Jesse shrugged. “I’m just telling you what the police said. They also said they’ve got fingerprints, fibers, the whole nine yards. And it all points to you.”
“Yeah well, whatever. They can have whatever they want. It still wasn’t me.”
“And what’s this about this kid? I don’t know why you want to get mixed up in Matt’s shit for. Why don’t you just walk away? Give yourself up while you’ve got the chance.”
“Why doesn’t anyone get it?” She snatched the keys from his hand, shook one out, tried to insert it, before giving up in frustration and shoving them back at him. “Nobody else gets it.” When he just looked at her, she said, “I gotta get her home. She’s just a little kid. She’s lost and she needs her mom.”
Jesse shuffled through the keys, trying to identify where he’d left off and adjusting his glasses like they were the problem. In the end he simply selected one from the middle and tried it. “Well, the way I hear it, her mom’s a drunk.”
“So? Maybe she doesn’t care. Maybe she loves her mom anyway. Maybe she’s all she’s got.” Just then, the key turned with a satisfying click and the cuff sprang apart. “Man, I gotta get me a set of those,” she said, watching as he inserted the tiny key into the second bracelet with the same effect as the cuff fell away. She massaged her wrists.
“I’m kind of hoping you won’t need them again.” Jesse returned the keys to the drawer, then turned to her, arms folded as he perched on the corner of the bench. “Jesus H., I worry about you, Kelse.”
She gave him a half-grin. “You don’t have to. I’m okay. You mind if I change?”
“That was the idea of the coveralls.”
She ducked into the office and closed the door. In here the desk was littered with invoices and pens and assorted office equipment. A mug captioned “Kiss the boss” anchored down a bunch of grease-covered Post-it notes and hand-scrawled messages alongside a G-clamp that was holding a stack of invoices from cascading onto the floor.
Hanging on the wall above all this was a dirty square of mirror with a crack across the corner. She moved across to it, angling her head to look over the damage to her face. The bridge of her nose was swollen and spread wide, and her eye was puffed up from the brow right down to her cheek. She touched her fingers to it and winced. Already the area was turning black.
She peeled off her jeans and tee-shirt, then pulled on the blue coveralls, noting a smear of grease just above the knee and a greasy strip of rag in the pocket that made her wonder whose they were. When she pulled the narrow straps up over the shoulders and found it a little too revealing, she slipped them down to the waist and pulled her tee-shirt on again. With the bib front pulled up, the blood stain was hidden, so she figured it was the best of both worlds. Just as she picked up her jeans to retrieve her phone and her four dollars change from the night before, she felt something in the pocket. It was the button eye from Holly’s Lilly Lion. She turned it in her fingers for a moment, then tucked it into the pocket of the coverall along with the phone, the Roadster key and the coins. After taking a minute to brush herself down and check her face again, she noticed a cap on the desk with “Jesse’s Autoshop” embroidered along the peak. She tried it on.
“You okay in there?” Jesse called from the other side of the door.
“Yeah.” She opened the door and stepped out, still shrugging into the coveralls while she adjusted the cap.
“They fit okay?” he said.
“A little roomy, but that’s fine. Thanks.”
She went to take the cap off, but he said, “Keep it. It’s good advertising.” And grinned, probably seeing the irony of having a person on the run promoting his auto shop. “So where to now?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said and looked him right in the eye. “I gotta find her, Jess. I don’t even know why. Something inside me just …” She took off the cap and ran a hand through her hair. He waited, head cocked while she shook her head at the stupidity of the whole situation and turned the cap in her hands. “It’s like, sometimes you gotta do something right. Y’know?”
“And you gotta do a whole lot of wrong to do it?”
“It’s not like that. I just have to find her. Something inside says I have to bring her home.” She looked up at him. “I put her there. I did this. I have to make it right.”
“And if you don’t? If you just walked away? Left it to the police?”
“I can’t do that. If I just walk away, it’s like … I lose a little bit of me, y’know? And I lost enough of that already.”
He nodded once, like he understood. She knew he didn’t. She was just opening her mouth to try and explain—to try and reason it through so he’d understand, even though she didn’t really understand it herself—when her phone rang and broke the moment. She dredged it out of her back pocket to find Matt’s name flashing on the screen. Standing there, staring at the phone, she froze. From the look on Jesse’s face, he had guessed who was calling.
“Don’t answer,” he said.
She wasn’t going to. She stood glaring at it, but out of nowhere a stab of panic hit her. Something could be wrong. He could be hurt or he could need her or any goddamned thing. Before she knew it, she’d hit the answer key and now she was standing there with the line open and her mind scrambling for words.
Jesse simply shook his head and went back to his bench while she turned her back to him, stuck the cap in her back pocket and lifted the phone to her ear. “Hey.”
“Hey,” Matt said.
Silence stretched out for almost ten seconds. It felt more like a day and a half. Finally, his voice came through in a whisper, and he said, “I’m sorry, Kelse. I am so sorry.” When she said nothing, he went on, “I don’t know what got into me. I’m just plain no good. I’m just bad, that’s all.” And she wanted to tell him too damn right he was no good. He was bad right down to the soles of his shoes. But all at once he pulled in a ragged breath and something in her chest tightened as he sobbed into the phone.
