by Matt Witten
As the driver took her suitcase and put it under the bus, Susan thought about what lay ahead. Would she really be able to pull it off? She told Kyra, “I get in to Hodge Hills on Friday morning. That only gives me one and a half days to stop the execution.”
“You’re gonna fucking kick ass,” Kyra said.
Susan bit her lip. “I just hope I can convince Agent Pappas to test the necklace.”
Kyra put a hand on Susan’s arm. As Kyra’s sleeve rode up, Susan noted a big flame tattoo on the girl’s wrist.
“Just tell that dude everything you told me,” Kyra said. “You’re very persuasive.”
Susan looked into Kyra’s eyes. Now that she was saying goodbye to the one person in this whole world—aside from Mike the counterman—who believed her crazy story, she felt tears coming. She would be all alone again.
The driver said, “All aboard,” aiming his words at Susan since she was the only passenger not on the bus yet. She wondered if he recognized her. Probably not.
She looked awkwardly at Kyra, not wanting to say goodbye. “I’ll call you from North Dakota.”
“You fucking better.”
Then Kyra surprised Susan by stepping forward and hugging her.
Susan held her tight. “Your mom’s an idiot,” she said.
Kyra smiled, though her eyes were wet too. “No shit.”
Susan waved goodbye and got on the bus.
CHAPTER THIRTY
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 1, PRESENT DAY
THE BUS HAD about twenty passengers, just like it did two days ago. Susan walked up the aisle and found the same empty seat she’d sat in then.
It was eerie: everything was the same, and yet her whole world had careened upside down.
She waved goodbye to Kyra one last time through the window, watching her disappear as the bus headed down Main Street. Then they passed Tamarack Realty, and she saw the picture of Danny in the front window. She shivered, then reached into her coat’s inside pocket and felt the necklace through the baggie, reassuring herself it was still there.
The bus rumbled back onto I-90 and headed through the bare ancient hills of western New York. She felt carsick. She longed for the certainty she’d had all these years, for the simplicity of her pain. Sure, she had felt guilty about Amy’s death—but she’d never experienced anything like the torrent swirling inside her now.
Did my own husband kill my daughter—and I didn’t know?
She looked out the window at the trees rolling by. Then they drove toward a giant McDonald’s sign. She could practically smell the French fry grease and her stomach got queasy again. An old memory came to her, incredibly vivid:
Sitting in a booth at McDonald’s with Amy, the two of them eating Big Macs. Marveling at how fast her little daughter scarfs her food down.
“Honey, take your time,” Susan says.
Danny walks up with his own Big Mac and smiles down at them.
“She’s just a starving little carnivore,” he says.
Amy asks, “Daddy, what’s a carnivore?”
Danny tousles her hair. “A carnivore is you, you little munchkin.”
Susan smiles. A happy family …
Happy.
Was it all a lie? Their seven years together?
It couldn’t be.
Susan looked out the window, agitated. The McDonald’s sign was out of view now. She wished she had a magazine to read, to take her mind off everything. Every minute felt endless.
After about an hour the bus came down from the rolling hills and entered an industrial wasteland. She thought she wouldn’t be able to fall asleep, but weariness overtook her at last and she managed to sleep straight through the westernmost part of New York and a pie-shaped piece of Pennsylvania. Now they were all the way into northern Ohio.
Good. She was desperate to be in North Dakota already and see Agent Pappas.
They passed a used car graveyard, a tire warehouse, and vast empty parking lots. Then the bus stopped in Cleveland, where she had a two-hour layover. Kyra had given Susan her last six dollars, which brought her to six dollars and ninety cents. That was enough for a cheeseburger with a dollar forty left over.
As she ate the burger—not as good as Molly’s, but not bad—she wondered how in hell she’d make it for three days on a buck forty, and where she’d sleep in Hodge Hills. She really should call Terri and ask for help.
