The Perfect Son Read online

  I stare at my phone for a moment. I feel slightly calmer. It must be the Xanax.

  I looked back at my list of calls from the last several days. I select Frank Marino’s number from the list before I can chicken out. I’ve got a new job for Frank.

  After five rings, when I’m about to give up, Frank picks up the phone. “Erika! What’s going on? Your little town is all over the news.”

  “Yeah.” I swallow hard. Frank hasn’t mentioned Liam, which means his name isn’t in the news. Of course, since he’s underage, the media can’t mention him by name. But I have a feeling if he gets arrested, it will all come out somehow. The media can’t mention Liam’s name, but it can trend on Twitter or be shared on Facebook. Or whatever it is people do on Instagram. “Frank, I need you to find somebody for me.”

  “Find somebody?”

  “Yes, like where he lives. An address.” I take a deep breath. “His name is Marvin Holick.”

  “Okay…”

  “Just so you know,” I say, “he’s my father.”

  Chapter 42

  Olivia

  I don’t think he’s coming back tonight.

  Part of me is scared maybe he’ll never come back. Not that I want to see him—the thought of seeing him again makes me physically ill—but I’ve only got left three slices of bread, one apple, and one bottle of water. I’m doing my best to hold off on eating or drinking, but my throat is painfully parched. All I want is to guzzle the entire bottle, but I know that would be stupid.

  What if he doesn’t come back for two or three more days? Then what?

  If he doesn’t come back soon, I’ll die.

  I can’t let that happen.

  I’m making some progress with the mound I’m building. It’s hard to tell how big I need to make it, because I can’t actually see where the trap door is aside from that tiny dim slice of light that disappears entirely at night. It’s very hard to tell how high up it is. Also, I am essentially doing this blind. The hole is pitch black—it makes no difference if my eyes are open or closed.

  And I’m so weak. All I want to do is lie on the ground and sleep. It would be easy to do. To let starvation and dehydration take me.

  Every time that happens, I think about my parents. My friends. My bedroom.

  But I can’t think about it too hard, or else I’ll start crying.

  I’ve been doing all the digging with my fingers, and now they’ve become painful and raw. I can’t see what they look like, because I have no light, but I imagine they’re very red. I imagine pinpoints of blood.

  I pat the mound with my palms. It’s not big enough—I can tell that much. It needs to be at least a few inches higher. I scrape at the ground with my fingers and wince. God, my fingers hurt. I don’t know what’s worse—my fingers or my ankle.

  If only I had a tool to help me dig.

  I’ve got the empty water bottle. That’s better than nothing, but it’s hard to grip. And other than that, the only thing down here even resembling a tool is…

  Oh no, I’m not going to do that.

  Yes, one of those bones lying in the corner would be ideal for digging. Not as good as a shovel, but much better than a water bottle and light years better than my poor fingers. But I can’t do that.

  Can I?

  I reach into Phoebe’s corner until my fingers touch the smooth surface of one of her bones. A shudder runs through me. I lean forward a little more until my fingers close around the bone.

  It would be so perfect.

  But I can’t. It’s bad enough I’m stuck down here. It’s bad enough I’m starving to death. But I won’t do that.

  Of course, it might be the only way I’ll ever get out of here. The only way I’ll ever see my family again.

  I pick up the bone, feeling the weight in my hand.

  I have no choice.

  I’m going to get out of here for both of us, Phoebe.

  I’m going to let your family know you’re down here. Give them closure. Give you a real burial.

  And I’m going to make sure that asshole goes to prison for the rest of his life.

  Chapter 43

  Erika

  It’s at five o’clock in the afternoon the next day that I hear a crash coming from the kitchen.

  I was in the living room, trying desperately to focus on getting an article written for the next edition of the Nassau Nutshell when the sound of broken glass stole what little was left of my concentration. I slid my laptop off my legs and got up to investigate.