Now she didn’t know what to do. She bit her lip because she wanted to yell at him, to tell him he’d hurt her so bad, and then hang up. But it was breaking her heart to hear him. Matt—her big, strong, handsome, so-fucking-cocksure-of-himself Matt. Now here he was on the other end of the line, breaking his heart and crying like a little kid. And all because of her.
“That’s not true,” she said without emotion, because she didn’t know what the hell else to say. She didn’t want to listen to this.
She was about to hang up, when he said, “Kelse? Are you there?” Vulnerability and pain seeped through in his voice.
Beyond all reason, she wanted to reach out and touch him. She wanted to help him but at the same time she wanted to end the call. As much as she wanted to hang up and turn her back on him, she couldn’t while he was falling apart like this. Cutting him down like that would hurt him even more than he was already hurting, and she couldn’t do that. Not after all they’d been through together.
“You hit me,” she said at last. “You fucking hit me, Matt. It really hurt.” And she touched her fingers to her swollen face as if he could see it and understand that her pain wasn’t just physical.
“I know, I know. Jesus, I’m so sorry.” His voice was so strained he could barely hear him. He pulled in another ragged breath. “It’s all that shit, y’know? That’s when it started …”
“Yeah,” she said a little impatiently because she knew what was coming and the sorrow inside her subsided.
“It was when I saw my mother die,” he told her. “Overdosed, just like that, right in front of us. Me and Li, just standing there while she died. That does something to a kid …”
“Yeah. Yeah, I know.” Like she wouldn’t know, for chrissakes. He always did this: rolled out the same old story when he knew how her own mother had died and how it had shadowed her ever after.
“Eight years old …” he whimpered.
“I thought you were six …” she said, a little abruptly because the ag
es kept changing and just lately, she’d begun to wonder whether the story was really true, or maybe something he made up to manipulate her with.
“Yeah, well I was six, but Li was eight. And you know what that does, Kelse. I know you do.”
“Yeah, I do know,” she said quickly. Another silence hung between them. She glanced back at Jesse, who had his back to her while he worked on something, making it obvious he was ignoring her. “Listen, I gotta …”
“Wait!” he said. “I need you.”
It was so unexpected, she felt her breath catch. “No, you don’t.”
“You left me, Kelse. Why did you leave me?” he said, sounding hurt and confused all at once. “You just turned around and walked away. How could you do that? After all we had together. You could’a just stabbed me right in the heart, it wouldn’t have hurt any less.”
“I told you I had to take the kid home.”
“But …” There was a pause, then he said, “But that’s exactly what we were doing. Wasn’t that the plan?”
She hesitated. “Yeah, but …”
“And I told you as soon as we got the money, we were out of there. All of us. You, me and Lionel. It was so damn easy. And everything was going exactly the way I said, wasn’t it? Huh?”
“Yeah, but …”
“And then you just walked away.”
“I know, but …” Now she was confused. Yes, she’d left them to take Holly home, but he was right—if they’d waited for the money, they could have taken her straight home. But that raised the other issue …
“You lied to me about when the deadline was.”
“I know,” he said as if he was finally telling her the truth but it was killing him. “I know, Kelse, and I’m sorry. But sometimes when you’re the one in charge, y’know, when you’re the one with everybody else depending on you, you have to make the decisions. You gotta be the one that sets out the rules, right? And sometimes not everybody likes those rules. And you didn’t like ’em, did you? So what was I supposed to do?”
She didn’t know what to say. He was right. He was the one planning everything; the one making the decisions. She was the one turning against them. Now she was in two minds. She felt like she was making an issue out of nothing and she didn’t know what to do.
“Where is she now?”
“She’s fine. And she’ll stay that way till we get her home. But there’s something else …”
“What? What’s happened?” she said.
“Lionel’s gone.”
“What do you mean ‘gone’? Gone where?”
“I don’t know. He just up and left. I’ve decided to … y’know,” he sucked in a breath, blew it out, “… take the kid back home.”
“Are you serious?”
“Of course. I just said it, didn’t I? This whole thing is turning to shit. And Lionel lied to me,” he said.
“Yeah, about the money and that drug deal he’s putting together,” she said.
A clanging silence followed. Then he said, “Yeah. I ah … I didn’t know you knew about that.”
She could hear the sledgehammer shock in his voice. “Yeah,” she said, trying to imagine the scene at the other end of the line. “I heard about it from one of the guys.”
“Anyway, the thing is … I need you back.”
She fell silent while a thousand emotions hit her all at once. She wanted to believe him more than anything. She wanted to fall into his arms and hear him say he loved her. She wanted everything to be true. She knew it wasn’t. “Where is she? I want to talk to her.”
“Huh …?”
“I want to talk to her. Put her on.”
“Well …” There was a moment where the line sounded like he’d put his hand over the mouthpiece, oblivious to the fact that she could still hear a whispered debate going on even if she couldn’t hear the actual words. Lionel was probably standing right next to him, the lying shit. “Here,” he said, and the next thing she heard was the adenoidal breathing she knew was Holly, and she found herself smiling.