But Terri was just as broke as she was. And more than that … Susan wouldn’t be able to talk to her without explaining what was going on. And then she’d have to listen to Terri tell her how ridiculous she was being.
If she got Agent Pappas on her side, maybe she would feel okay calling Terri then.
To get some exercise and distract herself from worrying about money, Susan walked around the bus station. She had a stroke of luck: there was a People magazine sitting on a chair, and she grabbed it. She’d never even seen a People before except in supermarkets or doctors’ offices.
Her next bus rode deep into the night, through Toledo, past a rural area with endless cornfields, and into Indiana, where they stopped in Clear Lake, Sturgis, Shipshewana, and three other towns she’d never heard of. They arrived in Goshen at eleven thirty at night. The bus lights came on and she watched as the sleeping passengers woke up and rubbed their eyes.
“Goshen, Indiana. Everybody off.”
Susan took her suitcase off the bus and stood there as the other passengers rode away, getting into cabs or cars driven by their loved ones. They all had places to go. She had nowhere.
The coffee shop was closed for the night, but at least the bus station was still open. There were four people inside, two men and two women, each of them looking lonelier than the next.
She found a seat in a corner near an outlet and plugged in the charger for her flip phone. She put the suitcase under her feet so people would be less likely to steal it. Then she put her phone in her lap.
She wondered why Danny hadn’t called her when he realized she’d stolen the necklace. She tried to figure out if there was any way he could hurt her.
Well, he could kill me.
What if he was innocent—what would he do then?
Once again, she reached inside her coat pocket just to feel the shape of the necklace. Then she buttoned up her coat, even though the station was pretty warm, and folded her arms in front of it. If anybody tried to get into her pocket, she’d know.
She forced her eyes shut, leaned her head against the wall, and eventually drifted off into an uneasy sleep. It wasn’t long before Curt Jansen appeared. Some part of her mind was still awake, and she wondered: Should I call him the Monster, or Curt Jansen?
He’s in the courtroom, white knuckles gripping the edge of the defense table, listening as the judge reads aloud from a white sheet of paper: “… On the count of murder in the first degree, we the jury find the defendant …” He pauses. “Guilty.”
Jansen’s whole body goes limp.
In the gallery, with Danny sitting beside her, Susan is so relieved. She looks down at Jansen—
—and suddenly Jansen becomes Danny. The marshals walk up to Danny to put handcuffs on him.
Then, just as suddenly, Danny is back with her in the gallery again, squeezing her hand. She looks over at him. He’s smiling, satisfied.
Susan’s conscious mind broke into her dream. Maybe he’s too satisfied, she thought. He’s glad he got away with it.
The sound of the judge’s voice brought her back inside the dream again. “On the count of aggravated rape of a minor …”
Somebody’s crying in the gallery. She turns her eyes upward. It’s Jansen’s sister, Lisa, wearing another one of her conservative suits.
Susan’s jaw tightens. She won’t allow herself to feel bad for this woman. Damn it, her brother is—
“… guilty,” the judge says.
She stares down at Jansen again, triumphant, willing him to look up at her and meet her eyes. He does, glaring, his face filled with violent rage.
Susan’s conscious mind jumps in again and she thinks, But wouldn’t I be full of rage too, if I was innocent?
She feels a hand on her shoulder.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” a man says.
What?!
“Ma’am?”
She startled awake. A security guard was standing over her, lifting his hand off her shoulder.
“We’re closing up for the night,” he said. “You can’t sleep here. I’m sorry, ma’am.”
She stared at him, disoriented, then looked around and saw everybody else at the bus station had left. Without a word, she gathered her suitcase and phone charger and walked out into the night.
A freezing wind was blowing. She pulled her coat collar up, then opened her suitcase and took out the pink and purple wool sweater she was planning to wear to the execution. It was the same sweater she’d worn to the trial; she’d been saving it, only wearing it on Amy’s birthday, for twenty years. She put that on, then took out a faded blue baseball cap with the letters RJ on it. She couldn’t remember anymore what the letters stood for. She put the cap on and looked for a place to sit or stand that would be partly protected from the wind.
