Chapter 72
“Got your tickets, dear? Watch, wallet, phone, laptop? Just being your helpful driver today.” Harper had come into the bustling hotel lobby to collect her, wearing a lavender Iowa State ball cap, Jackie O sunglasses, an oversized lavender sweatshirt, frumpy jeans, and pristine white tennis shoes.
She looked more like someone’s softball mom than a blackmailer.
“Don’t want you to miss that plane. The bookstore in Philadelphia is sold out, so I hear. ”
The woman reached for Tessa’s roller bag, but when Tessa swiveled it out of her grasp, she fluttered a dismissive hand at her, whatever, and sashayed through the revolving door.
Tessa, fuming, trailed her to a white Toyota. The license plate was different from yesterday’s car. Harper clicked open the doors, and Tessa tossed her suitcase into the cramped back seat. And put her tote on top of it. No trunk. Not this time.
“Whatever works for you,” the woman said as she slid into the driver’s seat. “Sure you don’t want to sit in the front?”
“What do you want from me?” Tessa yanked on her seat belt, enraged.
What was truth and what was fiction—that was still to be determined.
But the dénouement was coming fast now, and where Tessa would wind up when this story was over—she had to keep that in her sights.
She felt gut-twisting guilt, and heartbreaking sorrow, but she’d been as much a victim—almost as much—as whoever they’d left in the middle of that shadowy Maine dirt road.
Reading her mother’s will last night had only made things worse.
So. Much. Worse. It appeared—shockingly, unimaginably, devastatingly—that this woman was right.
The payments existed. The will had specified the amount to be paid every six months, and created the trust to receive them.
Her own mother’s will meant Tessa, innocently complicit in a horrible crime, was irrevocably trapped.
“Let’s get out of the hotel driveway before we talk, Tessa,” Harper said. “Although I’m gratified you seem eager to come to an agreement. Airport, here we come.”
“Bull,” Tessa murmured, making sure her voice did not carry to the front seat.
The driver merrily waved to a bellhop as they rounded the curve onto the main street, took the first left.
A square green sign with an arrow pointed forward—DSM Airport 10, it said.
Ten miles until she could get out of this car.
Ten miles to see how much she could learn.
How much she could fight. Depending on traffic, that could give her twenty minutes.
But Tessa could not miss her plane. This woman knew that.
Because Tessa was only good to these people alive. And so intensely ironic, that Tessa’s one superpower lay in book sales. If she stopped selling books, she was valueless to them.
Still. It was difficult enough to sell books without having someone put a metaphorical gun to your head.
Stoplights, rush hour traffic, an orange cone narrowing two lanes to one. The woman had not said a word. And Tessa was not about to start this conversation.
Last night, she’d barely slept. Mayzie had tucked a yellow sticky note inside the will: ‘Found it! Sorry couldn’t make it tonight, so cool to meet you .
’ But with the incriminating document zipped in an inside pocket of her suitcase—even if she’d burned it, the original document still existed—she’d lain awake, spiraling into irretrievable tragedy.
She’d imagined walking out the door of the Des Moines hotel, with this monster to greet her.
Imagined getting into her car, actually getting into the car !
In a novel, no smart heroine would ever do that. Not ever.
Unless her family’s safety was at stake, Tessa had reassured herself, smashing her hotel pillow into submission. Unless everything in her entire and complete life was on the line.
Highway signs whizzed by now, a blur. In her mind’s eye she saw the old-fashioned typed words and the arcane legalese as plainly as if she were holding the pages of the will in her hands.
Tessa needed a lawyer to untangle the details, but the wording indicated the payments were a “periodic bequest” to a trust that would continue as long as Tessa herself—who was referred to as Tessa Danforth, her post–bad thing name—was alive.
Or until the money ran out.
And the same phrase looped through her brain, over and over. Her mother would not have paid for a deer.
This was real blackmail. With an explosive secret behind it.
The story of that night— not a deer —was all true.
And that meant Tessa’s entire history, everything she believed, was all a fiction.
Now, exactly as this woman had threatened the day before, Tessa was a character in a true crime narrative.
And what’s more, she was the guilty one.
Starting now, everything she did on this tour—signing books, engaging audiences, chatting with bookstore owners, accepting the praise of her publishers—was a performance. A fake. The illusion would shatter into infinite pieces if she did not do what this woman ordered.
She closed her eyes, feeling the forward motion of the car, and tried to remember her joys; the day she met Henry, and when Linny was born, and then Zack, too, and when she’d recognized Annabelle’s voice, and then the book and everything that happened.
And today was Tuesday. Tomorrow the bestseller list would be out.
She would do anything, anything, to make this all go away.
Would you? Annabelle said. Now you understand how your mother felt. Now you’re the parent. How far will you go to get what you want?