The Girl on the Stairs Read online

  “Oh, hi, Sam,” said Annie. He could hear a slight shift in her tone. She was probably communicating across the office to Petra, who was making faces at Annie. Petra probably didn’t want to talk to him, not after the last three conversations they’d had, none of which had been particularly cheery.

  “Tell her I’ve got good news,” said Sam.

  “Oh.” Another shift in tone. “Hold on a second, okay?”

  Sam began to pace the office as hold music filtered through his phone.

  Hell, he wanted a cigarette. Apparently, he wanted to smoke not only when he was feeling bad but when surprisingly good things happened too.

  Still, he didn’t want to go out onto the porch again. Too cold.

  Screw it.

  He dug the pack out of his pocket and lit up. The only reason he wasn’t smoking inside was because Daphne wouldn’t like it, and Daphne wasn’t fucking here, was she?

  “Sam?” Petra’s voice cut off the hold music.

  “Did you tell anyone I was going to have to pay the advance back?” Sam said. After Devil in the Dark, he’d gotten a two-book contract. One of those books was Stolen. The book about Rachel was supposed to be the second book. And since he’d already turned in an outline and proposal for it, he’d already gotten a portion of the advance money for it. When the book died, he’d phoned Petra to tell her that, and she’d informed him that he’d have to pay the advance back if he couldn’t deliver the book.

  “Not yet,” she said. “I was hoping you’d talk some sense into Rachel. Are you calling to tell me that you did?”

  “No, no,” said Sam. “Rachel’s not speaking to me. But I’ve got something else. Maybe even something better.”

  “What?” Petra sounded wary. She often shot down his ideas. In the beginning of their working relationship, it had pissed Sam off, but he’d come to realize that she was usually right.

  “Guess who just emailed me and wants me to write a book about her?”

  “Who?” said Petra.

  “Lola fucking Ward.”

  “Lola Ward?”

  “You know,” said Sam. “The twelve-year-old who was maybe working with the dude that killed her parents?”

  Petra was quiet.

  “Please tell me you remember this.” Sam ashed in the coffee cup and took a furious drag on his cigarette. “It was a little more than ten years ago. People said she was the bad seed.”

  “Oh,” said Petra. “I do remember that. She wants you to write about her?”

  “Yes,” said Sam, grinning. “I’m looking at the email right now.” He was feeling his confidence return. This was him. This was what he did. He was good at it. And this book would be much, much bigger than a book about Rachel Fletcher, the rich girl kidnapped for ransom. Things had been going badly since Daphne had left, but they were suddenly starting to look up.

  “Sam,” said Petra, “how do you know that email’s really from Lola Ward?”

  “Who else would it be from?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Someone pretending to be Lola Ward?”

  Sam was starting to deflate. He looked down at the ashes in the coffee cup. “People do that?”

  “People do all kinds of weird things.”

  Sam made a face. “All right, well, I’ll make sure it’s her, okay? I’ll try to get her to meet me. Assuming it’s on the up and up, then you think the publisher would take a book about Lola Ward instead of a book about Rachel Fletcher?”

  Petra laughed softly. “Oh, I think they’d do cartwheels for Lola Ward.”

  He sucked on his cigarette. “Good. Then as soon as I’ve got confirmation it’s her, I’m doing this.”

  *

  Lola didn’t have any problem meeting with him. She’d responded to his followup email right away, giving him the address for her apartment. Before Rachel, Sam would have been surprised that she didn’t want to meet in public. Girls who’d been through the kind of hell she’d been with often didn’t want to be alone with strangers. Daphne hadn’t wanted to. Melody Lynch, the subject of his first book, had insisted her husband be nearby when they met. But Rachel had been terrified to leave her apartment, and he’d conducted all of his interviews there.

  Still, from the tone of her email, Lola didn’t sound like a shut-in. She’d contacted him, after all. Surely that kind of initiative meant she was outgoing. Of course, it could all be a hoax. Once he got a good look at her, he’d know for sure if she was the real Lola Ward or not.

  He really hoped she was.

