A Slow Ruin Read online

  Another raindrop made waves in my drink. I was ready for the check, but Oliver seemed unfazed by the weather.

  “You think Vera realized it’s not normal to do a full blood panel in order to go to lacrosse camp?” Oliver’s eyebrow bowed upward.

  I huffed. “I’m pretty sure she knows something’s up.”

  “What about Eliot? He’s only eight. I’m not sure he’ll understand that his little sister is sick. And I don’t want him to be freaked out.”

  “We don’t need to go into great detail, Ollie. Just the basics.” The basics. Another subjective word. How basic could we get when trying to explain to the kids that their three-year-old sister was dying? All she knew from her trusting perspective was that several times a week she got to play games with her new nurse friends at the hospital while hooked up to the dialysis machine. “I don’t want them being angry at us for not telling them sooner. It feels like we’re lying to them.”

  “Since when have you felt bad about lying to the kids, Felicity? We’ve been doing it since they were born.”

  I shrugged the implication away. It was date night; we weren’t supposed to be fighting.

  “Speaking of the kids, do you think I should check on them?” The clouds darkened with a final warning. I was as ready to change the subject as I was to avoid the rain. “Maybe I should call Vera to make sure they’re okay.”

  My phone was already out of my purse, my fingers swiping to dial. Oliver rested his hand on mine, stopping me.

  “Hey, stop worrying. The kids are fine. We’re on a date. Let’s enjoy it while we can.” He grinned, creasing the face that wasn’t quite movie-star handsome, but close enough. A face I still loved waking up to even after two decades together.

  “You’re right, Ollie. I can’t help it. I’m petrified something will happen to Sydney while we’re out and Vera won’t know what to do.”

  “You worry too much, Felicity,” Oliver replied. “They’re probably just watching a movie and eating junk food. Besides, Vera’s a capable girl. She knows what she’s doing.”

  “Yeah, I know. But have you noticed something…different about her lately?”

  I couldn’t quite pin down what it was. Not the typical teen sullenness or mood swings or rebellion. It was something else. Something darker.

  Oliver scraped his fork across his plate, scooping up the last morsel of his cheesecake. I pushed what remained of my tiramisu toward him to finish off. “No. What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know. She just seems…quieter than usual.”

  “Isn’t that a good thing? You’re always telling the kids to keep the noise down. When they do, you think something’s wrong. There’s no pleasing you, Felicity.”

  “Not true. I’m easy to please, if you’d take a minute to bother trying.” In a mutter I added, “You have no problem pleasing everyone else.” I shouldn’t have said it. The jab was unnecessary when we were having such a good time on our first date night in months. Well, good up until now.

  “Seriously? You’re bringing her up again?” He stabbed his fork into the tiramisu. Tossed the last bite into his mouth. Shoved the empty plate to the other side of the table. The fork skidded off and jangled on the deck floor. Heads turned.

  “Well, as your wife, it bothers me that you flirt with Marin. She’s your brother’s wife and my best friend.”

  Oliver slammed his fist down, upsetting his water glass. “How do I flirt with her?”

  I should have stopped right there. Instead, I plummeted right off the edge. “You two are constantly whispering and laughing and touching each other. It’s inappropriate. I’m not the only one who notices it; your brother and parents do too. And I’m sure Vera does, which may be why she’s acting so strange, seeing her father blatantly flirting with her aunt.”

  “So the whole family is talking about me behind my back?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Yes, you did.” Oliver raised his hand, motioning to the shrink-wrapped waitress. “Check please.”

  With a dip of her chin, the waitress stooped to pick up the fork and was off.

  “This is supposed to be a fun night out, and I really don’t want to fight about this. Whatever flirting you think I’m doing, it’s all in your dirty little mind. If it bothers you how I act around Marin, then let’s cancel family dinners with them, okay? You know I love you, but this jealousy has got to stop, or it’s going to start affecting our marriage.”

