Chapter Sixty
The only silver lining from being exposed was that Myles seemed to believe her and had agreed to help her flush out the guilty.
So much had happened since she’d arrived at the Corrigans’ doorstep, and especially since Charli, that Isla had forgotten one last lead.
She couldn’t hide out the next couple of days at the Red Roof or her studio apartment as the time ticked by until she could expose Bennett and confront Victor.
She scrolled through the photos in her phone until she got to the picture of the invoice for Jackson’s storage unit that she’d taken during her noninterview with Jackson. No time like the present.
As she was about to get out, her phone rang. She considered ignoring it and dealing with whatever issue had now popped up later. But when she glanced down and saw who was calling, she answered, preparing herself for the worst. The first sounds that came through the phone’s speaker were ragged sobs.
“Is it true?” Holland asked without any greetings. She sounded bad, and Isla felt worse, because she already knew why Holland was calling. “Is it true you were lying this whole time? You knew my sister Edie and never told us.”
Isla sighed, resigned to her well-deserved fate. She owed Holland this. She closed her car door. “Who told you?”
“Who do you think?” Holland yelled. “My mother couldn’t wait to call me and tell me the friend I brought home had been using me the entire time.”
Just like in the parlor, when the Corrigans looked at her, expecting excuses or an explanation, Isla had none to give Holland without giving away everything.
She let out a breath to regulate the way her heart ached as Holland cried on the other end, a fierce fencing collegian reduced to tears because of Isla’s betrayal.
“I’m sorry, Holland.” Out of all of them Holland was owed this the most.
“So it really is true? When we met at the shopping center, and you coming to my house with my keys? It was all a setup?”
From the moment Isla had pointed out Holland’s flat and let her phone slip through to its demise, but there was no need to add fuel to the fire.
“Yeah, I knew who you were from the beginning, and it’s why we met,” Isla said. She rushed on, her true purpose for sitting in an unfamiliar town temporarily forgotten. “But our becoming friends, how I was with you, was sincere. Our friendship is real.”
Holland hiccupped. “Was it about our money? Is that what you’re after?”
“No.”
“Then what?” There was silence in the background on Holland’s end, and Isla wondered where she was, if she was in a safe space, but she didn’t dare ask.
“I can’t say right now.”
“Why?”
Isla remained patient. “I can’t say that either.”
Holland laughed dryly. “You’re lying. You can say, but you choose not to.
You know, I thought that maybe you would eventually be like my sister Edie.
I thought you were so much like her and that maybe I’d finally have a sister again, someone I could talk to, since everyone in my family only thinks about themselves. But I guess I’m just an idiot.”
Isla’s throat constricted. Her eyes burned with tears that threatened to come.
She was every bit the asshole that Holland thought she was.
She was not a good person, and Holland was too good, just like Eden.
But Isla couldn’t let herself fall into her emotions.
If she did that, everything would fall apart, and she was already hanging on by a thread.
“I have to go,” Isla said flatly, her voice not betraying her feelings.
“That’s it? That’s all you have to say to me, you fucking liar?” The curse sounded all wrong coming from Holland. Like the word was unfamiliar to her.
Isla nodded, though Holland couldn’t see her. She swallowed the lump in her throat, telling herself to hang on a little bit longer. This was what Rey and Nat had warned her about. Being in too deep and becoming emotionally involved with the people she was supposed to expose.
“When it’s time, I’ll tell you everything. You’ll be at your dad’s reception, right?”
Holland blew her nose. “What do you care?” she said pitifully.
“I care.” It was all Isla could offer as consolation. “Take care of yourself, Holland.”
She hung up before Holland had a chance to say anything more, and refocused, with only one thing on her mind. Getting into Jackson’s unit.
The place was nondescript and old school, a more run-down place than she’d imagined a meticulous person like Jackson would utilize.
The main office was dark, which was perfect.
And the fact that this place was so old was perfect too.
It meant no fancy security cameras or keypad entry systems, just the thick padlocks, and that no one would be paying attention if nothing looked broken into.
Isla used all of those assurances to boost her courage as she glanced at the photo of Jackson’s invoice and compared that number with the ones above each corrugated metal door.