  He’d spent all of the night before reading up on the case, doing as much research as he could manage on the Internet.

  At first, all he’d found were a few sites that demonized Lola. The way certain people had it, Lola was actually the mastermind behind the murders. This was based on claims that Nicholas Todd had made. He said he’d done everything for Lola. He was convinced that he and Lola had a relationship, that she was his soul mate. And in his mind, anyway, Lola had wanted nothing more than for him to murder her parents so that she could be free to run off with him.

  As much as Todd insisted this, however, he’d had no way to prove it.

  Todd said that he and Lola had had a relationship and that many, many people had seen them together.

  But none of these people had been willing to testify to this.

  Still, the sites believed his story, despite his lack of evidence. Sam’s first inclination was to dismiss the theory as ludicrous. This was a twelve-year-old girl they were talking about here, and he didn’t see why anyone would believe she was anything other than a victim.

  Then he saw the pictures.

  Sam was familiar with the pictures of Lola on the news. She had sandy hair and big, mournful eyes, and she looked every inch the victim. She looked serious, never smiling in the photos.

  The websites, however, had very different sorts of pictures of Lola. Candids taken before the murders. In those pictures, Lola was wearing heavy makeup—dark lipstick, clumpy, spiked eyelashes.

  In those pictures, Lola looked a lot older than twelve.

  She looked goth, which matched Todd’s look, and she looked… well, hell, she looked sexy.

  There was one picture in particular. Lola in a short skirt with fishnet stockings. She was blowing a kiss at the camera.

  Sam tried to tell himself it didn’t mean anything. A girl looking too sexed-up for her age was not an admission of any kind of guilt. But he thought he understood why the websites wanted to paint her as Todd’s accomplice. Teeny-bopper temptresses made everyone feel uncomfortable, Sam included.

  Then he happened to stumble across a PDF file of the entire transcript of Todd being recorded by an undercover cop.

  The cop had been thrown into a cell with Todd, wearing a wire and disguised as a fellow inmate. The PDF file was about thirty pages long, and Sam read every single word. The first thing that struck him was that Nicholas Todd wasn’t a very intelligent guy. The cop didn’t even have to lead him before the guy was bragging about what he’d done. Todd had volunteered the information that he was the guy who’d murdered the Wards and had cut a swath across West Virginia, Maryland, and Virginia, leaving bodies in his wake.

  He’d said it in the way some dumb teenage jock might offer up his accomplishment on the football field. As if he was looking to belong, as if he was trying to prove that he belonged.

  It wasn’t the kind of thing a criminal mastermind might do.

  And the Ward murders, at least, hadn’t been crimes of passion. There had been a certain amount of planning and sophistication to them. There was the fact that Todd had known where the spare house key was kept, which wasn’t a typical place, like under the mat or something. The Wards kept their spare key hanging on a wind chime on their front porch. The chime was something Lola had made in elementary school. It was made of crushed soda cans—one of those trash-to-treasure kid projects. Todd had to have been watching the place to find that out. Or someone had to have told him about it.

  Someone like Lo
la?

  In Todd’s version of the events—given to the undercover cop with minimal amounts of prompting—Lola had indeed told him where the key was. In fact, she’d buttered him up for the crime, assuring him that it would be the very best way for him to prove her love for her. And that was what Todd told the cop. He’d done it for Lola, because he loved her. The murders were a testament to his devotion to her. He was convinced that he was going to get out of jail and that he and Lola were going to get married.

  At the time, Nicholas Todd was twenty-three.

  Lola was twelve.

  Sam could see why none of the authorities had wanted to believe Todd’s story. It seemed equally likely that he was just crazily obsessed with Lola. Perhaps he’d watched her for quite some time. Perhaps he’d fantasized about her. Perhaps he’d gotten too deeply into his fantasies to tell them from reality.

  After all, the other murders really didn’t make much sense.

  Todd claimed to have killed Lola’s parents for her, but when the undercover cop asked him about the subsequent murders—Joyce Valentine and Mick Wiley, for instance, the hitchhikers that Todd had picked up and executed in front of Lola—Todd seemed confused.