  It was already affecting—and infecting—our marriage; Oliver was simply oblivious to it. I could give them a pass at being naïve, but the line between flirting and falling was growing thin. Letting his hand linger on her forearm for too long. The way he laughed too loudly at her jokes, while ignoring everyone else. And they always picked seats next to each other at family dinners. Anyone with eyes could see it, but Oliver remained blind. Or pretended to be.

  A mist thickened the air as we paid our check and sprinted to the car. Oliver opened my door—since our first date as freshmen in college he remained ever the proper gentleman, even in the middle of a fight—and I stepped in, flipping down the mirror to check my mascara while he slid into the driver’s seat. The thirty-minute drive home to Oakmont was tensely silent, me brooding over Oliver, Oliver brooding over traffic, both of us stuck in the middle of a fight that neither of us would end. Sometimes it lasted through days of silent treatment or one-word exchanges.

  My phone chirped with an incoming text:

  Mom pls don’t be mad at me when u get home. but i need 2 clean up the mess.

  Vera. The reliable distraction. “It looks like we’ll be coming home to a messy house. I hope that Vera at least puts Eliot and Syd to bed before we get home.”

  Oliver grunted, his passive-aggressive way of moving on without actually moving on. He was still angry at me, though I doubted he remembered why. That’s what grudge-holders do. It was the Portman Family Plague; we were gifted grudges.

  The downpour hit just as we turned onto our street. Rain smeared across the windshield as we pulled into our winding orange brick driveway that matched the orange brick of our three-story Second Empire Victorian home. My stomach churned from looking at my phone. The perils of carsickness were unavoidable when multitasking on my phone while in motion, which mainly consisted of scrolling through my Facebook and Instagram feed. I’d never actually hurled, but the tiramisu was knocking at the door.

  I liked several posts of my friends’ book club picks, kids, pets, inspirational memes, and spring flower gardens, then clicked over to Vera’s profile. Sure, I was being sus, a Vera-ism for “suspicious,” but I always checked her Instagram just to make sure everything she posted was parent-approved. It had been a big battle when she first wanted a phone, then a war when she wanted to join social media, so I obliged only after her assurance that if I ever found anything sus, I’d take away her phone and disable her social media accounts. Our mutually-agreed definition of sus was yet to be determined.

  Vera mostly posted drawings. The artist within her was emerging, a blooming talent she inherited from her father, not me. I first noticed it when she turned ten. It was sweet how she avidly watched her dad design my new business logo for a dog grooming venture, Barkalicious Boutique. Her eyes had traced his graphite sketch pencil swirling confidently across the paper. That’s when her spark ignited. The calligraphy and acrylic paint sets we bought her that year for Christmas fanned the flame.

  Thunder shook the car as Oliver rolled to a stop. I was flicking through the last post before putting my phone away when an image held me captive. A photo that tagged a @blythesampson4ever in a tribal design image. A pretty, swirly triangular design. Inked on pale flesh.

  That looked way too much like Vera’s skin. And way too much like a tattoo. A tattoo that Vera knew better than to desecrate her underage body with.

  “You ready to run?” Oliver asked me.

  “Huh?” Momentarily confused, I glanced up at him, his hand cra
dling the door handle.

  “To the porch. I’ll hold my jacket over you while we run.”

  “Oh, yeah.” I’d table the conversation about the ink in question until we got inside.

  Oliver held his coat over my head as we dashed across the brick walkway, rain sluicing off our backs. Once up the stone steps leading to the tiled wraparound porch, we shook off like two drenched dogs before I noticed that the oak door that led into the foyer was cracked open. It wasn’t exactly unimaginable seeing a door left open, with three kids constantly running in and out. The strangeness of it only struck me when I walked inside.

  A chill followed me in, crawled up my legs, hung in the foyer. Water pounded the roof like a drum, but the heart of the house was eerily quiet and black as a scorched wick. I had expected to find Vera awake with Eliot and Sydney watching a Disney movie marathon, popcorn scattered across the floor, but only the squeak of our shoes disturbed the hush.

  It was far too dark and far too quiet for this early hour with a night-owl teen among us.

