Текст книги "Crash & Burn"

Автор книги: Lisa Gardner

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Текущая страница: 19 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

Chapter 33

IT’S NOT HARD to sneak out of the hotel. Middle of the night, off-season in the North Country. Summer, a hotel like this one would be overflowing with families eager to jump in the pool, hike the mountains, raft down the rivers. Early fall, tour buses would cram the parking lot with aging leaf peepers, armed with cameras and heavy knit sweaters. Of course, December brought snowfall, teenage boarding dudes, and impeccably clad ski bunnies. But now, mid-November, when the mountains were denuded of leaves, covered in nothing but dirt . . .

Not even the locals enjoyed November in the North Country. This was a time of waiting. Which is exactly how the night felt to me. Expectant. With just enough chill in the air to prickle the hair on the back of my neck.

Slipping out of the room was easy enough. First I found Tessa’s computer case, where she’d left it next to the table. Then I rifled through it in the dark, until my fingers discovered the rectangular shape of her key fob. Next it was a simple matter of waiting for her and Wyatt’s voices to pick up, become louder, more focused on their phone call next door. Six quiet strides and I stood next to the exit.

Tessa asking a sharp question. Me opening the door. One muffled click. Another exclamation from the adjoining room. Me slipping out, closing the door behind me. Second muffled click.

I didn’t wait after that. Just headed straight down the hall to the stairs. Down one flight; then I was striding out into the darkened parking lot, armed with keys and hopped-up on determination.

Of course, where to go, what to do . . .

Is knowing who you aren’t the same as knowing who you are? Is knowing you’re sick of running the same as knowing how to fight?

Is knowing that you’re tired of forgetting the same as knowing how to remember?

I stride across the parking lot in search of Tessa’s black Lexus SUV. Cloudless night above. Half-moon in the sky and so many stars. I can’t help but stop and stare. In all the places I’ve lived, the cities, the coasts, the deserts, there’s still nothing like the night sky in the mountains of New Hampshire.

I should count the stars, I think. So many, so vast. I could count and count and each one would make me feel smaller, less significant. Until I’d disappear once and for all, standing in the middle of a hotel parking lot. No more decisions left to make. No more past left to escape.

Then, in the next instant, I smell smoke.

And that’s how I know he’s here.

I can’t help myself. I take one step forward. Then another. There are only six cars in the dimly lit space. But I already know he’s not in any of them. He’s the shadow, right there, leaning against a tree. The man slowly straightening, unpeeling himself from the branches.

My husband walking toward me.

It’s funny the things you know after so many years together. I can’t see his face. He’s too far away and it’s too dark. But I don’t need to see his eyes or his nose or the slash of his mouth or the set of his jaw. I know my husband simply from the way he moves.

And the corresponding tightness in my chest.

He has his hands in his pockets. Nonthreatening, I think, and yet already my nerves are on edge. I hold Tessa’s key fob tight in my fist, just in case.

He stops four feet back. I can feel his gaze on my face, assessing me, even as I try to gauge his mood.

I feel too much at once. An urgent desire to rush forward, throw myself at him. Because I’m alone and I hurt and I wanted a family and I lost a family and he’s all I have. All, maybe, I’ve ever had, and God, I’ve missed him. The steady comfort of his voice. The feel of his fingers, massaging my temples. The strength of his resolve, day after day, week after week, month after month.

I love you, he told me, all those years ago. Wherever you want me to go, whoever you need me to be, whatever you need me to do . . . I will always be there for you.

Now I stare at my husband of twenty-two years, and I realize that for the first time, I’m afraid.

“Where are you going?” he asks. In the faint light cast by the moon, I can see that he’s frowning. “Should you even be out here?”

“Funny, I was going to ask you the same.”

He frowns again. Takes another step forward, before something about my expression brings him up short. He rocks back on his heels. Nervous, I think. Uncertain, which doesn’t make any sense.

“You met with her, right?” he presses. “Marlene Bilek. I saw the cops bring her.”

“You’re spying on me.”

“Of course. What did you expect?”

I shake my head, fight an instinctive need to rub my forehead. “You burned down our house.” Then, perhaps more important: “You were with me Wednesday night. You asked me if I trusted you. Then you fastened me into the driver’s seat and shoved my car down a hill.”

Thomas doesn’t say anything. He’s eyeing me intently. Waiting for me to speak more? Or waiting for me to remember more?

Sergeant Wyatt has it wrong, I realize abruptly. This has never been about Vero. And it’s never been about me. It’s about us. Thomas and me. Because that’s marriage, right? It’s never about one person or the other. It’s always the dynamics between the two.

And Thomas and I, we go way, way back. The longest relationship I’ve ever had. To the smell of freshly mowed grass. And a lonely girl’s view from a tower bedroom.

