The One I Left Behind Read online

  THE ONE I LEFT BEHIND

  Jennifer McMahon

  Dedication

  In memory of my mother, Dorothy Elizabeth McMahon—my co-conspirator, my teller of tales, my blue-eyed newt.

  I know we’ll meet again; you’ll be waiting one day, with a bottle of gin and a smile. We’ll climb into your old Vega, crank the radio as loud as it can go, and ride right on out into the stars.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Excerpt from Neptune’s Hands: The True Story of the Unsolved Brighton Falls Slayings by Martha S. Paquette

  Neptune’s Last Victim

  PART ONE

  Excerpt from Neptune’s Hands: The True Story of the Unsolved Brighton Falls Slayings by Martha S. Paquette

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Excerpt from Neptune’s Hands: The True Story of the Unsolved Brighton Falls Slayings by Martha S. Paquette

  Chapter 7

  Excerpt from Neptune’s Hands: The True Story of the Unsolved Brighton Falls Slayings by Martha S. Paquette

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Excerpt from Neptune’s Hands: The True Story of the Unsolved Brighton Falls Slayings by Martha S. Paquette

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Excerpt from Neptune’s Hands: The True Story of the Unsolved Brighton Falls Slayings by Martha S. Paquette

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  PART TWO

  DAY ONE

  Excerpt from Neptune’s Hands: The True Story of the Unsolved Brighton Falls Slayings by Martha S. Paquette

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  DAY TWO

  Excerpt from Neptune’s Hands: The True Story of the Unsolved Brighton Falls Slayings by Martha S. Paquette

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  DAY THREE

  Excerpt from Neptune’s Hands: The True Story of the Unsolved Brighton Falls Slayings by Martha S. Paquette

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  DAY FOUR

  Excerpt from Neptune’s Hands: The True Story of the Unsolved Brighton Falls Slayings by Martha S. Paquette

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  PART THREE

  Excerpt from Neptune’s Hands: The True Story of the Unsolved Brighton Falls Slayings by Martha S. Paquette

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Afterward

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Jennifer McMahon

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Excerpt from Neptune’s Hands: The True Story of the Unsolved Brighton Falls Slayings by Martha S. Paquette

  It began with the hands. Right hands, severed neatly at the wrist. They arrived on the granite steps of the police station in empty red and white milk cartons stapled closed at the top, photos of missing children on the back—the whole package wrapped in brown butcher’s paper, tied neatly with thin string like a box of pastry.

  The medical examiner told the police to look for a surgeon or a butcher, someone who knew bone and tendon. It was almost as if he admired the killer’s technique, like there was something beautiful about the cleanliness of the cuts, so perfect it was hard to imagine the hands had ever been attached to anything; objects all their own.

  The killer kept the women alive for exactly four days after the removal of the hands. He took good care of them, cauterized and dressed their wounds, shot them full of morphine for pain, tended to them like precious orchids.

  On the fifth morning, he strangled them, then left their bodies displayed in public places: the town green, a park, the front lawn of the library. Each woman was naked except for her bandages—brilliantly white, lovingly taped like perfect little cocoons at the ends of their arms.

  Neptune’s Last Victim

  THE FIRST THING SHE does when she wakes up is check her hands. She doesn’t know how long she’s been out. Hours? Days? She’s on her back, blindfolded, arms up above her head like a diver, bound to a metal pipe. Her hands are duct taped together at the wrist—but they’re both still there.

  Thank you, thank you, thank Jesus, sweet, sweet Mother Mary, both her hands are there. She wiggles her fingers and remembers a song her mother used to sing:

  Where is Thumbkin? Where is Thumbkin?

  Here I am, Here I am,

  How are you today, sir,

  Very well, I thank you,

  Run away, Run away.

  Her ankles are bound together tightly—more duct tape; her feet are full of pins and needles.

  She hears Neptune breathing and it sounds almost mechanical, the rasping rhythm of it: in, out, in, out. Chug, chug, puff, puff. I think I can, I think I can.

  Neptune takes off the blindfold, and the light hurts her eyes. All she sees is a dark silhouette above her and it’s not Neptune’s face she sees inside it, but all faces: her mother’s, her father’s, Luke the baker from the donut shop, her high school boyfriend who never touched her, but liked to jerk off while she watched. She sees the stained glass face of Jesus, the eyes of the woman with no legs who used to beg for money outside of Denny’s during the breakfast rush. All these faces are spinning like a top on Neptune’s head and she has to close her eyes because if she looks too long, she’ll get dizzy and throw up.

  Neptune smiles down at her, teeth bright as a crescent moon.

  She tries to turn her head, but her neck aches from their struggle earlier, and she can only move a fraction of an inch before the pain brings her to a screeching halt. They seem to be in some sort of warehouse. Cold cement floor. Curved metal walls laced with electrical conduit. Boxes everywhere. Old machinery. The place smells like a country fair—rotten fruit, grease, burned sugar, hay.

