Night
When I see the green truck drive past, relief and elation wash over me. Luca is okay. And if I can get to him, I will be too. I burst through the door of the station.
But it is a mistake.
The minute I hit the sidewalk, I’m blindsided, football-tackled and pushed to the dark side of the building. I yelp once—a swallowed cry—then find myself looking up into Heath’s eyes. They glitter, catching the light from the street lamps lining the sidewalk behind us. Or maybe it’s the reflection from the sparkly cutout jack-o’-lanterns and ghosts tied to the lamps.
Heath snatches the iPad I’m clutching and tucks it into the back of his jeans.
“Is that why you’re running from me? Because of what you heard on that?” He’s in my face now, and I can see that even though he’s wiped most of Cerny’s blood off, a trace of it has settled into the creases around his eyes. The bloody crow’s-feet give him a demonic look.
“Please, Daphne,” he says. “Can’t you see that running’s not a possibility for you now? Too much has happened. What you’ve done, what I’ve done . . . we’ve gone too far. We can’t go back.”
I can’t answer. My throat feels used up, rusted out.
“We have to face this together. Can’t you see that I’m the one person in this world who understands you? I read you like a book from the first moment I met you. I read you, and I gave you everything you ever wanted. A hero, a rescuer, the strong, silent type, right out of a romance novel, who wouldn’t ask too many questions, who wouldn’t get too close. I played it perfectly and you believed me. And now we’re a team. I know you. And now, finally, you know me.”
I don’t answer, and I can tell it frustrates him.
“I was going to tell you about who I was, but I wanted to do it on my own terms. That’s why I took the extra key from the Nissan. I couldn’t take the chance of you running away. But then Cecelia wouldn’t let up, constantly trying to meet with you, acting like the two of you were friends. I told her to stop—that it was my story to tell—but she wouldn’t listen. She was jealous of you, how much I loved you. She was going to tell you everything just to spite me.”
He lets go of me and rakes his fingers through his hair. The crazy thing, the thing that doesn’t make an ounce of sense, that the most astute therapist in the world couldn’t untangle, is that even after all I know, I still have the impulse to comfort him.
“I’m smarter than this,” he says. “I swear, I just miscalculated.” His eyes are wide pools of innocence. I wonder how he makes them look that way, how he fakes it so well. “You have to believe—I only killed the other ones, the other girls, because I wanted to prove to Cerny that he had hurt me. I thought it would make him feel guilty when I told him how he’d driven me to do it. But the man has no remorse. He didn’t care, not about the girls, not about the fact that telling you about my past had to be handled very delicately.”
The girls.
“You’re lying, Heath.” My voice is shaky. “You told him you wanted him to help you adapt what you did. Make it SUSTAINABLE.”
He claps a hand over my mouth, but I claw it away.
“You didn’t kill anyone to prove a point to Dr. Cerny. You did it because you enjoy it.”
His eyes widen. “Okay, yes. Yes. See how bad he messed me up? Do you see? But it doesn’t matter, does it? The bottom line is, Cerny couldn’t cure me. I am who I am. We are who we are.”
“What do you mean, ‘We are who we are’?”
“What you did,” he says, like I’m unbelievably dense. “What you had to do to survive. It was just like me.”
“What I did? You mean . . . hiding Chantal’s medicine?”
He’s cocked his head and is regarding me with an amused expression.
“No, Daphne. I mean what you did to Holly Idlewine.”
“What I . . .”
“At the bar last week,” he continues. “You flipped her off, then gave the bartender your credit card. You told him to charge all Holly Idlewine’s drinks to you.”
He’s right. I did do that.
“That doesn’t prove anything,” I say weakly, but I know it doesn’t matter. He has been planning this day, this moment, for a long time. He is way ahead of me. I am outmatched in every way.
“You paid for all her drinks because you wanted her so completely smashed that when she stumbled out of Divine, you could easily drag her to your car. Put her in the trunk and drive her to some dark, isolated location.”
My lips part.
“A nothing piece of property so far out in the country, nobody would ever think to look there. That’s where you tied her up. Tortured her and killed her.”
I can no longer feel my fingers and toes. The electrical impulses in my skull have dulled to a low buzzing. It feels like my body is shutting down.
