THE DAMAGE DONE

HILARY DAVIDSON

Books by Hilary Davidson

The Lily Moore Series

The Damage Done

The Next One to Fall

Evil in All Its Disguises

The Shadows of New York Series

One Small Sacrifice

Don’t Look Down

Standalone Novels

Blood Always Tells

Her Last Breath

Collected Short Stories

The Black Widow Club: Nine Tales of Obsession & Murder

THE DAMAGE DONE

Copyright © 2010, 2020 Hilary Davidson

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, incidents, and events are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the author.

ISBN-13: 978-0989726313 (paperback)

ISBN-13: 978-0989726320 (eBook)

Cover design by Damonza.com

Fourth edition

Books by Hilary Davidson

Author’s Note

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

CHAPTER 34

CHAPTER 35

CHAPTER 36

CHAPTER 37

CHAPTER 38

CHAPTER 39

CHAPTER 40

EPILOGUE

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Read an Excerpt From the Second Book in the Lily Moore Series, The Next One to Fall

For my mother, Sheila Davidson, for so many reasons

Author’s Note

I wrote The Damage Done in 2008 and 2009, and first published it with Tor/Forge in 2010. The book went on to win the 2011 Anthony Award for Best First Novel, for which I am eternally grateful. While preparing this new edition in 2020, I was tempted to change some of the technology, which now feels dated (does anyone have an iPod or DVD player anymore?). Ultimately, I decided to leave it alone, and simply remove bits like the hyphen that used to be in “e-mail.” I hope you’ll enjoy spending time with Lily Moore as much as I enjoyed writing about her.

CHAPTER 1

It was the bright yellow tape that finally convinced me my sister was dead. When the police had called me, I’d cried for her, but afterward a slender thread of suspicion had snaked into my brain and coiled itself around my thoughts. Claudia was deceitful, like every junkie has to be, but she also had a temper and hated to be ignored. I’d kept my distance from her since September; maybe being the butt of the world’s worst practical joke was the price I would pay for four months of silence. That suspicion didn’t deter me from getting on the first flight I could out of Barcelona, but it kept my heart beating at a relatively steady pace until I’d arrived in New York. Part of me believed that I would come home and find my sister waiting for me with her dark eyes and twisted smile, pleased with herself for tricking me back into her orbit.

Instead, I’d raced up the stairs of the Lower East Side tenement and found her door crisscrossed with yellow crime-scene tape. My hands shook as I peeled it off the right side of the doorframe, leaving tendrils dangling like wilted vines. This was further than Claudia had ever gone for a joke. My old keys still turned the two locks. Then I took a deep breath, pushed the door open and stepped inside.

The smell wasn’t anything like death. Instead, something sweetly floral made my nose twitch. The apartment had always been shortchanged on natural light, but there was enough to make out ghostly silhouettes of furniture. I brushed my hand against the wall and the overhead light flickered on. The living room was painted a robin’s egg blue, just as I’d left it when I’d hastily moved out a year ago. One wall was lined with my rickety old bookcases; across from them was the small sofa I’d found on the street and reupholstered, back in the days before bedbugs had made New Yorkers leery of sidewalk finds. There was a walnut night table I’d found at a thrift shop, with a new television and DVD player on it. At the far end of the room, under the window, was an Art Deco desk I’d regretted leaving behind. There was an empty space in the center, with a bright pink rectangle in it. It wasn’t until I was right in front of it that I realized it was an iPod. I wondered where my sister had come up with the money, and how she’d held back from pawning the gadgets when she was nauseated with the craving for a fix.

“Claudia?” I called out, my voice cracking on the last syllable. My voice was too loud in this empty room.

The floor was bare wood, cracked and splintered and crying out for refinishing. If the police had searched the apartment or taken any fingerprints, there weren’t any traces I could see. It looks like your sister drowned in her bathtub at home, the police detective had told me on the phone. Her tone was warm, as if she were sure that the cold body was a suicide or an accident. I’d heard that same soothing score from the police when my mother died. They wouldn’t bother with fingerprints in a case like that. I wondered if they’d straightened the place out, because Claudia thrived on chaos. Even when she came out of rehab, bursting with good intentions and energetic as a puppy, she left dirty plates and glasses around and deposited her worn clothing on the floor. There was a pile of magazines next to the sofa, Elle and Vogue and Travel & Leisure; Claudia often laughed at me for writing articles for them. Next to the TV was a stack of DVDs; Sex and the City was on top. Had she hidden them from me before? There was something darkly humorous about the fact she’d never kept her drug use a secret from me, but that her unspeakable shame was an indulgence in pop culture.

