You Can't Catch Me

by Catherine McKenzie

  “No. Kiki never told me.”

  “I wondered. Anyway, once I learned all of that, I decided to go to Kiki’s college in Ohio.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because I wanted to know what had really happened to her.”

  “And you didn’t trust me to tell you.”

  “Frankly? No. That’s how I found out about her suicide. There was an article in the school newspaper about her.” He reaches into his pocket. “I also found this.”

  He hands it to me. It’s a newspaper clipping. I unfold it. It’s a picture of Kiki and her roommate from college. They’ve got their arms around one another and are laughing into the camera. They’re wearing Hawaiian leis for some luau party. Did she tell me about that? I can’t remember. My eyes trail away from a happy-looking Kiki to her roommate, Jessie. Only she went by the name Karen then.

  “That’s her, isn’t it?” Covington says. “Jessica Two? I recognized her from the wanted poster I found online.”

  They’d used a picture of Jessie from the school where she worked. She didn’t look that different at thirty from how she had looked at twenty-four.

  “It’s her.” My hands flutter at my sides. I’m not mad, or scared. Not yet, anyway. “Why are you here, Covington? To tell me all of this?”

  “No.” He pulls out his phone. “I read this online this morning.”

  I take it from him. It’s a wire story that hadn’t made it into the Jackson Hole News & Guide yet. A badly decomposed body was found in Jackson Lake. Female. Late twenties to early thirties. They haven’t been able to identify it, but they think it might be associated with a woman who’s wanted by the authorities for theft and identity fraud who was last seen in Jackson.

  Jessie.

  “Is this her too?” Covington asks.

  “How am I supposed to know?”

  “Come on, Jess.”

  I stare at him.

  “Look, I don’t know all the details,” Covington says, “but I think I’ve figured out enough. And I’m not saying I blame you, okay? I might’ve done the same in your place.”

  “Why are you here, then?”

  “I came to warn you. Liam’s been asking questions too. About Kiki. Once this gets out . . . He’s not stupid, Jess.”

  “I know.”

  He puts his hands on his knees. “That’s what I came here to say.”

  “So what now?”

  He stands. “I’m going to go.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that.”

  He moves toward the door. I stand to follow him. I feel detached from my body, strangely disconnected.

  “You okay for money?” Covington asks with his hand on the knob.

  “Yeah.”

  “Good. Just . . . don’t leave without telling him goodbye, okay?”

  “Who, Liam?”

  “He wouldn’t take that well.”

  “He’ll be all right.”

  Covington shakes his head. “He’s in love with you.”

  “He’s never told me that. Not really.” Only that one text last summer. Same, he’d written. Same.

  “Would’ve thought it was obvious. Anyway, tell him something, okay? Something he can live with.”

  He opens the door, stops, then leaves without saying anything more.

  I sink back into the couch, and the world tilts away from me.

  So close, I think. I came so close to getting away with it.

  Ohio, May 5, 2016

  Dear Jess,

  By the time you get this, I won’t be here anymore. That sounds more dramatic than I wanted, but I’m not quite sure how to do this. The actual part, I’ve figured out. I’ve been seeing a doctor and she’s given me pills, only I haven’t been taking them. I’ve saved them and saved them, and I’ll take them all at once. Then, hopefully, I’ll fall asleep.

  They’ll find me in the room I shared with her. I don’t know what made her do it. I would’ve given her the money if she’d asked. I never cared about it, anyway—that’s why I told her about it in the first place. About Todd, all of it. This isn’t because she took the money. I loved her, you see? I thought she felt the same. I trusted her. I shared myself with her. She was the first person in my life that I chose. That felt different and so much less complicated than what we’d been through. I thought it was real, but it wasn’t. She betrayed me, and it’s that I can’t live with. Another person I love letting me down like that.

