Chapter 35
Night Twelve
Betty
Sybil had called Betty while she was feeding the rats behind the restaurant, the snow beginning to fall, and in a literal instant, everything changed.
Betty hung up the phone and sank into the back booth of the diner. Then she jolted up, raced to the front door and bolted it, then raced to the back door and bolted that too. She needed to think. She needed to think.
“Something’s happened to Julian,” Sybil had said, and Betty was entirely unprepared for what came next.
Julian? Curmudgeonly but sweet Julian? Betty was not a stranger to death, but nothing about this made any sense to her.
Her brain couldn’t compute the news. She glanced down at her hands and saw they were shaking, and then she glanced down at the table and saw the single sheet of paper that had been tacked up on the back door of the diner by the garbage cans.
RUN
Bile rose up from her stomach into her throat.
She tried to swallow it back down, but she gagged and tilted over toward the edge of the booth so she didn’t vomit on the tabletop.
She hadn’t eaten in hours so it was mostly just stomach acid, and her clothes were soaked in a cold sweat by the time she was done.
“Right, right,” she said aloud.
She had prepared for this; she had essentially trained for this.
She knew she was lucky to have been warned, though she couldn’t imagine who warned her, what mistakes she made.
Well, the laundry commercial for Natalie for one thing.
But it was regional, and she didn’t think anyone from the church would ever see it in the tri-state area, much less so quickly.
Maybe she shouldn’t have trusted Caleb, who was so roundly wonderful that maybe it had just been part of a long con.
It didn’t matter.
It doesn’t matter, she reminded herself.
She had to move, and she had to move quickly.
She folded the sheet of paper and made her way to the back to tuck it into her backpack.
She pulled on her parka, flipped up the hood and tugged the backpack onto both shoulders.
Then she unlatched the back door and stepped out into the snowy dark alley.
She would slip away from this life before any more mistakes caught up with her.
She’d done it before, she’d do it again.
In the end, Betty would do anything to survive.