  I ran my hand along the wall until I felt the switch and flicked it on. Light from the chandelier bounced off the glossy woodwork.

  “It looks like Vera actually put the younger ones to bed on time.” Oliver stepped out of his wet shoes and hung up his coat.

  “I’m going to go check on the kids really quick,” I said as I headed up the staircase. At the top of the first floor, the stained-glass reflections of the original owners—an 1880s glass-manufacturing power couple—stared dully at me.

  I rounded the corner, aiming straight for Eliot’s room first. He’d likely still be awake, because he couldn’t sleep until my lips touched his forehead, my arms squeezed him close, and my prayer over him reached God’s ears. I was surprised—and admittedly a tad wounded—that he was already asleep in bed, his Marvel comforter twisted around his feet and pillow fallen to the floor. For his eighth birthday he had wanted a whole new room décor. Marvel everything, from the Thor nightlight, to the Spider-Man lamp, to the Iron Man chair. I hoped some other little boy was now enjoying the Tigger-themed bedroom set that we had donated to Goodwill. I tiptoed to his bed, lightly pressed my lips to his sweat-dampened head—both he and his father got as hot as furnaces when they slept—and pulled his blanket up to his chin.

  Next was Sydney’s princess pink room, where I found her with two fingers tucked upside down in her mouth. An involuntary tremor shot through my carpal-tunneled wrists. It looked painfully uncomfortable, but she preferred it to her thumb and we hadn’t made the effort to break her of it yet. By kid number three, we had given up on the child-molding we had applied to Vera and Eliot. I figured we could tackle the upside-down finger sucking once she reached her fourth birthday.

  Both Sydney and Eliot were asleep in their bedrooms. Great—but where was Vera?

  I scanned her bedroom. Dark and empty.

  Then the bathrooms. Dark and empty.

  I checked the spare bedrooms we never used. Dark and empty.

  I skipped the library because we seldom entered it, especially not at night.

  Trotting downstairs, I found a freshly pajamaed Oliver lying on the sofa, socked feet propped on the coffee table, channel-hopping for something worth watching at this late hour. The rain was growing heavier, heaving sheets of water on the mansard roof.

  “Have you seen Vera?” I asked.

  “Isn’t she in her room?” He continued to stare at the television.

  “No, Ollie. Syd and Eliot are sleeping, but I can’t find Vera.”

  “Did you try calling or texting her?”

  “Why would I need to call or text her when she’s supposed to be here watching her siblings?”

  I was growing worried. Where the hell was my daughter? I called her cell phone, expecting to hear its familiar ring echo somewhere in the house. It chirped in my ear once, then slipped into voicemail.

  “Her phone’s off,” I said. By now the worry escalated to panic, yet Oliver remained transfixed by an episode of Doctor Who. “Oliver, shut the TV off and help me find Vera!”

  “You really need help with that? This house isn’t that big.”

  Wrong. It was too big. Sometimes I wondered why we’d poured all our money into such a monstrosity. The upkeep was impossible.

  I tripped up the stairs to her bedroom and turned on the light. Her space was a crumpled mess of bedding and clothes, schoolbooks and art supplies tossed everywhere. Nothing unusual for my teen daughter. What was unusual was her purse on her desk. She never left the house without it. I pulled the mouth of the leather bag open, rummaged through the contents. Lip gloss. Hair brush. Wallet. But no cell phone. At least she had her phone with her, though it was useless off.

  Something hard sat on the bottom of her purse. A book. I pulled it out and recognized the beautiful personalized journal I ordered for her birthday last year. I fingered the filled pages. Held the leather binding to my chest. A memory gave me pause. Of the day my own mother read my own journal. The betrayal I felt then resonated with me now. There’s an unspoken pact between a mother and daughter that you never—never—read your child’s journal. And yet here I was, flipping through the pages, searching for anything in my daughter’s secret words that would help me figure out where she had gone.

