Dear Carrie,
I was both happy and sad to hear from you this weekend. Happy because it’s been too long and I missed you. Sad because of what your letter told me. He has sucked you back in. I would say I don’t know how, but I guess that would be wrong. I do know how. He is who he is. Nobody says no to him. Well, nobody says no to him without paying for it, anyway.
Maybe there is a way for you to get out. It can’t be as bleak as it seems.
Come to Oildale. I have found a wonderful church home. You could live with me. You and Milo and little Nikki. We could be a family. I know it’s not impossible to get out, because I did it, Carrie.
Think about it. Please?
B
I had opened all the letters and ordered them according to their postmarks. There had been many of them, over a period of about six months. I wasn’t able to understand everything they talked about—it would have been really helpful if I’d had Mom’s letters to Brandi, too—but I was able to piece together a few things.
Mom had reached out to Brandi. She’d confided in her about going back to Hollywood Dreams. She’d felt trapped. Brandi had offered her a way out, but it wasn’t until she was pregnant and had nowhere else to go that she finally took Brandi up on her offer.
What Bill Hollis had over Mom was a bit of a mystery. But by reading Brandi’s letters, it became clearer what Mom had done.
Dear Carrie,
Yes, I heard about the fire. I had no idea, honey. I’m so sorry. Accidents happen, and you can’t take all the blame for that. It wasn’t your fault. You didn’t drop the spotlight. You didn’t leave the props lying around. It is a shame—although not at all surprising—that he is using the accident as a way to get you back into the business.
You don’t have to do this. You have Milo and little Nikki to think of. What can he really do to you if you just refuse? Surely you’re not worried about him ruining your film career. With the failure of Eleven, it seems that it’s already been ruined. I hate to say that, but I’m afraid you need truth right now. And the truth is, that man isn’t your key to salvation.
You know who is.
Come see me.
B
I read them all. Every sentence begging Mom to come to Oildale. Begging Mom to get out of Hollywood Dreams. Begging Mom to get away from Bill Hollis before she ended up broken or dead.
Begging Mom to think—just, please, think—about Milo and Nikki. She was supposed to love us. She was getting seduced by Hollis power. She was too scared to see her way out. Brandi offered her a way out, over and over and over again.
And she chose to stay.
Why?
I found a letter dated about four months before Peyton’s birthday.
Dear Carrie,
Thank you for meeting me for lunch. It was so great to see you! Little Dru absolutely loves the race car you brought him.
I paused, touching the word Dru. Imagining him as a two-year-old sitting on my mother’s lap—another link between us—chewing on his fingers. Imagining him sitting on the floor of Brandi’s trailer, pushing Hot Wheels around the floor, making zooming noises. If he had been allowed to stay with Brandi, what would have been different? Would we have still crossed paths? Would there have been something more there?
I read on.
I hate to see you cry, honey. You know that. It tears me up inside. I wish you could see how strong and beautiful and perfect you are. I wish you could see that God’s plan for you does not include Bill Hollis. I tried to tell you when you argued that what you’re doing isn’t hooking—that what you’re doing is only seeing him—that it was a bad idea. I know firsthand what happens when Bill Hollis decides you’re one of his special ones. A lot of us know, Carrie. I’m just the only one who had the strength to keep my baby.
I understand you wanting this pregnancy to be a secret. I really do. Why jeopardize things with Milo when he’s the one you actually love? And I think you’re right—he wouldn’t understand that you can’t terminate. But I understand. I obviously couldn’t do it either, no matter who fathered my Dru. And I’m so glad I didn’t. Dru is the light of my life.
Come to Oildale. Let me help you. Let me raise this baby. You can go back to Milo and Nikki. You will be able to see your baby as often as you like, and I will have the side benefit of getting to see you. It’s a win-win. I promise to treat the baby like my own until you’re able to make a break from Bill Hollis. We can worry about what to tell Milo then.
I know you don’t feel ready to make a decision yet, but like I said at lunch, you’re showing. Pretty soon both Milo and Bill will know that you’re pregnant, and I’m afraid that would be very bad for you. You need to decide right away.
The offer always stands.
B
The letters stopped then, for about six months. When Brandi commenced writing again, she was writing to a shattered version of my mom. Stroking her from miles away, telling her everything would be okay, telling her that she did the right thing for her beautiful daughter, Peyton, even if it didn’t seem like it just now.
Warning her to stay strong and stay far away from Bill Hollis.
Surely Mom had learned her lesson. Surely she understood that messing with Bill Hollis was something that could ruin your life. She’d had to give up a child, for God’s sake. She knew that he was dangerous.
