When She Left: A Thriller, page 10
Her mother was the one who found Ray’s body later that year, the gun in his hand and a hole in the back of his head, slumped off his wheelchair, his body blocking the bathroom door. She didn’t seem, to Ruby, particularly sad—whatever hold Ray had had on her was gone, as if now that he was unable to take care of her in the way she needed, they had nothing left. It was an odd strength that, in some disquieting way, Ruby understood.
When Ruby thought about Ray, she remembered who he had been, his cheerful confidence as he sauntered into their apartment, the way he’d kept the devil in her mother at bay.
The way his secret sustained him until it was revealed.
And this unseen force that had crippled and then killed him, overthrown the natural order of the world with a gesture. Like a stone blocking the entrance of a cave shoved to the side, and what emerged was both true and incomprehensible, terrified witnesses falling to their knees, unable to rise as it stood before them.
Ruby stood uncertainly between the liquor store and the church and couldn’t go to either, knew she wouldn’t find refuge in a bottle or a pew.
Neither would save her son.
She didn’t even have a way to contact the Winterses. All she ever received from them were burner phones with a few saved numbers and messages to remember. And the people she called were the ones with orders to kill. Yes, she had been the one to tell them, but the messages came from someplace higher, and if the Winterses knew her relation to Jake, then there was the chance they would use her to get to him.
And her death wouldn’t save his life.
She couldn’t turn to Lucky, not after she’d deceived him for so long, even though he’d helped Ruby when she’d decided to leave the Winterses, and Lucky had found a new home and life for her and Jake.
And then the Winterses had found her.
She’d thought Lucky had given her up, revealed her new location. But he hadn’t; the men who came to her house one morning when Jake was at school told her how they’d found her—a camera at a gas station. And Ruby didn’t reveal that Lucky had helped her attempt to leave. The men offered death to her and Jake, and Ruby begged to return instead, and somehow they accepted her offer. They gave her mercy, and because of that she wholly gave herself, tempering any regrets with alcohol.
She never told Lucky she was back, never betrayed that sense of hope he had that, perhaps, there was another life to which he could return. Sometimes he would check in on her, and Ruby never confessed that she hadn’t escaped.
And when Jake left her and she left alcohol, Ruby found something else to turn toward, a church where she learned about a God who had struck down His enemies, who had drowned a world, and in this God Ruby understood everything she had ever witnessed.
There is the Lord, and He is God, and He is the Devil, and He is us. And we are sin, and we are blessed.
And she was His voice.
Evening was setting over Winchester, and the nights here were blacker than Ruby had ever experienced when she’d lived in Alexandria, the way that city’s array of lights had silenced the stars. Ruby trudged back home.
Her nails bit into her palms as she desperately tried to figure out how she could save her son, wondering if she even should, until she felt a trickle of blood over her fingers.
Her phone buzzed.
Ruby stopped walking, slowly pulled it out of her pocket. Worried about what she would be told.
“Wharfside.”
One single word, spoken by a voice she didn’t recognize. But she understood the message.
Jake and Melissa were in the town of Wharfside. That was what she needed to convey to the assassins, to Lucky and the others.
But with that information, Ruby understood, there was a path ahead.
There is the Lord, and He is God, and He is the Devil, and He is us.
She pressed her bloody palms together, in plan and prayer.
CHAPTER TEN
MELISSA
Morning came when Harold had finally stopped moaning and fell asleep. Melissa had cleaned his wound with bottled water, used a pair of shears Jake had found to cut away the cloth from Harold’s pants. Tied and loosened a tourniquet throughout the night, all advice she and Jake had hurriedly read on their phones. Now she stared intently at the bullet wound just above his knee. It was still a mess of torn skin and bone fragments, but the wound had dried.
Melissa sat back heavily.
Harold was going to live.
She hoped so anyway.
Jake had been a panicked mess after they’d lifted Harold up and pushed him back through the window, Harold dropping inside the warehouse with a thud and a shriek. Jake and Melissa had dragged him back to the yacht and its lanterns, but Jake was unable to stop his hands from shaking as they tried to treat the older man. Eventually Melissa had asked him to hold Harold down.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Melissa had told him over Harold’s moans. “He shot himself.”
“We should have just let him go.”
His words were too mired in self-loathing to sound like an accusation.
Besides, regardless of what had happened, even if Harold had died, Melissa knew letting him leave would have been a mistake.
She knew that as firmly as Jake believed the opposite.
And that impasse between her and Jake was apparent, even if unspoken. Their silence grew so thick it felt like a living thing between them. Eventually Jake had stalked off.
She’d let him go, staring down at Harold, wiping sweat away from his face. And had an odd thought.
Was she acting like Chris, and had Jake assumed her role?
Melissa remembered Chris perched over Jake, his fists thundering down, and the horror that had filled her. A horror at the shine in Chris, the luster in his anger.
And yet, somehow, she’d understood his actions. Not that she agreed with them, just that she expected them, in the way that a child awaits punishment. This was the order of the world she’d lived in for so long . . . and now Melissa realized she hadn’t emerged from it unscathed.
