The Last Word, page 26
She stops for a breath.
He sniffs. A crackle of static.
“Shawn, I abandoned you when you needed me.”
He says nothing.
Dusky light falls over the visitor center. She’s alone here. She checks her phone’s screen—yes, the call is still connected. The call timer still ticking seconds.
Emma feels it again, the inexorable downward tug. The enormity of things unspoken, unspeakable. Maybe this was a mistake. The sun is dimming behind the nearest peak, the mountain pass shadowed into a cold lake of darkness. Still, her husband says nothing.
She pats her purse on instinct, wishing for a cigarette. Before leaving Strand Beach, she’d smoked the last one in her squashed pack, also vowed to be her last one ever, with Old Cop on a boardwalk bench overlooking the waves.
Fuckin’ writers, man. She’d taken a long drag. Maybe they’re all nuts.
Old Cop—no, his name is Eric—had laughed until he coughed. What else can you do? And then he’d softened and touched her shoulder.
Remember, Emma. Time. Tears. And talking.
She’d nodded.
That day, she’d also visited Jake Stanford’s parents. On their front porch she told them that their son’s last delivery that night, the parcel that cost him his life, was an item that helped save Emma’s. She felt they deserved to know that.
Last of all, on her way out, she stopped at Strand Beach’s secondhand bookstore and purchased a yellowed paperback of Silent Screams. On the back cover, a black-and-white Deek, two decades younger and clearly at the apex of his life, nods knowingly with a hand raised to the brim of his fedora. A gesture she’s seen before.
M’lady.
Howard studied his idol, all right.
The face still gives her a chill. The silver hair. The square jaw. The piercing eyes. This face will always exist in history—even if police found the man himself dead in his recliner with his bowels released and his honorary revolver still in his mouth. On his whiteboard, a fully drawn stick figure hung on a noose.
Emma’s forearm still itches as it heals. The scar, however subtle, will remain on her skin forever: DEEK KILLED ME. Like a tattoo, a reminder of what she almost lost.
Almost.
She shivers in the mountain air and checks her phone screen again—it’s been more than a minute now. Her husband still hasn’t spoken. She can hear his distant breaths, a faint rhythm to the static. “Shawn?”
Aching silence.
She dreads the answer.
When it finally comes, his voice is barely audible over the hum of the highway: “Emma . . . where are you?”
She reads a sign. “Glacier Ridge.”
“The ski resort?”
“No. A visitor center.”
Silence again.
Her chest tightens.
“Okay,” he says. “It looks like the exact midpoint between that visitor center and our house is . . . uh, some little town called Brighton. It’s in Idaho. Five hours and fourteen minutes from me. Five hours and eleven minutes from you. I’m getting in my truck, right now . . .”—in the background, she hears a door shut—“and I’ll meet you halfway. Okay? I’m sorry, but I can’t wait until tomorrow. I just can’t, Emma. Your call is the best thing to happen to me in I can’t remember how long, and I need to see you and Space Dog as soon as possible. Today. Tonight. In five hours and fourteen minutes.”
Tears cloud Emma’s eyes and she laughs with a shiver. She slides into a crouch against the building’s brick wall.
He pauses. “Is that . . . is that okay?”
“Yes.” She nods hard, wiping her eyes. “Yes, yes, yes—”
“I love you so much.”
“I love you, too.”
“Brighton,” Shawn promises. “I’ll meet you there.”
Acknowledgments
Thank you to everyone who made this book possible.
To Jaclyn and to my parents, thank you for your critically important early reads and your ongoing support and patience as I often sat in a tranced, zombie-like silence, trying to solve problems in my head. This was a fun novel to write—how often do you get to write a false acknowledgments page for your story’s villain?—but it was also a challenging puzzle that I couldn’t have managed alone.
A huge thank-you to my agent, David Hale Smith, and to Naomi Eisenbeiss at Inkwell Management for guiding this project from idea to completion, and to my manager, Chad Snopek, for a hugely valuable early draft read.
My endless gratitude to editor Jennifer Brehl at William Morrow for helping sculpt this story (particularly its third act) and giving me all the right feedback at every step. And many thanks to the entire team at William Morrow and HarperCollins, including Nate Lanman and Danielle Bartlett, and to copy editor Nancy Inglis for bringing this book to readers in its best possible shape.
And a shout-out to the real Laika, the golden retriever who sat faithfully by my side while much of this novel was written, along with our Chihuahua Clementine.
Last, a thank-you to my readers for your support and enthusiasm. I realize that, given this acknowledgment is in a novel about an evil author terrorizing a reader, that may sound like a threat, but I promise it’s not! Thank you all for reading. I’m so lucky to be able to do this.
About the Author
TAYLOR ADAMS is the author of several acclaimed thrillers including Hairpin Bridge and No Exit. No Exit has been published in thirty-two languages and was recently released as a Hulu Original film. Adams lives in Washington State.
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Also by Taylor Adams
Hairpin Bridge
No Exit
Our Last Night
Eyeshot
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
the last word. Copyright © 2023 by Taylor Adams. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
first edition
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Cover design by Elsie Lyons
Cover photographs © Yannik Willing/Arcangel Images (house); © Shutterstock
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
Digital Edition APRIL 2023 ISBN: 978-0-06-322291-5
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-322289-2
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Taylor Adams, The Last Word