All these years, my husband hasn’t been waiting for me to tell him the truth. He’s simply been waiting for me to remember it.

I step forward. Testing out my theory, I hold out my left arm, push up my sleeve to reveal smooth skin. “Vero had a scar,” I say.

There, just for a second, a flash of recognition in his eyes.

“On her left forearm,” I continue, eyes still on his face. “I don’t have it.”

He knows. He knows exactly what I’m talking about.

“But the fingerprints,” he counters, “recovered from your car. The police identified you as Veronica Sellers. I saw it on the news.”

“I’m not Vero. Marlene Bilek knows it and so do I.”

He frowns, disappointed, frustrated, annoyed? I can’t tell and it makes me angry.

“You did this.” My conviction is growing, and with it, my sense of power. “You handed me those gloves. Did you tamper with them somehow, etch Vero’s fingerprints into the tips? But you did it. You made me put them on. And then . . .”

Rain, mud. I’m cold; I’m hot. I’m crying, but I don’t make a sound. I’ve consumed too much scotch. I’ve followed the woman, the magical queen from all the stories. And I’ve seen Vero, who was once dead but is now alive, and my world is imploding and I can’t put the pieces together again.

Thomas, responding to my frantic call. Thomas, once more riding to the rescue.

“Do you trust me?” he asks me, standing in my open car door. “Do you trust me?”

He bends down, presses his lips against my cheek. Soft, featherlight. A promise already laced with regret.

Suddenly, in the midst of the rain and the mud and the smell of churned-up earth.

The smell of smoke. The heat of fire.

I sit, fastened into my Audi in the middle of an empty, rain-swept road. I stare at my husband, and I can almost see the flames dancing around him.

I remember.

In that moment, I remember everything.

And he knows I know.

My husband reaches across my lap. My husband puts my vehicle in neutral. My husband steps back, closes the door, shuts me in. And I realize, belatedly, what he’s about to do next.

His lips moving in the rain.

“Do you trust me?” Thomas says again. He’s standing right in front of me. So close I can feel the heat of his body, the bulky softness of his overcoat.

“You tried to kill me.”

“I love you.”

I shake my head. Order myself not to listen to his words, but focus on his actions. “Something happened back then. Worse than Vero OD’ing, worse than being buried alive. What can be worse than being buried alive, Thomas? What did you do?”

“I love you,” he says again.

I realize then that I’m doomed, for I can already hear the undertone. But it won’t save you in the end. Vero had tried to warn me. Maybe it wasn’t my past I was trying to escape, but the man I married.

“I am not Veronica Sellers,” I hear myself say. I need the words out. Thomas’s fingerprint trick had briefly disoriented me, my own confused state and guilty conscience making me that much more vulnerable. But Vero is Vero, and I am me, and I owe it to both of us to get it right.

“I know.”

“My name is Chelsea Robbins. My mother sold me to Madame Sade when I was ten. And I hated her for that and I loved her for that because the house was nicer, the food better, and at least Madame Sade pretended we were family. Then Vero came along and kicked me out of the tower bedroom and I hated her for that, but I loved her for that because she became the sister I never had and spun our world into a fairy tale.”

I look at him. “And I met you, the boy I watched in the distance, walking free about the property. And I hated you for that and I loved you for that, but mostly . . .” My voice breaks. “I loved you. From the very beginning, I’ve loved you and I’ve never forgiven myself for it.”

Thomas smiles. I think it’s the saddest expression I’ve ever seen on a man’s face.

“It’s time,” he says simply. “She’s waited long enough.”

He holds out his hand. This time, I take it, following him across the parking lot. Because there is nothing else to do. There is nothing else to say.

Thomas had been right: I never should’ve returned to New Hampshire; I never should’ve hired an investigative agency; I never should’ve tried so hard to discover the memories I’d worked even harder to forget.

But what is done is done.

And now, twenty-two years later, for both of us, for all of us, there is no going back.

Chapter 34

MY CAR KEYS are gone,” Tessa reported ten minutes later. She and Wyatt had snapped on the lights, giving the room a cursory glance, before tearing outside to the parking lot. With no sign of Nicky inside or out, they’d returned to the room and summarily ripped it apart. Senseless, really, given they were looking for a full-size female, which wasn’t exactly something you could lose beneath a sofa cushion.

“She doesn’t have wheels of her own,” Wyatt commented.

“But where would she go? She doesn’t have a house of her own either.”

Wyatt nodded. He straightened, took in the wreck of the hotel room and finally exhaled in defeat. “All right. Time to regroup. We’re reacting. This whole damn case, frankly, has been one reaction after another, and it’s not getting us anywhere. From the top, what do we know?”

