CHAPTER ONE

 

In her first few years of incarceration, Zoey Proctor would often think about Martha Stewart and her own time behind bars. The domestic diva’s internment had become notorious for a single defining element. Ponchos. Yes, a multi-millionaire white-collar criminal had waltzed into a federal penitentiary and filled it with granny stitches and kumbaya.

And as far as the public knew, none of those crochet or knitting needles had ever been repurposed for a violent assault, nor had a two-foot section of yarn ever been pressed against someone’s throat or otherwise put to some horrifying use. No, Martha’s disciples had made ponchos and were, no doubt, allowed to wear them every day with no fear that they might be concealing weapons or contraband. No such improprieties in Martha Stewart’s prison. Why hadn’t it been Zoey’s fate to wind up surrounded by poncho-loving felons?

Bad luck. That’s why.

It’s one thing to fall short of the grandiose and fanciful dreams of one’s younger self. In fact, join the club. Most people don’t wind up as multi-millionaires, NBA superstars, gold-medal athletes, musical icons, or tech wizards who will become household names. But surely, it’s not too much to ask of life not to spend one’s thirty-third birthday celebrating eight years of incarceration at Western Massachusetts Women’s Correctional Facility.

Zoey’s understanding of prison had come from the movie screen, and there had been many surprises in store. One was that there was far more freedom in the prison than she ever would have suspected. The prisoners slept in large dorm rooms, each with about three bunk beds and six inmates. It felt like a miniature army barracks or a crowded youth hostel, and there was considerable flexibility as to how they could spend their day.

Indeed, there was a multitude of privileges. Possibly because, in order for the disciplinary tool of taking privileges away to be effective, the prisoners had to start with having privileges. There were a number of TV watching rooms, there was a card playing area, there was a library with books and magazines, and an indoor gym facility, as well as one out in the yard.

However, unlike Martha Stewart’s prison, the inmates at Zoey’s facility were rarely granted access to sharp, pointy objects. Overall, a lot more security, a lot less kumbaya. While not the worst of prisons, it was a pretty rough population of prisoners, with hardened guards to match. Thus, the freedom of the place was one of its greatest liabilities—the prisoners had way too much access to one another in a never-ending game of rivalry and one-upmanship.

There were a fair number of murderers, most of whom had killed their husbands, and most of those had snapped after long-term abuse. Some of them would spend the remainder of their lives behind bars. Not surprisingly, with no possibility of time off for good behavior, there was little incentive for good behavior. These prisoners were the top dogs of the facility and many reveled in their scary reputations.

An assortment of petty thieves, drug dealers, gang members, white-collar con artists, and working girls rounded out the population. It was not a world that Zoey ever thought she would cross paths with. She didn’t want to cast too many aspersions on the unfortunate women around her. She didn’t like to think of herself as being superior to her fellow detainees, and some of them were seriously impressive survivors of very harsh environments. It’s just that they were all criminals, and she was . . . unlucky.

The very concept of being in prison was an unfathomable nightmare. Perhaps it was one that she could have anticipated if she had at least deserved it. But her only crime was getting involved with a loser. She hadn’t liked to think of Dalton as a loser, even though he was often moody, poked fun at her sometimes—maybe often—and would snap at her if she asked about his whereabouts. But they had been together for almost three years. And while it had been difficult enough to let go of her early dreams of romance, devotion, and that whole soulmate fantasy, it was a big leap to think that he would destroy her life the way he did.

After the police raid on their apartment, his drug supply and drug money were found stashed amongst her belongings—deep in the bottom of her storage boxes. And he expressed shock and dismay to the police, claiming he had never known that his girlfriend was involved in such things! It was like listening to a complete stranger.

Would he have done it if he had known that she was pregnant? Zoey hadn’t been completely sure of it herself. She had bought a home pregnancy kit but hadn’t taken it. Deep inside, she knew that if it was positive, she would owe it to the baby to leave Dalton, and she hadn’t been quite ready to face that.

