I haven’t had one of these in years!” Dani said as she chewed on a miniature candy cane. “Almost forgot what they tasted like.”
Waiting in the mile-long line to visit the FAO Schwarz Santa Claus in downtown Seattle, Val ignored her mother as she held Simon and Lydia in place with an iron grip, both children pulling in opposite directions. Mentally, she was too busy fighting the permanent sick feeling that lingered in her stomach after her fight with Max that morning, and the memory of those horrible pictures he’d shown her. It took all her concentration to focus on anything else, and she would’ve paid a small fortune not to be surrounded by screaming children, blaring Christmas music, and her mother’s idiosyncrasies.
Val sighed as the line inched forward for the first time in ten minutes. After advancing two feet, it stopped.
“Oh, come on,” Val mumbled under her breath. “Pick two things you want from Santa and move on, Jesus. How hard is that?”
She should have hired a Santa Claus impersonator to come to their house and made up an excuse about Saint Nick getting lost on his way to the North Pole. It’s not like she and Max couldn’t afford it. But no, she had to drag them to the toy store to get the “real” experience, as if having her mother around spurred in her a need to show her kids how normal parents acted. Big mistake.
In fact, she should’ve canceled the ill-advised trip all together. She pushed back another wave of anxious nausea. How could she explain her involvement with Sten to Max? She hadn’t actually cheated on her husband, but she’d violated his trust by having any kind of relationship with Sten, sexual or not, without telling him. Maybe she could convince him to sit down with her at a private dinner at home, sending the kids to bed early and bribing Dani to stay in her room with a pile of candy canes—
“I wanna look at Santa’s workshop,” Simon whined, pointing to a play area off to the side of the extended platform the whole Santa operation was set up on. The workshop included toys and games to keep kids busy while their parents saved their spots in line for two or more hours.
“I won’t be able to see you from over here,” Val said. With the crush of holiday shoppers all around them, she could barely see five feet ahead of her.
From behind her, Jamal said, “I’ll take them.”
Val frowned. It was one thing to leave the kids alone with the nanny in the safety of their own home, but quite another to let them wander off in a public place. Eleanor was still out there, being crazy and doing God knew what evil things.
“Please?” Simon and Lydia said in unison, their big puppy-dog eyes appealing to her softer side.
She knelt in front of them and asked at a volume only they could hear, “If I let you go over there, what will happen?”
“We’ll play,” Lydia said matter-of-factly.
“Then what? Will you be safe?”
They looked at each other, then back at her, meeting her gaze with blank stares as if they didn’t understand her question. Despite their preternatural abilities, they were still only children. And they couldn’t see every future event—yet. Thank God for that.
Simon smiled. “We’ll be okay, Mommy.”
It was the best response she could hope for. With some reluctance, she nodded at Jamal. “I’ll text you when I can actually see Santa. Come back if there are any problems at all. And don’t let them out of your sight.”
Jamal nodded back an affirmative. He knew the drill by now. Val let go of the twins’ wrists, and they shot like cannonballs into the crowd toward Santa’s workshop, Jamal rushing after them. Glancing at her phone, she considered calling Max. The ambient noise was too great for a conversation, unfortunately. They really needed to talk.I’m sorry, she texted him. I can explain. Plz call me. I love you.
Sighing, she was about to shove the phone back into her coat pocket when it rang in her hand. Her heart lifted—thank God, Max wanted to talk—then sank when she saw it was from “Asshole,” her call sign for Sten. Maybe he called to gloat about those fucking photos.
She turned away from her mother for as much privacy as she could get. “What?” she snapped as she held the phone to one ear while plugging the other with a finger to damp down the background noise.
“Why are you always so full of holiday cheer?” Sten said. “It’s like Santa shoved a candy cane of happiness up your ass.”
“What do you want, Sten?”
“Thought it might interest you to know we got a hit off Eleanor Fatou’s fingerprints. Multiple hits, actually.”
Val gasped. Yes. “And?”
“Katie Lee Edwards, picked up for prostitution in Michigan fourteen years ago, then again three years later as Donna Lords in Montana. Questioned in the disappearance of a couple of her Johns, but never charged. About seven years ago, as Julie Mars, police questioned her in connection to a nightclub fire that killed twelve people in California. Then six years ago, questioned again about a commuter bus crash in Chicago, three people dead. Four years ago, Lisa Higgins, questioned about a boating accident off the coast of Florida, three people drowned. Two years ago, same drill: Rachel Peirce, two guys found in a Dumpster behind the restaurant where she worked.”
He took a breath, as if rattling off the long list of Eleanor’s alter egos had left him winded. “And there you go. Never charged with anything. No known family. No history of terrorism. Just always in the wrong place at the wrong time, poor girl. Kind of like you.”
