Chapter 29
Now
The storm blew in from nowhere.
A flash of lightning. A crack of thunder.
Then the first raindrops pelted the windshield as we slowed to a crawl, crossing the bridge over the creek where Burt had buried Andrea’s body in a shallow grave.
In the seconds it took to reach the other side, the bottom had fallen out of the sky in a soupy downpour.
“I don’t know about this,” Frances said, as I pulled to the side of the road, rain pelting the windows like sticks on a snare drum. She bit her bottom lip. “What if it just pisses him off? You don’t understand—he will find me. And it won’t be good.”
“It’ll work.” It had to work. I forced more confidence into my voice than I felt. “You have everything?”
She nodded, holding up the engraved wristwatch and Blake’s and Andrea’s driver’s licenses.
We were going to plant everything where it couldn’t be missed.
Another streak of lightning illuminated the sky, followed by a rip of thunder.
If the rain doesn’t ruin everything and wash it away.
I pushed the thought aside. There was no going back.
“Ready?” I asked.
“Ready,” Frances replied.
Neither of us moved.
We both stared out the windshield silently.
The road stretched out in both directions, hugged on either side by ditches and tall pines. I imagined Burt bringing Andrea’s body to this same creek, late one night, dragging her down the embankment toward the water, while less than ten miles away Frances slept in their bed, oblivious.
Afterward, had he gone home and climbed under the covers next to my sister, giddy with anticipation?
How long had it taken him to plan it? Had he watched Blake ever since getting the helmet—or perhaps after Frances first told him the story?
Or were Blake and Andrea simply unlucky enough to be the wrong people at the wrong place, wrong time, their connection to Frances too much for Burt to resist?
My hand was on the door handle when Frances grabbed my arm.
“I don’t know.” She shook her head. “The cops already combed this area, and suddenly there’s a tip to look again?
Then they find not only the driver’s licenses of the dead girl and missing boy but also Burt’s watch?
It’s too convenient. And Burt is… He’s Burt.
I keep telling you how the local cops love him, but I don’t think you understand.
I don’t doubt they’d make everything disappear, and the state police won’t ever even know about it. ”
“First off, police miss stuff all the time, right?” My knowledge of what police did or did not miss mostly came from Law & Order and Criminal Minds, except there’d been that conversation with the cops at the Huddle Hut.
Something they’d said. How the creek would make it harder to find evidence—how it could flood and wash it downstream.
That could explain why certain things—like a watch and licenses—weren’t discovered until later.
“Besides,” I continued. “We aren’t only calling the police tip line. We’re also calling the media.”
“The media loves Burt’s family too,” she said.
“Yeah, but they love a story more. And this will be the story. A son from Alabama’s favorite family turns out to be a murderer? The next political dynasty toppled by one bad seed? They’ll be frothing at the mouth for this.” I hoped I was right.
Girls went missing all the time. Sometimes they were even found.
Most vanished into obscurity, but this girl was young, pretty, and upper middle class.
She was found in a wealthy rural area with no crime rate to speak of.
If she was linked to one of the state’s golden boys, news stations across the country would salivate to run the story, never mind all the true crime armchair experts across social media.
All we had to do was call it into the tip line set up by one of the local news channels and let the ensuing frenzy do the rest.
“Come on. Let’s get this over with.” Without waiting for an answer, I pushed open my door and stepped into the pouring rain. Once Frances was next to me, we made our way down the embankment toward the creek. We moved slowly, careful not to slip on the wet ground.
Frances was quiet as we stepped. The ground was soft, but grassy. I looked back to see if we were leaving footprints, but in the dark, rainy night, I couldn’t tell.
When we got to the bottom, right before the earth grew sandy, I turned to my sister. “I think right here is good. Not too close to the water, in case it rises.”
My sister wiped the watch down with the tail of her blouse. I’d pieced the plan together, but somehow forgot we’d need gloves, so Frances used her shirtsleeves to cover her hands as she pressed it into the ground. She did the same with the driver’s licenses.
