You'll Never Know Dear: A Novel of Suspense Read online

  Evelyn said, “It’s almost impossible to go through withdrawal without a relapse. Not without medical intervention. Fortunately, the hospital has a detoxification unit and they have a bed free. I checked.” Of course you did, Vanessa thought. “They’ll keep her under general anesthesia through the most painful part, then bring her back sedated, and keep her here through the next critical days until she’s back up on her pins.”

  Maggie looked so deflated and bleak, Vanessa sat down and put her arm around her. “I’ve worked with people who’ve been through terrible traumas. From everything you’ve told me, it sounds like your mother is tough and resilient. And if Evelyn says they know what they’re doing here, you can believe that they do.”

  “Oh, they know what they’re doing,” Evelyn said. “But I won’t sugarcoat it. It will be rough. It takes days to recover, and though there will be nurses on the unit, these days they’re stretched thin. I’d recommend strongly that you hire someone to monitor her care round the clock.”

  “A private nurse? Around the clock?” Maggie was ashen. “But we can’t even afford . . .” She stared off into the middle distance, her jaw clenched. “I’ll do it. I’ll call and tell them I can’t start the job. I’ll take a leave of absence from school if I need to. Get my car fixed and registered.”

  Vanessa couldn’t shake the thought that none of this would be happening if she hadn’t leaned on Gary’s wife to look up Maggie’s address. Officer Frank would have treaded much more softly approaching Jenny if he hadn’t felt he needed to show Lis and Vanessa that he was in charge. “You’ll do no such thing,” she said. “I’m staying for at least another week anyway.” Another week away from the lab wouldn’t be the end of the world, and, besides, she could always work on her grant proposal here.

  “You?” Evelyn said. “Vanessa, Elisabeth is barely out of the hospital herself, and neither of you know a thing about withdrawal or psychiatric nursing care. What if she vomits while she’s under anesthesia? Or has a seizure? Or codes in her sleep? Or has hallucinations? Or tries to hurt herself? Someone should be there with her the minute she comes out of anesthesia. Sakes alive, would either of you have even the slightest notion what to do? It’s not as if you’re going to have time to google it.”

  She smoothed her uniform. “You need somebody a lot more qualified, a private duty nurse who knows her way around this hospital and knows what kind of support a recovery like this requires.”

  Somebody a lot more qualified. Evelyn had to realize that she was setting herself up, or was she too fixated on being a know-it-all? “You’re absolutely right. It has to be someone with the training and experience,” Vanessa said, laying it on thick. “Someone we trust. Too bad we can’t get you, Evelyn. You’d know exactly what to do.”

  Evelyn smiled. “It’s been ages since I was a duty nurse, but staff will be there to help. As I say, it’s been awhile though . . .” For a few moments she seemed to be thinking. She had that way of settling herself that reminded Vanessa of a plump hen, preening and ruffling her feathers. “I might consider doing it. Yes, I might be able to help. After all, Buck and I were Janey’s godparents.”

  “We don’t know if she’s our Janey,” Vanessa said quickly.

  “She’s not your Janey,” Maggie said.

  “No, she’s probably not,” Evelyn said. “But Miss Sorrel thinks she could be. I’d be doing this for her.”

  “My mother’s not a drug addict,” Maggie said.

  “Blood levels don’t lie,” Evelyn shot back.

  Maggie shifted uncomfortably. “I have no way to pay you.”

  “Maggie, honey,” Evelyn said, just as sweet as pie, “you’ll repay me by finishing your course work, starting your new job, and getting your car repaired and registered so’s you can drive your momma home when she’s clean.”

  “We’ve always taken care of ourselves,” Maggie said, her jaw set.

  “It’s no sin,” Evelyn said, “to accept a little help. And a blessing to be able to give it.”

  20

  “I don’t mean to judge, but you know drug addicts are compulsive liars,” Evelyn said to Vanessa as they walked to the parking lot. The sun was low in the sky, making some of the hospital windows look as if they were on fire.

  Vanessa was heading home to pick up the doll and take it to Frank at the police station. She’d checked in with Lis, who’d assured her that the nurses said they didn’t need one of them, never mind both of them, watching Grandma Sorrel overnight. She was improving steadily and would surely be released in a few days. Evelyn was on her way home to get what she needed to spend the night at the hospital in the drug treatment unit taking care of Jenny Richards.

