Chapter Sixteen
Regan
Everyone is staring. I finally pick my jaw up off the ground and go back into the café to collect Hallie and go home. I thought
Sasha going MIA when she promised to pick me up was very out of character, but this . . . Something is happening beyond Jack
and beyond whoever broke into my house looking for something very specific, and it can’t all be a big coincidence. This all
has to be connected somehow, and I am dead set on getting to the bottom of it.
The police plan to add extra patrol on my street, and I already have a beefy alarm system with cameras in the house.
I just hadn’t had a chance to turn the system on yet before the break-in, attack—or whatever it was meant to be.
But I have a sneaking suspicion that the person was there looking for something.
The more I really think on it, if they were there to hurt me, why didn’t they have a gun?
They seemed caught off guard, panicked, and attacked me with the handle of a shovel that was leaning against the stairs, and then they had to break a window to escape. That couldn’t have been the plan.
He had gloves on, and there’s no blood from a cut or anything around the window he broke. It seems pretty impossible the police
can do anything more than file a report. So what can I do? I was too scared to go into the basement all day after Sasha dropped
me off. I just slept and slept. It had been a few days since I’d been able to sleep at all, so it all caught up to me, and
the pain pill they gave me at the hospital helped. Now it’s time to take matters into my own hands.
“Did Aunt Andi go crazy?” Hallie asks from the back seat, jolting me out of my looping thoughts.
“No, she’s just . . . under a lot of stress.”
“If you say so,” she says with raised eyebrows.
“She’s going through a lot—we need to be a little understanding.”
“I know, but . . . do I have to go to Dez’s pizza night next week? I don’t wanna go. No one does.”
“Who’s no one? Why not?” She doesn’t answer. “Hal, why? He’s your good friend.”
Hallie nods and shrugs and stays silent. After a few moments she looks up at me and I meet her eyes in the rearview mirror.
“We’re not safe,” she says as I pull into the garage and park. She gets out of the car and slams the door.
“What?” Her words have caught me so off guard that I don’t have any other response. I hesitate and she runs off.
She doesn’t want to talk about it, so I don’t force her. After a couple tries, I let her lie to me about not having any homework and allow her to eat in her room and watch TV. Whatever she needs today is fine by me. Kids talk and rumors gets embellished. That’s all this is.
I double-check the alarms and doors before making a pot of tea and sitting on the armchair near the fireplace. I scroll on
my phone to find Beatrice from the Bluebird Café and send her a message. She seems all too eager to offer any gossip she can,
so maybe she’ll keep me informed since I couldn’t get there myself today.
I hesitate, though. I think about forgetting the whole thing. Depression can be funny like that. On one hand I’m fueled by
this quest—it’s the only thing giving me life right now—but on the other, I question myself every other second, wondering
if I’m actually mad. Have I lost my mind? Everyone else thinks so. I see the way they look at me. It’s not a self-pitying
thing when I say it; I actually do wonder if I had some mental break and all of this is in my head. Maybe I went into the
basement on some hallucination-filled rage from the meds and took to the boxes with a baseball bat and imagined it all. It’s
not impossible. Except that Hallie saw someone, and unless my overwhelming paranoia is rubbing off on her, there is no way
we can both be wrong.
I could just go to sleep and forget about all of it—escape life completely for the next ten hours.
Then I could drop Hal at school and sleep for six more.
That’s mostly what I’ve been doing since I lost my job.
Our savings was already plenty to live on, and with the life insurance, I could sleep all my days away and only pretend to be alive for Hallie.
Evenings and weekends. That could be my life.
It’s tempting. But there is something else tugging at me—something telling me to get up, wake up.
Follow this through. Something that feels a little like hope.
Maybe just for closure so I can move on with my life.
I feel like I have to know or I’ll rot here, under all the grief.
Hello Beatrice, I type. I was hoping you could tell me if Jack was at the café today? You didn’t tell him about our conversation, I hope. It takes only a couple of minutes before her reply comes through.
Girl, I was looking for him to pop in all day. He always comes on Monday. He did look pretty pale when I asked if his name
was Jack though, so maybe he’s scared off. How mysterious. I’ll message you when I see him next. Don’t worry, my lips are
sealed.