So, fast-forward to eight years later. There was a baby out there, an eight-year-old, actually, who had never laid eyes on Zoey. Not really. Just those first five minutes in the delivery room before the baby was whisked away. Dalton had assumed full custody and ignored years of Zoey’s begging to see her daughter. After a while, he cut off his phone service, and Zoey’s hopes were at an end.

She knew that she was knee-deep in a continual pity party, but she couldn’t help it. To be a complete stranger to her own little girl? To face fifteen years in prison for selling drugs when the only thing she had ever sold in her life was at a lemonade stand? Yeah. Unlucky.

The women in prison were as tough as nails, and Zoey had to put a lid on her inner wimp and at least put on a façade of a street tough. She had to fight her inclinations to protest her innocence. Let them think that she had been a hard and heartless drug dealer. Cultivate the perfect scowl. Line every exchange with a string of profanities and display a reckless willingness to engage in a physical scuffle at a moment’s notice. She wasn’t involved in very many scuffles, and she certainly didn’t welcome them, but afterward, she couldn’t help but notice how they broke up the monotony of the years passing by.

Until one day, it was as if keeping up the tough act had sapped so much energy out of her that she could feel her strength draining away, a little bit at first, and then a flood of tiredness and weakness overcame her.

She was probably malnourished. The prison doctor was probably going to tell her that she had anemia and send her away with some iron pills.

“I’m sorry to say that it is a very pernicious form of leukemia. It is fairly advanced and it is untreatable. If I had to make a prognosis, I think that you still have another year, maybe a year and a half. It will be necessary for you to get your affairs in order. And I’m going to recommend you for an early release. You should not spend your final days in here.”

Did you just tell me that I’m about to die? I don’t want to die. I just want some iron pills.

And so, after eight and a half years of incarceration, an innocent woman was sentenced to freedom and death. Wearing an ill-fitting, oversized T-shirt and jeans, Zoey walked all the way from the prison exit to the bus station, where she would ride all the way to a halfway house just outside of Boston.

The first face that Zoey saw at the halfway house was a somewhat familiar one, although not necessarily one she had previously considered to be friendly. The ex-con’s name was Justine Fogg, and she had been released about one month earlier than Zoey had.

Justine was in her late thirties. Once, the scruffiest of prisoners, and still with a no-nonsense look about her, she had cleaned up very nicely. She took one look at Zoey and started cracking up.

“Well, don’t you look like a hot mess. I hope we’re going to be applying for the same jobs. I need someone to make me look good.”

While the words were a bit on the rough and combative side, Zoey recognized them for the prison culture welcome she had long become accustomed to.

“Are you saying that I could use some new clothes?”

“Well, that depends. Were you planning to apply for a job opening as a rag?”

Zoey walked over to a full-length mirror nearby. It was framed by cheap plastic. Its purpose was to allow the residents to double-check their grooming on their way out the door, all the better to ensure housing and job market victories.

The image looking back at her was no longer in a khaki prison-issued jumpsuit, but it was still pretty drab. Her near-black hair was tied back in a messy ponytail, and her body, which had once reached a respectable level of menacing athleticism, courtesy of the prison weight room regimen, had become considerably thinner and frailer. In her early twenties, she had been flattered when friends likened her looks to Sandra Bullock’s. That was a long time ago. Today – only true if Sandra was living under a bridge.

“I guess we have to start caring about how we look again. Yeah, yeah, I see there’s some room for improvement. But that’s not my priority right now.”

“Oh, yeah? What is?”

“Finding my daughter. I haven’t seen her since they took her away from me in the delivery room. She’ll be eight and a half now. And she won’t know me. She won’t know anything about me, except what her father has told her.”

“A few words of advice. Don’t kill him, no matter how much he deserves it. And don’t kidnap her. Both of those things will land you straight back at Western Mass. How did you get out so early, by the way? I thought you had some time left.”

