Chapter Thirty-Five

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

We took Robbie’s car, because the metallic smell in Eddie’s Pontiac was so bad we couldn’t bear it. I took the first hour driving while Eddie slept in the passenger seat. Then we switched. When I woke up, we were more than halfway to Midland. Eddie was silent in the driver’s seat, his jaw set.

“What’s the matter?” I asked him.

He tapped one finger to the rearview mirror. “See for yourself.”

I leaned to look in my side mirror. Driving behind us, not bothering to hide, was a police cruiser. There was a single driver inside, a cop in uniform. Officer Kal Syed.

“Are you kidding me?” I said.

“I spotted him right after you fell asleep. He must have been farther back before, but he’s been following us all the way from Coldlake Falls.”

“Does he have nothing better to do?” I rolled down my window, letting the summer wind blow into the car, and adjusted my mirror. Kal didn’t move, but he would clearly be able to see my hand. I gave him the finger.

Beside me, Eddie cracked a reluctant smile, the first one I’d seen in a long time.

I let my rude gesture linger for a moment, just so that Kal would get the message. Then I brought my hand back into the car and rolled my window up. “Do we just let him follow us?”

“I don’t see why not. We’re not doing anything wrong. If he wants to waste his time, we may as well let him.”

“What is he thinking?” I looked in the rearview mirror again. “Maybe he thinks we’ll kill a hitchhiker right here on this road while he watches. Shouldn’t he be questioning Max Shandler about Rhonda Jean? Looking for evidence? Arresting drunk kids? Doing some kind of police work?”

“I don’t know,” Eddie said. “Where is Max Shandler? Did he confess? Are they processing the evidence they found? If they’re doing all of that, why is he following us? I’m tired of having questions. Maybe we’ll finally get some answers of our own.”

“Maybe Detective Quentin sent him,” I said.

The silence in the car grew heavy, and then Eddie said, “April, I need to know. How much of what you told me was a lie?”

He meant about my mother, about the story I’d given him. I owed him the truth.

“I was asleep,” I said. “My mother woke me up and told me we had to run, just like I told you. I packed my things, just like I told you. But the house was too quiet, and Mom had just had a shower. I wondered why, if it was such an emergency, she had taken the time to have a shower before getting out of the house.”

Eddie was quiet, driving and listening. I glanced at Kal in the rearview mirror.

“We left in the dark, and their bedroom door was closed.” I made myself say the rest, made the words keep coming. I owed Eddie this. “Mom only told me it was over, but that we had to run or we’d be in trouble. She was jumpy and her hands were shaking. She smoked one cigarette after another. As we drove away, I saw the flames through the windows. She’d set the fire right before waking me. It was only later that I wondered how much blood there had been if she felt the need to take a shower. It must have been a lot.”

“Jesus,” Eddie said softly.

“I didn’t let myself think about it for a long time,” I admitted. “I didn’t ask questions. I probably should have, but I was twelve. She was all I had. We moved around like we were scared Dad would find us—changed identities, changed states, changed jobs. That was the story—that we didn’t want Dad to find us. That was the story I told myself, at least for the first few years. After a while, I admitted to myself that I wasn’t scared of Dad tracking us down, and I never had been. It was the police we were running from. Because Dad had been dead since that first night.”

“Did you ever talk about it with her?” Eddie asked.

“No, and she never confessed to me. She never confessed any of it, because the more she told me, the more I could tell the police if I got picked up. Maybe I would have forced it at some point, but when I was eighteen I came home and she was gone. I knew the police had caught up with her, that she’d been arrested, and I knew what she’d been arrested for. Part of me always knew. From the moment I saw her damp hair and her fresh clothes, I knew. So I packed my things and ran again.”

There was a long moment of silence. Behind us, Kal Syed followed steadily, never out of patience.

“You could have told me,” Eddie said.

I blinked back the tears that lurked deep behind my eyes. “I thought you would be disgusted. I thought you would leave. I was planning to tell you—honestly I was. I had it all planned out. Then you proposed before I could get my nerve up, and I said yes. And it felt like it was too late. I couldn’t make the sacrifice. I couldn’t lose you anymore.”

“You could have told me,” he said again, his voice rough. He was torn. “It wasn’t your fault, what happened. I would have understood.”

Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe he didn’t understand, even now. I rubbed a hand over my face, thinking of all the mistakes stretching back through my life, a long chain of them. “You’re the opposite of my mother,” I said. “She was all I had for a long time, and it was killing me. She was killing me. I was becoming something I didn’t want to be. You’re everything she’s not. I think that’s why I fell for you so fast. What would I do if I told you and you hated me?”

Eddie frowned, his eyes still on the road ahead. “That visit from Quentin was deliberate. Showing up at Rose’s, dropping information on us. He was trying to rattle us. Maybe there’s a reason Max Shandler couldn’t have killed Katharine O’Connor. He’s solved Rhonda Jean’s murder, or at least it looks like it, but when it comes to the others, he has nothing except us.”

There was no discussion of telling Quentin the truth, of what I’d seen on Atticus Line last night. We had nothing concrete to tell. If the Snell sisters found Trish, would she even remember what had happened? If she remembered, would she confess to trying to kill me? It would be my word against hers, and if it came to that, which one of us was untrustworthy, a liar, and possibly crazy?

Me. Only me.

Even if Quentin bought my story, I didn’t want Trish to get in trouble. I hadn’t meant to involve her, or anyone. She’d had no choice in what she’d done. She was innocent. It was strange to say that about someone who had tried to smash in your skull with a tire iron, but it was true.

“So he was trying to rattle us,” I said. “Trying to turn us against each other.”

“Trying,” Eddie said grimly.

I turned and looked at him, focusing on every line of his body. Trying to read his thoughts. If I could put my hands on him right now, I would know everything, as if he telegraphed his feelings to me through his skin, through my palms. As if he always had.

“Is it working?” I asked him. Because I was done going along with things, not asking questions. I needed to know.

“April.” Eddie reached to my lap and took my hand. He raised it to his lips and kissed the back of it, like he had that first night. Then he let me go. “I don’t hate you,” he said roughly.

I couldn’t speak. I didn’t know why I felt like crying.

A sign for a gas station appeared ahead, and Eddie switched on his signal. “We’re almost out of gas,” he said. “Let’s see what Kal has to say.”