The best place she found was a bench on the far side of the station. She sat down, put her hands in her armpits, and stamped her feet. For hours. She had never been so cold in her life. Her exhausted mind jitterbugged from thought to thought. She wondered what Agent Pappas looked like now, and was he really as kind as she remembered. She wondered if Danny was asleep right now, or was he awake and brooding just like she was. She wondered why she was fated to be in this situation.
Then she shook off that thought. All that mattered was getting to North Dakota and finding out the truth.
Finally, at seven o’clock, the station reopened. She walked inside and got warm at last. But her long night outside had left her desperate for food and caffeine. She got a Hershey bar for ninety-five cents, but she was still ravenous.
She decided to scavenge the coffee shop for food. She felt like a homeless woman, sitting in a corner with her old suitcase and watching people eat, hoping they’d leave behind their home fries when they stood up. But it seemed like everybody else was just as hungry as she was this morning, because they all cleaned their plates—except for one elderly man who didn’t eat half of his scrambled eggs, but brought his plate up to the front counter before she could grab it. In the end, her efforts yielded only one-third of a bread roll and a half-cup of herbal tea. Making matters worse, the liquid soap dispensers in the bathroom were empty so she couldn’t come close to washing up properly.
At eight thirty she was on another bus leaving Goshen behind and riding a county highway through northwestern Indiana. They stopped in Elkhart, Ligonier, Mishawka … She watched a mom, dad, and two rambunctious little kids with plastic wands and swords get off the bus. Was that family as happy as it looked? What would it be like to have a family like that?
Luckily she fell asleep and got a little peace, only waking up when they hit Chicago. She just had fifteen minutes ’til her next bus left, but the coffee shop here was much busier and her scavenging brought in a pretty good haul: a whole hamburger roll with mayonnaise, along with coleslaw.
Then it was on to the next bus, this one smelling of strong bleach. They went through Pingree Grove, Riley, Rockford, every mile bringing her closer to the Hodge Hills Federal Penitentiary in North Dakota, where a man she wasn’t sure anymore if she hated was about to die.
They stopped at a bus station/diner in South Beloit, and she was able to get a day-old doughnut with the last forty-five cents in her purse, along with some more leftover coleslaw. A middle-aged couple saw her collecting the coleslaw and eyed her disapprovingly. Unshowered with stringy hair … What must she look like now?
To say nothing of how she must smell.
Night fell, and she was grateful the bus rode through the night and she wouldn’t have to spend hours stamping her feet outside another bus station. They passed a “WELCOME TO WISCONSIN” sign. It was a state she had never been to, but she imagined cheese, and sure enough they began riding through dairy land. Then came “WELCOME TO MINNESOTA” and she fell asleep again.
Curt Jansen in cuffs, being taken away to prison. Susan hugs Danny. Then Agent Pappas walks up, smiling.
“We got him, Susan,” he says. “We got the Monster.”
She throws her arms around Agent Pappas—
Susan woke up, distressed by the dream, just in time to see a sign: “WELCOME TO NORTH DAKOTA DISCOVER THE SPIRIT!”
Holy crap, we’re almost there! All of a sudden, she had a desperate need to use the bathroom and get rid of some of that coleslaw. She got up and headed down the aisle to the back of the bus.
In the bathroom, she washed her hands and face and did her best to comb the tangles out of her hair. It was a narrow space, but with a lot of maneuvering she was able to take off her coat, sweater, and shirt and wash under her arms.
When she was done, she reached into her coat pocket and took out the baggie with the necklace inside. Yup, still there. The purple dolphin, the pink duck …
The bus pulled into the station in Fargo and everybody got out. Susan would be here for an hour before she finally boarded the last bus on her journey, the one that would take her to Hodge Hills. She got her suitcase and headed into the station. It was cold, so she buttoned up her coat and put her RJ baseball cap back on.