  There’s a rock lying on the floor, in the center of our kitchen. The window above the sink is shattered, and there’s glass everywhere. I take a step and feel a sliver slice into to my foot. I wince at the pain and crouch down to pick up the rock. There’s a piece of paper taped to it with a word scribbled in red magic marker:

  MURDERER

  It’s starting.

  “What was that, Erika?” Jason is standing at the entrance to the kitchen, still in his boxers and a T-shirt. He insisted on staying home again today, and I am intensely grateful. If Liam gets arrested today, I don’t want to be alone here. Of course, if the police show up, I feel like maybe Jason doesn’t want to be in his underwear. But I don’t want to give him a hard time. Jason’s underwear is the least of my problems.

  I hold up the rock. “Somebody had a message for us.”

  “Shit,” he breathes. “Should we call the police?”

  “What’s the point?” I say. The truth is, Liam probably deserves it. And the last thing I want is to invite the police into our home. “Just be careful where you step until I can clean up. There’s glass everywhere.”

  Jason glances down at his watch. “It’s getting late. No police yet. Maybe they’re not going to arrest him after all.”

  I snort. “You’re joking.”

  “Look, I know they think he did it. I’m not an idiot. But they have to have evidence to arrest him. They can’t do it on a gut feeling.”

  I close my eyes. I wonder where Olivia Mercer is right now. I hope to God she’s okay.

  The doorbell rings, and my eyes fly open. Every time I hear that ring, I feel like I’m going to have a heart attack. Jason and I exchange looks.

  “Maybe it’s the person who threw the rock, coming to apologize?” he suggests.

  I don’t dignify that with a response.

  I reach the door first. I peer through the peephole and see Detective Rivera’s face. Oh no.

  My hands are shaking too badly to open the door. Jason has to work the lock for me. When he gets it open, I immediately see the handcuffs in Rivera’s hands. I think I’m going to faint.

  “Is Liam home, Mrs. Cass?” she asks me.

  “You’re arresting him,” I say numbly.

  She nods slowly. “I’m sorry.”

  Jason looks down at the handcuffs, his face growing pale, but he doesn’t protest this time. He walks to the foot of the stairs and calls out, “Liam? Get dressed right now and come down here.”

  I watch as my son emerges from his bedroom, wearing a plain T-shirt and a pair of clean blue jeans. In spite of the bruise on his cheekbone, he looks so young and handsome now. When he catches sight of the detectives at the door, he stops walking. I watch as he takes a deep breath, then forces himself to move forward.

  I get seized by the desperate urge to throw my arms around him and tell him it’s all going to be okay. But it would be a lie.

  When Liam gets to the bottom of the stairs, Rivera steps forward. She holds out the handcuffs, and Liam’s eyes widen as he takes a step back.

  “Liam Cass, you are under arrest for the kidnapping and murder of Olivia Mercer.”

  She reads him his rights as he listens silently with a dazed expression on his face that likely mirrors my own. I can’t believe this is happening. My legs are jello—they feel like they’re going to collapse under me.

  I wonder what they found in their search. It must be something really big.

  When Rivera finishes reading his rights, s
he holds out the handcuffs. Now Liam looks really panicked. He looks like he’s about to burst into tears, but he’s holding it back. I haven’t seen Liam cry since he was three years old. He very rarely cried as a baby. He was such a good baby. I remember thinking to myself that it was unfair any woman should be so lucky.

  “Do you have to put those on me?” he asks, unable to hide the note of desperation in his voice.

  “I’m afraid so,” she says, without any sympathy in her voice.

  At least she cuffs him in front rather than behind his back. I flinch as the cuffs snap into place. This is it. They’re really arresting him. They’re really taking him away to jail. My baby. In jail. How could this be happening?

  “Liam, please just tell them where she is!” I blurt out.

  For a moment, everyone goes silent.

  Jason stares at me, open-mouthed. “Erika…”

  The officers are staring at me too. Liam’s face is bright pink. “Mom,” he says, “I didn’t—”

  But before he can finish saying whatever it was he was going to say, Rivera puts an arm on his back and leads him out the front door. The sun is still up, and it’s obvious several of our neighbors are watching him get led to the police car in handcuffs. Everyone knows what’s going on. I expect more rocks through our window tonight.

