Chapter 61
“We’re at twelve on the clock now,” the woman—Harper—was saying, “and let me reassure you that the last thing we want to do is hurt you. Or your family, in that pricey new house. You’re really raking it in with this book. Keep it up. We rely on it.”
“We?” Tessa clenched her phone. Henry would figure she was still in the air.
Her publishers, too. She’d told DJ she didn’t need an escort.
No one was expecting her to be anywhere but in transit.
No one would worry that she had not arrived at the hotel.
There was no way for anyone to know where she was.
“I need to call my husband and let him know I’m okay. He’ll worry. Then he’ll call me, and worry even more. I want him to know I’m all right.”
“Are you though? All right?”
Tessa had spent so many days and nights by herself in hotel rooms, trying to get used to the solitude. Now, surrounded on all sides by cars and people and trucks and traffic, she had never felt more alone.
“Listen.” She would not be a victim. “You can taunt me, or tease me, or hold me captive in a moving car, which, no matter what you say, is kidnapping. Life in prison.” I could silently take her photo, Tessa thought.
I could record this . But safer to commit her face to memory; her hairline, the distance between her eyebrows, the length of her earlobes.
Things she could not change. There was no way to fight back using two plastic bottles of water and two bags of potato chips; she was not MacGyver or Nancy Drew.
She was in real-life trouble. “Wouldn’t it be easier to tell me what you want? ”
Harper smoothed her hair behind one ear, and Tessa noticed her chewed fingernails. “The reason I chose the name Emily. Let’s start with that. I’m sure you remember your summer friend Emily? And what you two got away with?”
“I have no—”
“And if you are about to tell me you have ‘no idea’ what I’m talking about, that’s a lie, Tessa, and we are at one o’clock now, and if I were you, I would hurry this along.”
“Tell me what you want. And who you are.”
“There are consequences, Tessa, for your actions. When you were just another housewife, saddled with your ne’er-do-well husband, you weren’t much help to us.
But now our Tessa has had a publishing windfall.
And instead of your mother paying to keep us quiet, it’s your turn.
And, if you are keeping track, we are now at three o’clock. ”
“My mother? Paying? Paying who? For what? No. No way. My mother lost her money in the real estate crash, if you know so much.”
“Oh, please,” the driver said. “I’m sure that’s what she told you. But here’s the hard truth. She used her money to pay us . Until it ran out. So she may have ‘lost’ it, but it was our gain. She did not want her darling daughter to be arrested. And she bankrolled the cover-up. Now it’s your turn.”
“What are you even talking about? Cover-up of what? Besides, both my parents died when I was in college. You’re lying.”
“You live in utter fiction, don’t you, Tessa? Your mother was protecting you. And herself, I might add. Until she couldn’t anymore. And she killed herself, Tessa, as a result.”
“No.” Tessa shook her head, refusing to believe that, her stomach hollow and her brain imploding. That was a monstrous and atrocious lie. “No. That’s not true. Absolutely not true. She had a heart attack.”
“Isn’t it helpful to think so? You were told she had a heart attack. And because it’s easier for you, safer for you, more palatable for you, you believed it. Your entire life is a made-up story.”
“I—you—there’s—wait. My mother was paying you? For what?” Tessa had to keep her head. Shift the power. The bad thing was long ago. But she would handle it now. “Let me out of this car. I’m calling the police.”
“Wonderful. Make the call.” The woman twisted over the seat, offering Tessa a simper of a smile. Then turned back to the highway. “But then, I’ll simply… tell them. Tell them the truth about the dead, mangled, abandoned body they found on that back road in Maine.”
“In Maine ?” She tried to rethink. Maine? Annabelle had been found in Ohio . That meant… this person wasn’t talking about Annabelle.
That meant… this was not about the bad thing.
That meant… Tessa had been on the trail of the wrong story. Totally wrong.
“Maine?”
“And how that body was actually a victim,” the woman went on.
“A victim of Tessa Savannah Danforth, the underage drunk-driving daughter of a money-grubbing mother, a social-climbing bitch who let her get away with anything, even vehicular homicide. I’d call it murder, but the legal definition will do.
And the prison sentence is twenty-five to life, just so you’re aware.
With no statute of limitations. Think what murder would do for your career. ”
“Murder? What victim? Victim of what? ”
“Do I need to replay it for you? One fine summer night, in Blytheton, you two hotshot, boozed-up teenagers took your mother’s rented car… is it coming back to you, pray tell? The dark night of your soul?”
No. No. Talk about fiction. This woman had it wrong, too. She was spouting some warped, horror-movie version of the truth. Was Emily behind this ? The… blackmail? If that’s what this was. She gulped for air now, her heart racing faster than the cars speeding beside them.
“No. It wasn’t a person. Emily hit a deer. And I wasn’t driving.”
“Again, isn’t it helpful to think so?”
“No.” Tessa had to call the police. “You can’t do this to me.”
Harper caught her eye in the rearview. And winked. “Ah. Yes, I can. And I am. And I’ll let you contemplate, for a moment or two, exactly how.”