Free The One I Left Behind by Jennifer McMahon Page A

doctor tapped her knee with a rubber hammer. Her body felt twitchy and strange, like it was pulled on by invisible strings.
    There was now a detective being interviewed and he had little else to say. He was a red-faced man with a bushy mustache and green polyester sport coat.
    “Oh my God,” Tara yelped. “That’s Charlie’s dad!”
    “Is not,” Reggie said, moving closer to the TV.
    “Regina, don’t hog the television,” Lorraine scolded. “You’re blocking our view.”
    Reggie went back to the couch.
    “It totally is,” Tara said. “He’s like . . . famous now.”
    “Do you have any idea whose hand this might be?” the newscaster asked. “Or whether it was taken from someone dead or alive?”
    “I’m afraid I can’t comment on that at this time,” the bushy-mustached detective said. He asked anyone who might have been downtown and seen a person with a brown paper package to call the station. Reggie looked at his face. Tara was right. It was Charlie’s father. He looked fatter, more washed out and potato-like than in real life. But then again, she hadn’t seen him a lot lately. Charlie didn’t invite her over all that much these days, and when he did, his dad was always working.
    “Je-sus!” Tara said, her mouth staying open, her eyes huge and hungry, all lit up like they got when she was playing one of her end-of-the-world games.
    Lorraine smoothed the front of her stained fishing vest and shook her head, then closed her eyes for a moment, like she was making a wish.
    Reggie reached up and touched her new ear, pulling it loose, then attaching it again with a satisfying metallic click.

Excerpt from Neptune’s Hands: The True Story of the Unsolved Brighton Falls Slayings by Martha S. Paquette
    Officer Thomas Sparrow was the first one to notice the package when he returned from the parade at approximately 11:45. It sat at the top of the granite steps leading to the main entrance of the Brighton Falls police station. It was a plain brown package, tied with string. Officer Sparrow, the newest member of the force, untied the string without notifying his superiors or screening it as a possible explosive device.
    “I don’t know what I was thinking,” he told me in an interview later. He was a fresh-faced twenty-two-year-old who’d gotten an associate degree in criminal justice from the local community college and joined the force right away. He’d grown up in Brighton Falls and had always wanted to be a police officer. “I guess I figured it was a mistake, you know? Someone set it down and left it by accident. It looked like something from a bakery, all wrapped up like that.”
    Under the brown paper, Sparrow found a red and white milk carton, stapled closed. His curiosity piqued, he pulled open the top and discovered a woman’s right hand, the well-manicured nails done in a fresh coat of coral polish. Officer Sparrow set the carton back down, hurried inside to alert the desk sergeant of his discovery, then ran down the hall to the men’s room and vomited.

Chapter 7
    October 16, 2010
    Worcester, Massachusetts
    “R EGINA?” THE WOMAN UNDER the covers crooned. “Is that you?”
    Her face was skeletal, her skin so thin and white you could see the blue veins pulsing behind it. Her hair, once a radiant platinum blond, was now limp and colorless as rice noodles. But it was Vera, no doubt.
    Reggie froze in the doorway, a tight squeezing sensation in her chest pushing all the breath out of her, nearly stopping her heart.
    Go on in there, you fucking coward , she told herself.
    “It’s me, Mom,” Reggie said. How strange, to find herself wondering who it was her mother saw. Was there some part of the kid she used to be peering out from under the dark bangs of curly hair, the five-foot-eight frame—still all elbows and knees like some absurd marionette? Maybe not much had changed after all. In her leather jacket, jeans, and boots, she was still dressed like the tomboy she’d always been.
    The