Chapter 34 Greer
STEFFANI ARNOSTI.
I’ve spent so long trying to scrub that name from the world that saying it now feels like a betrayal. Nic stares at me, her confusion clear.
“You were… What do you mean?”
“Just what I said: I’m Steffani Arnosti. The driver’s license you found in the pit? It’s mine. I threw it in.”
“You threw it in.”
“It’s what I wanted to get rid of.”
It was the only remnant of my old life left in our cabin.
When the police showed up to search the property, I snuck it into the bottom of my boot, underneath the insole, and smuggled it out with me.
A smart choice because, even though they swore I wasn’t under suspicion, they asked me to turn out my pockets when I arrived at the station for questioning.
I’d thought about burning it to ashes hundreds of times after that, but whenever I stood in the backyard, thumbing the lighter, watching the flame spark to life, the girl gazing out from that shitty DMV photo stopped me.
Now, though, with Tom’s execution date looming ever closer, she’s too much of a liability.
Nic’s hand slips away from mine, and the warmth from her palm immediately starts to fade into the memory of what could’ve been.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “You’ll have to explain.”
I tell her about how my father, my real father, tracked me down again and again; how I hitchhiked my way across the country, accepted a ride from a stranger who then kidnapped me, locked me in a shack, and almost killed me—before changing his mind.
I watch her closely as my story unwinds, searching for any traces of reassurance, but her expression remains painfully stoic.
“That’s impossible,” she finally says.
“You wanted the truth.”
“That’s not the truth; it can’t be. Tom Woods’s arrest was national news. The FBI, the state police, everyone worked on that investigation. Your birth certificate is a matter of public record.”
“It’s not my birth certificate. Tom had a daughter who lived with him until she was eighteen. It’s hers.”
The girl whose photo hung on the refrigerator.
“What happened to her?”
“She died. It was an accident.”
Nic looks like she doesn’t believe me—and why should she?
We both know what kind of man Tom Woods was.
And yet, when he told me what happened to his daughter, I’d believed him without question.
He’d raised her just like he raised me—tucked away in the wilderness, with only each other for companionship.
By the time she reached adulthood, she was desperate to build a life beyond him.
She knew he’d never let her go easily, so she decided to run away.
When Tom checked her bedroom and discovered it empty, he tore off to the nearest town in an attempt to find her.
He whipped around a sharp turn in the road, blind to what was waiting on the other side—until it was already too late.
I used to imagine her—the real Greer Woods—running across the road, then whirling at the flash of headlights, only to find her father speeding toward her without enough time to slam on the brakes.
“Because they lived such a secluded lifestyle, no one noticed when she disappeared. The two of us looked a lot alike. It wasn’t that hard for me to slip into her place.”
“But your friends,” Nic argues. “Your family—you were all over the news after the arrest. Someone would’ve stepped forward to identify you.”
“Who? I was just some disposable foster kid, shuffled around from house to house. Never stayed at a school long enough to make friends. It’s nice that you think someone would’ve come forward to claim me. I never thought they would.”
That’s a lie. After the arrest, I’d been certain that one of my former foster families would reveal my identity.
If I remembered them—the Koerbers, the Eberhardts, and all the others—then surely they must’ve remembered me.
But as the months passed, and no headlines with my real name appeared, it became clear that no one was going to challenge me.
Fair enough. They hadn’t seen me in over a decade, and a lot had changed since then.
Tom had gotten my teeth fixed; there used to be a gap between the front ones wide enough to slide a credit card through.
My cheeks had slimmed down; my jawline had sharpened.
Tattoos now covered all the scars. It made sense that they hadn’t recognized me.
Most mornings, when I looked in the mirror, I couldn’t recognize myself.
Or maybe they’d thrown me away as easily as the spare toothbrushes handed to me whenever I arrived somewhere new. I should’ve been relieved; no one was trying to snatch away my new life. Instead, I lost track of the number of times I cried myself to sleep.
“So, you knew what he was all along,” Nic says. “Why didn’t you turn him in sooner?”
I’d had access to a phone at the cabin—that landline phone on the wall—and later the internet. I could’ve contacted the police at any time, but I hadn’t.
“He told me he’d stopped. I believed him.”
After my real father had finished bleeding out, Tom loaded him into the trunk.
I was still trembling with the shock of what I’d done.
We drove into the mountains under cover of darkness.
The trees towering on either side of the road interlaced their branches like silent accomplices.
Finally, Tom veered off the pavement, onto the dirt shoulder.
“We’ll do it here,” he told me.
He removed two shovels and a pickaxe from the back seat, and together, we dug a grave far from the road.
It took hours thanks to all the roots blocking our path, and by the time we’d finished, the sky had lifted to the color of stonewashed denim.
The blister nestled between my thumb and index finger had popped, leaving a loose flap of raw skin.
Still, I hadn’t hesitated to return to the trunk with Tom, to help him haul my father out, drag him all the way back to the grave.
By then it was clear that Tom had done this before.
As we packed dirt into the grave, I wondered what would happen now.
It’s no good if you want to die; that’s what Tom had said to me only the day before.
Now that my father was dead, I was free.
The road stretched before me like an open invitation. I could go anywhere, be anyone.
Unless Tom killed me first.