  Evelyn went on, “She’s probably been in all kinds of trouble. Wouldn’t surprise me if they both have. And along comes Miss Sorrel with meal ticket written all over her.” She waved her keys and clicked to unlock her car doors. “I don’t want your grandmother to get her hopes up, only come to find out that woman’s not who she says she is.”

  “Grandma Sorrel’s already got her hopes up.” And that woman was not saying she was anything. It was her daughter who’d brought over the doll and she wasn’t saying her mother was Janey, either. Vanessa agreed with all of them; she didn’t think Jenny was Janey, even if the doll turned out to be Janey’s doll. But she couldn’t pass up an opportunity to bug Evelyn. “You have to admit, Jenny Richards is about the right age.”

  Evelyn nailed Vanessa with a skeptical gaze. “About the right age.” She opened her car door and heaved herself into the driver’s seat, slammed the door, and lowered the window. “My niece Amelia’s about the right age. You could go to the Piggly Wiggly and find a half-dozen women in the dairy section who are about the right age.”

  There was no arguing with that. “Well, right now I’m taking the doll over to the police and they’ll tell us if it could be Janey’s doll.”

  “Well.” Evelyn harrumphed and started her car. “It’s about time.”

  The winter sun had set and the streetlights had come on by the time Vanessa got to the police station with the doll Maggie Richards had brought them wrapped in a baby blanket and stuffed into a shopping bag. She parked on the street and walked around to the front of the annex to Bonsecours’s recently renovated municipal complex.

  A pair of uncomfortable-looking wrought-iron benches flanked a black stone monument in front of the wide steps that led to the police department. The lettering on the monument came to life in the gleam of passing headlights: bonsecours fallen officers’ memorial. Below that, a laurel wreath was etched into the stone and beneath that, names of fallen officers. The name that topped the list was familiar:

  Chief of Police

  Robert “Buck” Dumont

  EOW FEBRUARY 23, 1988

  Buck Dumont had been Evelyn’s husband and Vanessa’s grandfather Woody’s best friend. He’d been chief of police for a decade or so before drowning in a fishing accident in the Bonsecours River. That had been before Vanessa was born.

  Vanessa climbed the steps, continued past the two-story columns that flanked the portico, and entered the building. Inside it was spare, institutional white with vinyl floors. Vanessa waited at the window that separated the public from clerks at work on the other side. An older woman with blond streaks in her dark hair looked up from one of the desks, glanced at the wall clock—it was ten minutes to five—and came over to Vanessa, her expression bored but polite. A name badge pinned to her white starched shirt read mattie day.

  “I’m here to see Officer . . . I mean, Deputy Chief Ames,” Vanessa said. Ms. Day slid a clipboard over. A sign-in sheet. Vanessa wrote down her name.

  When Ms. Day took the clipboard back, her face lit up. “Vanessa Strenger? You must be Miss Sorrel’s granddaughter.” She turned around and called to another woman working in the inner office at a desk. “Vera, look who’s here! It’s Miss Sorrel’s grandbaby.” Was that a smirk that Vanessa saw passing between them? Bonsecours really was a small town.
r />   Ms. Day turned back to Vanessa. “Working in Rhode Island, are you?”

  “Goodness, aren’t y’all well informed?” Vanessa smiled.

  “A psychologist I heard. Not married.”

  Vanessa smiled again and gave a bobblehead nod.

  “Or not married yet, that’s what we like to say. So sorry to hear about the accident. And the robbery on top of it. Shocking. Bonsecours is turning into New Orleans. How are they? You send our best, you hear?” Ms. Day delivered all this without taking a breath.

  “They’re . . . fine. Thank you for asking.” There was no point going into chapter and verse. “I’ll let them know you asked.”

  “You just hang on, then, and I’ll tell the deputy chief you’re here.”

  While she waited, Vanessa examined the array of annual police force photographs that hung on a wall. In each, the officers were lined up in rows. In a photo dated 1987, Vanessa recognized Buck Dumont. Standing dead center with a bit more space around him than the other officers, he was also taller and broader with a bushier mustache than anyone. All he needed was a pointy helmet to pass for a Viking. Nineteen eighty-seven, that would have been the year before he died.