“Hey, baby. Is that you, Holly?”
For a second there was nothing but the breathing. Then she heard Matt say, “Well, go on, say somethin’.”
And a tiny voice said, “Nangsie Mommy.”
And she said, “Yeah, it’s me, baby. Listen, sweetheart, I’m comin’. Don’t you forget it,” and the breathing ceased and Matt was back.
“See, she’s fine.”
“Who were you talking to?”
“No one. I was talking to her. She keeps asking for you. I need you, Kelse,” he said. “Fuck, she needs you. You’re the only one that can talk to her. I can’t understand a word she says. You know what I’m like. I’m just no good with kids, y’know? And that’s what you’re good at, right?”
“Well, I don’t …”
“You absolutely are. I mean, look how you talk to people. Look how you always talk ’em around. That’s what you’re so great at. That’s why I need you. That’s why I love you so much,” he said softly, and let it hang between them. “Just come back to me, Kelse. And everything will be just the way we always wanted. You’ll see. I’ll take care of us. Just like I always did. It’ll be perfect. Come back and we’ll take the kid home and then we’re gone. We’ll find our own blue sky and crystal clear water …”
She could see it right now. Lazing back in one of those inflatable rings and floating on water you could see forever in. He had been her rock. He had been her everything. Right from when they were kids too stupid to know shit from clay, he had been there for her.
“I miss you,” he whispered. “I need you.”
“Where?”
“So you’ll come?” he asked hopefully.
“Tell me where. I’ll think about it.”
“There’s an empty building over on Collingwood. Used to be an old fertilizer company or some such. Meet us inside.”
“I’ll think about it,” she said again.
“I need you, Kelse. Be there.” And he hung up.
She put the phone back in her pocket and turned to find Jesse still working at whatever and ignoring her. Hearing Matt’s voice had moved her. It brought back memories of all those times he’d said sorry, all the promises that it would never happen again, that he’d change. He once said he would always look after her, and now look. Another of those little stones came loose and tumbled into that echoing canyon inside her. This time, she knew why.
If she was going to save Holly, she had to move fast. She’d meet up with them. But this time she’d be the one with the plan.
“I guess I’ll get out of your hair,” she called to Jesse, who had moved to the far end of the shop. Without even turning around, he reached across and hit the button to the roller door, then went back to whatever he was doing. The garage door rumbled behind her and the harsh rays of daylight flooded in as it went up. “Thanks. Y’know … for everything,” she called, but it was as if she’d never even spoken. So she turned and left.
She had no idea what Matt had in mind. But at least now she knew where to find them. The deadline for the ransom was in three-and-a-half hours, and Collingwood was a half-hour’s drive away. She got back into the car and hit the road.
Holly was still alive. Kelsey had to find her before Matt and Lionel figured out she didn’t have to be.
CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE
DAY TWO: 11:32 AM—ELIZABETH
Elizabeth leaned forward from the rear seat of the taxi and peered through the windshield ahead. All she could see was a UPS van in front. Behind them was a baby blue Chrysler in which a thirty-something guy in a suit was drumming his fingers on the steering wheel and shaking his head in frustration.
“Excuse me,” she said to their driver, “what’s taking so long? Can’t you go another way?” They had been gridlocked in the same spot for the past six minutes, during which she must have checked her watch every twenty seconds and she’d called Richard twice.
The driver was slumped in his seat, one knee up, elbow rested o
n the frame of his open window. He shifted his gaze up to the rearview mirror and said, “What do you want me to do, lady? Drive over the top of the cars in front? Go up on the sidewalk and run people down? Sheesh.”
“I expect you to drive the damned car,” she told him. “Not to plow us into a traffic jam and make us sit here—”
“—Elizabeth,” Diana said, leaning forward and touching her gently on the arm. “The traffic is like this everywhere. There’s a march heading downtown. We’ll get there. We just have to be a little patient.”
Elizabeth sat back again with her mouth set in a thin line and her gaze directed out the window. When she spotted a liquor store, she thought, Maybe if I could just …
“What did the police say?” Diana asked suddenly, breaking the moment.
In total, Elizabeth had made four phone calls to Richard since they had left the school. None of which had got her any of the information she wanted. “Apparently, an anonymous call came in. Someone saying they knew where the woman who took Holly is. They didn’t say anything about Holly. I hope Detective Delaney can tell us more when we get there. God, I hope it’s not a hoax.”
“Prepare yourself for the worst,” said Diana.
Elizabeth coughed out a bitter laugh. “The worst? How could this situation get any worse?”
“While we’re sitting here, why don’t you tell me a little about when Holly was born?” Diana said gently. “What do you first remember?”
Elizabeth’s first instinct was to roll her eyes and say something sarcastic. But the image of that little face leapt into her mind: the sweet, plump little cheeks, the pink fists bunched under her chin, her lip …
For the first time Elizabeth had no idea what to say. The lambasting Belinda had given her still echoed, still ached. It had stolen something away from her.
“I can’t even explain,” she said, suddenly feeling as though the air had been punched out of her. “When I found out I was pregnant, I was so excited. And then …” Her gaze shifted to the window where it locked on something out on the street.
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