Pretty Ugly Lies: a gripping and chilling domestic noir Read online

  Pretty Ugly Lies

  Pamela Crane

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Epilogue

  The Girl Who Got Kidnapped

  A Note from Bloodhound Books:

  A Final Word

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright © 2018 Pamela Crane

  The right of Pamela Crane to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in 2018 by Tabella House

  Republished in 2018 by Bloodhound Books

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publisher or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  www.bloodhoundbooks.com

  This book is dedicated to all the unsung heroes – my fellow mothers around the world. You’re forged with fire but stronger than steel.

  Embrace the small moments , love yourself each day and always remember you’re not alone.

  I did learn something about insanity while I was down there. People go crazy, not because they are crazy, but because it’s the best available option at the time.

  -Gabrielle Zevin , All These Things I’ve Done

  1

  15 Oleander Way

  Blood draped around me like a winter coat, thick enough to taste, feel, wear. My fingers were intertwined with my dead husband’s, two platinum wedding bands of regret touching in a soft clink. My other hand clung to a knife with the lifeblood of my children smeared up to the hilt. I sat there, crouched in a puddle of crimson, realizing only one thing amid the blanket of fear that suffocated me: this was only the beginning of the end.

  It was the beginning of death and the end of life. At least the life I knew. In their last flutter of heartbeats, I was swallowed up into a new life. A widowed life. A childless life. And I had wanted it mere hours ago—to be free of them all. Now suddenly it was more than I could bear.

  Rising from my dead husband’s side, I dropped his limp hand as I shifted one step away. Other than the bloody ooze crawling across the blond acacia floor, the living room appeared immaculate. Every tasteful knickknack in its place, every sofa pillow plump and lint-free, every toy hidden from view. Even the framed art purchased from Pottery Barn hung perfectly straight on the walls.

  All these beautiful things I’d spent a lifetime accumulating, putting in just the right place, tending to with dust cloths and lemon-scented cleaner, suddenly it all felt so meaningless. All of it a waste of time.

  Where were my family pictures? Where were my children’s stacks of schoolwork spread all over the dining room table? Where were the piles of food-encrusted dishes from a home-cooked family brunch, or dirty cleats scattering blades of grass and chunks of mud all over the entryway?

  A museum, that was my home. I lived in a hollow museum—or perhaps a mausoleum was more fitting. No signs of life, no signs of family. Just a sterile block of walls and ceilings and pastoral artwork. This was the lifestyle suburban families like mine slavishly followed—organized and neat, down to the fescue grass in the yard cut to a recommended height of three inches. But darkness hid behind closed doors, climbed up the walls, wove a web that would eventually entrap them in misery.

  I’d been caught in that web.

  As I heard the distant police sirens screaming, I knew they were coming for me. I imagined the headline: Mom Snaps and Murders Family. Such headlines plagued the news more and more these days. Why? Why were we all losing it?

  Was it because we felt neglected, taken advantage of, unloved? Were mothers being torn in too many directions, expected to be more, more than just a mom? A maid, a chef, a tutor, a breadwinner, a chauffeur, a prostitute. Because that’s what we were, weren’t we? Expected to give sex in exchange for a husband’s paycheck? And if we didn’t, well, he shopped somewhere else.

  I looked at my husband, a man who a lifetime ago fulfilled me, charmed me, enthralled me. Where had he gone? Where had we gone? A part of me wanted to say good riddance; the other part of me ached to breathe life back into his mouth that had wounded me so deeply.

  Blinking blue and red lights illuminated the living room. They arrived faster than I expected. I had placed the call mere minutes ago, though to me it felt like grueling hours. I considered going back upstairs to where my children’s bodies lay—draped across the playroom sofa and spread-eagled on the floor—in front of a moronic kiddie show on TV I had forgotten to turn off, restful as if they were sleeping. But I knew better. Their last breaths had departed for good. I had checked, just to be sure.

  Circling my dead husband’s body, a single piece of paper fluttered in my breezy wake. I picked it up, gently rubbing the bruise spreading across my knuckles, then skimmed the familiar handwriting. The first lines captured exactly how I felt, though I would never admit it aloud:

  Sorry isn’t enough anymore. Sorry can’t fix what’s broken.

  Sometimes a sacrifice is the only way to start over again. This is one of those times.

  My legs grew unsteady as the stench of blood saturated the room. Exhausted yet eerily calm, I sat on my overpriced Italian leather living room sofa, waiting. From upstairs, the bombastic sound effects from SpongeBob SquarePants drifted down to the first floor. The kids always did like to blast the TV volume, no matter how many times I screamed at them to turn it down. No more.