I set my purse on the sofa and turned to the bookcase. On it sat a framed snapshot of six-year-old Claudia and eight-year old me hugging in front of a Christmas tree. I had an identical picture in my purse, ripped from a frame in my Barcelona apartment, an ocean away. One shelf above held a photo of our parents on their wedding day. Next to that was the painted porcelain rabbit that had been our father’s last Christmas gift to Claudia. The pictures of my sister with her goth posse of art-school dropouts were gone. On the top shelf was a red card with a heart wrapped in a bow on the front. I picked it up.

Claudia, what will I do without you over the holidays? Only nine days until I see you again. I’ll be counting the minutes. M

I set it back on the shelf, remembering a couple of Claudia’s boyfriends who’d expressed their devotion through tattoos. Did the use of a single initial indicate a certain playfulness or a desire to hide his identity? I wondered if M knew about Claudia yet. I didn’t want to track him down just to break his heart, but there wasn’t much else I could do for my sister now.

Wandering through the short hallway, past the galley kitchen, I stopped in front of the bathroom door. It was closed, and the cold metal of the knob made my hand freeze. I didn’t want to see the room where my sister had died. Nothing would get me to open that door. Letting go, I backed slowly into the bedroom. Here was a hint of the familiar shambles, at least. There were no overflowing ashtrays or used cotton balls, but an open suitcase on the bed was stuffed with clothing that was piled too high for the bag ever to close. A black dress flopped drunkenly over a chair, a pair of black pumps in the gutter beneath. The label on the dress caught my eye. Prada. Claudia, shopping at Prada? Not likely. Shoplifting at Prada was a possibility.

The clothes on the bed bore similar labels. Feeling slightly emboldened, I reached for the closet door. Inside, stacked like bricks in a crumbling wall, sat dozens of shoeboxes. Manolo Blahnik. Christian Louboutin. Jimmy Choo. How did anyone, even Claudia, steal that many shoes? I peeked inside a box and found a pair of black patent stilettos. The smooth red leather sole was virgin. Size nine? My sister and I were the same height, five foot six, and we wore a size seven shoe. She had stolen enough clothes from me over the years that I knew we were the same size, though when Claudia’s heroin addiction spiraled out of control, as it always did before each stint in rehab, she vanished into the skeletal range. Had my sister been involved in some scam to fence designer shoes? I pulled down a couple of hangers from the densely packed clothing rack. Gucci. Michael Kors. More Prada. Everything would have fit Claudia, assuming she wasn’t subsisting just on junk and tar.

I almost missed the brown cardboard box on the floor. The handwriting on it was flowing and feminine, and I wondered who was sending parcels to my little sister. I tore into the box before I realized it was from me. Before Christmas, I’d phoned in an order for an expensive, impossible-to-find perfume called Tabac Blond that my sister loved. The store had couriered over the box and Claudia had abandoned it in the closet, unopened. An odd sense of rejection made a lump in my throat and I shut the closet door.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, it felt like the year since the apartment had been mine had multiplied into ten. I’d left it behind with almost everything I owned when I’d moved to Spain. Why had I been in such a rush? My own personal life was a shambles, but… My eyes fell on a silver bracelet and I made a strangled sound. It looked almost innocent, sitting atop the scarred wood of the old dresser. I stood and grabbed it, then rolled it around in my hands. It was an inch-wide bangle with an interlacing Irish scrollwork pattern on its surface. The inscription read For Lily, With Love Always, Dad.