  And oh, now I’m letting you down. I let people down, I do. Ask your mother. She’ll explain. I can’t write down why. I’ve locked it away so deep I can’t let it out. But go see her after you get this. Ask her and she’ll tell you, and then, maybe, you’ll understand.

  I love you so much, Jess. I know you think you failed me, but you didn’t.

  And now I’ll be free from all of it for real this time.

  Forgive me.

  Love, Kiki

  June 10, 2021

  Dear Liam,

  Have I told you enough, my love, for you to understand?

  I started writing this as a way to pass the time, and to process what happened. I’ve had so much time to fill this last year while I watched us disintegrate and I waited to be discovered. Only, if I’m being honest, I didn’t think I would be. I truly thought I’d get away with it. All the planning would pay off. So, I was also writing this as, maybe, my true comeback piece. A book. A novel. Who knows? I’d change enough details, if need be. Some chapters I’d take out entirely and replace with the stories I’ve told you.

  But things are not working out like I planned, and I don’t want to leave you with questions, so . . . Here’s what I did. The unvarnished truth.

  That piece I wrote about the Land of Todd, the one that started my career—I wrote that about Kiki. Maybe you’ve worked that out now that you know about her. I didn’t ask her permission, and she wasn’t happy about it. It was a shitty thing to do, but I knew she’d forgive me, and I knew it would help me make my mark, so I did it anyway. That should have been a clue to myself. A warning that I wasn’t as far away from Todd as I thought.

  If I heard it, I ignored it.

  Jessie was Kiki’s roommate at the school she went to in Ohio. Her name was Karen Rivers then, a name I’d find out later was fake. I don’t know what she did before she became Karen. If she’d done anything truly bad already. Perhaps she was escaping a terrible childhood, trying to start over. It’s possible those stories she told me about foster care were true. Or maybe her life was idyllic and she was born that way. Nature versus nurture. What would I have been if Todd had never gotten ahold of me? So many questions.

  It doesn’t matter why, though; it only matters what.

  The consequences. The ripple effects.

  Bad luck for Kiki to end up roommates with her. Worse luck still when Kiki told her about the money from the settlement. Jessie befriended her, seduced her, gained her trust, and took all Kiki’s money. And then she disappeared.

  Kiki was devastated. Not about the money, she wrote me, but about the betrayal of her trust. I get that, but I’ve never understood why she felt like killing herself was the only option. Why she couldn’t reach out to me for help. That’s probably my fault. If I’d done the right thing from the beginning and gotten her proper help, she would’ve made a different choice.

  You can drive yourself crazy with what-ifs, I’ve learned.

  I don’t know what Jessie thought would happen. I presume she didn’t know Kiki would take it badly and that her betrayal would be one straw too many for Kiki to bear.

  Didn’t know or didn’t care. Another thing that’s impossible to know and doesn’t matter in the end.

  But I do know that she had no idea Kiki would send me a letter before she did it, telling me what had happened, why she was ending her life. Because of who. Which meant I knew something Jessie didn’t. I knew about her. That she was responsible for Kiki’s suicide.

  I told the police what she’d done; that’s how I found o
ut about her fake identity. But she was missing. Living under some other name, maybe in another state. They said it wasn’t going to be easy to find her.

  I thought I could do better. I started off trying to track her down. I used the skills you taught me, and the revelation I had one night, something I’d overlooked. Kiki’s driver’s license was missing. When I collected her things from her dorm, it wasn’t there. I couldn’t find her Social Security card, either, or the birth certificate I’d helped her get. I was sure Karen was using it, because who would look for a dead girl?

  Turned out I was right. Karen was living as Jessica Williams outside Chicago. I held on to that information for a while, watching her from afar. I’m not sure why I didn’t turn her in immediately. Maybe I was thinking of revenge, even then. And then she moved to Wilmington and floated that story about winning the lottery, and I couldn’t help but wonder. Why would she draw attention to herself like that?

