Chapter 26 Angela
ANGELA
She didn’t look the same as she used to.
Five years had passed. It made sense that she wouldn’t look identical. Still, each time Angela watched her walk into the coffee shop—Maple & Thyme—she had to do a double take.
Jess had always been pretty. That’s what David saw in her, Angela had always known. It’s not like the girl had that great of a personality.
When they’d met as teenagers, Jess already had a womanly figure. Full chest, wide hips, narrow waist. Her midsection was the only place she didn’t carry weight. Tack her height onto that, and the girl could pass for a model. Youthful in the face, not a stretch mark in sight.
Angela smiled at the fact that life had caught up with her. Now, she wore those trendy high-waisted jeans that—yeah, showed off her round hips and big ass—but made that mound around her stomach all the more obvious.
This was who Jess had become, and she thought she could do better than David?
Aside from Jess’s figure, which she was rapidly losing with age, what did she even bring to a relationship? One thing was for sure. She would never again land a man as beautiful as Angela’s son.
Through the glass windows, she watched Jess exchange a few words with another young woman. Mid-twenties, maybe? She stood behind the counter, her cherry red hair swept into a curly bun.
She was pretty too, but in a different way. That woman had a cuteness about her. She looked soft. Sweet. Angela would never understand the girls these days and their need to dye their hair such obnoxious colors, but even with it, she still looked normal. Approachable.
Jess didn’t.
That jet-black hair with hints of blue throughout looked absurd. At least red hair was something you could be born with. No one came out with blue hair.
Trashy. That was the only word Angela could use for it.
She flicked her cigarette into the ashtray and pulled in another deep draw.
Jess and that girl kept talking. Laughing.
Over the last three days since Angela had arrived in Black Pines, she had watched Jess walk into this building each morning.
Those two girls always shared some pleasantries, but today was different.
Jess reached across the counter to adjust the other woman’s apron. That girl, the redheaded one, shooed her away with a wave of her hand and splashed some water at her. Jess laughed in response.
That was not the way a typical customer and employee relationship worked. Those two were friends.
Maybe Angela would stop in for coffee. Build a rapport. Then ask the other woman questions.
But she could do that later.
She had just sat outside the salon all day, waiting for the place to clear out. There was no use in confronting Jess in a crowd. She would do what she’d always done. Play the victim. Call the cops. Kick Angela out.
No, no, no. Angela had to time this just right. She needed a private moment with Jess.
Maybe she’d have more luck finding a private moment with Junie instead.
Jess walked out of the restaurant, iced coffee in hand.
Angela hated that look on her face. So smiley, so smug.
How dare she smile? How dare she be happy when Angela spent every waking moment worrying about her son?
Hands clenched tight around the steering wheel, Angela watched Jess walk down the street, and click her car alarm. Further down, the lights flickered.
The other days this week, Jess had gotten a ride with someone else to work. Angela assumed it was because Jess was too broke for a car. She always had been before.
Now, she watched her step into a shiny Toyota Corolla. Nothing fancy, but brand spanking new. Couldn’t have been more than a year old.
Jess took a moment to turn over the engine, but the moment she pulled out of the parking spot, Angela was on her tail.
At least a hundred feet behind. She made sure to let others pass as they started onto the winding mountain trail.
That way, there were a few car lengths between them.
If Jess saw her, she would do that victim bullshit again.
She’d call the cops and then pursue charges and blah blah blah.
It wasn’t like Angela was stalking her. Not really. She was just watching. Learning.
She kept her eyes on Jess’s flank. Followed every turn she took. Even snapped a quick photo of her license plate. In TV shows, they were always able to find people that way. Angela would too.
If she couldn’t find her address first.
Angela followed her deeper and deeper into the mountains. More than half an hour driving onto the darkest and dimmest of roads. The sun was still shining, but the snow-covered tree canopy hardly let anything through. Her stomach curled and coiled the farther they got from civilization.
Bile burned up her throat when Jess turned onto a gravel road.
Did she know? Had she realized Angela was following her? Was Jess leading Angela to her son in the worst way she could imagine?
Angela pulled over.
She waited on the side of the road. She checked where they were on a map, but all it mentioned was some forest.
Why had Jess driven into a forest, alone, not long before nightfall?
Her fingers trembled and her heart slammed harder. Time passed, but she couldn’t say how much. She just had an odd, sinking sensation that she was in danger. That Jess knew, and Jess would do to her what she had done to David.
Whatever that may have been.
Cars drove past. One woman even rolled down her window and asked if Angela needed any help. Angela only shook her head, forcing a smile.
Then, that very woman, in an old beat-up van, turned down the gravel road.
Angela waited. She waited until that van was out of sight, then shifted into drive.
She kept a distance. The other woman couldn’t have seen her, not through the cloud of snow that floated from her van’s rooftop.
The moment Angela saw her taillights, she tapped her brakes. She stayed practically frozen between the conifer trees, waiting for the dust to settle behind that woman’s vehicle.
When it did, other shapes became clear. A tall metal fence, wrapped in barbed wire. A small metal box—the kind the correction officers talked through when Angela had visited David or her late husband in jail.
A security measure of some kind.
But there were only trees behind the fence. Trees and a gravel road stretching uphill.
That fence. The longer Angela stared at it, the sicker she felt.
Something was wrong here. Something had happened. Angela couldn’t put words to it, but a mother knew. A mother always knew.
What the hell is this place?