I close my eyes and seethe at this comment. If her goddamn lips were sealed, he’d be there getting his “usual” and I would
have some hope to see him, to figure out who the hell this really is. I have to go there anyway—I have to see the place he
goes so often—to see if there are any clues that will help me understand.
Once I check on Hallie and see she’s sleeping, I turn off her TV and cover her with a jack-o’-lantern quilt, then I go downstairs to face the basement.
I stand at the top of the stairs with my heart pounding.
The memory of last night flashes back, flitting across my brain, telling me there’s danger, but the danger is gone and I have to look through all of the fallen bankers boxes that sit in a pile on the concrete.
Would a normal person be doing this? I find that I ask myself that question a lot lately, but if I waited to feel safe, I’d never make a move.
And if I waited for someone else to save me or offer answers to all these questions, or unearth the truth, I’d probably just go on waiting forever.
No one is coming to save me. I have to save myself.
I prop a chair inside the door to the basement, paranoid it could close on me. I triple-check that it’s secure, and then I
make my way down. The police offered to board up the broken window until a replacement could be arranged later this week,
and it’s that kind of thing that makes me feel grateful to live in a small town. It’s still freezing and damp and smells faintly
of mildew at the bottom of the stairs, and I don’t want to be down here, but why did this man rifle through our things? There
has to be a reason. I hadn’t been down here since last Christmas and even then it was only for exactly five minutes while
I grabbed some storage containers of decorations. The only things here are old tools and boxes of photo albums, suitcases,
Jack’s golf clubs, boxes of receipts from home repairs and KitchenAid manuals—stuff like that. What in the world would anyone
want? Maybe nothing. Maybe they were just lying in wait to try to kill me, but I go over and over that, and they would have
done the job if that were the case, not panicked.
I pick up a few of the boxes and straighten up the contents. One is kids’ craft supplies—pipe cleaners, cotton balls, markers.
The next is stuff that should probably be in the locked file cabinet—tax stuff and expired passport and mortgage documents.
The last box I pick up is heavy, too heavy for paperwork and fingerpaints. I peer in and see a safe box. The kind that feels
like it’s made of lead. It’s only about twelve by fourteen inches, but it feels like it’s over twenty pounds. It’s solid as
a brick and locked.
I have never seen this thing before in my life.
And then it hits me, stealing my breath when I put it together.
The key I found in the glove compartment of Jack’s truck.
Holy shit. What if this is what it opens?
I hold the safe in both hands and take the stairs up two at a time, breathless, shaking.
I put the safe down on the kitchen counter and start to fish in my handbag for my keys.
I examine the small brass key for a moment and then say a little prayer as I fit it into the lock.
Click. It opens. It fucking opens. My hand flies to my mouth involuntarily as I stare down at its contents, in anticipation,
but when I register what I am looking at, it’s not a gun or a million dollars or whatever the hell else I thought it might
be. I didn’t have enough time to really think about it, I guess. It’s just an ID. A driver’s license and social security card,
actually, but it’s not Jack’s. It’s just some guy’s. A stranger’s. Someone named Patrick Finch. Who the hell is Patrick . . .
Oh, my God. I pick it up and stare. I stand up and place my hand on my chest to calm my racing heart. What am I looking at?
It doesn’t add up.
It’s Jack’s photo next to the name “Patrick Finch.” A very, very young Jack on an ID that expired years ago. What? What does this mean?
I throw it back down on the counter and stare at the wall, my mind reeling, trying to understand. Then I go to the sofa where
my laptop sits, and I google the name Patrick Finch. Lots of people come up, but none of them have Jack’s face. There was
no LinkedIn or social media to speak of that long ago, so if this man—Patrick Finch—vanished over twenty years ago, who the
hell is Jack Hoffman? Who did I marry? And which one is dead?
I feel my phone vibrate in my pocket and I jump.
Then I take a deep breath and place both hands on the table for a moment.
Get a grip. Calm down. There is an explanation.
There must be. I look at my phone. It’s a text from an unknown number with a local area code.
I click it open and gasp when I read what
it says.
Jack is dead. If you don’t stop, you’ll be next.