  I looked into it and found the police report that she’d filed after “Jessica” stole her money. And there it was—her whole new scam laid out. She’d realized how much easier it was to take someone’s money when you had their ID. There’s no photograph on a birth certificate or a Social Security card. If you find someone with the same name, you’re all set. But she had to be careful. If she was going to use Kiki’s identity, she had to have an alibi. Be hiding in plain sight. If she played the victim card, she might escape detection if anyone ever went looking.

  I’m not sure what tipped her off that there were other Jessica Williamses. Maybe it was something as simple as a Google Alert. I get a dozen hits a week for someone with my name. I just prayed that Kiki hadn’t told her about me. How our parents had given us the same name when we’d been born on the same day.

  I used a guy I’d met researching a piece to help me track down the other Jessicas. There are eight of us in North America. I watched all of them as closely as I could. I was worried about JJ when I saw her get famous, and sure enough, once that piece was written about her, Jessie struck. It was like watching a car wreck in slow motion. The piece. JJ tweeting that she was going to that cooking exhibition. Her going silent. Then those terrible tweets from her account. I saw it all and it felt like there was nothing I could do to stop it. But it solidified what I wanted to do. If I could get someone to help me.

  I struggled with that for a while until it struck me.

  Who better to ask than JJ?

  It took a while to gain JJ’s trust, but I’d learned a thing or two living in the Land of Todd. I worked on her slowly, and in the end I’m not sure she’d even say that what we did was my idea. It was something we agreed on together.

  This was the plan. In the end, it was simple. Step 1: make myself a perfect target and get Jessica to take my money. Step 2: act like I had “tracked” down another victim, i.e., Jessie. Step 3: meet Jessie and get her to believe my story and agree to help me. Step 4: have JJ “appear” on Facebook from the same online trap I laid for Jessie. Step 5: get us all together. Step 6: use one of the other Jessicas as bait to get Jessie somewhere we could expose her and finish her.

  That last part JJ and I left unspoken. But we both understood.

  What else? I was the one who made sure my plagiarism was uncovered. I was the leaker. I knew it would cause a fuss, and I was delighted when it worked.

  JJ and I were careful. We communicated through a secure messaging app and wiped our messages constantly. If anyone went looking, the only thing they’d find were the Facebook messages from last summer, when she reached out to me when I was with Jessie.

  And I used you, my love, to redo all the things I’d done in the first place. Find Jessie. Find the other Jessicas.

  Jessie went along with all of it, even though I realize now because of what she said on Jackson Lake about researching all of us that she must’ve known who I was from the beginning. How she must’ve been laughing inside, thinking she was taking me too. She really couldn’t help herself, which is what I had been counting on.

  Not everything went according to plan, but we were nimble. We adjusted. We shuffled the cards enough times to keep her following the wrong one.

  We won. We took her money, and also her life.

  Like she’d taken Kiki’s. Like she’d taken JJ’s. Like she thought she was taking mine.

  I should’ve left you out of it, but I needed an alibi too. To leave a trail that would look like someone trying to put together a puzzle rather than carry out a plan.

  The one thing I didn’t plan was that night at your apartment, or the days that followed.

  I almost gave it up then. I almost called it off.

  But what if I could have it all? You and revenge. You and justice for Kiki.

  Too tempting.

  I’m sorry. I did a bad thing, but there’s a certain justice to it, isn’t there? And we’re going to have to pay. Despite all our plans, JJ and I will both have to disappear.

  Please, don’t try to find me.

  Please, let me go.

  There are others who need you, and I’ve been too much trouble from the get-go.

  Love, Jess

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This is my tenth published novel. Such a crazy sentence to write. When I sat down all those years ago (fourteen by the time you read this) to write I did not know what, I never could have imagined that I’d be here. Ten books. More than a million copies sold worldwide. Bestsellers in several countries. They tell you to dream big, but I never would’ve gotten this right.

