So said Todd.
“He was never the same after I helped get him and his parents out of there.”
“What happened between them and Todd, anyway? They were so tight with him.”
Liam grips the wheel harder, like he’s trying to strangle it. “Todd . . . wasn’t right.”
“We all knew that.”
“I mean, he wasn’t right with Aaron.”
Despite everything I went through, this shocks me. “I didn’t know.”
“I’ve never told anyone. Todd destroyed that kid.” His voice is tight and filled with emotion, like mine gets when I’m on the verge of tears. I’ve never seen Liam even come close to crying, though. My hatred of Todd deepens, and I’m so glad he’s dead, it feels wrong.
He clears his throat. “Anyway, when my aunt and uncle found out, they knew they had to get Aaron away from there. So, they found a way to contact me and I came to get them. Afterward, I worked with Aaron, trying to help him get back on his feet. He had this . . . not quite a list, but other kids that he’d talk about. Kids he thought Todd liked too much. I couldn’t let anyone else go through that.”
“Was I on the list?” I ask.
“Yes.”
The cheese crackers I ate earlier rise like bile in my throat. Even though I knew about Todd’s plans for me, there’s something worse about knowing that others could see it too. That I didn’t only imagine that my parents had turned the other way. That everyone in the LOT had.
“So, you were looking for me.”
“Yes, but Aaron’s descriptions weren’t much to go on. Pretty girl with light-brown hair—that applied to more than one of you.”
It was true that there was a bland sameness to many of us, especially those of us who were related. By the end, more than half of us were tied by blood in some way or another. Aaron was different, though. He looked like the movie-star version of Liam, and those good looks were part of the reason we hated him.
“How come Aaron has never hung out with the rest of us survivors?”
“He didn’t make it.”
My own selfishness sickens me. How did I not know this? How could I never have asked before? I turn back to the open window. If I breathe deeply enough and concentrate on a single point, I may not puke.
“I’m sorry, Liam. And I feel like a complete shit for never asking you about it until now.”
“It’s okay.”
“No, it’s not.”
I reach out and place my hand over his on the gearshift. I squeeze it hard, then release.
“He couldn’t take it out here in the real world, but you did. Cov, Miller, and Daisy did. The others.”
“You saved a lot of us.”
“Not enough.”
That’s how I feel also, but I don’t blame Liam for that. I search for the words to comfort him, to change the mood back to what it was a couple of hours ago when we first left the confines of New York and all there was in front of us was possibilities. But before I can put the words together, my phone buzzes.
I take it out of my bag. Jessie’s written me back on Facebook. I open the message.
I heard you were asking about me. What’s this about?
My fingers tingle in excitement as I tap out a reply. Did you get my DM? Can I come see you?
I got it. What for?
I want to talk about what happened to me. Did it happen to you too?
There’s a pause. She’s writing something, then stops. Writing again.
It won’t do any good.
Can we discuss it in person and then we’ll see?
Another long pause.
Fine.
I smile as I close my phone. “We have contact.”
Chapter 8
The Third Jessica
“Contact?” Liam asks as he pushes his aviators onto his head, his eyes squinting against the sun.
“With Jessica Three. She’s agreed to meet me.”
“Jessica Three?”
“You know, the one in Wilmington who we’re driving to see? I find it’s easier to refer to us like that.”
“I thought you said her name was Jessie.”
“Yeah, so?”
“I would’ve thought that you, of all people, wouldn’t be so cavalier with people’s names.”
“A name is a name is a name.”
Another Toddism has Liam shaking his head. “Okay, I deserved that. But that’s your one free pass for the day.”
“We’ll see.”
The last time I was in Wilmington, it was a run-down town with a Santa’s Workshop near Whiteface Mountain. My parents took me there once before Todd moved the kids up the hill. It still fits that description. Many of the houses are falling apart, with rusted-out trucks littering the lawn, and the motel we pass where Liam mentions that he’s reserved a room has definitely seen better days. But there’s a fancy chocolate shop now, and cute decorated roadside stands where you can buy firewood. When we turn down the dirt road Jessie lives on, I catch a glimpse of several large houses with high peaked roofs and walls of windows facing the ski hill.
We pass a short woman with brown hair tucked into a baseball cap who’s running on the road. Liam slows down to give her a wide berth. A minute later, we arrive at our destination.
Jessie’s house is surprisingly large and imposing, a timber-frame with gray cladding and the requisite tall windows facing the hill. There’s a perennial garden in the front yard full of daffodils and tulips that dance in the pleasant breeze. The lawn is freshly cut, and the box hedge along one side of the house is neatly manicured. Despite this, the house has a deserted air, even though there’s a car, a dark-blue hybrid, in the driveway.
We get out of the car. Crickets grind in the air, and somewhere in the thick wood behind the house, a woodpecker taps at a tree.
I ring the front doorbell, but no one answers. There’s no shifting presence inside. Even though Jessie is expecting us, I didn’t give her a precise ETA.
“We should’ve called ahead,” Liam says.