  “Did you kill those people for Lola, too?”

  “No,” Todd said. “No, those people I killed for me.”

  At any rate, Sam didn’t have an opinion on what he thought had happened yet. He needed to do some more digging. He was going to get Lola’s side of the story, of course. He was pretty interested in hearing what she had to say.

  Lola hadn’t talked to any reporters at the time of the murders. As far as Sam knew, this was the first time she’d ever opened up to the public about what had happened.

  He pulled into the parking lot of her apartment and checked his phone again, scrolling back to see the text message that Lola had sent him with her address. This was it.

  He got out of the car, closed the door, and headed over to the building.

  Lola’s apartment door wasn’t adorned, but there was a welcome mat. It read, “Go Away.”

  He knocked on the door anyway.

  Nothing happened for several seconds.

  Sam looked to see if there was a doorbell that he’d missed. He didn’t see one. He raised his hand to knock again.

  And the door opened.

  A woman stood in the doorway. She had shoulder length blond hair, but her darker roots were coming in. Her hair was curly and a little messy. Sam supposed the polite word was “tousled.” Tousled curls. He made a mental note of that. That’s how he’d describe her in the book. She wore a flowered baby doll dress over leggings and boots. She wasn’t wearing any makeup.

  He scrutinized her face. Yeah, that was her, all right. She was older now, and she didn’t look exactly like the victimized waif or the tarted up goth chick, but she definitely was the real article.

  She cocked her head at him. “You’re hotter in person than on the back of your books.”

  Hotter? That was an interesting thing to say. Why would Lola bring up his relative attractiveness? As a conversation starter?

  Sam smiled—a self-deprecating smile, one that he hoped was charming. “How are you?”

  You are not going to sleep with Lola Ward, he told himself. You are not going to sleep with Lola Ward. She’s probably a murderer.

  Lola opened the door wider. “Fine. Come on in.”

  He stepped into the apartment.

  It was small. It was messy. It smelled strongly of smoke—a mingling of cigarettes, incense, and possibly marijuana. All available surfaces were overflowing with knickknacks and trash—takeout containers, empty cigarette packs, plastic bags.

  Lola smiled at him. “Sorry about the mess. I cleaned up my bedroom so that we could talk there.”

  Her bedroom? Look, he didn’t even find Lola Ward attractive. She was too young for him. Well, she was twenty-three, which meant she was three years younger than Daphne, but really, that was too young. He cleared his throat. “This is fine, really.”

  She laughed. “What? Didn’t Daphne Perry take you to her bedroom for your first interview?” She managed to make the word “interview” sound dirty.

  Sam flinched.

  Lola threw her head back and laughed. Her laugh was deep and throaty and rich, but it wasn’t jeering. She wasn’t taunting him. She was having fun. She shoved him. “I’m teasing you, Sam. Jesus, the look on your face.”

  He felt off-kilter, unsure of how to react to her.

  She wound her hands around his arm, leaning close to him. “I cleaned out the den, not my bedroom. Trust me, we’ll be more comfortable there.”

  He recoiled from her, just a little bit. Then he remembered that he was trying to charm her. That was his gift, right? The patented Samson Black charm that made women spill their stories and drop their—

  You are not going to sleep with Lola Ward.

  Lola tugged on him, leading him down the hallway. “So, did you guys start dating before or after you started interviewing her for the book?”

  “Who?” said Sam.

  Lola laughed again. “Daphne. Why? You date other girls you write about?” She peered up at him, grinning mischievously.

  Jesus. It was hardly a state secret that he’d married Daphne after writing a book after her, but Sam didn’t like the way she seemed to have picked up on his inherent weakness and was using it to make him uncomfortable.

  “Maybe ‘date’ is the wrong word,” said Lola, her voice dropping several decibels. “Maybe the word I’m looking for is ‘fuck.’”

  Sam gritted his teeth.

  She gave him a sultry smile. “That about the way it goes, Sam?”

