Chapter 61

“Dad!” is the first word out of her mouth when Holly comes to.

Disoriented, she sees police cruisers, fire trucks, and ambulances everywhere. People in uniform mill around her. Everything stinks of smoke.

How did I get here?

The last thing she remembers is the heat of the fire threatening the overturned car. Then it all comes back to her. She’s lying on a stretcher on her grandfather’s front lawn. She turns just in time to see a cop protecting the top of Reese’s head with his hand, as he loads her into the back of a cruiser, her wrists cuffed behind her back.

Before the cop shuts the door, Reese locks eyes with Holly. There’s no remorse in her swollen, red eyes. If anything, she looks betrayed. As if Holly should have known that Reese did it all to protect her own sobriety and to validate Holly’s method.

What utter bullshit!Holly wants to scream.

Is Reese a sociopath? she wonders. And if so, why hadn’t she picked up on it before? Holly probes Reese’s face and posture for a hint of shame, but finding none, turns her head away in disgust.

A shadow crosses her face, and Holly sees Detective Rivers standing over her. He wears a suit, as usual, but it has dark patches and stains across it and on his shirt. His tie is crooked. And blood is crusted over his right eye.

Suddenly she remembers. “Papa?”

“He’s going to be all right.” He kneels down to her level. “They took him to the hospital for assessment.”

“What happened?”

“A fire. In that sunroom. The firefighters say it was deliberately set. Reese was trying to burn down the house.”

With me and Papa inside.“How did you know?”

“I traced Dr. Koskinen’s phone records back to some unlisted cell phones, including Reese’s. When we triangulated the cell signals from the night of the group chat—”

“What group chat?” Holly asks, her brain still foggy.

“Among the group members. You weren’t included. Anyway, after Dr. Koskinen was already apparently ‘on the run,’ both phones dinged to the same cell towers. Meaning—”

“They were together! Reese was the one sending the texts under Liisa’s name to her daughter, right? She must have been pretending to be Liisa on that group chat, too.”

“Looks like.”

Holly exhales. “Liisa is dead. Reese told me as much. I think she drugged her and dumped the body in the ocean.”

Rivers doesn’t appear surprised. “Dr. Koskinen’s car was found this morning by the highway patrol. Off the trails near Big Sur.”

Holly tries to sit up, but her head spins, and he helps her lie back down with a gentle hand on her shoulder. “I still don’t follow. How did you know where to find me? And Reese?”

“I tracked her phone to this house. When I saw that the home was registered under the name of Danvers, I rushed over. I smelled the smoke as soon as I pulled up. Once I recognized it was coming from behind the house, I raced around the side and ran into Reese out back, trying to rinse the pepper spray out of her eyes and nose with a garden hose. I cuffed her to the gate and then kicked in the back door. She had tipped the hookah over, and the rags were burning, but the fire hadn’t consumed the room yet.”

Holly looks at him in awe. “And you carried me and my grandfather out?”

He shrugs it off. “Luckily, you’re both on the lighter side.”

She smiles. But then, unexpectedly, her eyes mist over, and her throat thickens. “Reese killed them all.”

“Your instincts were right about foul play.”

She wipes her eyes with a sleeve. “Thank you for following up on them, Detective Rivers.”

“It’s Cal.”

“Cal?” She cocks her head. “As in Calvin? Or Caleb?”

He shakes his head.

“Callum?”

He chuckles. “Just Cal.”

“I’m Holly, Just Cal.”

He nods to the pair of paramedics standing off to her right. “I’ll come check on you in the ER. OK, Holly? Meantime, I’ve got to go process Reese.”

“Yeah, of course.” She touches his arm. “Thank you, Cal.”

Another smile, and he’s gone.

A female paramedic appears at Holly’s feet and says, “We’re going to take you to the hospital now, Dr. Danvers.” And her partner pushes the stretcher from behind.

They wheel her toward the open back door of an ambulance. The shape of the vehicle reminds Holly of her dad’s old station wagon. Suddenly, the vision from her DMT trip rushes back to her. And with it, the actual memories of the accident flood back, too.

Holly can feel her heart breaking again in the moment when her dad told her the news about her parents’ separation. Even as a teenager, she had recognized how strained and loveless their marriage was. She didn’t care that he had found another woman. No. What devastated Holly was the thought of her father, the most important person in her world, choosing to live with someone else instead of her. She remembers grabbing his arm and begging him not to go. She also remembers her anger.

But the DMT-induced hallucination didn’t fully align with the recollection of actual events. Holly hadn’t wrapped her whole body around his arm. She had only tugged at his sleeve, pleading with him. True, she had distracted him at the worst moment. But the deer had darted out of nowhere. And she clearly remembers that her dad’s eyes were on the road when he yanked on the steering wheel.

The accident wasn’t my fault.