“Ha, ha. I did, dummy.” I wave my phone at him.
“Maybe she changed her mind.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“Looking for me?” a woman’s voice says behind us. It’s the jogger we passed a few moments ago.
I feel that prick of excitement again. “Jessie?”
“Jessica?”
“Yes.”
“And this is?”
“Oh, Liam. He’s with me.”
She looks at him nervously.
“Don’t worry,” I say. “He’s harmless.”
“What do you want?”
“I’d like to know what happened to you.”
Jessie approaches us cautiously, her eyes shifting from me to Liam and back again. There’s a sheen of sweat on her forehead. “Why should I trust you?”
“She took your money, didn’t she?” I say. “Jessica Williams?”
Jessie closes her eyes for a moment, perhaps wishing us away.
“Yes,” she says finally, then opens her eyes. “You’d better come in.”
Inside, Jessie offers us water and asks for ten minutes to clean herself up. She takes eight and returns in a loose pair of boyfriend jeans and a screen-printed T-shirt with the New York skyline on it. Her hair is scraped back, revealing a high forehead and watery blue eyes. Like me, she’s not wearing any makeup. About five feet tall in her bare feet, she looks to be about my age, which, of course, she is.
She pours herself a glass of water from the tap and sits down across from us, tucking her legs under herself in a lotus-like position. She holds her glass of water as if she might lose her grip on it.
“How did you find me?”
I decide to leave Liam and his background favors out of it. “I put up this post on Facebook, and two of your friends tagged you in it. When I reached out to them after you didn’t answer my message, they told me where you lived.”
“Friends! Sure.”
We wait for her to say more. It’
s a technique Liam taught me years ago—wait for someone to fill the silence when you want to get information out of them. Sometimes the questions in their minds are larger than the ones you might ask.
“It was Leanne, wasn’t it? That’s who you talked to?”
“That’s right.”
She makes a small noise of disgust. “The town gossip.”
“All small towns have them.”
“Yeah, that’s true. But she . . . likes to stir up trouble.”
“Oh?”
She looks out the window. Some of the trees have grown up and obscured the view of the hill. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but . . . a couple of years back, when I moved here, she had me over to some Welcome Neighbor thing. I guess it’s a big deal when a new person moves to Wilmington. Anyway, most of the town turned up, but it wasn’t welcoming at all. It was like . . . You know those super friendly people who are kind of rotten underneath?”
“Sure,” I say. “I’ve met people like that.”
More techniques from Liam. Agree with whatever someone says when you’re interrogating them because it creates intimacy.
“They’re horrible,” I add. “Leanne was like that?”
“Yeah. She didn’t want to get to know me, not me me—none of them did. They wanted to know about me, to inspect me. And when I didn’t want to share, well, she turned kind of nasty.”
“What’d she do?” Liam asks in a gentle tone.
“This rumor started . . . God, it sounds so weird to even say it out loud, but it was this stupid thing about how I was a witch, or a Wiccan, running some secret coven up here. I found out about it at the library where I work. The kids would whisper when they saw me, and some of the younger ones even started crying during this reading exercise.” She shrugs. “I was reading Dr. Seuss.”
“You don’t look like a witch,” I say, smiling, trying to defuse the tension. She looks more like a bird. Thin, small, and jittery, as if she might take flight at any moment.
“Why do you think she did it?” Liam asks. He’s leaning forward, reducing the space between them. Another way to create intimacy.
“Who knows. To run me out of town, I guess, once she knew I wasn’t going to fund the new covered bridge over the river.”
“I feel like I’m missing a few pieces,” Liam says.
She blinks slowly. “Because I wouldn’t use the money to do it . . .”
“The money?”
“That I won. In the lottery.” She looks back and forth between our puzzled faces. “She didn’t tell you?”
I answer her, feigning ignorance. “She just said that you lived here and were a bit . . . private.”
“Oh. I assumed she’d told you the whole story. Her side of it, anyway.”
She looks into her water glass, clearly regretting her confidences. She puts it down.
“No, she didn’t say anything,” I say. “But don’t worry. You can trust us.”
“That’s what she said.”
She looks up. Her eyes are brimming with tears.
Liam leaves the couch and sits on the coffee table in front of her. He reaches out and takes her hands in his. She startles but doesn’t pull back.
“Are you talking about Jessica?” he asks.
“Yes.”
“I call her Jessica Two,” I say, feeling a stab of jealousy.
She breaks Liam’s gaze to look at me. “Which would make me?”
“Jessica Three. Sorry, I know it’s probably annoying.”
She nods almost imperceptibly.
“Will you tell us how it happened?” Liam asks, bringing her focus back to him.
“Okay.”
Jessie tells us her story with Liam’s gentle prompting.
She was born in rural Illinois, but she was working as a teacher in a suburb outside Chicago when she won a million dollars in the state lottery. It was the one silly thing she did every week, she said, playing the lottery.
“It’s hopeful,” Liam says. “That’s why people play.”
“Is it?”