  I’ve gotten a lot of help along the way. My agent, Abigail Koons, and the team at Park & Fine. My editors, Jodi Warshaw at Lake Union and Laurie Grassi at Simon & Schuster Canada. The editors who acquired me in the first place in Canada, in the US, and in many countries around the world. The publishing and marketing teams at Lake Union and Simon & Schuster Canada. My sister, Cam, for reading as I write and fixing my mistakes. My mom for being the eagle-eye finder of typos on the final-pass pages. My writer peeps: Randy Susan Meyers and Matt Norman for reading an early draft of this and helping me craft it; Shawn Klomparens; my writing partners and daily partners in crime, Elyssa Friedland and Kim Roosevelt, whose new (but forever) friendships have enriched my life; Therese Walsh for being a sounding board.

  I also couldn’t do this without my friends and family, and especially Tasha, Sara, Candice, my husband, David, and the reason this book exists in the first place: Christie Brown. Thank you for having such a common name that we got pulled over at every border crossing for two years! Because of you, this book exists.

  Finally, thank you, dear reader, and especially if you’ve followed me from Spin to now. I write for you.

  BOOK-CLUB QUESTIONS

  When the novel opens, we learn that Jessica Williams has recently been fired for plagiarism but managed to finagle a good settlement on her way out the door by essentially blackmailing her employer. What were your initial thoughts about her character? Did you feel bad when she returned from Mexico and found out that all her settlement money was gone, or did you think that she somehow deserved it?

  As we get to know Jessica, we realize certain things—for instance, how she was raised in a cult without a typical family structure. Did this make you change your perception of her character? Does it excuse some of the things she did later on?

  Jessica has tried to move on from her upbringing and lead a “normal” life, but it seems as though her only real friendships are with The Twists, people who have also experienced a similar upbringing. She often repeats the “Toddisms” that were hammered into her as a child. How difficult do you think it would be for someone to be “deprogrammed” after a childhood like that? What would be their challenges integrating into society afterward?

  Jessica is determined to find the person who scammed her and get her money back. Do you think that determination and resilience is somehow a product of growing up in the LOT? Do you see any similarities between her and Todd?

  Liam seems wary of Jessica’s plans but is nonethe
less keen to go along with her, and he acts like a pseudo father figure to her. Do you think he has been harboring feelings for her for some time, or is he merely taking advantage of a new opportunity? Did you believe Jessie when she said that he was with other women he’s helped out? Jessica seems jealous whenever Liam interacts with another woman—do you think that’s why she didn’t introduce him to Kiki?

  When looking for Jessica Two’s other victims, Jessica finds “Jessie” (who we later learn is the scammer). Jessie is effectively “hiding in plain sight” and succeeding in her criminal activities. Why do you think she agrees to go along with Jessica and put that all at risk?

  When Jessica and Jessie are in Philadelphia looking for JJ, they participate in a few scams themselves, beating the three-card monte man at his own game and running a Bar Bill con on an easy mark. Did this raise any red flags for you or make you suspect that there was more to know about Jessie and/or Jessica?

  What are your thoughts on Jessica and Kiki’s relationship? When Jessica left the LOT, she tried to get Kiki to go with her, but did she try hard enough? When Kiki does finally leave five years later, she’s far more vulnerable than Jessica was. Is Jessica at fault for not getting “real” help for Kiki and for her suicide? Can you understand Jessica’s desire for revenge?

  Jessica’s mother, Therese/Charlotte, was complacent during the hardships Jessica endured growing up, but reveals that she was instrumental in Jessica’s escape from the LOT when she realized what Todd’s intentions were. Do you believe her? Do you think she’s fit to raise Kiki’s daughter, Serene? Many of the former cult members are still living together—do you think they’re carrying on Todd’s vision or they simply don’t know what to do with themselves?

  It took Jessica many years of planning to find Jessica Two and enact her grand plan. Do you think there is something pathological in that? Even with all that planning, things still didn’t work out perfectly. Do you think Jessica intended to kill Jessica Two from the start?