Chapter 43
CHAPTER
It’s a red pickup.
I drop the bags, freezing in place, and stare.
It’s too dark to see inside the cab, but I know it’s Noah. Neither of us moves for what must be close to a minute, until the window on the truck rolls down.
“Can I talk to you?” he yells.
“What do you want?”
“I just want to ask you a few questions. I haven’t slept in days.”
I scoff inwardly. Days? That’s nothing.
I’m still mulling how to play this when Noah points to the driveway. “I’ll just pull in. I won’t get out of the truck if you don’t want me to.”
I have questions of my own, so why not? What’s the worst that can happen? He kills me? At least then my eyes would shut for more than ten minutes, and I’d be put out of my misery. “Fine. But I’m only answering your questions after you answer mine.”
I turn and walk toward the house, not bothering to hang around for his response. Noah waits until I reach the front porch before pulling in. He parks ten feet from the door and kills the engine.
“What can I answer for you?” he says quietly.
“For starters, you can tell me where the journal is.”
He shakes his head. “I wasn’t lying. There is no journal. Or if there is, I don’t have it.”
“How do you expect me to believe you when you had pictures of me and told me you didn’t know who I was when we met?”
“I had no idea one of those girls was you. It wasn’t like I spent a lot of time staring at the photos. They’re fucking creepy. But I did go through them after you left.” He reaches over to the passenger seat and holds a Polaroid outside the window. “Is this you, too?”
It’s dark, but the porch light shines enough to see it. I can feel a storm brewing inside me, yet I swallow. “Of course it is.”
“Why does it say Jocelyn underneath? They’re all labeled with that name. I never understood that.”
I’m supposed to be asking the questions, so I ignore his. “If I didn’t kill your father, then who did?”
Noah shrugs. “I always wondered if maybe it was my mother. Couldn’t blame her after what that bastard did to her.
Though I never asked, and she never mentioned it.
We just went on with our lives—my mother fell into a deep depression, and I tried to make the best of it after he was gone.
” He shakes his head. “But it seems like there were plenty of people who had good reason to kill him.”
“How is it possible that I didn’t know someone strangled him?”
“Did you ask anyone questions about what happened?”
I shake my head. I’d left Minton Parish for New York the very next day, with a whopping $600 saved from my shifts at McDonald’s. But the homeless shelter I stayed in until I landed a job was better than this place. “No, but it was on the news.”
He shrugs again. “I remember seeing it. Georgina Cobb was the reporter, a pretty brunette. She wore a blue dress on the news that day. I’m not sure why I remember that, but I suppose there are some things that stick with you forever.
She said my father had been killed in a homicide, during a robbery.
Don’t think they reported the specific details.
But I’m positive they called it a homicide, because I asked my mother what the word meant.
After, she unplugged the TV and told me not to turn it on for a while. ”
I hate that I want to believe him. It makes me feel like the same dumb little girl who believed his father time and time again. I fold my arms over my chest. “I want all of the Polaroids. Not just the ones of me, but of all of the girls.”
“Okay. You can have ’em. What will you do with them?”
“Light them on fire and watch them melt. They should’ve never existed.”
He nods. “I’ll deliver them, or you can come by the house and pick them up. Whatever you prefer.”
My mind is a tangle of random thoughts. I don’t bother to try and organize them before spitting each one at Noah. “What’s the book you’re writing about?”
“Three estranged brothers wind up on vacation at the same resort twenty-five years later. They haven’t seen each other in more than two decades, so they think it’s a coincidence at first. But when one of them dies, and the body is found tied up in the exact way a young girl was found when they were teenagers, they realize there’s more to their getaway than meets the eye. ”
He’s either one hell of an off-the-cuff liar, or he’s telling the truth. I shake my head, unsure what to believe anymore, and go quiet.
After a few minutes, Noah speaks. “If you’re done, can I ask you a few questions now?”
“What?”
“Why are all the photos labeled Jocelyn?”
I frown. “That was the name he made me use to check into the motel where we met. I didn’t know about any of the other girls until I found the box, but I assume he did the same with them.”
“Do you know why he had you use that name?”
I meet his eyes. “Do you know anything about your grandmother?”
Noah’s eyes close. “Fucking hell.” He shakes his head. “I was afraid that might be your answer. I don’t know much about my real grandparents. I was always told they died when my father was little. He had a foster mother I vaguely remember. That was his biological mother’s name? Jocelyn?”
I nod.
“I’d never heard the name mentioned before I saw it written on those Polaroids.
But when I took out the autopsy report and death certificate the other day, his mother was listed as Jocelyn.
I wasn’t sure if that was his foster mother who adopted him or his actual mom.
The last name is . . . something with a B . ”
“Burton?”
“That’s it. I take it my father wasn’t put into foster care because his real mother died, like I was told?”
“No, she abused him. The same way he abused others. She went to prison.”
Noah swallows. “Is it all right if I get out of the truck? I think I’m going to be sick.”
I nod.
Noah hops out of the pickup and jogs around to the back.
He bends over, hands on his knees, and empties the contents of his stomach.
After, he dry heaves for a long time. Eventually, he wipes his mouth on the back of his hand and walks back to the still-open car door.
“I don’t know what to say. Sorry for my fucked-up family doesn’t seem like enough. ”
“If you’re not sending me the chapters, then who is?”
“I wish I knew. I’d help you if I could. I swear I would. You’ve been through so much already.” He rakes a hand through his hair. “You have any other questions for me?”
I’m certain I do, but my mind is too jumbled to do this anymore, so I shake my head.
Noah nods. “Will you be home if I go get the Polaroids and come back?”
“Yes. But just leave them in the mailbox.”
He smiles sadly and nods as he climbs back into his truck and pulls the door closed. Noah starts the ignition but then turns it off again. “Hey.”
I look up.
“It’s probably not the right time to say this. In fact, I know it’s not. But I get the feeling this might be the last time I get the opportunity, so I’m going to say it anyway.”
“What?”
He smiles, and his adorable dimples make an appearance. “I really did like you, Elizabeth. That’s why I was paying you attention. You’re different from other women.”
I shake my head. “I’m different because I’m fucked up, Noah. And that’s because your father made me this way.”