  He didn’t know what to say. He felt fiercely uncomfortable. He was pretty sure his face was getting red, but he wasn’t sure if it was from embarrassment or anger.

  She giggled again. “Wow, I’m still teasing you.” She poked him. “You get worked up easily, don’t you?”

  He took a deep breath. “I’m here to interview you, that’s all. Maybe we could just get started?”

  She tossed her hair. “I’m kind of offended, actually. I was expecting you to come onto me right away.”

  He cleared his throat. “I think you have the wrong idea about me.”

  She laughed one more time, but this time, there was a dark undercurrent in her voice. “Or maybe it’s exactly the right idea.”

  Sam was suddenly seized with certainty. This girl did it, he thought. She killed her parents and got away with it. There is something not right about her.

  She patted his shoulder. “Really, I’m sorry. I have this tendency to say whatever comes into my head. It gets me in trouble sometimes. Come on, let’s go to the den for the interview. I’ll be good, I promise.”

  Lola led them into another room. It was shockingly clean. There was a desk in here, a computer with an ergonomic keyboard. And there was a couch. It was threadbare but spotless. Everything in this room seemed subdued, from the choice of framed Rembrandt prints to the dark wood coffee table, bare except for a single white candle in the middle.

  She pointed at the couch. “Have a seat.” She sat down in the desk chair and wheeled it over in front of the coffee table. “I’m a writer too, you know.”

  He sat down and began fumbling through his bag for his recorder. Lola Ward made him nervous. “Excuse me?”

  Lola threw her legs over the arm of the office chair, settling into it sideways. “Yup. I write erotic e-books. Self-published. I used to write a lot of pseudo-incest. You know, girls getting it on with their stepdads? But they’ve been cracking down on that, so I’ve been moving into babysitter fantasies instead.”

  Sam coughed. He had no idea how to respond. “Um, you enjoy that?”

  She shrugged. “Pays the bills, and I don’t have to leave the apartment. I don’t get recognized too much anymore, but whenever I am, it’s rarely good.” She picked at the skirt of her dress. “People are mean, you know.”

  Sam drew his eyebrows together. “How?�
��

  “Well, they call me a murderer. They say I got away with it and that I should be in jail. They don’t think about how that might make me feel. It’s been years since my parents died, but that’s not something you just get over. And when people accuse you of something you didn’t do… well, that’s a really bad feeling. It makes you feel fake all over. It makes you feel like people reached inside you and changed who you were without asking you.”

  Maybe he was wrong. Maybe she hadn’t done it after all. He couldn’t be sure. He leaned forward. “If we do this book, Lola, you’re going to get recognized more often.”

  She picked at her fingernails. “I know. But I figure that if I get you to write it—” She looked at him. “You’re Samson Black. You don’t write about murderers. You write about women who triumphed over their circumstances. You write about survivors. I picked you because you’d help people see the truth about me. And because you must understand women like me if you married Daphne. I read that book, and I know everything she went through. Hell, I feel like I know her. I could tell that you were in love with her when you wrote that book, because you made me love her too.”

  Sam blushed, feeling buoyed up by the flattery. She didn’t do it after all, he thought. I misread everything. “Daphne is an extraordinary woman. But all of the women I write about are extraordinary. You’ve been through a lot, Lola. If you want to set the record straight, well, then I’m your man.”

  She sat up. She looked girlish and vulnerable, her huge eyes seeming to swallow up her face. “So, you’ll be on my side, then? You won’t twist everything I say?”

  “Of course not.” He felt a surge of protectiveness toward her. He wanted to fix everything for Lola, make her life better. He felt as if he could do that with the power of his pen. He’d write the book that exonerated her.

  She grinned. “Good.” She bounded out of her chair and snagged a pack of cigarettes and an ashtray from the desk. Setting them on the coffee table, she asked, “You want a cigarette?”

  “Um, no thanks, I don’t smoke,” he said. He hadn’t finished the pack that he’d bought earlier. He’d thrown them away, breaking up the cigarettes so that he couldn’t be tempted to dig them out of the trashcan.