  “It didn’t need to be this way,” Neptune says, head shaking, clicking tongue against teeth, scolding.

  Neptune walks around her in a circle, whistling. It’s almost a dance, with a little spring in each step, a little skip. Neptune’s shoes are cheap imitation leather, scratched to shit, the tread worn smooth helping them glide across the floor. All at once, Neptune freezes, eyeing her a moment longer, then quits whistling, turns, and walks away. Footsteps echo on the cement floor. The door closes with a heavy wooden thud. A bolt slides closed, a lock is snapped.

  Gone. For now.

  The tools are all laid out on a tray nearby: clamps, rubber tourniquet, scalpel, small saw, propane torch, metal trowel, rolls of gauze, thick surgical pads, heavy white tape. Neptune’s left these things where she can see them. It’s all part of the game.

  Son of a bitch. Son of a bitch. Son of a bitch.

  Stop, she tells herself. Don’t panic. Think.

  Tomorrow morning, another hand will show up inside a milk carton on the steps of the police station. Only this time, it will be her hand. She looks at the saw, swallows hard, and closes her eyes.

  Think, damn it.

  She struggles with the tape around her wrists, but it’s no good.

  She opens her eyes and they go back to the tools, the bandages, the saw with its row of tiny silver teeth.

  She hears a moan to her left. Slowly, like an arthritic old woman, she turns her head so that her left cheek rests on the cool, damp floor.

  “You!” she says, surprised but relieved.

  The woman is taped to a cast iron pipe on the opposite side of the warehouse. “I can get us out of this,” she promises. The woman lifts her head, opens her swollen eyes.

  The woman laughs, her split lip opening up, covering her chin with blood. “We’re both dead, Dufrane,” she says, her voice small and crackling, a fire that can’t get started.

  PART ONE

  Excerpt from Neptune’s Hands: The True Story of the Unsolved Brighton Falls Slayings by Martha S. Paquette

  The year was 1985. Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” was pumping out of every boom box. Kids were lined up to see Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future. And in the sleepy little suburb of Brighton Falls, Connecticut, Neptune was killing women.

  Brighton Falls, northwest of Hartford and just south of the airport, was a farming community that had quickly given way to suburbia. The men who worked in the insurance high-rises in Hartford moved their families to places like Brighton Falls, safe little bedroom communities with good schools, no crime, and fresh air.

  Along Main Street were the most prominent shops: Luke’s Donuts, Wright’s Pharmacy, Ferraro’s Family Market, Parson’s Hardware, and The Duchess Bar and Grill. Tucked behind these shops, on the cross streets, were the gray granite police and fire station, a doll shop, Joanne’s House of Nuts, a cheese shop, two bookstores (one that specialized in used romances), three churches, Talbots, the Carriage S
hop Fine Furnishings, Carvel Ice Cream, Barston’s Dry Cleaning, and The End of the Leash pet shop.

  Most of Brighton Falls itself was idyllic, but after you crossed the river, left the waterfall and old mills turned into condos behind, as you drove north on Airport Road, past the tented tobacco fields and leaning barns, the road turned from two lanes into four. Here were the strip malls, boarded-up factories, vacant lots, fast-food restaurants, motels where you could pay by the week or the hour, X-rated movie houses, used car dealers, and bars. This was what the insurance executives considered no-man’s-land, an area they carefully avoided on weekend outings in the station wagon. Here, the noise and chaos of the large airport had spilled over and was reaching dangerously toward suburbia.

  Other than the occasional drunk and disorderly arrest at one of the bars on Airport Road, the biggest crime the police had to deal with in recent years had been the time the mayor’s son drank too much at graduation, ran a red light, and led the police on an across-town chase that ended when he drove his Mercedes into the country club swimming pool. There hadn’t been a murder since 1946, and that had been a clear-cut case of a man shooting his brother after catching him in bed with his wife.

  There was nothing clear-cut about the Neptune killings.

  His victims appeared to have nothing in common: an accountant with two kids; a waitress who worked the swing shift at the Silver Spoon Diner; a film student from Wesleyan University; an ex-model turned barfly. The police were dumbfounded.

  In the end, everyone—the police, families of the victims, and citizens of Brighton Falls—were left with more questions than answers. Why did Neptune cut off the right hands of his victims? Why keep them alive for four days after leaving the hands in milk cartons on the steps of the police station? And what was different about his last victim, the glamorous has-been Vera Dufrane? Why is it that her body was never found?

  And perhaps the biggest question of all: was he just a drifter passing through, or is he out there still, living among them? What made him stop? And—the people of Brighton Falls wonder each night as they lock their doors—will he one day kill again?

  Chapter 1

  October 16, 2010

  Rockland, Vermont

  IMAGINE THAT YOUR HOUSE is on fire. You have exactly one minute to grab what you can. What do you choose?

  Tara turned over the little hourglass full of pink sand. Her fingernails were painted cyanosis-blue, chipped in places. Her face was pale, her lips bright red as she smiled, breathed the word, Go.