Zoey succinctly explained her leukemia diagnosis and the consequent urgency of locating and spending the little time she had left with her daughter. Justine took in the information silently and drew her breath in sharply at the end of Zoey’s tale. No matter what their crimes, none of the women she had encountered in prison had been facing a death sentence.

“Okay, I was just gonna tell you that your hair looks like a rat’s nest, but you just took all the fun out of it.”

Inmates don’t get a whole lot more sentimental than that. Zooey was relieved to have found a potential ally.

*****

Zoey had always been good at saving money. Her job as a receptionist at a medical firm paid pretty decently, and in the five years before being convicted, she had managed to put away nearly 15,000 dollars. She was going to need every penny of it. Private detectives weren’t cheap, and it soon became clear that she’d need to hire someone to find her daughter.

His name was Vincent Dempsey. He was an ex-cop and not terribly happy to hear that she was an ex-con. He echoed Justine’s warning that she shouldn’t entertain the thought of kidnapping her own child for even a millisecond.

“I didn’t do it. The dealing charges. I didn’t do it. I spent over eight years in prison for something I didn’t do.”

Dempsey shrugged. “What’s that to me?”

“Because if you think that you’re returning a child to a horrible drug dealer, you might not try as hard. But that’s not me. That’s not who I am. That’s not what I am. I’m just a really unlucky woman who needs to hold my daughter in my arms and spend my last year on Earth with her.”

Zoey certainly didn’t look like a scumbag drug dealer. She just sounded like a heartsick, desperate woman. Dempsey took her case, warning that Dalton had probably hidden his tracks pretty well and it might turn out to be a very long search. It might take months. Zoey wanted to be reasonable, but she didn’t have time for a long search. She promised Dempsey a five-thousand-dollar bonus if he could find her daughter in under a month.

That was all the incentive that Dempsey needed to hear. He located Dalton and their child in twenty-one days flat.

“If he was out of state, you’d have some big problems with parole. You got lucky there. He’s right on the coast near the Cape. It’s a town called Oyster Cove. Beach town. Lots of tourists. But a good place for families. He’s got her in this school, summer camp kind of thing right now.”

Zoey’s heart was about to pound right out of her chest. “What’s her name? He would never tell me her name.”

“Sounds like a piece of work. Her name is Camille. At least he picked a pretty name, right? So, you want to see a photo?”

Zoey held the photo reverently, as if it were made of fragile glass. Camille. Camille. The child—her child—looked so young, so wonderfully young. All the time Zoey had been in prison, she had thought she wouldn’t see her daughter until she was a fifteen-year-old teenager, interested in dating and driving and full of teenage rebellions and cynicism. She had never thought that she’d be able to meet her daughter while she was still a wide-eyed little girl.

*****

Justine listened thoughtfully while Zoey rambled on about her uncertain plans.

“First, I’ve got to let my parole officer know that I’m staying in the state. Then I’ve got to get a bus ticket to Boston. Then I can change over and get a bus ticket to this Oyster Cove. Find a place to stay. Find out where they’re staying. Mr. Dempsey said that they’re living in a hotel. Like . . . permanently. But I have to figure what I’m going to say to her. ‘I really needed to see you, but don’t get attached to me because I’ll be dead in a year?’ What am I going to say to him? Can I keep my cool around this man who ruined my life? Who made me pay the price for his crimes? And who, if he is still dealing, shouldn’t be anywhere near our daughter? But if I’m not around and he’s not around, then who would take care of her?”

“It would help if you had a car,” Justine observed. “You can be in this Oyster Cove by tomorrow afternoon. And then it would help you get around town. Those small places never have good transportation.”

“It would be helpful. But I don’t.”

“But I do. What I don’t have is money in the bank So, listen up. My car. Your money. Road trip. I’m never going to find a job if I stay around here. All the employers know that we’re from the halfway house, and most of them aren’t willing to hire ex-cons. And the ones who are willing are already full up. I spent all that time in prison studying Excel and Word and PowerPoint and all that crap. I can type seventy words a minute. I know how to read legal papers. I should be able to get every kind of office job in the world. But . . . ‘Have you ever been convicted of a felony?’ And then it’s game over.