Maybe putting my faith in a couple of well-placed tokens wasn’t the best plan, but here’s the thing I couldn’t tell my sister.
When I thought of Burt and everything he’d done, I wanted to kill him.
And if I hadn’t killed before, perhaps I’d have been easily persuaded, maybe even excited to dig a grave and be done with it.
I wasn’t talking nonsense when I told Frances I couldn’t go down that road again. Sometimes I felt as if my humanity was hanging on by a thread. If I killed again, it would be like taking a pair of scissors and snipping it loose. This plan had to work.
“Come on.” I grabbed her hand, and we made our way back to our vehicle.
A car whizzed by, traveling in our same direction.
“Fuck!” Frances yelled over the weather. “Was that a cop car?”
I squinted through the rain. “No. No way.” I had no idea. The car had been moving fast, and the night was dark. “Let’s get out of here.”
We slid into our seats and slammed the doors, both drenched to the bone, our hair plastered to our heads.
I cranked it and slammed the gas. My tires slid against the wet ground as I steered onto the road, where they found purchase on the asphalt, and we lurched forward and took off.
“Should I make the call now?” Frances turned around, leaned into the back seat, and rifled through her bag for her phone.
Originally, I’d thought we would go to the Walmart in the next town and purchase a burner phone, but my sister assured me she knew how to block her number and said there were apps she could download to change her voice to not be recognized.
After she made the calls, we’d factory reset her phone and toss it into the next body of water we passed.
Before I could answer, blue lights flashed from the roadside. I ordered my racing heart to calm down.
Frances sat back in her seat and clicked her seatbelt as the cop car flashed its siren in a quick blip blip and pulled onto the road behind us, following close.
“I knew that was a cop,” she said. “I freaking knew.”
“What do I do?” I asked. The cop had only flashed their siren once before pulling from the roadside and following on our bumper. It followed us, but with its siren and police lights off. “What’s he doing?”
Frances sat deathly still next to me. “This is bad,” she whispered. “This is so bad.”
“Frances?”
My gaze bounced from the black pavement ahead of us, to the rearview mirror, to my sister next to me. She shook her head slightly.
“He…he can’t see me in here. He’ll tell Burt…” Her voice trailed away. “God. I knew we should’ve just figured out how to kill him. Milly. I can’t go back. I can’t.”
“You won’t have to.” I resisted the impulse to punch the gas. “He’ll stop. We aren’t doing anything wrong.”
I stayed five under the speed limit. The cop remained on my tail.
“If he pulls us over, lay against the window and pretend you’re asleep. We’re on a road trip—that’s all. I got a little turned around and am looking for the interstate.”
“Do you think that cop saw what we were doing?”
“No. We were only—” I glanced to the empty fast-food cups and soda bottles on the floorboards at Frances’s feet and for once in my life, was thankful I was a car slob. “We were only stopping so I could pop a squat and pee. It was an emergency.”
I again looked into the rearview mirror.
“In this storm?” Frances asked.
I shrugged. “When you gotta go, you gotta go.”
“That’s stupid,” Frances said.
Tension crackled between us.
“If you have a better idea, I’m all ears,” I snapped.
The rain fell in thick, opaque sheets. Normally, I’d have pulled over and flipped on my hazard lights, and waited for the weather to pass—but no way I was stopping now.
I leaned forward in my seat and squinted. The pulse in my neck felt like a living thing trying to escape, pounding against my skin. My mind sprinted.
“Milly,” Frances said. “If we get pulled over, we have to abandon the plan. If a cop could put us here at the same time an anonymous tip about my husband came through, that wouldn’t be good for me.”
The metallic taste of blood hit my tongue, and I realized I was biting my lip.
“Milly, you understand that, right? If Burt finds out what we’re trying to do…”
I nodded. “He won’t find out.”
I eased on the gas, speeding up, doing my best to follow the white line that marked the side of the road. The cop followed, still on my tail. Still no siren. Still no lights.