  Reggie tore down the front hall, skidding as she rounded the corner to the narrow oak stairs, galloping up, one hand on the curved snakelike rail, the other on the cool wall of damp stone.

  “Your lungs are filling with smoke!” Tara called from down below. “Your eyes are watering.”

  Reggie gasped, jerked open the door to her room, her eyes moving over the crammed bookshelves, the desk covered in her sketches, the neatly made bed topped off with the quilt her grandmother had made. She skimmed over all of this and went right for the closet, moving toward it in slow motion, feeling her way through the invisible smoke, stinging eyes clamped shut now. She reached for the sliding door and eased it open, the little metal wheels rattling in their tracks. Reggie stepped forward, fingers finding clothes hung on hangers. She reached up, felt for the shelf.

  “Hurry,” Tara whispered, right behind her now, her breath warm and moist on Reggie’s neck. “You’re almost out of time.”

  REGGIE OPENED HER EYES, took a gulp of fresh, cold, October air. She was at home in Vermont. Not back at Monique’s Wish. And she was thirty-nine—not thirteen.

  “Damn,” she said, the word a cloud of white smoke escaping her mouth. She’d left the windows open again.

  Wrapping the down comforter around her like a cape, she slid out of bed and went right for the windows, pulling them closed. The trees, vivid with oranges, yellows, and reds just last week, were losing their brightness. The cold and wind of the last three days had brought many of the leaves off the trees. Out across the lake, a V of Canada geese headed south.

  “You don’t know what you’re missing,” Reggie told them. Then, in her next breath, she muttered, “Chickenshits.” She squinted down at the lake, imagining it three months from now, frozen solid and snow covered; a flat moonscape of white. It wasn’t all that different from Ricker’s Pond, where her mother had taught her to ice-skate. Reggie could see it so clearly: her mother in her green velvet coat and gold chiffon scarf soaring in graceful circles while Reggie wobbled and fell, the ice popping beneath them. “Are you sure this is safe?” she’d asked her mother, each time the ice made a sound. And her mother had laughed. “Worry girl,” she’d teased, skating right into the middle where the ice was the thinnest and holding her hands out to Reggie. “Come on out here and show me what you’re made of.”

  Reggie shrugged off the memory, along with the heavy down comforter. She quickly threw on a pair of jeans and a sweater and headed down to the kitchen, her bare feet cool on the wood floors.

  She’d laid out the house so that she’d have a view of the lake from almost any vantage point. As she descended the stairs, she faced the large bank of windows on the south side that looked out over her yard and meadow and down to Arrow Lake. It was a little over half a mile from her house to the water’s edge, but when she came down the stairs, she felt as if she could just step out into the air and float across her living room, through the windows, over the yard and field, and down to the lake. Sometimes she caught herself almost trying it—leaning a little too far forward, putting her foot too far ahead so that she nearly missed the next step down. These were the moments that defined her success as an architect: not the prizes, accolades, or the esteem of her colleagues, but the way coming down her stairs made her believe, just for a second, that she could turn into a bit of dandelion fluff and float down to the lake.

  For a building to be successful, it had to be connected to the landscape in a seamless way. It couldn’t just look like it had been dropped there randomly, but like it had grown organically, been shaped by the wind and the rain, cut from the mountains. The rooms should flow not just from one into the other, but also into the world beyond.

  4 Walls Magazine had just named Reggie one of the top green architects in the Northeast, and called the Snyder/Wellenstein house she’d designed in Stowe “a breathtaking display of integrating architecture with nature; with the stream running through the living room and the 120-year-old oak growing up through all three floors, Dufrane has created a sustainable dwelling that blurs the lines between indoors and out.”

  Blurring the lines. That’s what Reggie was good at—indoors/outdoors; old/new; functional/ornamental—she had a gift for merging unlikely ideas and objects and creating something that was somehow both and neither; something greater than the sum of its parts.

  Still foggy headed and desperately in need of caffeine, Reggie cleaned out the little stainless-steel espresso pot, then filled it with water and coffee and set it on the gas stove, turning the knob to start the flame. Her kitchen was a cook’s dream (though honestly, Reggie didn’t do much cooking and subsisted largely on raw vegetables, cheese and crackers, and espresso)—right down to the huge counter-hogging Italian espresso machine that Reggie only used when she was entertaining. She preferred the small stovetop pot she’d owned since college. It was simple to use and quietly elegant—the epitome of good design.

  The water came to a boil. The coffee bubbled, filling the kitchen with its rich, earthy scent.

  Reggie checked her watch: 7:15. She’d go out to the office, do some brainstorming for the new project, go for a run around the lake, shower, and do some more sketches. She looked back at her watch, catching it change to 7:16.

  Imagine that your house is on fire. You have exactly one minute to grab what you can. What do you chose?

  Reggie glanced around the house, feeling that old panic rising up inside her. Then she took in a breath and answered her old friend out loud. “Nothing, Tara. I choose nothing.” Her chest loosened. Muscles relaxed. Tara didn’t have that kind of power over her anymore.