“You’re going to be lost out there, and you don’t have a lot of energy. I can see you getting a little bit worse every day. So, you help me out, and I’ll help you out. I can help you work out what your legal options are. Because he’s not going to give her up without a fight. You’re gonna need someone in your corner. Plus, you help me out with money now, and then after I get a job, I can help you out with rent and stuff so . . . you should be able to spend the time you have left with your daughter, not cooped up in some nine-to-five job.

“And I’ve always wanted to live on the coast. ‘Course, I hoped it would be LA. But I’m not really in a position to be fussy. Oyster Cove will do just fine. Whaddya say?”

It made a lot of sense. It was a sincere exchange of assistance between two people who really needed a break. Zoey did need someone in her corner. In just a few days, she would be confronting Dalton and meeting Camille. Both encounters filled her with anxiety. And yet, she couldn’t wait.

*****

The artsy beach town of Oyster Cove was not only a jarring contrast to the ugly concrete and barbed wire aesthetics of prison life, but to the drab halfway house and neighborhood as well. This was a tourist town in peak season, filled with people who were single-mindedly devoted to vacation and enjoyment. It was a town filled with galleries, clothing and jewelry boutiques, and a staggering array of public artwork that presented art as if it were . . . something important.

Perhaps those heady aesthetics did not extend to Zoey and Justine’s motel, just outside of town. It was a very solid, unremarkable classic facility called The Notel. In order to make their money stretch, they didn’t mind sharing a room with two twin beds. After prison, it was still an upgrade.

Justine advised Zoey to rest and get her bearings before confronting Dalton. Which Zoey would readily have agreed to if Dalton were the only one to be met. But she couldn’t stay away from Camille, not for a single day longer. The first morning in Oyster Cove, she had to meet her daughter.

The name of the hotel where her ex and her daughter lived was called The Grand Hotel. Zoey had expected it to be a seedy, dilapidated mockery of its name. Instead, it was a slice of Monte Carlo elegance transplanted to New England, a gilded oasis of luxury. The lobby’s high ceiling boasted a chandelier that looked like something out of Phantom of the Opera. The hotel was renowned up and down the coast for its restaurant, tea room, and bar. Even when the tourist season slowed down, there was always a steady buzz in the downstairs facilities.

The owner of the hotel was Franklin Churchill, who had only been resident in Oyster Cove for seven years. When he arrived, another real estate developer was in the process of renovating a historical hotel right on the boardwalk but had run into some cash problems and needed a partner. Mr. Churchill gladly stepped into the role. And as soon as the hotel was finished, he moved into it as his permanent home. Gourmet food, maid service . . . it was a pampered life that he gladly became accustomed to.

Later, the partner’s cash problems continued, and he was obliged to sell sole ownership of The Grand Hotel to Mr. Churchill.

But the most visible presence at the hotel was concierge Arthur Frost. It was as if the man never took a day off. He was unfailingly polite, a man of Old-World formality. He was probably judged by many to be a bit uptight. He put the highest priority on propriety and decorum. Behind his back, he knew that some of the other employees called him King Arthur, which he found quite appropriate and only pretended to be annoyed by.

In addition to Franklin Churchill and Dalton Spitz, the hotel had one other year-round resident. Her name was Esmeralda. She probably had a last name—doesn’t everyone? But she declined to provide one, and no one could bring themselves to press the matter. It wasn’t that they were frightened by her. Although, if they knew she was a witch, they probably would have been.

But she was intimidating. And eccentric. And persuasive—which is to say that her abilities included the power to compel others to bend to her will. And after tasting the exquisite creations of The Grand Hotel’s resident chef, she decided that it was an amenity that she wouldn’t mind coming home to on a nightly basis. Plus, housekeeping can really get old. Esmeralda was in her senior years, and like Franklin Churchill, she didn’t mind a bit of pampering.