For a moment I thought I’d burst into tears. It wasn’t awful enough that Claudia was dead; now I was reminded how much I hated her sometimes. The bracelet was the last Christmas present I ever had from my father. He’d even let me open it on Christmas Eve. We’ll have to wrap it up tight again, he’d said, imagine the hell your mother will give me otherwise. Then he’d died that night and I’d treasured and guarded his gift. I’d worn it to sleep as a teenager, afraid my mother would sell it for brandy or gin. Eighteen months ago, when I’d allowed a very sick Claudia to move in with me, it went missing. My sister had hepatitis then, and her normally pale skin was flushed yellow with jaundice. You don’t think I took it, do you? she’d said, the picture of frail innocence. Deep down, I’d always known she had. Even when she wasn’t shooting heroin she needed cash to buy her more-than-state-allotted doses of methadone, which provided its own high. But I’d never suspected she would steal it just to take it away from me. Dropping onto the bed, I took deep breaths and tried to pull myself together. I hadn’t thought I could be sadder or angrier or more miserable than I was when I found out my sister was dead, but I was wrong.

CHAPTER 2

I don’t know how long I sat there, surrounded by the ghosts of my past, before I heard the knock at the door. For a moment I lost my breath. Was I hallucinating now–or, more likely, hearing noise from an apartment down the hall? It came again, sharp and insistent. Snapping the silver bracelet securely around my wrist, I retraced my steps to the living room. The peephole revealed a blond woman I didn’t recognize. When I opened the door, I noticed that she was tall, five foot ten without her heels, in her mid-forties, broad-shouldered but elegantly slender. She was simply but expensively dressed in a silk blouse and tailored pants.

“Hello, I’m Sarah Lyons. I live down the hall.” She spoke in a low, mellifluous voice and gestured lazily with a manicured hand at the hallway opposite the stairwell. “I noticed that the police tape was coming off the door and I wanted to make sure…” Her voice trailed off. Make sure you’re not a thief breaking into this apartment, she meant.

“I’m Claudia’s sister,” I said.

“Lily?” she answered, as if we’d met before. “Oh, hello. You live in Madrid, don’t you?”

Her cheerful tone grated on me, but I knew that I was an irrational mess of tattered hopes and dashed prayers. “Barcelona. I just moved there from Madrid.” My voice strained with the effort of manners.

“You’re a journalist, aren’t you? Claudia told me something about that being why you moved there.”

“I went to Spain a year ago because I was writing a travel guide about it. I ended up deciding to stay for a while.” My answer was mechanical. I wasn’t going to admit to a complete stranger that I’d been desperate to escape the emotional undertow of my relationship with my sister, among other things. I’d almost convinced myself that I hadn’t abandoned Claudia. After all, I’d given her my apartment, and every month I’d mailed the rent check directly to the superintendent. But now she was gone and I was left with the guilty knowledge that I hadn’t really taken care of her at all.

“Spain is such a wonderful country,” Sarah said, her smile revealing perfect, pearly teeth before her expression darkened. “I’m so sorry about your sister. I was very fond of Claudia. She was such an unusual person. Unique.” Sarah’s heart-shaped face was sorrowful, but there was nothing affectionate in her tone. I wondered if she was being sarcastic. Calling Claudia unusual was like referring to the pope as religious. Sometimes I’d felt guilty about inflicting her on my neighbors, but she had to live somewhere. She’d already put in time in a south Bronx squat and in various shelters around Manhattan.

“Thank you.”

“It’s such a sad situation,” Sarah continued. “Claudia was so young. What was she, twenty-eight?”

“She turned twenty-seven in November.”

“I should have remembered—she told me that—but she looked older. I suppose she’d just had such a hard life.”

Behind my eyes, there was a sign that was flashing Get lost. Sarah didn’t see it, or she didn’t care, because she went on. “Claudia told me a little of your family history—”

I had a childish impulse to slam the door in her face. For years, I’d dealt with teachers and social workers and counselors who thought that they could divine my future from the facts of my past. I knew nothing about their personal lives, an imbalance that made me feel both vulnerable and angry. Now, I cut Sarah off before she could get into the gory details. “You live down the hall? In which apartment?”

“I live in C.”

“Are you a relative of Mrs. Felesky’s?”

“Who?” Sarah’s eyes widened slightly.