“They haven’t found her yet, and they won’t until I want them to. What they do know is a woman named Daphne Amos, a woman who was once questioned in the suspicious death of a fourteen-year-old girl in a state park in north Georgia, paid for Holly Idlewine’s drinks the same night she disappeared.”
He pulls me by the wrist into a hug, and around his shoulder I see Cerny’s silver Mercedes parked just a couple of feet away. It’s idling. Then Heath speaks again, low and soft.
“When they find this on the ground near her body, the case will be closed.”
I jerk back. He’s holding up my engagement ring. Cecelia’s ring. I feel like I’m having a heart attack. My hand dips toward my boot, fingers between the leather and wool, and I draw up the knife.
“No, no, no . . .” is all I can say. I am shaking and crying, swinging the knife in wild arcs.
He catches my wrist easily, wrenches the knife out of my grasp, and tosses it into the bushes beside the police station. I can’t stop crying—nose running and mixing with the tears—as he hustles me to the car.
“Don’t worry, Daphne,” he says once we’re locked in. His voice is soothing and he pulls the seatbelt across me. “If they find her with the ring, I’ll tell them that you were with me all night that night. That you couldn’t have kidnapped Holly or taken her to the woods and tied her up. That you couldn’t have done all those horrible things to her.” His face splits into a grin, but one so full of evil I cannot move. “You see? We can’t go back.”
Heath stops for gas on 515, at a place just south of Ellijay. It’s one of those shiny new mega-stations with endless rows of gleaming pumps and a combo convenience store and Ye Olde Donut Shoppe. And it’s hopping, even this late at night. Inside, I walk past a bank of cappuccino machines sandwiched between the sizzling hot-dog rollers and slushie station. I’m starving, but Heath’s got my purse with him in the car, and he hasn’t given me any money.
The ladies’ room is down a short corridor, a spacious, exceptionally clean single. He’s let me go alone—there’s no reason for him to follow me in there. If I run, he’ll just plant the ring and then tell the police I killed Holly Idlewine.
After I use the bathroom and wash up, I stare into the mirror. I remove my smudged glasses and splash water on my face, then wash my glasses. My face looks so normal—pink and healthy. I touch my cheeks. My skin is warm. I am still alive. Still breathing. Still able to think and to reason and to act.
I am still myself.
When I emerge from the bathroom, a yellowed old woman with a thick head of glossy chestnut hair and a purple terry tracksuit is waiting. A brown fake-crocodile purse is slung over her stick arm.
“Whew,” the woman says in her Marlboro-roughened voice. “Thank you, sugar. You’d think they’d have more than one potty in a place this big.”
I smile and she locks herself in. I stand there, letting the information filter through my consciousness: that was a wig she was wearing, and her skin had a yellow tinge to it. She’s ill—cancer, most likely. And then, I can’t help it, I picture myself waiting until she unlocks the door, then pushing my way into the bathroom with her before she realizes what’s happening. In my mind, I snatch the wig, the tracksuit, and her purse. Disguise myself and walk out right under Heath’s nose like something out of a bad spy movie.
But no. I close my eyes and turn away from the door. I’m going to have to find another way. Assaulting ill old ladies isn’t an option. I haven’t sunk that far yet.
I head toward the doors of the convenience store, and I’m just about to push through when something stops me. Outside, parked a couple of pumps down from Cerny’s Mercedes, a green pickup truck. The driver’s-side door is ajar. It has a long white unbroken scratch down the side of it. I inhale sharply.
A young man, medium, compact build, wearing a gray hoodie, jeans, and a black knit cap, stands on the other side of the truck at the pump, hand on the nozzle. His cap is pushed far back enough to see the brush of close-cropped light-brown hair. He is scanning the pumps.
I start to move forward again, but something yanks me back by my coat collar.
“Hold up,” a voice behind me says. It’s Heath. I can smell him—the stink of Cerny’s blood on his clothes or skin—but surely I’m imagining that. “He must’ve followed us here. Did you see him at Baskens? Did you tell him what we did?” Heath twists the collar tight and pulls me back against a rack of Grandma’s cookies and beef jerky.
“No,” I say.