“Nicky Frank is missing,” Tessa supplied sourly. She’d stripped the covers from both beds. Now she was on her hands and knees, peering under the first, then the second, as if locating a missing witness was no different from finding a lost pair of shoes.

“Nicky Frank who is not Veronica Sellers,” Wyatt emphasized, “the girl who went missing thirty years ago.”

“Meaning she’s probably not running to Marlene Bilek’s house,” Tessa muttered, still crawling on the floor. “Her only contact in the area remains her husband, Thomas.”

“Who most likely engineered her car accident and set things up for her to be falsely identified as Vero.”

Tessa finally paused, sat back on her heels. “Could they be in this together? A joint ruse to pass Nicky off as a missing girl? Maybe as part of that, Thomas and Nicky set a predetermined rendezvous point for if things got too dicey, and that’s where Nicky’s headed now?”

Wyatt grimaced. “Except what is this ruse? What could Nicky possibly gain as Marlene’s long-lost daughter that would justify the risk of a major auto accident, let alone Thomas burning down their home?”

Tessa had to think about it: “Revenge? Marlene failed her daughter, maybe was even part of Vero’s abduction? Nicky wants payback, and what better way to get it than masquerading as the lost child?”

“I think Thomas is behind it.”

“Okay.” Tessa resumed her search, slipping a hand beneath the box spring and top mattress of the bed closest to the door.

Wyatt ticked off on his fingers. “Nicky’s concussions are real. Her memory loss certainly appears real. Then there’s the multiple accidents, house fire, et cetera. In all those scenarios, Nicky’s a victim, not a perpetrator. Given all this started when she decided to move to New Hampshire and search for answers, I think her desire for the truth upset the apple cart. Meaning Thomas is the one with something to hide.”

“Hang on.” Tessa paused. “What do we have here?” Her fingers worked between the mattresses; then she slowly withdrew an oversize piece of paper, top edge ragged where it had been torn from the sketch pad. Tessa eased it carefully from where it’d been stashed, between the mattresses on Nicky’s bed.

Wyatt immediately crossed the room to study the black-and-white pencil sketch. “That’s Thomas Frank.”

“Little young, don’t you think?”

“She must’ve drawn this earlier, when you had her working, because you’re right; this isn’t the Thomas Frank from present day. This is him, easily twenty years ago.”

“The time of the dollhouse. My God, look at his face.”

Wyatt understood her point. The Thomas he’d interviewed had been a stressed-out middle-aged male. Clearly tired, maybe a bit frayed from caring for his ailing wife, but not the kind of man you’d look at twice.

Whereas younger Thomas—teenage Thomas? He looked haggard. Haunted. Hard.

A kid who already had plenty to hide.

“Nicky never showed this to you?” Wyatt asked.

Tessa shook her head. “No. I left to take a call. Bet she stashed it then.”

“She’s sitting here. Candle’s lit, the air smells like grass. She draws the house. She draws rooms in the house. She sketches Madame Sade, and then: this.” Wyatt turned over the matter in his mind. “She didn’t expect it. I bet that’s why she hid it. Of all the details to start returning to her, that Thomas is part of the dollhouse, that she knew him before, better yet, he knew her from before, must’ve rattled her.”

“He was part of it,” Tessa whispered. “And judging by his expression, not a nice part of it either. You think she contacted him somehow, set up a meeting time? But how? She doesn’t even have a phone.”

Wyatt shrugged. “If she really wants answers, Thomas is the next place to start.”

“Except . . .” Tessa’s voice trailed off. “I don’t think this boy”—she tapped the sketch—“has anything good to tell her.”

Wyatt nodded. He was worried about the same. If even half of what Nicky had said about the dollhouse was true, then there were plenty of secrets worth killing to protect.

“We need to get eyes on your car. Immediately.”

“Shit! We’re idiots. It’s my vehicle, dammit. And I have OnStar!”

*   *   *

TESSA MADE THE call. Once given the password, the operator of OnStar was more than happy to be of assistance. In fact, he pinpointed the location of her Lexus in less than thirty seconds as sitting in the hotel’s parking lot.

“What the hell?”

She and Wyatt walked out together, discovering Tessa’s black SUV, sitting beneath an energy-efficient lamppost.

“Why take my keys if she wasn’t going to take my car?” Tessa exploded. She sounded genuinely insulted.

“Slow us down, keep us from following her?” Wyatt reasoned. “She already hid Thomas’s sketch. Clearly, she wants some privacy.”

Wyatt took his hands out of his pockets, walked the space. One A.M. Lot held four vehicles, which made for a quick inventory. Bushes, trees, shrubs, nothing.

“She didn’t walk out of here,” he stated. “We’re too far away from civilization, let alone any major roads. So if she’s not here, but your car is, then she found another mode of transportation.”