“Mrs. Felesky lived in 5C. This used to be my apartment,” I explained, thinking of the petite powerhouse who slipped whiskey into her tea and told ribald stories from the days she’d been a showgirl. “Mrs. Felesky was in this building for thirty years at least. She’s a wonderful lady. I guess she’s about ninety now, but she was always so independent. Do you know where she went?”

“I have no idea. I just moved in a few weeks ago. Why would you think I was her relative?” Her imperious tone suggested she found the question offensive.

“Rent control.” Sarah looked blank. “The people who’ve been here for decades pay next to nothing in rent,” I explained. “When they leave, sometimes a relative moves in, without mentioning it to the landlord.” It was pretty much what I’d done with Claudia, only I’d made the mistake of inviting her to live with me first. That hadn’t worked out very well.

“Oh, I see.” Sarah paused, then tugged the thread of conversation back to the morbid. “I saw Claudia on New Year’s Eve, just before I went out. She wasn’t in very good spirits. She just seemed so… sad.”

I wasn’t ready to hear anything else she had to say about my sister. “Thanks for coming by.”

“I’m glad I got to meet you,” said Sarah. “I often wondered what you were like.”

I closed the door quickly, spinning the locks. Suddenly I was drained and empty, and I rested my forehead against the door. I knew from experience that people were awkward when dealing with death. After my father died, kids at my junior high would whisper about me in the hallway. That’s the girl! Her father died on Christmas Eve. It’s really sad. My mother said… They weren’t being cruel, they were just getting a charge from their proximity to death, which was close enough to chill but not to harm. It was worse when I was in college and my mother died over the winter holiday break. It was midway through freshman year, and I found that I was suddenly shunned by people who’d invited me to parties only weeks before. One girl pushed a big, flowery card under the door of my dorm room, but she avoided actually talking to me.

The phone rang, reminding me of where I was. The sound had come from the vintage black rotary-dial phone I’d salvaged long ago when another elderly neighbor had left the building. You couldn’t use an answering machine with it, but you had to respect technology that had been around for half a century and refused to quit. On impulse, I went to the desk and answered it. “Hello?”

Silence on the other end. Then a sound like a wheezing breath.

“Hello?” I repeated. “Who is this?”

“I think I got the wrong number,” replied a woman’s voice. She sounded very old or very tired. “Sorry ’bout that.” She hung up, and I set the receiver back into its cradle.

I’d spent long enough at Claudia’s. I retrieved my bag and grabbed my cell phone. My best friend, Jesse, answered on the second ring. He’d wanted to come to my sister’s apartment with me. As a consolation prize, I’d promised to phone him when I was done.

“It’s me,” I said. “Are you ready to get drunk now?”

CHAPTER 3

I woke up early Monday morning, jet-lagged and hungover. What really made me feel ill was the fact that I had to go to the morgue that day. Claudia and I were each other’s only family; there was no one else to identify her. Still, when I called the police precinct to let the detectives know I’d arrived in New York, I held a faint hope that I wouldn’t have to do it. The police had to be busy right after New Year’s. It was January third; they’d be up to their eyeballs in thieves and fighters and would-be terrorists. “Car will pick you up ten-thirty,” barked the desk sergeant. “Detective Renfrew will meet you.” The name twigged my memory. Norah Renfrew was the sympathetic-sounding officer who’d called about my sister’s death. I wasn’t looking forward to meeting her.

I was staying at Jesse’s apartment, and he was up brewing coffee by the time I’d showered and dressed. “Mornin’, Tiger Lily,” he said in his deep Oklahoma drawl, handing me a cup.

“You didn’t have to get up.” I felt guilty. “I know you’re not a morning person.”

“You’re not gonna let me live down that time I fell asleep while eatin’ breakfast, are you?” He smiled down at me. Jesse was six-foot-one, handsome like a thirty-year-old Gregory Peck with his dark brown hair and piercing eyes.

Even on such a grim day, he could make me smile. “You went headfirst into a bowl of cornflakes.”

“That’s our li’l secret.” We clicked coffee cups as if they were champagne flutes. “Damn, but you look fine first thing in the mornin’. Like Ava in The Barefoot Contessa.”

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