Not to mention that between the guests and the staff and the management, there was sufficient vice in the air, under the façade of luxury and calm, to energize her.

The Grand Hotel had always enjoyed a busy summer season, but on this particular occasion, something very special was in the air. Hollywood actress Susan Sidwell had just arrived and would be staying for an entire month. She was the single individual to whom Oyster Cove most owed its current prosperity. As a twenty-five-year-old hot It Girl, she had singlehandedly put Oyster Cove on the national map fifteen years previously. While visiting the Cape, she took a little meandering road trip south and discovered Oyster Cove’s quirky and talented jewelry makers.

She purchased a mountain of jewelry and showcased them at every red-carpet appearance for the next several years. So much so that every designer and reporter in Hollywood had heard of the Oyster Cove treasures. And mainstream America became aware of them as well. The tourist numbers went through the roof, and every artist was able to do a thriving online business on the strength of the Oyster Cove brand. Susan Sidwell’s glowing patronage had entirely revived the town’s prosperity and future.

Thus, the hotel was at full capacity, filled with Susan’s entourage and a crowd of overeager super fans. There was even a lone paparazzo, from one of the LA tabloids, Cory Wyatt, who had been set to cover the story.

Zoey and Justine settled down in a far corner of the lobby, just taking in the loud, animated display of Susan walking through, surrounded by her people and being accosted by eager admirers, who all received gracious and patient attention.

“Ms. Sidwell, this is such a great pleasure to meet you. My name is Sherman Baretta, and you couldn’t possibly have a bigger fan.”

The other fans murmured in protest. How dare this man crown himself the biggest fan?

 “I came all the way out from Nevada just for the chance to see you,” Sherman gushed. “I was thinking of going to Europe or Hawaii for vacation, but when I heard you were going to be here, that was all I needed to know. I canceled all of those plans just for the chance to get a picture with you, shake your hand . . . just be under the same roof with you. It’s such a thrill.”

Some of the other fans shrugged, conceding. Nevada really was a long way to come.

“Sherman, there’s nothing I love more than getting an opportunity to meet and thank my fans. Every wonderful thing that has happened in my life is because of you all,” Susan assured him. “And I would love to take a few photos with you. Got your camera?”

The spectacle was a welcome distraction from the daunting task at hand. Now that the time had come to go upstairs and meet her daughter, Zoey was frankly terrified. Private detective Mr. Dempsey had provided a room number. All Zoey had to do was to summon up the courage to go upstairs and knock. Justine waited patiently, realizing it was a momentous occasion.

But somehow, they, or perhaps their scruffy clothing, attracted the attention of the hotel’s gatekeeper. Concierge Arthur Frost appeared in front of them.

“Ladies, can I help you?”

Zoey shook her head. “We’re fine. I just came to visit my daughter. She’s staying in room 206.”

Mr. Frost’s eyes widened with recognition. “Camille. Yes, yes . . . I do see the resemblance. Lovely girl. I see she takes much more after you than . . . ” Frost’s lips curled back in the mildest grimace. “her father.”

Eureka. Here was someone who knew both Camille and Dalton and could give her some real information on how her daughter had been doing. “Does . . . he treat her well?”

“It appears you have not been in contact very recently. I had actually believed . . . . I beg your pardon. Clearly, there was a miscommunication.”

“How long have they lived here?”

“Almost two years. How much longer, I couldn’t say. Mr. Spitz and Mr. Churchill, the owner, seem to have reached a mutually beneficial accommodation, and there does not appear to be an end date to Mr. Spitzer’s residence.” Although Mr. Frost evidently wished there were. Even a man of his control and restraint couldn’t hide his distaste for Dalton Spitz.

However, now that Zoey had spoken to Mr. Frost, she couldn’t very well continue to hide out in the lounge. Justine sent her off with a fist bump and a few words of encouragement. “If you’ve got a few grand left, you can always hire someone to make him disappear. As long as you don’t do it yourself. What? Bad things happen to bad people. That’s all I’m sayin’.”