  I wondered if I’d ever hear children’s programming again.

  I closed my eyes to the death, though I could still smell it, taste it. You never expect death to be so palpable until you experience it firsthand. My children’s faces flashed through my mind, but not images of toothless smiles or that childish mischievous glow. All good memories were long gone, none left to unearth. Lately it just all seemed to fall apart—all the smiles and giggles and bright-eyed joy vanished in the chaos of our flat daily lives.

  All work, no play, as they say.

  We had lost the idea of family somewhere along the path of work and responsibilities, then slipped into becoming cohabitants.

  How could that be? In the catalogue of my mind there was nothing fond to reminisce about. I couldn’t even remember the last time our family felt whole, and that painful thought dampened my eyes. Now it never would be again.

 
Blinking my eyelids open, I pushed away thoughts of the kids. I couldn’t stand reliving their vacant eyes and gaping mouths frozen in a silent scream anymore.

  I tucked the letter in my pocket, unsure what to do with it. My palms, sticky with blood, were folded primly in my lap as I waited. Waiting for the cops, waiting for the turmoil to settle, waiting to be led out of this upside-down world and into something that made more sense. My thoughts lapped gently over what I’d lost, but also what I’d gained—the ability to feel something again.

  Where had it gone for so long?

  The tears were streaming now, but I didn’t bother to swipe them away. I needed this. I needed to let it out. I’d been fighting to keep my sanity for too long, evidenced by my damnable, throbbing, discolored hand. Eventually every battle must end, but the casualties linger on. My family paid the price for my misery, and I felt their sacrifice. They were my collateral damage. My anguish had bubbled just below the surface for far too long, the silence and anger and fear of losing everything just one sob away. And that sob was now.

  I heaved, my shoulders crumbling under the pressure of each strained breath, and I couldn’t think, couldn’t feel, couldn’t do anything but weep. It’d be the last time I’d cry today, if ever again, so I better make it count.

  In the recesses of my darkened soul I had thought about this day. I had thought often of what freedom would feel like, no strings binding me, no baggage hefted on my back. No husband, no kids—it was a fantasy I guessed all bored, frustrated wives and mothers imagined now and then but didn’t actually want. I, however, almost yearned for it sometimes. But I never told anyone; no, I never showed my true face. It was too horrible a thought to voice, giving it purchase and power in the realm of reality: I wish I’d never married. I wish I’d never had kids. I never said those things. Nevertheless, the wish was there, hidden among my inner shadows.

  No husband, no kids—now my wish had come true. And yet, it didn’t feel liberating. The man I gave my body, my youth, my everything to, who used me and abused me, lay facedown in an endless slumber. I should be celebrating getting rid of this loser, user, abuser, and yet I mourned him.

  And the leeching kids. Always whining, always fighting, always screaming, always complaining, always take-take-taking … Shouldn’t it feel like a burden had been lifted, to know my time would be mine to sleep in, to eat while my food was hot, to cook what I liked, to clean and know it’ll stay clean, to put on music and actually hear it, to watch the shows I wanted to watch, to live a day for myself for once? But I didn’t feel relief. I felt a complicated blend of regret and release. I felt an emptiness, as if an appendage had been ripped from my very own body.

  Yet I had wanted this, hadn’t I? I’d never uttered it aloud, but the daily effort of loving a family that didn’t love me back had ground me into dust.

  My macabre ruminations were pierced by the sound of my front door swinging open, slamming against the wall behind it as a herd of police officers rushed into my home followed by paramedics who would prove useless.

  Just as the barrage of questions floated off the officer’s tongue, I regained my composure, wiped away the tears, and prepared to tell the story of the day my soul died and awakened a monster …

  Chapter 2

  Jo Trubeau

  Forest Hills Park

  Before …

  My life was the tide. Some extreme lows, some intense highs, but all in all, it was steady and predictable. Even my thoughts drifted like the ocean, ebbing and flowing seamlessly, only occasionally crashing onto the shore of my brain when I realized I forgot to turn on the Crock-Pot or iron my husband’s clothes for work.

  Yes, my life was a perfect, quiet ripple of water. Until today.

  Today my life morphed into a riptide dragging me out to sea. And it nearly drowned me.

  You never see it coming when you’re in the thick of it, but with the clarity of distance it’s easy to look back and know what went wrong.

  For me it all went wrong on an otherwise normal Saturday morning at Forest Hills Park, the park that would forever change me, permanently altering my memory. Never again would I look at that place without the accompanying pang of my heartbeat racing, my breath catching, my fear mounting, my world ending.