  The door to the inner area opened, and Officer Frank came out. His gaze fell to the bag Vanessa was holding and he ushered her inside.

  “Fax came for you,” another clerk said, intercepting them. She handed him a sheet of paper.

  Officer Frank stopped, looked at the fax. Looked across at Vanessa and then back at the fax. Vanessa tried to read his expression. He didn’t seem taken aback or surprised. More like grim satisfaction.

  He folded the paper over quickly, but not before Vanessa caught the block letters across the top: CERTIFICATE OF DEATH. “Vanessa,” he said. “Come on back.”

  Vanessa followed Officer Frank down a corridor and into an office. Despite Frank’s name on a plaque outside, the office was so aggressively impersonal that it felt as if he’d just moved in. The broad top of the steel desk was cleared of papers. A massive map of Bonsecours hung on the wall behind it. A corkboard filled the adjacent wall and was hung thick with a half-dozen Wanted posters. Next to them were pictures of Miss Sorrel’s stolen dolls.

  Officer Frank must have followed her gaze because he said, “None of the dolls have turned up so far. We’re monitoring eBay—” He slid the fax sheet under his desk blotter.

  “eBay?”

  “And Craigslist. The Internet’s become the preferred venue for fencing stolen goods. Especially stolen goods with a narrow appeal.” He tilted his head and appraised the photographs. “I’m still not altogether satisfied that we know what we’re dealing with. A burglar who steals dolls and leaves behind so many easy-to-carry valuables? Then, for good measure, explodes a ceramics kiln? Feels like a gumbo with too many ingredients.” Officer Frank opened the drawer of a file cabinet and pulled out a folder. From it he slipped a copy of the classified ad Grandma Sorrel had been running for the last thirty years. He smoothed it on the desk. “Let’s see what you brought me.”

  Vanessa took the doll from the bag and laid it on the desk alongside the picture. She couldn’t read Frank’s expression as he gazed down at it. He opened his top desk drawer, took out a magnifying glass, and examined the stamp on the foot. The disfigured face. He lifted the dress, exposing the doll’s soft body, its once-white linen covering nearly brown with dirt and age.

  Finally, he turned his attention to the doll’s hair, or what was left of it. He took a scissors from his drawer and snipped a few inches from a bundle of strands.

  “Can you test the DNA?” Vanessa asked.

  “Unfortunately, a hair shaft doesn’t have the material we need for DNA testing,” he said as he took a matchbook from a desk drawer. “But it’s pretty simple to test whether it’s real hair or synthetic.” He struck a match and touched it to the hair. The flame flared as the hair caught and then quickly went out, leaving a nasty scorched smell in the air and dark ash on the desk. “Most synthetic hair melts.” He poked at the ashes with his finger. “This didn’t.”

  Vanessa’s stomach turned over. Not that she was surprised. The hair on any Miss Sorrel doll was harvested from the head of the little girl portrayed. “So it’s human hair?”

  “Maybe. I want someone to take a closer look.”

  He snipped some more hair, a single strand this time, and dropped it into an envelope. Vanessa followed him back to the reception area and up a flight of stairs to a second-floor office. The sign on the door said forensics lab.

  21

  At the hospital, Lis had taken up the post beside Miss Sorrel’s bed. Her mother slept, but she seemed anything but peaceful. Her eyes twitched behind closed lids. Her chest rose and fell rapidly. A glance at the monitor by the bed confirmed—her heart rate was climbing.

  Lis pulled her chair closer. “Mummy,” Lis whispered. She hadn’t called her mother that in years.

  Miss Sorrel muttered in her sleep and turned her head one way, then the other. When Lis touched her arm, her mother’s shoulders seemed to lift off the mattress and her eyes flew open, focused unseeing on the middle distance. She put her hand to her chest and lay there, breathing heavily with her mouth open.

  “Shhh,” Lis said, taking her hand. “Relax.”

  Miss Sorrel looked around the room, panic in her eyes.

  “You’re in the hospital, remember?” Lis said. “Were you dreaming about Janey?”

