Had she already said too much?

  It was too late now.

  I am not a kidnap victim.

  With that conviction rolling around her brain, she met his gaze. “I’m certain I was six years old. Don’t ask me how I know. I just do.”

  He inclined his head. This was the moment he’d been waiting for, and his wide eyes indicated that his mind was open for every bit of information to leave her lips.

  “My mom and I were in the back of a car. I remember thinking how weird the car was, as it had no roof, and I giggled a lot because my hair whipped up in the breeze. It was only years later that I learned the car model was a type of jeep. It was olive green, like the ones you see in those army movies.” She tried to smile, yet she was certain it’d look more like a grimace.

  “Two men were in the front, and the drive seemed to go on forever. They drove us through town after town, with miles of nothing between each one.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Yeah, trees, open paddocks. Not farms as such, just…nothing.”

  “Hmm. Who was driving?”

  She shrugged. “No idea. Two men were in the front, and they never spoke to my mom. In fact, I can’t recall her saying a word to them for the whole trip either.”

  “Tell me about her.”

  “Oh.” He caught her off guard again. So far, Chapel had remained silent whenever she told her stories. “Mom was beautiful. She was always hugging me and telling me stories, and she tucked me into bed every night. Sometimes we slept in the same bed.”

  “Hmm.” Frown lines dented his forehead.

  “Hmm what?”

  “Where do you think your father was when you slept in her bed?”

  Charlene blinked at him, searching her brain for an answer. In the end, there wasn’t one. “I don’t know.” She snapped. She hadn’t meant to yell, and the venom behind it had surprised her as much as it appeared to shock Chapel.

  “It’s okay, Charlene. You’re doing great.”

  Her shoulders slumped. “It’s just random memories. I can’t put them in order.”

  “That’s okay. Tell me about this trip. Was it day or night? What sights do you remember? Did you stop anywhere along the way?”

  Uncurling her fists, she stood and strode to the board. With her back to him, she said, “I’ll just tell you the bits I remember.”

  “Okay, take your time.”

  She huffed out a sigh. “Once the sun set, it got cold, and I climbed onto my mother’s lap. I was straddling her legs, facing her so I could snuggle into her chest. She wrapped her arms around me, and I can remember hearing her heart beat. Between that and the bumpy road, I must’ve fallen asleep, because the next thing I remember was waking up after we’d stopped.”

  Charlene returned to her chair, but she was no longer seeing Chapel; she was seeing that night like she’d just lived through it. “I was pulled from the car, and Mom was screaming at the men. They had guns, big long rifles that were slung over their shoulders. Some of them aimed their weapons as us, but most were just standing around, smoking and laughing.”

  “Do you remember what your mom was saying?”

  She blinked at him, suddenly recalling that her mother had been speaking in Spanish. She’d never realized it until now.

  “What?” Chapel must’ve seen her confusion.

  “She spoke in Spanish.”

  “Spanish? Like the woman who stabbed Peter?”

  “Yes. I didn’t remember that until now.”

  “Hmm. So, what happened after you were out of the jeep?”

  “I…I just stood there as they pulled Mom out of the car and tied her to a pole near this shed.”

  His brows shot up, and the muscles in his jaw bulged. “Can you describe the shed? What else do you see?”

  “It was dark. Trees everywhere. There were about five or six men. All in green uniforms. All carrying guns. I clutched my arms around her waist, and a few of the men just laughed at me. At us. There was this really loud noise, and the men started shouting. Some ran into the bushes. Two hid behind the jeeps. But this one man just stood there in the jeep’s headlights. His feet were apart, and the gun was aimed at something. We couldn’t see past the shed.”

  As Charlene twisted her fingers, bolts of memories flashed across her eyes, and she blurted out the snippets like she was tripping in a drug-induced high. “A brilliant light lit up the area. It grew brighter by the second. A huge gush of wind peppered us with rocks and bits of trees. Years later, when I saw a movie, I realized that it’d been a plane that’d landed near us. I remember screaming at how loud it was. Mom’s hands were tied behind her so she couldn’t hug me, and when I looked up at her I saw the whites in her eyes. But she smiled down at me like she’d done thousands of times, and I knew that everything was going to be okay.”

  She sipped her coffee, but the now cold brew stung her taste buds, and she put it back down. “But it wasn’t okay.”

  He shook his head as if knowing exactly what Charlene was talking about.

  “When the noise stopped, the shouts started. Mom was trembling. Then they started shooting. I don’t know who or what they were shooting at. A man fell over right near us, clutching his neck. Mom told me to close my eyes. But I didn’t. I just clung to her and watched the man roll about with blood gushing through his fingers.”

  Chapel’s lips drew to a thin line, turning them pale. “What happened next?”

  “There was more shouting and more guns going off. But the shouts got more distant. I think the men were all running into the trees. It was almost silent for a bit. But then I felt Mom stiffen, and she looked down at me. This time she told me to run. But I shook my head. She screamed at me to run. I didn’t want to let go of her.”

  A memory came to her like a bolt of lightning. She’d never had it before.

  “What?” Chapel’s eyes bulged.

  “It’s Peter.”

  “What’s Peter? Tell me what you remember.”

  “Mom kept screaming at me to run. But when I didn’t, Peter grabbed me. He was dressed in that uniform. He had a gun too.”

  “What’d he do?”

  “He dragged me from her and scooped me up. As I screamed for my mother, he took me into the bushes. His gun dug into my thighs, and I remember having a bruise there for days.” It’s funny what she’d blocked out. She’d always pictured that bruise
and had recalled it many times over the decades, but she’d had zero recollection of how she’d gotten it. Had she deliberately blocked out that it was Peter’s gun? Had she forced the image away, not wanting to believe it was true? But it was true. And the implications were brutal. Peter had been one of those soldiers. Or whatever they were.

  “That was the last time I ever saw my mother.”

  “So you ran into the bushes. What happened then?”

  Charlene searched for the answer. But it wasn’t there. It was as though a black cloud had smothered every recollection. After a few thumping heartbeats, her shoulders sagged, and she shook her head. “I…I don’t know. One minute, we were hiding in a rusted-out old car in the middle of the woods, with guns booming and lights flashing in the distance. The next memory I have is sitting in the sunshine on a beach, sharing an ice cream with Peter. It’s like I’ve lived two different lives.”

  Chapel moaned as he reached forward and placed his hand on hers. “Charlene, I think you have.”

  Chapter 5

  Charlene was completely drained by the time Chapel drove her home. After saying good-bye and making promises to return to the station in the morning, she entered her apartment and locked the door behind her.

  Her mind was in a fog as she went through the motions of showering and dressing in her pajamas. After that, she was torn between curling up in a ball on her bed and pacing the length of the tiny kitchen. She did the latter.

  The apartment consisted of a combined kitchen and living room area, a bathroom and two bedrooms. None of the furniture belonged to them. Not a single knife or fork. Not the bedding. Not even the decorations.

  It’d never bothered her before. But after weeks of defending her lifestyle with Detective Chapel, she’d begun to second-guess her upbringing.

  Scanning the meaningless objects in the room—the flower print on the wall, the plain white lamp with the yellowing edges, even the hardcover books on the shelves—she had never felt so foreign in her own home.

  Peter’s absence added to her alienation. All the energy had been sucked from her life. She felt empty. Devoid of emotion. Devoid of care. Devoid of love.