Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
Like any case, my life was made up of means, motive and opportunity.
The things that had led me here were also the things that made me who I was.
Which was why—if I wanted to completely leave Avery McHale behind, to stop reacting and become an active participant in my life again—I was going to have to reinvent myself inside and out.
Standing outside the hair salon, I bit my lip, hating the idea of spending so much money on such an inane thing, but the truth was that until I fixed what I’d done to my hair I would continue to stick out like a sore thumb.
The DIY look didn’t automatically imply that I’d given myself a makeover in a truck stop bathroom, but it did point to signs of instability.
And beyond that, it left me feeling like I didn’t belong in my own skin.
Setting my shoulders in determination, I entered.
There were half a dozen stations that ran along each side of the room, a few waiting area chairs to the right of the door and a small register stand to the left.
There were three people inside, a woman with dirty-blonde hair sitting in one of the salon chairs while another woman with jet black hair tied up in a complicated bun painted sections of the blonde’s hair before folding them in foil.
The hairdresser had strikingly pale skin, a cut on her lip, and a vicious-looking bruise on her bicep that she was doing nothing to hide.
She looked like the kind of woman who frequently got into bar fights or spent her time at the roller derby.
An Indian woman dressed in all black with several gold piercings in her ears and thick eye liner looked up at me from where she was leaning on one of the salon chairs and looking at her phone.
“Hey,” she said, flicking her head to acknowledge me. “Need a cut?”
“Badly,” I replied. She waved towards the chair she’d been leaning on and I took a seat. I tensed a little as I felt her fingers run through my hair and again when she made a tsking sound.
“Oh, hon, what happened to you?” she asked, like I was the one with the cuts and bruises. “Bad break up?”
“Something like that,” I replied, watching her in the mirror as she played with my hair.
“What kind of style were you thinking?” she asked as she tousled my hair one direction and then another. “Do you have any inspo pics?”
“No,” I replied, shaking my head and then stopping the moment I realized it wasn’t helping her to assess my situation. “I–this wasn’t planned.”
“I can tell,” she said, pulling out a black cape before wrapping it around my neck.
“I just needed a change,” I said and then stopped speaking as I felt the cloth tighten.
I held myself very still, trying to block out memories of a hand around my throat, the man above me squeezing too tight.
A button snapped and the collar of the cape loosened as it settled into place.
I shoved the memory back into the recesses of my mind.
“But I didn’t do a good job, and I don’t know what would look good at this point. Can you just fix it?”
“Sure,” she said, pressing her lips together as she looked back at me through the mirror, clearly imagining what she could do with my hair to fix the damage I’d done. Then she patted my shoulder and motioned to the back of the salon. “Okay, come on, let’s get you washed.”
I followed behind her, settling into the low seat in front of the wash basin and laid my head back, closing my eyes.
Allowing myself to be vulnerable. The angle of the chair did little to support my back, but it was a familiar feeling.
I was always just a little uncomfortable in the salon at the start and I knew I would relax soon enough.
“Didn’t catch your name,” the woman said as she turned on the water and began running it through my hair.
“Hale,” I replied, trying to connect to it in a way I hadn’t before.
Trick had asked me what name I wanted on my ID, and I had said the first name that came to mind, the one that was all that had been left on my mother’s gravestone after it had been vandalized.
I’d worn it like a child might wear a costume with Halloween nowhere close, with willful stubbornness and the knowledge that I could put it on or take it off at will.
But Avery McHale was a ghost that the FBI would continue to hunt, which meant I couldn’t be her anymore.
I had to be Hale Hastings from now on, no exceptions.
“I’m Lila,” the hairdresser said and I smiled but kept my eyes closed as I heard soap being lathered in her hands.
And just like that, my body relaxed. Sure, I was doing this because it needed to be done, but it was nice to spoil myself a little after everything I’d been through. “You from around here?”
“Not really,” I replied, and then paused to think about it, about where I might have come from if I’d been Hale Hastings all my life.
The answer immediately came to me, baked into the name itself.