“Maybe she didn’t have to drive to meet Thomas. He met her here.”

“She called him from the hotel room?” Wyatt tried on.

“Can’t. I asked the hotel manager to block all incoming and outgoing calls. Containment issue. Plus, I have my cell. We didn’t need anything else for making contact.”

Wyatt was impressed. “You didn’t trust her?”

“Hey, just because she’s my client doesn’t mean I’m stupid. Plenty of people ask for help, then maneuver around your back, which, of course, gets the savvy investigator in trouble. One form of contact means I always know what’s going on. For example, she didn’t call Thomas.”

“Maybe he followed us from the sheriff’s department to here,” Wyatt theorized. “Or even tracked my vehicle while I was picking up Marlene Bilek. Easy enough to guess she’d want to meet with Nicky, given the story on the nightly news.” Wyatt’s voice trailed off. If Thomas had known Nicky was here, then the moment she walked out of the hotel into the darkened parking lot . . . They hadn’t kept her safe at all, he realized. More like delivered her straight to the lion.

Wyatt glanced at his watch again. He needed to get on the radio, mobilize a fresh search. Except be on the lookout for what? They’d already been hunting for Thomas Frank for more than twenty-four hours. The man was a fucking ghost.

“We need cameras,” Tessa muttered, as if reading his mind. “Search like this in Boston, we’d have toll records, traffic light cameras, business surveillance and/or ATM security on every block. One click of a video screen, and Thomas would be ours.”

“Hang on. We might not be in a big city, but this hotel has a security system. Check it out.” He pointed back at the hotel roofline, where at least one camera was clearly visible. He turned on his heels, already heading for the front office. “We might have some tricks up our sleeves just yet.”

The nighttime hotel clerk identified herself as Brittany Kline. Blond, bubbly, and extremely excited to assist with an official police investigation. Yes, the hotel had an excellent security system, she informed them. Installed six months ago, great cameras, great imaging, tons of stored footage. She liked to peruse it herself on slow nights. You know, in order to augment her online classes in criminology. She led them toward a back office, where she immediately proved herself to be adept at retrieving video from the system.With Brittany’s assistance, they sorted out which security camera had the best view of the parking lot; then backtracked through the various video feeds in one-minute intervals. It took only four tries to get it right.

“There!” Tessa exclaimed excitedly, pointing at the screen, as Brittany manned the digital controls. “That’s Nicky, walking toward the parked cars.”

“And there’s person number two, pushing away from the tree,” Wyatt provided.

They watched the figure approach. Clearly a male, but his back was to the overhead lights, casting his face in shadow. Still, neither one had any doubt.

“Thomas,” Wyatt stated.

“She doesn’t seem afraid of him,” Tessa commented.

“And yet, no welcoming hug.”

“Can you zoom in?” Tessa asked Brittany. The night clerk did her best, but the resolution remained grainy. After a bit more playing around, they decided the footage was best in broad view. Brittany resumed normal screen size, hit replay.

Wyatt watched the screen. Thomas’s rapid approach upon spotting his wife, followed almost immediately by an obvious hesitation. Nicky’s instinctive lean toward her husband yet also drawing up short. Love and fear, he thought. Twin companions in any relationship.

Even his and Tessa’s.

Thomas held out his hand to his wife.

Nicky stood there. Doubt? Wyatt wondered. Hostility? Wariness? Did she still see her husband of twenty-two years, a man who’d pledged to take care of her? Or did she see the grim-eyed youth from the dollhouse, a boy clearly conditioned to do what had to be done, regardless of the cost?

Another moment passed. Two. Three.

Thomas stepped closer. Nicky tilted her face up. The lighting was wrong. Wyatt couldn’t see her expression, and yet what she did next didn’t totally surprise him.

She placed her fingers within her husband’s grasp. She handed herself over to him.

Brittany sighed heavily, as if watching a romantic movie.

While Tessa exclaimed, “Oh my God, they’re in this together!”

“Maybe,” Wyatt murmured. But he wasn’t thinking of joint criminal activity. Mostly he was thinking that love is like that.

Thomas led Nicky to the last vehicle in the row. Low-slung hatchback. Subaru, dark green. In a matter of seconds, he was backing it out of the parking space. Heading toward the exit.

Standing behind a seated Brittany, Wyatt and Tessa both leaned forward, willing the parking lot light to illuminate the back license plate, give them what they were looking for.

“Come on,” Wyatt whispered, grabbing a notebook and pen from his pocket. “Come on . . .”

One digit. Two, three . . .

He was hastily scribbling them down, when Tessa suddenly grabbed his arm.

“Stop!” she ordered Brittany. “Freeze that frame. Look. On the right. Another car is pulling out. Wyatt, someone is following them.”