  I knew I shouldn’t, but right now my daughter was missing. I had no choice. Slowly at first, I turned page by page, lured in by her bubbly handwriting, noting several torn edges where entries had been ripped out. Giving those missing pages only a single thought, I started reading her most recent musings. The carefree letters turned jagged. The words were dashed across the page in an angry flurry. I could tell by the harsh lines and deep ink.

  Then I read an entry. A message intended for me.

  “Ollie,” I tried to yell, but my voice tiptoed out in a whisper. The television blared on. “Ollie!” His name exploded from my mouth. Oliver’s footsteps blended with the electronic pulse of the Doctor Who theme song. When he stampeded into the room, I held out the open journal in front of his pissed-off face.

  “What?”

  “Just read.”

  Oliver’s face blanched with dread as our daughter’s message sank in. “Oh my God. Do you think she knows? This is bad, Felicity. Really bad.”

  Yet Oliver didn’t even know the half of what I had done. If Vera had somehow found out the whole truth of it…I couldn’t let my worry go there.

  “What do we do?” My voice cracked open as the questions tumbled out. “Do you think she ran away because of…this? Because of me?” I thrust the journal up, as if that made my point any clearer than the terror in my voice.

  Oliver’s arms reached around me, pulled me in. “I don’t know, honey.”

  From the very beginning of our relationship Oliver always knew how to temper my flareups. It was one of the many things I loved about him. But this time there was no tempering. Only scorching fire.

  “Do you think she went to the police? Could that be where she went?” I searched my husband’s face for answers, but he said nothing. There was nothing to say. Everything would come out soon enough.

  Or maybe not everything. There was still so much hidden.

  Then somewhere buried in the ocean of my thoughts, a fear rose to the surface. This was only the first journal entry I had read. There were hundreds more. What if I discovered something worse in here? As I reread that last entry, I realized Vera’s journal was an omen…

  Every buried secret was about to be disinterred.

  Chapter 3

  Felicity

  OCTOBER

  I found out something horrible about Mom. I don’t know if I should tell the police or not. For the first time in my life I’m scared of her. She’s a monster, but she’s my mom. I hate that I love her. The worst part is that I think my whole family is protecting her, which makes them just as guilty.

  “Felicity!” Oliver’s voice dragged me out of the awful memory of the night Vera disappeared, back
into the even more awful present.

  The scribbled words of Vera’s journal dissolved into her bedroom comforter. It took a moment for me to realize I’d been standing in her room, holding my phone…doing what? Looking up something on the Internet? Oh yeah, the tribal design. I recognized it from somewhere, the memory sticky like taffy. But from where?

  “Mommy!” Now Eliot’s voice joined the commotion of Oliver yelling for me, the dogs barking somewhere in the house, and Sydney screaming. All I wanted was a minute to try to remember where I had seen the drawing before.

  I didn’t know if it was a clue, or if it was some small insignificant detail of Vera’s life that I wasn’t a part of. But nothing about her life felt insignificant anymore. Every little piece of her was now evidence essential to finding her.

  Downstairs the crying and yelling grew louder, so loud that the sound followed me into Vera’s bedroom, smashing against my eardrums. When I turned around, Oliver stood directly behind me, handing me a bloody child, a cordless phone perched between his shoulder and ear.

  “Please, sweetheart,” he said in a wheedling tone I knew all too well, “take care of Sydney. I’m on a work call and the kids need their mother.”

  Blood gushed from Sydney’s lip, dripping down her chin onto my shoulder where she rested her head. One chubby arm clutched the velveteen rabbit that had been Vera’s as a baby, Sydney’s self-soother in her sister’s absence. Another bloody dribble fell on the rabbit’s ear. How the heck had a paper cut turned into a bloody lip?

  “Oh, sweetie, what happened?”

  “Idiot”—her name for Eliot, which Oliver and I had found hilarious the first time she said it; the poor kid’s nickname had stuck—“pushed me and I owied my lip.” She thrust her swollen bottom lip out in a crimson and purple pout.

  It was always something with these two. One pushing the other. The other biting back. Someone always ended up in tears…and it was usually me.