The asshole was screwing with us, and I hated him for it. A bored cop from a Podunk town held my sister’s fate in his good-old-boy hands.
We drove in silence, except for heavy breaths and the pelting of raindrops.
After what felt like forever, the downpour eased.
A flash of blue light shone through the cab of my car, and my stomach clenched, but before I could even think to give my signal and pull to the side of the road, the cop car accelerated around us and shot off into the night.
Another minute passed before I could speak. “That was close.”
“Yeah, too close,” Frances agreed. “Like an omen.” She let out a heaving breath. “Made me think of another reason we should call it off. Figure something else out.”
I knew what she meant by something else.
“Look,” I said. “I’m rattled too. But this changes nothing. The plan will work.”
“No. You’re not understanding me. You said once the story is splashed everywhere the police will have to take it seriously.
The thing is, Milly—the big fucking thing—is that I’m an Anderson too.
Even if everything goes according to plan—if the story takes off and the police investigate—there’s no way I’m getting out of this unscathed.
Burt’s going to throw me under the bus. His family will close ranks and—”
“Frances,” I interrupted. “I don’t care what his last name is. He doesn’t win, okay?”
“I don’t think you fully grasp who he—”
“Look. You keep saying that, but I know exactly who he is. Maybe I didn’t go to a fancy school, but I know a rich-boy asshole when I see one. This one grew up and happens to enjoy hurting people. Fuck him and the family that created him.”
“Easy for you to say. You have nothing to lose.”
“That’s not true. I could lose you,” I said.
“And I’ve thought about this. It seems like Burt’s worked hard to keep your, uh, colorful family history out of the spotlight.
I’m your sister. I know where we come from.
Even I couldn’t find anything online to suggest you are anything but a picture-perfect Southern WASPy wife. ”
“So?”
“So if he tries to drag you into this, we blow that image up. You’re the poor girl from rural Tennessee who was pulled into the dark web of a wealthy family, forced to lead a double life.
Reporters will love you.” I said all of this as if I had any clue what I was talking about.
The only thing I knew for certain was that I meant it when I said Burt didn’t get to win.
I nodded to the phone clutched in her hand. “Make the call. Media first.”
As my sister entered the number for the news tip line, I mentally cycled through every hole in our plan.
I knew it wasn’t perfect. What if the cop wrote down my license plate number?
What if, when the story broke, he remembered seeing our car and ran my plate?
I swallowed these fears, not because they weren’t warranted, but because I didn’t know what else to do.
Frances spoke into the phone. “There’s something you don’t want to miss—” she began, and gave the information.
Just past the Warren Creek Bridge, the north side.
She said she was calling the police, so if they wanted to scoop the story, they’d better hurry—she didn’t trust the police not to get rid of the evidence. She hung up.
Was it suspicious as hell? Yeah. And a credible journalist might have reservations, but I wasn’t sure that was a problem with local reporters. I hoped to hell it wasn’t.
She called the police and gave them another version. How she was on a road trip and had stopped to relieve herself, when she saw something that they’d probably be interested in. It was about the dead girl and missing boy. Again, she hung up.
When we crossed the Tennessee River, she lowered her window and tossed out the phone. I thought I would feel better at this point, but the opposite was true. Probably because part of me believed my sister. This plan of mine couldn’t work.
And what if it didn’t?
Was I gambling with my sister’s life by not listening to her? By not consulting with my aunts on the best way to get rid of Burt permanently? After all, they’d made Shane’s body disappear.
I continued driving until my eyelids grew heavy and my mind foggy. My front right tire bounced off the road, the bump jarring me awake. I jerked the wheel to correct, swerving into the other lane. “Shit.” I hit the brakes, slowing. “Sorry,” I said.
“Why don’t you rest and let me drive?” Frances said. We had about two hours until we reached Puddle Creek.
I wanted to say no. But it was either stop for the night, risk having a car accident, or let her drive. We pulled over and switched places. I laid my head against the window, each bump jarring me a little. I thought there was no way I’d fall asleep, but my eyes drifted closed.