“It’s about fantasy. Dreaming. What could be if only money wasn’t a factor.”
“Yes, I suppose that’s right. Anyway, then I won.”
“That’s amazing,” I say.
“It wasn’t like I won the Powerball or anything, and with the taxes . . . But it meant that if I was careful, I could leave teaching, which I hated, and take a bit of time to figure out what I wanted to do next. I started looking for a place to buy up here because I’d visited the area once as a child, and it’s so close to the mountains. I always wanted to live in the mountains.”
“It’s beautiful,” I say, though I hate the Adirondacks.
“Yeah. And I got this house for almost nothing.”
“This house?” I say, looking around. The beam work alone must’ve cost a small fortune.
She follows my eyes around the room. The number 2008 is carved into a large beam above the exit to the patio, the year it was built, presumably. “I got it in a divorce. They had to get rid of it quickly. I was in the right place at the right time with a cash offer.”
“So, you moved here?”
“Yes, two years ago.”
“What happened then?” Liam asks.
“Besides being labeled a witch?”
Liam smiles and nods. She has trouble taking her eyes off him. I know what that feels like. “Besides that.”
“There was some press when I won. Local teacher wins the lottery, that sort of stuff. Then the letters started.”
“Letters?” I ask.
“Begging letters. All lottery winners get them, I’ve heard. Can you please donate to this charity? I’m down on my luck. I’m your long-lost cousin. That sort of thing. Mostly, I ignored them.”
“I’d do the same.”
“I did make a contribution to the American Cancer Society.”
I nod. “They do good work.”
She looks away. “Then, after I moved here, I got a different kind of letter. It was from this . . . I guess you’d call it a support group?”
“For lottery winners?”
“Yeah. I know it sounds sort of hokey, but I was feeling pretty isolated.”
“What did the letter say?”
“It was an invitation to a conference in Denver. I’d never been there.”
“Was there a conference?” Liam asks.
“No, it was all a lie. I only found that out after.”
Jessie’s flexing her fingers back and forth, as if she has arthritis. Her nails are short and chipped.
“What happened, Jessie?”
“I had a connecting flight in Minneapolis. While I was waiting, someone called for Jessica Williams to come to the service desk. When I went up there, she was there.”
“Jessica Two?” I say.
“Yeah.”
“What did she look like?” Liam asks.
“I mostly remember her red hair.”
“Anything else? Height, weight?”
“She was taller than me. Wearing a fancy black business suit and these super high heels.”
“Confident? Pretty?”
“Yeah.”
“And she made the coincidence seem cool, right?” I say. “Like you were part of some club?”
“That’s exactly what she did.”
“How long did you talk to her for?”
“She offered to buy me a drink because ‘How often do two Jessica Williamses meet?’”
“Too often,” I say.
“Seems like.”
“So, you went.”
“I don’t usually drink, but I did that day.”
The woodpecker knocks loudly against a tree. Jessie turns to look out the window to the deck, maybe seeking him out.
“Was she drinking scotch?” I ask.
“What? Oh yes. She was.”
“And you?”
She turns back to me. “She ordered me something called a French seventy-five. Because I had to try it, apparentl
y.”
My brain tosses up the recipe from when I worked as a bartender for a catering company when I was in school. Sparkling wine, gin, lemon syrup. A deceptively strong drink. Especially for someone who isn’t used to drinking. The drinking is part of her MO, clearly, and for good reason. People open up more when they drink and are less likely to remember the fine details.
“Then what?”
“We talked a bit, about this and that. And we played that game, of course. How she got my information.”
“Jessica Williams Twenty Questions?”
She shakes her head. “I can’t believe I fell for that.”
“You weren’t the only one.”
“Then I went to get on my plane, and I only realized once I was on it that I’d left my phone behind.”
“She took it?”
“I think so.”
“How did she unlock it?”
“My password was lazy.”
“Your birthday?”
“Yes.”
“What happened when you got to Denver?” Liam asks.
She lets out a long, slow breath. “There was supposed to be someone to pick me up. Someone from the conference. But there was no one there. I didn’t have my phone, so I couldn’t call anyone. I found one of those airport computers, but then I realized I couldn’t pay for it because my wallet was missing, too, with all my money and ID and bank cards. Eventually, someone was nice enough to pay for me to have a few minutes on the internet, and I looked the conference up and I couldn’t find anything other than the website I’d looked at before. It didn’t exist.”
“She sent you the letter and made a fake website,” I say.
“I think so.”
“How did you get home?” Liam asks.
“I called my old boss from Chicago, and she faxed airport security the information from my personnel file. You can’t imagine how hard it was to get them to believe me when I didn’t have any ID.”
“You couldn’t ask your family for help?” Liam asks.
“My parents are dead, and I don’t have any siblings.”
It’s a terrible story, but believable, given what I know. I try to imagine how I might react in the same situation. Anger, fear, loneliness. Mostly anger, I’m guessing. But I’d also know that Liam would come to my rescue. There’s security in that, which I take for granted.
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