  The metal was cold even through my Guess jeans as I sat on the bleachers, along with two dozen other mothers, watching Preston’s soccer team haphazardly kick the ball twenty feet here, twenty feet there, eventually making it down the field before another parent’s shining-star soccer player intercepted it. Then the whole process began again heading in the other direction. An exhaustive production of mundanity and futility, at least for those watching.

  All of us soccer moms lived in the ideally suburban Oleander Way neighborhood, a long stretch of matching but stately homes that advertised an upper-crust lifestyle. Manicured yards and manicured nails; designer clothes and designer boobs—we were the Kardashians-meet-the-Joneses that everyone else was trying to keep up with. With Mercedes and BMWs parked in every power-washed driveway, Oleander Way families touted wealth, beauty, and perfection.

  One of those families was mine.

  Time is a harsh mistress. People are always complaining that there’s just never enough time to get everything done. I seemed endlessly gifted with Time, so much so that I often lost track of whole days. To me Time was a wonderful maze that I could get lost in with reading, cooking, cleaning, and homemaking. One day blended into the next until Saturday morning arrived, the only difference being the addition of my successful husband Jay, the eye-candy of joggers trolling for a distraction from their workaholic husbands. Notorious for his shirtless gardening, and tanned, muscled chest, if Jay was tending to the yard, you bet there’d be a bevy of bored housewives wanting to tend to him happening by. I’d see them circling the block as Jay mulched or mowed, and I’d smirk with pride knowing the sidewalk was as close as they’d ever get.

  Not that I minded being the envy of the block. We were unbreakable, impenetrable. Jay and I enjoyed a perfect marriage in our perfect home with our perfect children.

  I loved my life. I loved my husband. I loved my children. What wasn’t there to love when everything was so perfect?

  While Amelia and Abby played at the nearby playground—slipping down the yellow slide, climbing up the red ladders, running across the blue bridge—I held an open book on my lap, its title—A Secondhand Life—pressed against my thigh. Every few pages I glanced up to see where on the field Preston had aimlessly wandered. After this season he would have fulfilled his obligation to his father and thus be freed of his imprisonment to the soccer field. I knew the poor boy couldn’t wait to toss those cleats in the Goodwill bag once and for all.

  As my attention was swept away from Preston and the primary-colored playhouse the girls had been climbing on for the past hour, Time lost any allure for me. One moment I was watching Abby adorning her little sister’s hair with bouquets of dandelions, the next moment Abby ran toward me screaming my name—and I never caught the moments in between.

  “Mommy,” she said breathlessly, running up behind me where I sat in the front row. I always preferred easy access to the ground for a quick escape once the game was over. Not that I was antisocial, but after hours of sitting uncomfortably in the sun while my fair skin freckled and burned, the last thing I wanted to do was stand uncomfortably in the sun several minutes more, forced to make idle chitchat about a sale going on at Macy’s or where I got those gorgeous earrings. Jewelry always served up conversational fare among these types of women. Occasionally it’d segue into suspected infidelity or someone else’s financial woes. As far as I was concerned, gossip should be reserved for during the game, not after.

  “Mommy, can I go see the puppies?” Abby finally said after a snatch of breath.

  “What puppies?” I asked, expecting to see my five-year-old and three-year-old hand in hand, their matching blond curls swept up off their sweaty necks. I secretly loved that they took after me with their natural
golden waves, inquisitive blue eyes, and sprinkle of freckles. But my three-year-old wasn’t attached to her sister like she always was. I glanced behind Abby. No sign of Amelia. “Where’s your sister?”

  “With the puppies,” Abby said matter-of-factly, as if it should have been obvious. “Can I go, too?”

  Now I was standing—I don’t recall doing so—tossing my book on my seat and briskly walking toward the playground, my eyes searching. “What do you mean ‘with the puppies’? Where are these puppies?”

  “I don’t know.” The whine in her voice scratched along my eardrums like nails clawing a blackboard.

  “You don’t know?” Suddenly my voice tensed, a tone I rarely used.

  I didn’t want to overreact, but Abby’s ambiguity was forcing my concern. She knew better than to leave her little sister unattended. Even in our own backyard I had a rule about staying together. An HOA-approved fence—the Homeowners’ Association was known for its outlandish rules and was quick to fine rule-breakers—could have easily resolved that issue, but Jay’s tightfistedness with a dollar, despite his seven-figure income as a CFO, buried that option before I could build a case for it.