The letters continued. Peyton had smiled for the first time. She was saying mama. She crawled. She walked. She loved the birthday gifts Mom sent. And then a curious one.
Dear Carrie,
I can’t believe the news. He married Vanessa? Who does that? She is so crazy, I can’t believe even he would fall for it. Does he know about the little girl she left behind with her ex-husband? Probably not. God help that child. If it isn’t demon possessed, I would be shocked.
I would have laughed if it hadn’t been so prophetic. Luna wasn’t demon possessed, but she was about as close as someone could be.
The letter went on to talk about Peyton and referenced an included photo that I didn’t see in the envelope. Mom must have taken it out and kept it somewhere. Hidden it from Dad. Only Dad had all these letters, so nothing was hidden. Or maybe he didn’t find them until after she died. Either way, the question remained: Why did he keep them?
The last letter in the pile wasn’t from Brandi. And it wasn’t addressed to Mom, either. It had come to Dad. And had no return address.
But as soon as I pulled it out of the envelope, the slanted words lit up, not in their usual colors, but in a sunset orange with brown spots. A color memory. Africa. Kenya, to be specific. I went cold as I was taken back to the day in Bill Hollis’s office, when I found his hollow globe, a split across Kenya, stuffed with handwritten star ratings of his conquests. Notes. And invoices for abortions.
I would recognize Bill Hollis’s handwriting anywhere.
And he had written to Dad, a month before Brandi’s first letter to Mom.
Dear Mr. Kill,
I have received your message regarding your inability to pay for the damages you have caused my studio. You are correct that insurance will cover much of the accident. But insurance won’t cover it all. Your actions have cost more than a set and props. Your actions—no, your negligence has cost me the movie of a lifetime. It is an immeasurable loss. Your refusal to pay is unacceptable.
Let me be clear about one thing. You were only involved in the project at all because your wife insisted on it. If I wanted her, I’d have to use your subpar services, too. Had I known you were going to send my movie quite literally up in smoke, I would have gotten another director.
You should be very careful what enemies you make in this town, Mr. Kill. I do not lose. Remember, you are not the only one indebted to me. I will get my money from you, or from your wife, one way or another. I have other jobs for her. Jobs she performed for me long before you came along. She is quite good at what she does. Although I doubt very much you would want to see her in action.
My lawyer will be in touch with you regarding a payment plan.
The letter was finished with a scribble that was mostly illegible but came at me in glittery purple. The Hollis name.
I read the letter a second time, and then a third, and then let it fall to the bed. The orange and brown, the sparkly lilac pulsed up at me, taunting me. All these years, I’d thought my life was relatively normal, save for this one thing. My mom’s murder. A huge thing, yes, but in my mind it had always been random. It had always been the bad luck of the Kill family.
But now I was beginning to grasp the truth: that Mom was caught up in something bigger than she’d ever imagined. That she wanted out but felt trapped. That she was paying for someone else’s mistake.
That someone else was my father.
Angrily, I brushed the letters off the bed. They fluttered to the floor, appearing no more threatening than any other piece of paper. They turned the carpet around them an inky, rusty boil of betrayal and outrage. It smoldered, making me feel physically ill. I could hear my dad puttering around downstairs, opening and closing the refrigerator, scooting chairs around, whistling. As if his life had never been anything but perfect.
I flopped back onto my pillow, trying to get the letters out of my range of vision, and stared at the ceiling. My eyes burned and watered, not with sadness or disappointment, but with anger.
I understood what had happened now.
My father found out about my mom’s past. He found out she was sleeping with Bill Hollis. He found out she was pregnant, and that she had hidden the pregnancy from him and given the baby to Brandi. He found out everything. He burned down the movie set to ruin her. Only that didn’t work.
And now she was gone and he was the only one who knew everything. The only one. Not even Bill Hollis knew everything. Not at the time she was killed.
The police had a statement that I had gone to my friend’s house and he and Mom were going out on a date night.
Dad had lied about where he’d been when my mother was murdered. Why? And why would he pretend to know nothing about Bill Hollis when they actually had a lengthy history? Why wouldn’t he point the police to the Hollises, who had threatened them both?
Maybe because he knew Bill Hollis wasn’t the one who did it. Maybe because he knew how guilty he looked, and pretending to be in the dark about her affair was the one thing he hoped would keep the police from discovering the missing motive that they needed to bring charges.
You don’t have anything.
Maybe he really had killed my mother.
And he’d kept the evidence like a sick, murdering freak.