This wasn’t like when she had Rey and Nat nearby, working a job with her. She was entirely on her own.
Gravel crunched beneath her boots as she finally stopped in front of H48 at the end of the last row of units in the farthest, darkest area of the grounds.
Of course it was. It was one of the largest units, and she wondered what was so big that Jackson needed so much room all the way over here.
Surely not old furniture. The units were secured with combination padlocks; this one had a four-digit lock setup.
No problem. She’d cracked these before, YouTube videos saving the day as usual.
She fished out a tension wrench, put the tiny Maglite in her mouth with its beam spotlighting the lock, and began working.
It was relatively warm even this late at night, and humid.
Or maybe it was her anxiety and her intense concentration as she worked the lock, using the wrench to add tension to the hook shackle as she started from the bottom row and rotated backward through each number, listening for the distinctive deep tick of the correct number.
The first was always the most difficult, in her opinion.
The shackle downshifted, disengaging the first inner lock.
She repeated the process three more times.
Click, click, click. Each time, the shackle shifted with each disengaged portion.
At the top roll, the shackle popped open.
Her body relaxed with relief. She switched from the mini MAG to the regular one, pulled the latch, and braced herself as she lifted the door.
A thick cloud of dust and stale air hit her full force, making her cough and her eyes water. She waited for the dust to clear and shined the bright light inside. The unit was massive, empty apart from the single object, draped under a heavy cover, sitting in the middle of the room.
Maybe it was old furniture after all, all clumped together. Maybe a vehicle?
Okay. If Jackson was a car collector, again, why would he keep a car in some obsolete facility an hour from town?
And why would the unit look like no one had been here for years?
There was a thick layer of dust on the built-in shelves, and cobwebs.
She didn’t want to think of the spiders that had made those webs. Ignorance, in this case, was her bliss.
Dust motes swirled in the strong beam of light as she approached the covered shape. She gripped a portion and pulled, revealing a Jeep underneath.
She yanked the rest, and this time was unaffected by the plume of dust that had collected on the top of the car cover typically used for all weather. She took an involuntary step back as her mind worked to register what she was seeing.
It was the unmistakable yellow that sparked a memory from the recesses of her mind. The Jeep with aftermarket additions for continuous hours of off-roading.
The motel. The Jeep pulling up. The dome light illuminating the figures inside. Eden hesitating before climbing in. Eden looking back at Isla, who was watching from the second-floor walkway, confused and scared. Eden with the imperceptible shake of her head to say Keep quiet.
The vehicle that had taken Eden away.
Roger’s Jeep, the one everyone had thought stolen, was here.
There were too many realizations assailing her at once.
They made her double over with nausea as the magnitude of what had happened to Eden and who was involved grew.
That it was people she knew and trusted made it all worse.
There was a reason Danny had wanted to stop her and James, and now she knew.
There was a reason why Jackson had hid Roger’s Jeep all this time.
Because it linked Bennett to Eden the night she went missing, and Jackson couldn’t afford for Bennett to be connected to her disappearance.
Not when he planned to take over the Corrigan Group.
Isla barely had the presence of mind to get back in the game.
She fumbled for her phone and snapped a picture of the license plate and the VIN in the bottom corner of the windshield.
She didn’t need it to tell her what she already knew, but if things went sideways, this could be proof, placing Roger and one of the others in the vehicle that Isla had watched Eden get into.
She replaced the car cover the way she had found it.
She couldn’t do anything about the disturbed dust should Jackson finally come to check out his little secret.
She backed out of the unit, sucking in huge gulps of fresh air, and collected the bag she’d left just outside.
Back in the car, she gripped the wheel, heart still hammering. She had to be smart. Had to be careful.
She thought back to Roger joking around with Danny and Bennett the day they went hunting, talking about his lost first love.
“You remember your first ride?” Bennett asked. “The Jeep that you backed into the tree stump that one time, making that dent in the bumper?”
“Cops ever find it?” Danny asked, laughing.
“Hell no,” Roger replied, sounding wistful.
None of them knew what had happened to Roger’s Jeep. They had no clue.
But Jackson did.