Her perspective seemed ruined but necessary, the way her immediate impulse had been to shoot Harold when she’d looked down from the deck and seen Jake standing behind him, that brief hope in her during their struggle outside the warehouse that the gunshot had killed him.
How even now, treating him alone, she thought about slipping into the yacht and returning with a pillow, pressing it over Harold’s face until his arms and legs stopped flailing.
She poured water on a paper towel, ran it over the blood on Harold’s leg, careful not to press down on the wound.
Melissa had made her choice between Chris and Jake, between violence and retreat, but it was a choice she would need to keep making.
“Hey,” Harold said weakly.
He didn’t try to move from his supine position, lying down with his hand suspended as if waiting for someone to high-five him.
“Where’s your man?” he asked.
“Out.” Melissa ran a hand through her hair, already starting to feel where it was coarsening due to days without washing.
Harold wiped his face with his free sleeve. “My leg hurts. Can you call me a doctor?”
“I can’t.”
“Okay,” Harold said quietly, resigned.
“Are you in a lot of pain?”
He nodded.
Melissa bent over him, touched his forehead.
“You’re really hot,” she said. “Maybe it’s infected.”
“There’s a store up the way,” Harold told her. “A mile away. Straight up River Bend. They sell some medicine stuff.”
“That little convenience store?” Melissa thought back to the clerk who had hit on her. “I was there yesterday.”
“Want me to go?” Jake asked, and Melissa turned, saw him behind her. He lifted his camera and snapped a picture of Harold.
“I’m not going to smile,” Harold said grimly, and Jake laughed.
Jake seemed sure of himself, his confidence returning now that Harold was awake and showing resiliency.
“I’m sorry,” Jake told her.
“Why?”
“I should have trusted you,” he said. “Shouldn’t have waited to flash him.”
“What?” Harold asked.
“It’s okay,” Melissa replied. “We’re figuring this out.”
“And we’ll be okay.”
There was something contagious in Jake’s confidence, hope and happiness stronger than she’d ever felt.
“You got a good photo, didn’t you?” she guessed.
“I got a great photo! Those tree branches and the sky. Like ancient writing.”
Warmth touched her chest, love. Melissa couldn’t help it.
She’d make this choice over and over, until the end of time.
“Will you two stop staring at each other,” Harold asked, “and get me some damn medicine?”
The walk to the store seemed shorter than it had yesterday, but today Melissa walked with urgency.
She’d looked up infections, learned that fevers were a worrisome sign. And Melissa didn’t have the tools or expertise to treat Harold and didn’t trust the articles she’d read online to provide guidance. He needed true medical attention.
And to get that medical attention, they needed to leave. Drive at least a state away and take Harold to a hospital. She didn’t know if doctors would realize his wound came from a bullet, but she knew all gun injuries had to be reported to the police.
The only other option was to leave Harold to die.
She couldn’t trust him. He’d already promised Melissa and Jake whatever they wanted, promised to keep them a secret, agreed to hide whatever he knew. But what if he didn’t? Melissa knew that even the most innocent gossip could lead the Winterses to them. Chris used to boast how easily they found people who ran.
Melissa had always wondered if that was a warning.
She imagined Harold slowly dying in the warehouse. Calling for help, hoping his voice carried through that open window, praying someone happened to be walking by outside. The stark realization that no one was coming to save him, that Melissa and Jake had abandoned him. Tied to that metal ring, unable to free himself as hunger and thirst approached.
Melissa reached the store and hurried inside, grateful for the warmth after her walk through the December morning chill. She wandered through the aisles, glancing over snacks and automobile supplies until she reached a row with medicine. There wasn’t much, certainly not as much as she’d hoped. Small containers of Tylenol and aspirin, toothbrushes and floss and mouthwash and condoms and Band-Aids.
A single dusty brown bottle of peroxide.
Melissa grabbed the bottle and a package of Tylenol. She thought of a lie to tell in case the clerk questioned her about the purchase: her friend had cut himself during a fishing accident, a harmless cut, but they needed to be careful. Maybe change the male friend to a female, to distance Jake’s identity even further. She and some friends were in town for a lazy girls’ trip. Not that she could ever imagine coming to Wharfside in December with her friends.
She set the medicine on the counter.
The clerk wasn’t here.
Melissa hadn’t seen him when she’d entered the store but had assumed he was in one of the aisles, sorting items. Or maybe in the office or storage room or bathroom or whatever room she could see behind the counter, that door halfway open.
“Hello?” she called.
There wasn’t an answer.
A sensation seized Melissa, something terribly wrong.
“Hello?” she said again, her voice quieter.
No response.
That half-open door behind the counter.
“Hello?”
Again, nothing. She walked behind the counter, slowly pushed the door all the way open, peeked inside.
It was a small square bathroom with white tiles on the floor and a toilet and a sink. A paper towel dispenser hung next to the door. A guide to washing hands on the opposite wall.
The dead clerk in the corner, legs splayed.