  And then they drive away. I follow them outside and watch the police car until it becomes a speck of dust in the distance. Jason comes out to join me. I expect him to yell at me for my little outburst in the house, but he doesn’t say a word.

  When we get back in the house, Hannah is standing in the middle of the living room. Her eyes are bloodshot, and she looks like she hasn’t showered today. I’m fairly sure those are the jeans and shirt she was wearing yesterday. “Did they take him? They arrested him?”

  Jason sighs heavily. “Yes.”

  A tear escapes from her left eye. “Dad! How could you let them?”

  He frowns. “I didn’t have much of a choice. They had a warrant for his arrest.”

  She stomps her foot on the ground. “This is bullshit! He didn’t do it. You know he didn’t!”

  “Hannah…” I say.

  “Don’t even, Mom!” she snaps at me. “I know what you think of him. I see the way you look at him. At least Dad thinks he’s innocent.”

  They both look at me, waiting for a response. I don’t know what to say. Hannah is absolutely right.

  “Even if he’s guilty, I still love him,” I finally say.

  And that is the truth. Hannah and Jason might think Liam is innocent, but they’re wrong. I’m the only one who can see through him. All I can hope for now is that Olivia Mercer is still alive. Maybe if he tells them where she is, they’ll go easy on him.

  “You have no idea, Mom,” Hannah says. “Liam would never have done this. He really liked Olivia.”

  I wish I had a wife, so I could put her deep in a hole.

  Unfortunately, Hannah is the one who has no idea what she’s talking about. I know my son. And I know this won’t end well.

  _____

  When I first saw those two blue lines on the pregnancy test seventeen years ago, I never would have believed the baby growing inside me would end up behind bars.

  Everything about Liam’s early life was easy, starting with my pregnancy. I got knocked up on our first try—and in contrast to my pregnancy with Hannah, where I was sick for the entire time, I felt great when I was carrying Liam. People used to tell me I was glowing. And the labor was similarly easy. Five good pushes and he was out. Screaming and pink and perfect.

  Liam was a really mild-mannered baby. He rarely fussed or cried. He ate whenever I offered him my breast, and he slept nearly through the night as soon as we brought him home. He was a beautiful baby too. He looked like one of the children in the magazines with his chubby cheeks and sweet smile. Other women were always stopping me in the street to admire him.

  And Liam was fantastic at playing the part. When people would ask him how old he was, he would hold up one finger and cry, “One!” He loved to perform. Sometimes I would look down in his crib at night at his sleeping face and wonder how I got so lucky.

  It was when he was barely four years old that I first noticed something different about him.

  We were at the park. I had Hannah in her carriage and she was sobbing as usual. I was lucky that Liam could be trusted to play independently, because Hannah required all my attention. So I didn’t notice what he was doing until I found him crouched in the corner of the park. I pushed Hannah’s carriage over to see what was going on.

  Liam was playing with a large carpenter ant. He had built some sort of enclosure, and he would allow the ant to leave, then trap it again. I watched him do this for a minute, trying to figure out the rules of his game. Finally, I said, “What are you doing, Liam?”

  He lifted his big brown eyes and smiled at me—that smile that made all the women fall in love with him. “The ants thinks he’s gonna get away, but he can’t! He doesn’t know I’m gonna smoosh him.”

  Those words said in Liam’s four-year-old baby voice made me feel really uneasy. “Liam,” I said in a choked voice. “You’re being mean to the ant.”

  He scrunched up his little face. “But it’s just an ant, Mommy. Who cares?”

  “It’s a living creature, Liam.”

  But he just looked at me blankly until I told him to go play at the monkey bars again. He obligingly went back to the jungle gym, but I couldn’t get the incident out of my head. That night, I told Jason about what he said, but Jason wasn’t at all concerned. “Boys like to play with bugs,” he said.

  But he wasn’t playing with the bug. He was torturing it.