She went straight to the coffee shop. She headed for a corner far away from the counter, so she wouldn’t attract attention from the beefy security guard hanging out there. She didn’t know if her scavenging was illegal, but she didn’t want to find out. If anybody left any promising food on their plate, she’d use her body to block the guard from seeing her take it.
Hey, if she could break into Danny’s house and steal the necklace, she could damn well outfox this guard.
From her recon spot, she saw a teenage girl stand up and abandon almost a full order of leftover home fries in the middle of the room. Susan’s mouth watered just looking at them. She hurried over there with her suitcase.
But then a busboy swooped in and took the plate away.
She was crestfallen.
She felt a little nutty focusing so much on food when her whole world had just been ripped apart. But hell, it beat thinking about other stuff. Maybe all the stress was making her extra hungry. She searched the room for targets and lasered in on a table where somebody had left two whole pieces of toast, along with jelly. That’ll work. She headed toward there. But just as she picked up the slightly burned toast, she heard a woman say, “Excuse me.”
Susan jumped, startled, her face instantly reddening at having been caught in the act. She thought some waitress would ask her to leave, maybe call the guard over.
But when she turned and looked, it was another customer speaking to her, a woman in her fifties with curly gray hair and a wide face. There was a grilled cheese sandwich in front of her.
“Would you like half my sandwich?” the woman asked.
Susan stuttered, “That’s okay, I—”
“Please, I ordered too much, I can’t eat it all.”
The woman had big warm eyes, and the sandwich did look good, oozing yellow cheese out the sides. She took half the sandwich off her plate and held it out to Susan.
“Thanks,” Susan said, as she stepped forward and took it.
“Would you like some water?” the woman asked, moving her glass toward Susan. “I’m just drinking coffee.”
“Thanks,” Susan said again. “I’m not usually like this. Somebody stole all my money a couple days ago.”
“Oh my God, that’s horrible.” The woman gestured toward the seat across from her. “Sit down. Do you know who stole it?”
She sat down, wondering if this woman was lonely like her or just very friendly. “I think somebody at another bus station took it when I fell asleep.”
The woman shook her head, and once again Susan admired her curly gray hair. “There sure are
some terrible people in this world,” the woman said.
Susan was afraid the woman would ask her more questions about herself, and she wasn’t in the mood to share her whole frantic confusion about who had killed her daughter. All she really wanted to do was eat this delectable-looking half-sandwich. So she steered the conversation away from herself.
“So where are you heading?” she asked, as she lifted the half-sandwich to her mouth.
“Hodge Hills,” the woman said.
With the food still in midair, Susan stopped and stared at the woman, at her open, attractive face and curly gray hair.
Oh my God.
The courtroom, twenty years ago. An attractive woman in her thirties, with curly black hair, sitting in the gallery. Moaning with pain when the judge says, “Guilty.”
Curt Jansen’s younger sister, Lisa.
And now here she was: the same woman, twenty years older.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 3, PRESENT DAY
SUSAN WAS SO stunned she could barely hear the words coming out of Lisa’s mouth. But then her mind cleared up enough that she could make out Lisa saying, “I flew in to Fargo, but after that it’s either rent a car or take a bus, and this is cheaper.”
Susan realized her mouth was wide open and made an effort to close it.
“What about you?” Lisa asked. “Where are you going?”
Susan wanted to lie, but she’d be taking the same bus with this woman. “I’m going to Hodge Hills too.”
Lisa raised her eyebrows and smiled. “Really. What for?”
Susan put her hand to her baseball cap and pulled it down a little lower to hide her face. She wore glasses now, her face was heavier, and she wasn’t dying her hair blonde anymore; but still, she was terrified that at any moment Lisa would recognize her. What would Susan say? “I’m thinking maybe you were right all along and your brother’s been wrongly imprisoned for twenty years. But I’m not really sure.”