I watched Rico’s car pull away from the clinic, with Red and Audrey inside, then I climbed into the truck. From the heating vent, a folded sheet of paper protruded.
As I reached for it, my hand shook. The note was scrawled with a heavy hand, the black ink spreading at the edges of the words. When I touched the paper, ink came off on my fingers. I warned you about the police. Now I’ll have to kill them both.
On the back of the note was the same address Red had just given me.
How long had the note been there? I decided it must’ve been planted after Rico arrived, but before the other police cruisers. Either way, a risky move. I worried at that, and at the invitation.
On the highway, I drove faster than was prudent, trying to outrace my thoughts. Growing up, I had always been the girl without a mom, but it hadn’t mattered because I had my dad. Then I had started junior high, and more of my classmates began wearing bras and makeup, and boys began paying attention even if they were as intimidated as hell by the bras and makeup. So I had invented a mom—in the stories I told my classmates, she was a pilot who baked elaborate cakes and knew the words to every Aerosmith song. When a group of girls discovered my lie, my downfall had been swift and painful. For them too. I might have punched one of them in the nose.
But, again, I’d had my dad. I’d always had my dad. Until now. With one revelation, I had lost him, and a mom who might have been a pilot who baked cakes while listening to Aerosmith, but whose occupation and interests and favorite songs I would never know because I would never know her.
Worse, my husband was missing, and my son.
From the note: Now I’ll have to kill them both.
No. That wouldn’t happen. I had already lost enough.
I cut the travel time to Napa by half. As I approached the property, I slowed. Like I had done at Daryl’s, I headed for an adjacent parcel rather than coming in straight on.
I wasn’t stupid. I knew I had no leverage. But I had my life, and maybe I could bargain with that.
The electric motor at the gate looked like it had broken years before, the drive-up keypad dangling useless beside it. A gust propelled the metal box against the fence, away from it, back again, the hollow ping of the pendulum marking time.
I rattled the rusted chain and padlock that secured the gate. The low-tech alternative proved worthless as well, the lock springing with the movement. The mechanism hadn’t been secured. With another shake, the lock tumbled onto the gravel.
Come on in, it seemed to say.
I drove without my headlights on, my windows down. I heard the crunch of my tires on the gravel and felt the chill of the wind scrubbing my cheeks.
The road narrowed. I pulled the truck as far off the road as I could, parking it between two oak trees. Then I killed the engine and got out.
I took a breath and walked toward the lights of the house nestled on the hill, leaving behind the walnut trees and the narrow gravel road, passing what may once have been a guest house. Now all that remained were two walls that tilted in the absence of a roof and sagging floorboards open to the sky.
Nearer the main house, beneath an oak tree, I stumbled, landing on my knees. When I reached out for balance, star thistle stabbed my palm.
In the dark, I found the obstacle that had snagged my shoe: a single bone jutted from the hard-packed dirt. I shivered. I was in the right place.
I didn’t dwell on the bone and its implications. I focused my attention on the rows of wine grapes that marched up a nearby hill, leading to a house with all its lights blazing.
In the distance, a car’s headlights bobbed. I tucked myself behind the trunk of the nearby oak and stood still, watching. I hoped the tree and shadows would be enough to hide me, but if the driver was searching for me, he would find me.
The car veered toward the main road, passing a hundred yards from where I stood. If the driver spotted me, he gave no sign.
Once clear of the headlights, I continued walking toward the house. As I moved, I remembered the bandage scissors I had earlier slipped in my pocket. I pulled them out now, pressing against the tip for reassurance.
The road ended. With only my tiny scissors for a weapon, I started climbing toward the house at the top of the hill.
44
I didn’t make it to the house. When I turned the corner, another structure drew my interest. A cinder-block creamery with pine slats blinding its windows, the rotted planks of its roof slumped in resignation.
My attention shifted from the creamery to its neighbor, a storage shed. The shed held my interest longer. Old, abandoned. The hard-packed dirt around it held more polish than the building that sprang from it.
It was the kind of place that might hold piles of burlap sacks. Like the one in that texted image of an unconscious Sam.
With the moon pushing away the sun, the cornflower sky deepened to indigo. I kept to the darkness beneath the oaks. As I approached the shed, burrs breached the barrier of my jeans, sticking to my socks. I tried the door. Locked.
Frustrated but not surprised, I planted my feet, palmed my scissors, then threw my shoulder against the door. My body took most of the jolt. I slammed against it a second time. The frame crackled, split. A third strike and I was in, brushing aside cobwebs that laced the entrance.
My shoulder throbbed as I stood in the threshold, surveying the shed—apparently once used for the storage of empty feed sacks. Fading light seeped in through the four small windows high in the rafters, filtered through clouds of dust and spiderwebbing.
Carver’s earlier words, from our meeting at the hospital, tortured me now: I placed him on a pile of feed sacks and watched as he rolled, facedown, on the burlap.
Thinking of Sam that way—unconscious on his stomach, arms splayed useless to his sides—brought a sudden and dagger-sharp clarity. I worked to draw breath. Images flipped through my head in quick succession: Sam’s arm draped across his lover. Daryl drugged with my kids beside him. Sam battered atop burlap. The images blurred, until Sam’s arm became indistinguishable from Daryl’s, the fabric of Daryl’s sofa melting into a pile of feed sacks—a horror show inside my brain that I studied with new intensity.
I had been so focused on the woman in the photo with Sam and the possible ways the image might have been manipulated. But now I saw what I had missed before—in the picture of Sam and the woman, there had been no tension in his shoulders or in his arms. He had been posed in profile, the bruised side of his face hidden against his lover’s chest.
The sound of a man clearing his throat made me jump, and I rammed my already aching shoulder into an industrial vacuum, mounted to a beam overhead.
“Finally, your timing doesn’t suck,” he said.
I immediately recognized the voice. It was the same one that had threatened me and my children.
The scissors clenched in my fist, I moved toward the voice and found Carver in the corner, mostly hidden by a stack of boxes. In his current condition, Carver posed no threat: he squirmed against ropes that bound his ankles and wrists.
“Care to untie me?”
“Not particularly.”
Through the windows near the rafters, the rising moon cut through spiderwebbed glass and cast pale bands across Carver’s face. His lip was swollen, and the ropy scar along his jaw had been scraped raw. Bits of gravel pebbled one cheek.
In my search for Carver, I had pictured him a thousand ways, but I had never pictured him helpless. Still, I couldn’t discount him as a suspect solely because of his bindings. Criminals turned on one another all the time. Look at Ernie, who had shared all he knew for a few fake painkillers.