He slapped the grave with the back of the shovel, flattening out the soil so passersby would be none the wiser about what lurked underneath.
I couldn’t imagine who would be wandering this far off the marked trails, but Tom, as I would later learn, was cautious, always preparing for the worst. It’s the reason why, when he was arrested, I was still able to access a trust that he’d established in my name.
Even back then, he was making contingency plans in case he was ever caught.
“What will you do now?” he asked.
I shrugged. He knew these mountains better than I did, but if he came for me, I might still be able to outrun him.
“You should stay.”
“Stay where?”
“With me,” he said, as if that should’ve been obvious. “You need a roof over your head, and I have a spare bedroom.”
“Are you trying to lure me back so you can murder me in the night?” I half joked.
“Why would I lure you back when I could kill you right here?”
My gaze drifted to the shovel still loosely grasped in his fist. Noticing, he tossed it to the ground.
“Come back with me, and I promise I’ll never do that again.”
“What?”
“I lost my daughter, years ago. You lost someone, too, didn’t you?”
My mom. I nodded.
“I haven’t been myself since then, but I think…” He wiped the sweat from his brow, gazed back toward the road. “I don’t think it has to be like that anymore. For either of us.”
I understood what he meant then. Something had changed the moment I’d climbed into his passenger seat of my own free will, accompanied him back to the cabin, and agreed to stay.
He’d remembered what it was like not to be alone—to have someone to care about, who cared about you.
I could be the daughter he’d lost, and he could be the father I’d never had.
We could change each other for the better.
“But he didn’t stop,” Nic says, pulling me back to the present. “He kept right on killing, and you had no idea.”
The truth stings.
“I really thought he’d changed.”
A dull thwack echoes through the shack. Both our heads twist toward the sound. Probably a loose branch. We wait—but the night’s gone silent.
“Men like our fathers don’t change,” she says.
“They do. Just look at yours. He stopped killing for twenty years because he realized how much damage he’d done to you.”
I’ve tried so hard to conceal my jealousy from her. Her father loved her enough to stop, whereas mine went less than a year before picking up another hitchhiker from the side of the road.
“You think that’s the reason he stopped?
” She laughs. “Jesus Christ. He stopped because I never gave him the chance to do it again. I called him between classes to check in, drove straight to the hardware store after school, kept my bedroom window open so I could hear any sounds from the driveway—like a pickup truck engine turning over in the night.”
It feels like I’m seeing her for the first time. All the nights we sat opposite each other at Barry’s, splitting a bottle of that godawful wine; all the times I’d studied her on the television monitors during dailies had been nothing more than an illusion.
“You knew?”
“I suspected.”
That’s when she tells me about Claire. Her eyes stay fixed on the floor as she recounts how she discovered the text messages, then left the phone behind in the bathroom for her father to find, knowing he would read them.
How she’d become an expert on the case while trying to exculpate him, only to come up short again and again.
“If you suspected your dad, why agree to be on the show?”
“Like you would’ve left without getting an interview.”
“You could’ve given me a quick one and sent me on my way. But you didn’t. You guided me through the crimes, one by one, knowing your dad was probably the one who committed them. Why? You must’ve known that if you helped me, you ran the risk of losing him.”
The night air has turned sharp. She wraps her arms around her knees, tugs them tight to her chest.
“He killed my best friend.”
“He loved you. He only killed her because she hurt you.”
She hesitates, then says, “I was the one who identified Claire’s remains.
I don’t know if I ever told you that. Her parents hadn’t arrived yet, and the police wanted a positive ID so they could move forward with the investigation.
My dad sat next to me on the overstuffed couch as the detective placed the photo facedown on the table.
I hadn’t wanted to cry; I’d even researched what victims of drowning looked like before coming into the station so I wouldn’t embarrass myself.
It made no difference. I sobbed into my dad’s shirt while he rubbed my back and whispered that everything would be all right.
But when we finally broke apart, and I looked up at him, I realized that his attention had long since drifted away from me. He was staring at the photo.”
She lifts her gaze to meet mine. “You want to know why I helped you? The afternoon we met, you asked if I wanted to know the truth, and I realized I did. My father didn’t kill Claire because he loved me. He used love as an excuse to do what he wanted. The same way Tom Woods did.”
I don’t know how she turned this around on me, but she’s completely off base. “What are you saying?”
“He kept you locked up in that cabin.”
“I could’ve left at any time.”
“But you didn’t.”
“I’d been running for most of my life. I wasn’t about to throw away the first place I’d ever felt safe.”
She doesn’t understand. Her father might’ve been a murderer, but I saw the way he treated her. She’s never had to wonder, with every blow to the side of the head, if this will be the time he goes too far—if this will be the time she doesn’t get back up.
“He never would’ve let you go,” she says, then hesitates before adding, “the same way your real father was never going to let you go.”
She has no idea what she’s talking about.
“Don’t ever compare the two of them. Tom kept me safe.”
“Tom kept you trapped.”
We fall silent after that. Tom gave me a home when no one else would.
I never had a problem shucking off my old identity, marooning Steffani Arnosti at that run-down gas station, because he was more my father than the real one had ever been.
But even as all these thoughts spin around my mind, I can’t ignore the sinking feeling that Nicola Fischer might be right.