Hastings had been my mother’s maiden name, and while she’d changed it when she got married, my aunt Rita never had.
I could still remember the color of the leaves on the trees every autumn when we went up to visit her in Syracuse.
The face she had made whenever my mother suggested she come down to visit us in Newark instead. “I grew up in upstate New York.”
It wasn’t even a lie, really. There had been a few months after my mother’s death when I’d been forced to go live with my aunt.
I knew the area well enough, and it wasn’t unreasonable to think my aunt could have had a daughter.
That Hale Hastings and Avery McHale could have been cousins.
I didn’t need to make up a new identity whole cloth.
I could simply be me, one degree to the left.
“I hear it’s pretty up there,” Lila said, and I hummed in agreement, bracing myself for the first real test of my new persona.
“Cold, though, in the winter,” I told her, enjoying the feel of someone else’s fingers running conditioner through my hair. “Does it snow here? I didn’t really think about that before moving.”
“Oh, absolutely, but it’s a different kind of cold,” she told me as she returned to rinsing my hair. “Technically warmer temperatures on average, but the higher moisture combined with the wind really gets to your bones. Uh, I mean, it just gets to you…”
I opened my eyes at the strange way her voice trailed off at the end, finding that Lila had a guilty flush and a stricken expression as she looked towards the other two women. Her hands had gone completely still.
“I’m not going to fall apart if you mention bones, Lila,” the other hairdresser called across the room with an irritated tone. I scrunched up my nose, fully confused now.
“Sorry,” Lila called back and I could see the way she winced around the word, my hair completely forgotten. “I still don’t know what is or isn’t okay to say sometimes, you know?”
“I’ll make it simple,” the other hairdresser replied, and while I couldn’t see her from where my head was still tilted back in the sink, I could hear the sass coming through clear as day.
“Here are things you are allowed to say: bones, cancer, death, blood, yikes. Here are things you are not allowed to say: Wow, Ellie, glad to see the combination of your bone cancer and rare blood type hasn’t killed you yet, but yikes you look bad. ”
“Okay, okay, sorry,” Lila grumbled, going back to washing my hair like that was a normal, everyday occurrence.
And as I sat there waiting for my hair to finish being rinsed, I realized it might be.
It was a sobering thought, realizing that most days for most of the people around me the lies I was living were nothing compared to the truths they faced.
Forty-five minutes later the blow dryer clicked off, and Lila spun me around to look at myself in the mirror.
The woman who stared back at me was nearly unrecognizable, but in the best way possible.
The harsh lines of my DIY haircut were gone, replaced with long layers that had been added freehand with a razor blade.
The bangs that just covered my eyebrows blended out into face framing pieces that I knew would easily fall out of any hair tie, but the rest of my hair was just long enough to tie it up out of my face.
“What do you think?” Lila asked, but she sounded proud rather than nervous and I beamed back at her through the reflection.
“This is exactly what I needed,” I told her and she pumped her fist in the air.
“Excellent,” she said. “Just, do me a favor and don’t get back with that ex, okay? I don’t want to have to clean up a crime scene like that again.”
I snorted, shaking my head, and paid before heading out of the salon feeling like an entirely new woman.
I scanned the parking lot on instinct and froze halfway to my car as I caught sight of ASAC Shepherd walking towards me, head ducked down in conversation with another man.
I swerved to the right, ducking into the first store I saw in order to stay out of their line of sight.
A bell jingled as I entered, letting the employees know that I was there. To my surprise, I found myself in a pet store that was clean and well organized, with engraved wooden signs over each table.
I glanced back at the two men who had paused in the parking lot, still talking, and then turned back to the pet store with a renewed determination.
If I was going to wait them out in here, I might as well make use of my time, and while I didn’t have any need for pet food or toys, I did remember the man on the side of the road with the rotating roster of dogs keeping him company.
Deciding to get something for those dogs, I ignored the rather large dog food section in favor of the treat tables. The man probably didn’t have a way to get huge bags of dog food home anyway.