Chapter 34
There are already days when I’m finding it hard to live with myself, but what if something happens to Jess or Sam?
“Come on, come on,” I implore the Subaru in front of me, panic clustering up high in my chest.
My hands shake on the wheel.
The highway center strip turns from solid to dashes.
I throw on the blinker, slam on the gas, and whip around three cars as a pickup barrels toward me.
The driver is enormous, hairy as a Sasquatch.
Not a good day for him to play chicken with me.
He slams on the brakes, and I knife back into my lane, leaving his horn blaring in outrage.
When I get to Jess’s, she’s outside sitting on her front step. Even from a distance, she looks pale and stricken. She runs toward the driveway as I pull in next to her sky-blue Subaru Outback. I can see that there’s white text on her windshield.
When I step out, Jess is already there, in my arms, grabbing me. I hug her back, her body frail and rigid against mine. Whatever life the Dallas event instilled in her has all drained away. She feels like a twig that might snap if I squeeze her too hard.
I look over her shoulder to her car again and try to make out the lettering, but I still can’t see it clearly. I pull her away from me and go have a look.
Across the windshield is scrawled Your Next.
Ridiculous first thought: Do they not know their contractions, or is the grammatical error a ploy?
Fury follows, though, rising up and wedging tight in my chest. I scan the neighborhood.
It’s a peaceful, idyllic area with cute houses that have white shutters and nice paint jobs near some open fields and pine forests.
“Where’s Sam? Is he okay?”
“Yes, yes, he’s at school. He carpooled in with the McMurphys today.”
“When did you see this?”
“Right when I called you. I was cleaning up the kitchen after sending Sam off. I’d made him a lunch, and when I looked out the kitchen window . . .”
“Did you see or hear anything last night?”
“No, Allison was here with us for dinner, but she left early, around eight, before Sam’s bath.
” It stings slightly to know that Allison and Jess have become closer than Allison and I were.
But I don’t have time to think about all the ways I’ve failed Jess and Allison right now and how Jess is turning to other people to fill the hole I’ve left.
“But I heard dogs barking around one a.m.,” Jess says. “They’re always barking at something, getting worked up over a deer or raccoons. Took me a while to get back to sleep, and I slept lightly after that. Around two thirty, a car door slamming shut snapped me up in bed.”
“And?”
“I got up and looked out my bedroom window, then went to the kitchen and saw taillights pulling away.”
“What kind of car?”
She squints. “Medium-size SUV, maybe. It pulled away slowly, not in a hurry or anything, so I figured one of the neighbors had a visitor that left late in the night or maybe someone needed to leave early for the airport.”
“Did you notice the license plate?”
“Not the numbers, but it was a Montana plate, one of the solid blue ones. I didn’t think to take in the numbers. I didn’t think I needed to”—she looks back to her windshield, her voice cracking—“until this morning.”
I put my arm around her. “It’s okay, Jess. I’m going to figure this out.”
“No.” She twists away from me and hugs her sweater back around her waist. “Just stop.” Her voice sounds choked—the words barely getting out, but when they do, they sound like she’s coughed them up from deep inside her. “Would you please quit acting like you have it under control? You don’t.”
I set my jaw. I’m exhausted. Not only from this hideous week unraveling before me, but from all the past months since Jess’s rape.
She’s still living a nightmare, but I’m sick of tiptoeing around broken glass.
I want to scream, Jesus, Jess. I can’t always be taking care of you!
I need to take care of myself this time, this one time.
Can you let me do that without laying into me?
But no. That would be entirely unfair. She didn’t ask to be involved in this terrible thing any more than I did. And Mark Coleman? She certainly didn’t ask for that.
“Realistically, Cros,” she says, “who do you think is behind this?”
“I don’t know, but realistically?” I say, circling back to her choice of adverb.
“Yeah, please, Cros. None of this I’ll handle it fantasy anymore. Tell me what you and law enforcement are doing about this crap right now.” Like she’s firing her words from a nail gun.
It stings to hear her doubting my competence, but I swallow it down. I’m doubting it myself, aren’t I? “Come on,” I say. “Let’s go inside.”
“No,” she says, digging in. “Tell me. As if I wasn’t having a hard enough time before this cropped up. You’re making it worse—acting like you’ve got it all handled, and you don’t. Like you didn’t when you went to Mark Coleman’s that night.”
The final blow knocks my breath away. I knew intuitively that she was unhappy with what happened to Coleman, had even mentioned that she felt robbed of achieving some closure because she planned on confronting him when she was ready.
Now I’ll never be able to talk to him, she had said when I told her about the shooting.
But for her to throw it in my face right now, this week, when I’m the target of some sicko, is entirely surprising.
My teeth hurt with the pressure of my frustration, my guilt, but I say it as calmly as I can muster: “Look, nothing is certain, Jess. But I’m working on good leads. So are the agents.”
She doesn’t budge. She stares at me for a long moment, scrutinizing me.
“Come on,” I say.
We sit in the living room. Sam’s toys are scattered across the floor—a spaceship made from Legos, and the same small herd of dinosaurs.