There was such horror on his face.
Melissa was standing in his blood.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
LUCKY
“But you don’t know for sure your wife is seeing him,” Heather Anders told Lucky. She shifted under the zip ties binding her to the folding lawn chair Lucky had found in the Anderses’ garage. She wore pajamas, thin shorts, and a matching top, and the shorts had risen high on her thighs when Lucky had tied her down. He’d realized her fear when she struggled, how she pressed her legs together, and he’d placed a blanket over her lap.
Not that a blanket brought much comfort when you’re woken by a stranger with a gun, separated from your husband, zip-tied and blindfolded.
And then asked to counsel the man who’d kidnapped you.
Lucky knew all this, but he couldn’t pass up the opportunity to talk with a trained mental health professional.
“I saw her car parked in front of his house,” he said. “I saw her go inside.”
“Can you loosen these ropes?” Heather tried again to adjust her position. “They’re cutting into me.”
“They’re zip ties, not ropes,” Lucky said from his spot on the floor. He lay on his back, staring up at the ceiling, thinking about his wife and William. Much of his worry, he knew, was based solely on suspicion.
But he’d built his life around suspicion.
He explained that to Heather and played with the ski mask in his hands. Lucky rarely wore the mask, found it tended to creep up and block his vision. He’d immediately taken it off after blindfolding Heather and her husband.
“I just think,” Heather told him, “you might be imagining something worse than what’s actually happening.”
“Really?”
“It’s hard to give a diagnosis right now. But, sure.”
There was something about Heather that Lucky liked. She’d been scared, of course, when he’d woken her and her husband at gunpoint, when Lucky forced her husband to bind and blindfold her, the heartbreaking way she’d cried out “Bill!” when Lucky led him to a different room to question each of them about the shoot-out at the diner. Bill and Heather Anders had been there that evening, according to the article:
“I’ll never forget any of this,” local resident Heather Anders stated. “Never.”
Lucky had seen her series of framed degrees on the staircase when he’d broken into the Anderses’ modest colonial, each degree rising in level as he ascended the steps from the tasteful living room—dual-tone design, black-and-white furniture, good square footage, slightly outdated window treatments—until he came across her doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of Pittsburgh.
Lucky hadn’t expected to ask her for advice about his marriage, but he couldn’t stop himself. He was just so desperate to soften the lump in his throat.
“Do your other patients,” he asked, “sometimes imagine things so much that they believe them?”
“You’re not my patient.”
“Well . . .”
“But yes,” she said. “That can happen, particularly if something is affecting them, like a stressful job.”
From his back, Lucky tossed the ski mask into the air and caught it. “I’ve done this for something like twenty years. Why’s it affecting me now?”
“Obviously the threat to your marriage, real or perceived, can shake you. But have you experienced any other major life changes?”
“I have a daughter,” he said carefully. “She’s in high school. And she went to a party with older guys. I didn’t like that.”
“Watching your children make their own decisions is hard,” Heather said. And then her composure slipped, urgency filled her voice. “Bill and I have children, two girls in college. Their names are Patty and Paula. We love them very much. More than anything in the world.”
“In college? How old are you?”
“I’m fifty-nine. Bill’s sixty-six.”
“I thought you were ten years younger,” Lucky said.
She shifted under the blanket, and he realized the compliment only made Heather more uncomfortable.
“Sorry.” Lucky sat up gingerly to ease his aching back, changed the subject. “Was it hard raising your kids, even as a psychologist?”
Heather nodded under her blindfold. “That just made it harder. I knew what to expect but knew I shouldn’t always stop it.” She took a breath. “It’s important that people do the right thing. That people know what the right thing is.”
“I know!” Lucky clapped his hands. “That’s exactly how I feel with my daughter. Like I need to tell her the right thing, even force her to do it. But I can’t, right? You can’t stop someone when they really want something.”
“I think you can,” Heather said unsteadily. “I hope so.”
Lucky frowned. “I think there’s a subtext here that’s more about the situation you and Bill are in, and not about me and my family. Can we focus on me?”
Another pause. “Have you always been able to separate your life from your work?”
“I’ve killed people and had dinner with my family an hour later.”
A sharp intake of breath from Heather. Lucky saw her hands tremble.
“But you can’t, you can’t do that anymore?” she asked hopefully.
“No, I could. My work isn’t cutting into my family; my family’s cutting into my work. Like, right now, I should be questioning your husband in the other room, and instead I’m here with you. He’s fine, by the way.”
Tears streamed from under Heather’s blindfold.
“He really is fine,” Lucky added. “I promise.”
“Can I see him?”
“No.”
“That makes it very hard for me to help you. Do you understand that? I need you to help me, so I can help you.”
Lucky didn’t reply. Heather sighed.
“I don’t think you can simply say that your work isn’t interfering in your marriage,” she said.
Lucky had noticed that she paused a lot, and he wondered if that was due to the current circumstances or if she was a thoughtful, deliberative speaker. He’d never seen a psychologist before but imagined this cadence was common.