  Miss Sorrel batted away the thought with the back of her hand.

  “What then?”

  “The doll. I couldn’t find it.” She struggled to sit up. “But she’s back. She came back. Didn’t she?” She collapsed against the pillows.

  “Janey’s doll?”

  “Is it hers?” Miss Sorrel gave Lis an anxious, searching look.

  “We don’t know,” Lis admitted.

  “Find. Out.”

  “We’re trying to. Vanessa’s taken the doll to the police. They’ll examine—”

  “The police . . . pfff.” The lines at the corner of Miss Sorrel’s eyes deepened as she took a deep breath and held it. Exhaled. “They’ve never . . .” She squeezed Lis’s hand so hard it hurt. Then her face crumpled and she started to weep. Lis felt as if the chair had dropped out from under her. She’d rarely seen her mother lose her composure, never mind cry.

  Lis’s vision went blurry and her chest cramped. She waited until her mother released her grip on her and closed herself into the bathroom on the pretext of filling the water pitcher.

  She caught her own reflection in the mirror. She looked half dead, haunted and haggard, sad and beaten down. The circles under her eyes had circles. No surprise there. Her mother wasn’t bouncing back the way Lis had expected her to, and Lis still felt rocky, verging on nausea most of the time. Her life wasn’t about to return to boring and mundane any time soon. On top of that, she was smarting from the way Vanessa had implied—no, accused—Lis of rolling over and letting herself be bossed around by other people. Evelyn (You leave it to me, Lissie) and Frank (You need to let the police do their job, Elisabeth) manipulated her like a puppet. At least Vanessa had gumption. She didn’t let anyone tell her what she could and couldn’t do. It was only because Vanessa wouldn’t take no that they’d found Jenny Richards.

  Lis patted her pocket where she’d stuffed the bloody gauze pad wrapped in the Latex glove and returned to Miss Sorrel’s bedside. When her mother dropped back to sleep, Lis used her phone to look up a local DNA testing services lab and called them. She was put on hold to the strains of “Für Elise.” Finally a woman picked up. “Laurel Bay Testing Services. How can I help you?”

  “Do you analyze blood for DNA to see if two people are related?”

  “A paternity test?” the woman asked.

  “No. Sisters.”

  “A siblingship test. Of course. We need a DNA sample from both individuals and a maternal sample as well.” She went on to say that expedited test results came back in three business days. Payment in advance. Lis
could bring in the samples any time, weekdays until six, Saturday until five. “Unless, of course, you need a legal DNA test.”

  “Excuse me?” Would the other test results she got be illegal?

  “If you need to present the results in court for something like child support or to claim an inheritance, then you also need to have written consent from the donors and a documented chain of custody. Best if they come in and we take the samples on-site, then there’s no question.”

  “It’s a private family matter,” Lis said.

  “Of course. At Laurel Bay, we understand that. DNA testing is always a private matter, and you can rest assured we will exercise the utmost discretion with your test results. We have counselors on-site . . .”

  Lis tuned out. Sounded like a canned speech, upselling add-on services. But she appreciated the sentiment. Privacy mattered to her, too, and for Jenny it was paramount.

  “How much does it cost?” Lis asked when the woman took a breath.

  It wasn’t cheap. Expedited results for a siblingship test were $550. All Lis had to do was fill out the forms and drop off the samples. She had Jenny’s blood, she could help herself to a hair from Miss Sorrel’s hairbrush, as long as it had the hair follicle. The lab would swab her cheek at no extra cost when she got there. “Just takes a few seconds,” the woman on the phone assured her. They were open until six.

  “Just one more question. How certain are the results?”

  “If you provide usable DNA samples, results will be conclusive.”

  A chill went down Lis’s spine as she hung up. How many things in life could you say that about?

  22

  “I didn’t know Bonsecours had its own forensics lab,” Vanessa said as Officer Frank held open the door marked forensics on the second floor of the police station.

  “We’ve got our own lab and a small in-house staff,” Frank said. “We don’t have the resources to analyze DNA, though. We send that to the state lab in Columbia for testing. Of course we’ll send over Jenny Richards’s sample to see if it matches Janey’s.”