On the coffee table is his box of Creature Cards I found for him online.
They’re prized possessions for him because they no longer make them.
I worked hard to find a used set in good condition.
They’re a tad larger than index size and come organized by category in a filing box: Toxic Terrors, Monsters of the Deep, Monsters of the Past, Tiny Terrors .
. . Sam cherishes them, partly because he loves to read and organize things, and partly because they’re a gift from me.
The Wendigo and the Teke Teke—the scariest ones, the ones he always wants me to read to him when I come over—are displayed on the table.
I have no idea how they don’t give him nightmares, especially the Teke Teke, a Japanese myth about the ghost of a young girl who was cut in half by a train and now drags herself around looking to slice others in two with a scythe.
Sometimes Sam drags himself across the carpet, pretending to be her, and I act all terrified, running and hiding.
Jess sits on the couch, her eyes still stretched wide by fear and nerves. I see she’s chewed her cuticles and her usually neat nails are bitten to the quicks. Runs in the family . . .
Seeing her like this, wrenched into the same bristling bundle of fear and pain I saw her in the night she relived the rape when she finally told me about what Coleman did to her, lifts a surge of bile up my throat. I swallow it back and say, “I’m going to get you some water.”
In the kitchen, it’s all I can do not to kick the bottom of the fridge. I can’t afford to act out like a child, but what am I supposed to do with this rage—and my conscience—ballooning inside me? My eyes burn with it, but I need to keep my shit together, for Jess’s sake, for Sam’s sake.
How could this nightmare now involve them?
I squeeze my fists so tightly that even my short, clipped nails leave half-moon imprints in my palms. I take a deep breath and grab a glass, run the tap, and wait for it to get ice cold.
Jess hates tepid water. I can hear Mom’s orders to this day, to not forget to put ice in Jess’s water glass.
Standing with my index finger under the stream, I face myself down: What is your plan, Crosbie?
Maybe Jess is right. Maybe this is pure self-deception, acting like I know what I’m doing.
There’s a ping from my phone. My security app is picking up movement. I pull up the screen and see Greene on my front lawn. It’s Alderson I choose to call, but Alderson walks into the camera’s view and holds out his phone to Greene.
“Alderson’s talking with one of our techs right now,” Greene says. “We’re at your place to examine your car.”
“I see that. Smile for the camera.”
She turns and glares up at the one set above my front porch. “Where are you?”
When I tell her about Jess’s windshield, she says, “Stay there. Don’t go anywhere. We’ll be right over.”
Jess is scrolling on her phone screen when I go back into the living room.
“Don’t do that,” I say.
“Too late,” she says flatly. “Here.” She shoves her phone at me.
I take it with a sigh. The speed of news is staggering. There’s a video of me and my car racing by that pack of reporters and Deputy Zane going viral on TikTok. Oh, good: It shows the graffiti of It’s You scrawled on my car.
I shake my head and hand her phone back. “Whatever,” I say. “Trust me on this one, Jess. Turn off your notifications or you’ll drive yourself crazy.”
Her skin has taken on an unnatural pallor. She takes a sip of water. Her hand quakes.
When she places the water back on the coffee table, I say, “Do you know if your neighbors have any security systems or cameras?”
“Yeah. Maybe.”
“Anyone usually home now?”
“I’m not sure, but I think Mr. Johnston goes to work a little later in the day.”
“What does he do?”
“He’s a manager at one of the restaurants in Whitefish.”
“Which house?”
“Two houses to the left on the other side of the street.”
“I’m going over. Do you have a hat I can borrow?”
Jess digs in the front hall closet, finds a baseball cap promoting a local ice cream shop. I grab it from her and open the front door and run smack into Wallace.
“Oh,” I say, confused to see him at my sister’s house. The small flame of worry I’ve been feeling since seeing him with my gun in his hands erupts into a larger fire.
“And hello to you, too,” he says, extending his arms to give me one of his overbearing hugs.
I take a step back and stare at him with an obvious question written across my face: What are you doing here?
“I wanted to check on Jess,” he says, reading my expression. “After what you said last night. You know, that she was having a hard time.”
The back of my neck prickles.
But I think he’s not entirely ignoring my request for space. It’s Jess he’s checking on, not me. “She’s okay,” I say. “I don’t think she needs anyone here right now. She needs rest.”
“I brought these for her and Sam.” He holds up a white bag. “They’re from a new bagel store in Columbia Falls. I know how much Sam loves sesame seed.”
I take the bag. “I’ll tell her they’re from you.” I usher him to his car and watch him drive away and go back in and set the bag on the counter. I then call Alderson and tell him I’m going to the neighbors for a moment and hang up before he can protest.
Then I tell Jess that I’ll be right across the street at the neighbor’s front door and to text me or yell to me immediately if she notices anything odd or she’s worried about anything at all, even Wallace.
“Wallace? Why?”
“Just because,” I say. I don’t want to worry her further, and I’m not even sure where my own trust levels hit right now.
I wonder if I can leave her alone, but it’s broad daylight, and I don’t plan to go in and have coffee with them.
“I need to know who’s coming and going,” I say. “No matter who it is.”