  It only got worse after that. More disturbing statements that got harder and harder to shrug off. And then that girl found duct-taped in the closet when he was in kindergarten. He got kicked out of school for that one. I told him he could never do anything like that ever again, and technically, he didn’t. I finally took him to that child psychologist, Dr. Hebert, but I don’t believe she did anything to help him. He just got smarter about keeping his mouth shut.

  And not knowing what he was thinking was the hardest part of all.

  After the police take Liam away, Jason immediately calls Richard Landon. We sit on the sofa and he puts our lawyer on speaker phone, so we can both listen in. We have to order Hannah to go upstairs, because she shouldn’t be listening to this, and also, she’s almost hysterical.

  “John,” Jason said. “They just took him. The police. They cuffed him and put him in the car. They’re taking him to jail.”

  “Yes.” Landon’s voice jumps out of Jason’s phone. “I had a feeling that was going to happen today.”

  “What are they going to do now?” I ask.

  “They’re going to bring him to the police station and book him,” Landon says. “They’ll photograph him and fingerprint him, and then put him in one of their holding cells.”

  My son behind bars. Tears spring to my eyes. I can’t bear it.

  “We’ll get him a bail hearing tomorrow morning,” Landon says. “Hopefully they’ll set bail and he can go home until the arraignment.”

  Jason looks up at me, his brow furrowed. “You think they won’t set bail?”

  “It’s possible. They’re charging him with murder.”

  “But they don’t even know if Olivia Mercer is dead!” Jason says.

  “Right. They have to prove that a crime was actually even committed, so that’s in his favor.” Landon pauses. “Also, he’s only sixteen. I’ll argue all that at the bail hearing.”

  “So there’s a chance they might not even be able to charge him?” I ask hopefully.

  Landon is silent for several seconds. “I’m not going to lie to you, Erika. They may not have a body, but they’ve got a strong case against him.”

  My stomach drops. “What have they got?”

  “Well, for starters, it was known that they were at least dating, if not boyfriend and girlfriend
. We have the neighbor who is testifying not only that Olivia and Liam were together that night, but that she got into his car.” He clears his throat. “But it was what they found in your car that was the nail in the coffin. They found traces of blood that matched Olivia’s blood type and three of her hairs. In your trunk.”

  “In my trunk?” I say numbly.

  “Yes,” Landon says. “If they were just in the seat, we could argue she was in the car, but the trunk is a bit more damning.”

  “But it’s a hatchback,” Jason points out. “If she was in the backseat, her hair could’ve gotten into the trunk. It’s not like the trunk is an enclosed space.”

  “I can argue that. But it doesn’t explain the blood, does it?”

  Jason leans back against the sofa, shaking his head. I think he has just checked out of this conversation.

  “Are you still there?” Landon asks.

  “I’m here,” I say.

  “I’m going to go over to see Liam now. He’s probably very scared so I’ll tell him what’s going to happen next. Also…”

  “What?” I say.

  Landon sighs. “I’m going to try to convince him to tell me where Olivia Mercer is. Whether or not she’s alive. We can use that as a bargaining chip.”

  I swallow a lump in my throat. This is the last thing I wanted to hear. “Did Liam tell you he did it?”

  “You know I can’t tell you that, Erika. Confidentiality.”

  “Please, John! He’s only sixteen year old and he’s in jail and—”

  I’m sobbing now into the phone. I’m two seconds away from completely losing it, if I haven’t already. I don’t know how this could be happening. I was so careful. How did I get the wrong Olivia?

  “Erika, Erika…” Landon’s voice cuts through my sobs. “Look, calm down. He… he didn’t tell me anything. Okay?”

  I gulp, trying to catch my breath. “But you think he did it.”

  It’s not a question.

  Our attorney is silent for a moment. “Yes, I do. Come on, Erika. He obviously did it. The evidence is overwhelming.” He gives me a second to absorb this. “But look, even if she’s dead and he buried her, he can offer to lead the police to her body in exchange for leniency. A life sentence as opposed to the death penalty.”