He nudges me. “He sees the car. Look.”
He’s right. Luca’s edged past the pump and is staring at Cerny’s Mercedes.
“He knows,” Heath says.
“’Scuse me, sugar.”
It’s the elderly woman in the purple tracksuit. As she passes, she smiles at us both—a warm, grandmotherly smile. Then, in an instant, she’s out the door, and I realize I have a plan. Or, at least, the beginning of a plan. I face Heath, inch closer to him.
“We can put it all on him. Cerny, Glenys, all of it.”
“What?”
“He knows I’m in danger, and he’s trying to be a hero. We can use that.”
There’s a beat, then Heath lets out a soft sound of disbelief.
I meet his gaze. “We lead him somewhere, maybe to the woods where you left Holly. Make it look like he was threatening me. Then kill him.”
My heart is racing. I’m not sure if anything I’m saying is making sense, but I can see his gears grinding.
“If we don’t do it now,” I add, “we’re going to have to do it later. You said it yourself. He knows.”
Heath clears his throat. Runs a finger down my cheek all the way to my lips.
“We should go back to the car,” I say. “Get him to follow us.”
His eyes are locked on mine, their intensity dizzying. “Let’s do it,” he says.
We push out the door. I don’t look in Luca’s direction, but every nerve in my body tells me we have his attention. I’m right, because as soon as we step off the curb and head in the direction of the Mercedes, something whizzes past me, hitting Heath square in the center of his back. He whips around.
“The fuck—”
I look down. A set of car keys at our feet. A gift.
A gift meant for me.
It only takes me half a second to scoop up the keys, pivot, and run like hell for Luca’s green Tacoma. At the same time, I can see Luca take off, jogging away from the gas station toward the highway. It takes Heath a second or two longer to figure out what’s happened—and to figure out who to chase, me or Luca—but by the time he reaches the truck, I’m locked safely inside, jamming the key in the ignition. Heath yanks at the handle and blazes at me.
We lock eyes, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much hatred condensed in one human’s face. But he can’t make too much of a racket because there are people everywhere. I put my foot on the brake and grip the key. My body is practically vibrating.
I look up the highway and see Luca, about a dozen or so yards up the northbound side, pounding the gravel on the shoulder, all stops out. He’s heading in the direction of Dunfree. Run, run, run, I think. Straight to the police.
Heath follows my gaze, then turns back to me. He runs his finger across his throat. I feel sick, but I crank the truck anyway.
The next thing I know, he’s darting through the pumps, sprinting in Luca’s direction. Heart punching in my chest, I maneuver around the other cars and roll out onto the highway. Ahead, Luca veers from the shoulder onto the highway too, directly into the oncoming traffic. Heath follows him, and I gasp. A couple of cars screech and skid to avoid hitting them, as Luca tears up the center of the highway, adjacent to the median. Heath is only a couple of yards behind him now, narrowing the distance.
I’m closing the distance too, between them and me, white-knuckling the wheel, weaving around traffic. Maybe cars are honking. If they are, I don’t register them. I’ve become my heartbeat. My pulsing blood and gulping breath. Every function of my body transformed into a laser aimed at stopping Heath.
I will hit him with the truck. Crush him under the wheels. I won’t stop until there are smashing lungs, spurting blood, crunching bones.
We’re the same . . .
I shake his voice out of my head. It’s not true, it never was. And yet here I am, foot on the accelerator, calculating the shrinking distance between the nose of the truck and his body. I’m about to do this monstrous thing. But it has to be done, I know it. And I am the only one who can do it.
Not because I’m a monster, but because I am not.
I pull up behind Heath—there’s only a few feet between us, a few yards between him and Luca—and hold steady. This is it. I have to do this now or I’m going to lose my nerve. I inhale, squeeze the wheel, and gun it, the truck leaping forward. But at the same time, Luca swerves up onto the median and onto the other side of the highway, and Heath does the same.
The next instant, I’m thunking up onto the median too, slowing between the clipped crepe myrtles, then grinding to a stop. Cars whiz past me and I catch my breath, scanning the southbound lanes. Where did Heath go? And where’s Luca? A few seconds pass, and I spot them at last, Luca scrambling up the embankment toward the woods. Heath sprinting across the road in pursuit.