“Don’t compare me to her.” That woman left a trail of destruction wherever she went…which was kind of like Val. But the big difference was Val never caused any of it, whereas Eleanor definitely did, whether or not it could be pinned on her. “So you’re going to pick her up for the Thornton Building bombing?”
“That was terrorists, remember? I don’t have an excuse.”
She scoffed. “Bullshit.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Bring her in.”
“One, we don’t have a current address for her on file. Two, I don’t work for you.”
“Who do you work for, Sten? People who like to take pictures? People who like to torture Max and me for fun? Is that what you want from me? To see me suffer?”
He responded with silence, a rarity for Sten. After a few seconds, he said, “You have yourself a fun family day,” and hung up.
Rubbing the bridge of her nose, she slipped the phone into her pocket and tried not to scream. Eleanor had literally gotten away with murder, over and over and over again. How was Val supposed to stop a woman who really did seem protected by a divine force? Be nice if Max could help her figure this out, but of course he wouldn’t, not with those fucking pictures still fresh in his mind. The second she got out of that damn toy store, she’d find Max, force him to sit down with her and talk about all the things that had driven them apart recently. She just had to make it through the next hour or so of picture-line agony.
Tapping her foot, she glanced at Dani finishing off her candy cane. “You really don’t remember what mint tastes like?”
Dani shrugged. “I had a bigger one a few days ago, but they taste different than the tiny ones. I don’t remember a lot of things. I don’t recall the last time I celebrated Christmas. I do remember when I got you and Chloe matching My Little Pony dolls, though. Always had to get you girls two identical things. Otherwise, you’d fight over the same damn one.” She smiled and shook her head as if recalling a fond memory. Touching Val’s shoulder, she said, “Remember that, pumpkin?”
“I spend a lot of time trying to forget the past, actually.” Val took a breath and tried to calm her anger at her mother’s selective rose-colored memories. Of course Dani remembered the good things and ignored the bad—because she’d caused a lot of the bad ones.
Dani’s grin fell away. “Oh.” She bit her lip and cast her gaze downward. “I wish you’d tell me what I can do to make things right.”
“What do you want me to say, Mom?” Val tried to keep her voice down so the crush of people surrounding them wouldn’t get an earful. “You disappeared for thirty years. Your own daughter committed suicide and you couldn’t be bothered to go to the funeral. How do you make that right?”
Dani blinked away tears, but thankfully didn’t burst into sobs in the middle of the store, as was her usual MO since waltzing back into Val’s life.
“I went to Chloe’s grave once,” Dani said with a trembling voice. “I wasn’t on meds yet, so moments of lucidity were few and far between. But I had one, and then I learned one of my children was dead. So I found out where you and your father laid her to rest, and I traveled there to see it for myself.”
Val looked into her mother’s wet eyes, trying to gauge Dani’s sincerity, but all she saw were her own eyes, the ones she’d inherited, staring back at her. “When?”
“I don’t remember exactly. Ten years ago maybe? It was raining that day, a soft sprinkle. The air smelled like dead leaves. The ground felt mushy under my feet, but the grass sparkled. And I remember thinking I could easily dig into the soft ground with my bare hands until I reached the casket, opened it, and lay inside, then covered myself up with dirt, and no one would know what happened. No one would miss me. I wouldn’t miss me.
“I actually started grabbing fistfuls of earth until a cemetery worker caught me and told me to leave. Then after that, I don’t remember. But if I’d been in my right mind, that’s what I would’ve done—lay down with your sister and never left. That’s where I’d be today.”
As “Deck the Halls” played through the intercom above them, Val imagined what it might be like to wake up from a coma only to discover one of your children had died. Falling back into the coma might be preferable. Her mother’s story made sense. In the same situation, she doubted she’d act any differently.
“I’m glad you didn’t do that,” Val said, her words soft, “and you’re here with us now instead.”
“Oh, pumpkin, you don’t know how happy it makes me to hear you say that.”
For the first time in thirty years, Val smiled lovingly at her mother.
“Sometimes I imagine I still have two daughters, like opposites, and you just don’t know about each other—”
“Can you two move up, please?” an irritated voice said behind them.
Val turned to see a balding middle-aged man scowling at them as he held a fussy little boy in place. In front of her, the line had advanced another two feet.
“Yeah, yeah,” she muttered as she stepped forward to fill the gap. She looked back at the man again, something about him tickling her memory. He looked familiar…Where had she seen him before?
Then she remembered—her last vision with Max. He’d been one of the people she had seen die, falling to his death before being buried by debris.
With her heart suddenly in her throat, she scanned the crowd around her. There was the Asian man who would be crushed to death, twenty feet behind her. The woman who would hit the ground so hard she’d bounce lingered to Val’s far left, chatting on a cell phone. And eight groups ahead of them, the man wearing the Rudolph sweater with the nose that lit up stood with a family of four in matching outfits.
The platform they all stood on was about to collapse.