Chapter 39

Maisy and Bastianmake no effort at stealth as they crash through the woods, calling Chloe’s and Rich’s names. After several fruitless minutes, they pause to rest and catch their breath.

“How big is this conservation area?” Bastian asks.

“It’s more than four hundred and fifty acres, and there are eight miles of trails.” Maisy recites the statistics automatically.

“That’s a lot of ground to cover.” There’s a whiff of defeat in his statement.

“We’ll split up. We’ll both keep calling Rich’s cell phone. Eventually, one of us will be close enough to hear it ringing. It’ll lead us right to them.” The idea is nonsensical, but she doesn’t want him to lose heart.

Unfortunately, the French-Canadian chef sees right through her cheerleading. “If he has coverage. If his phone isn’t on silent or vibrate. Or dead. Or in the car.”

She shakes her head at herself. “No flies on you, huh, sugar?”

He looks down at his chest, then spreads his arms wide and checks them, too. “No. No flies,” he tells her sincerely.

She howls, laughing until she can’t breathe. He watches her with a concerned expression.

When she can speak again, she explains, “it’s a saying. It means you’re quick on the uptake or clever.”

“What do flies have to do with anything?”

She thinks for a moment. “Well, I suppose it might be because flies tend to land on animals that are slow or sleeping.”

He nods seriously. “Thank you. Understanding and using idioms and figurative language is one of the hardest parts of learning a second language.” After a beat, he says, “Perhaps we should call the police. I’m sure they’ll say it’s premature, but I don’t know how else we’ll ever find them.”

Maisy feels whiplashed by the sudden change of subject. But she can’t fault his focus: the man’s wife is missing, after all. Before she can respond to his suggestion, though, a woman’s scream cuts through the air.

“I said, don’t touch me!” The words are distant and faint but unmistakable. And the voice is unmistakable, too.

“Chloe!” Bastian runs toward the sound with Maisy on his heels.

“I said, don’t touch me!”

Rich is trying hard to keep his temper in check, but this woman, who’s both so familiar to him and a complete stranger, is screaming at him with such venom that spittle flies from her lips. She scrabbles backward like a crab.

He holds up his palms. “Hey, I was just trying to help you up.”

“I don’t want your help,” she spits.

Rich laughs darkly. “Right. That’s what you said that night, too.”

“What?”

“You told me didn’t want my help, didn’t need my help. But you did, and I helped you. I’ve been covering for you for thirty freaking years. All you had to do was stay gone. I can’t believe you were stupid enough to come back here.”

“You’ve been covering for me?” she repeats.

He’s tired of tiptoeing around the subject, waiting for her to admit what she did. “You have to remember killing that kid.”

“Andre Newport?”

“Yeah. Only, I didn’t know his name then.”

“You think I killed Andre?”

“I know you did.”

“You’re wrong,” she tells him.

“I know what I saw, Heather.”

“Stop calling me that.”

“Why? You are Heather.”

She’s shaking again. “Please don’t. Call me Chloe.”

“Sure. Okay, Chloe.”

Rich will call her whatever she wants if it’ll keep her from falling apart. He needs to finish this now, be done with it for good as soon as she admits she killed Andre Newport. She owes him that much after what he did for her.

“I didn’t kill Andre.”

“I saw you.”

“What did you see?”

“When the police came, Amy was freaking out. She wouldn’t leave without you, and she couldn’t find you. I told her to go, that I’d take care of you. I found you making out with … him.”

He stops for a moment, remembering the hot rage that coursed through him when he found her going at it with another guy.

Then he continues, “I told you the cops were clearing the woods, and you took off. Andre said some dumb shit to the guys, and there was a scuffle between us and his boys. Just a dust-up.”

Chloe has pulled herself to her feet and is standing with her arms crossed over her chest, staring steadily at him as he recounts what happened.

“But, as I was headed down to the road where I’d parked, I heard you screaming your head off. So I double back to that big, flat rock. And I saw you. I saw him sprawled on his stomach on the ground. You turned him over onto his back and started pounding on his chest. You were screaming.”

She’s crying now, silently, tears streaming down her face in twin tracks when she looks up. The sight of her in distress has the same effect on him now that it did thirty years ago. He yearns to protect her.

His voice softens, “I don’t know what he tried, but I’m sure you were defending yourself. Whatever you did, it killed him. I knew he was dead as soon as I saw him. So I told you to run, just go, and I would take care of it.”

She’s staring at him, wordlessly. Her mouth hangs slightly open.

“I kept my promise. The guys helped me drag his body into the bushes. We hid it and left. When the cops were gone, we came back in the middle of the night with shovels and a tarp and buried him. I cleaned up your mess so you wouldn’t have to face the consequences. You’re the one who decided to skip town. That’s on you. But once you did, you had to know you couldn’t come back without raising questions about what happened that night—especially not after all this time. All you had to do, Heather, was disappear and stay disappeared. Then no one would ever have to know that you killed Andre Newport.”

“I didn’t kill him,” she says in a monotone.

He doesn’t bother responding. “I covered for you. Brett and Frankie helped me bury a freaking corpse for you. They’re the only ones who know what you did, and they’ve never breathed a word of it. We got everybody else on the same page, made sure everyone’s story lined up so there would be no suspicion about you and Andre. I even snuck into the police department and used my brother’s phone to call in a tip about Andre leaving town to misdirect the Pittsburgh Police.”

She wipes her hands across her wet eyes. “Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why did you do that? Those things are crimes—disposing of a body, interfering with two separate police investigations. Why would you do those things?”

“Because I cared for you.”

“The way you care for Amy now?”

For a moment, he thinks she’s jealous. But then he realizes the emotion brimming in her voice is disgust, and his anger flares.

“You don’t get to judge me, Chloe. Not after everything I did for you.”

“I do judge you, Rich. What you did was abhorrent.”

“I did it for you.”

“I don’t care.”

He stares at her in disbelief. “You don’t care?”

“Do you even know how much damage you’ve caused? The lives you destroyed? Andre Newport’s mother, my parents, they all died not knowing what happened to their children. If you’d told the truth about that night instead of organizing a conspiracy of silence, Andre’s mother could have buried her son.” She draws a shaky breath. “And maybe somebody would have found me if they’d known what I’d witnessed, what I’d been through. They’d have understood that I was traumatized, not rebelling. They’d definitely have started looking for me sooner.”

“What you’d been through? Do you hear yourself? You killed him.”

She leaps at him, tears cascading down her face now, and beats her fists against his chest. She screams, “I didn’t kill him!”