And then what happens, happens so quickly, I almost can’t believe it.
A maroon SUV appears out of the dark, slams into Heath, flips him up and over the hood. I watch him slide onto the top of the SUV, then tumble to the asphalt, and a pale-yellow Cadillac runs over him. Front and back wheels. When the Cadillac is past, I can see Heath’s body, a shapeless, motionless lump on the highway. He looks like a stray dog, I think. Roadkill.
Do I scream? I don’t even know; I don’t hear a thing, not even the sound of my own voice. I only see Heath, motionless on the pavement.
The SUV and Cadillac screech to a stop, and both drivers jump out. I don’t move because I can’t. A wave of nausea, so intense I’m paralyzed, is slicing through me. I grit my teeth so hard I can feel my temples pulse, and I pray for the sensation to pass. It doesn’t. I lean over and vomit onto the passenger’s-side floor mat.
When I look up again, I see Luca’s made it all the way up to the top of the embankment. He stands for a minute, surveying the situation below. Back on the road, one of the motorists, the guy from the SUV, is already on his phone. The Cadillac guy is pacing up and down in front of him and yelling. Nobody has approached Heath, not yet. I wonder if it’s because it’s obvious that he’s dead. In an instant, I see Luca turn and disappear into the woods.
I grip the steering wheel and try to remember how to breathe. The police will be here soon. They’ll figure out that the Mercedes abandoned at the pump is Dr. Cerny’s. They’ll find the iPad inside—the files and Heath’s confession. They may not know how I fit into the equation, but before long, they’ll be looking for me, even if I wasn’t the one who hit him.
Now more cars are slowing and stopping, their headlights illuminating the road. Another guy’s out and on his phone. An older woman who stopped has got her arm around the Cadillac guy, leading him toward the median. There’s no sign of Luca. I shift into reverse, my hand trembling, then ease onto the gas.
I roll off the median and go farther up the road where I can hang a U-turn. I drive slowly past Heath and the clot of stopped cars. Nobody even glances my way.
I ease up to sixty miles an hour. Still nothing happens. No police lights, nothing. I drive and drive and drive, slow and steady down the highway, keeping the truck at an even sixty. All the while, a constant, low humming vibrates through my brain.
I don’t know how long it takes—maybe thirty, forty-five minutes—before I realize it’s actually me, humming a tune. Sinatra, if you can believe it. Goddamn Sinatra.
And then I’m sobbing. Loud, inhuman wails and tears pour out of me, and I don’t try and stop them. I am due. Past due. I drive and cry. Drive and cry. For the little girl in an apartment alone. On top of a bunk bed at night, hungry. Sitting in a psychologist’s smoky office, terrified, telling a partial truth that will slither and encircle and squeeze the life out of her for years to come. I cry for the woman who, even for a split second, actually believed she could stay with a murderer. That she could love him.
But I am alive. I’m alive and driving away from him. I was not willing to dig up a grave and climb in with the monster inside.
I switch on the radio, and the tears stop. Strangely, I don’t feel the urge to count anything or snap a band on my wrist. I’m wrung out, my body quivering like a dog in a thunderstorm, but just driving seems like enough for me right now. I have no idea where I should go. South, for now, I guess. Back roads all the way, until I hit I-20.
Then I’ll go west. I don’t have a phone, no money or identification. But west has a good sound to it. I remember having heard somewhere that getting a forged driver’s license, passport, birth certificate is possible—even though I don’t have the slightest clue how to go about it. I think I still have Jessica Kyung’s business card somewhere on me. She might be willing to help me. I hope so. She’s the only option I have right now.
A cursory inventory of the truck reveals Luca’s stocked it with food, bottles of water, and a wad of bills that looks like it could last me several weeks. And something else. The truck’s license plate is tucked in the sun visor. Luca must’ve taken it off before he caught up with Heath and me at the gas station. The next time I have to stop, I’ll screw it back on. I’ll keep to the side roads. Someone could have witnessed the green truck that was bearing down on Heath Beck right before he was hit. It’s impossible to know.
The only thing I am sure of is that I want to live. So I will run.
It’s the one thing I know how to do.