Keep Her Safe

by Sophie Hannah

  What’s the right name? You had it a few minutes ago.

  Hayley. That’s it.

  “Not Helen,” I say. “Hayley—that was the name.”

  “Are you sure?” His eyes widen, suddenly full of fear.

  “I think so.”

  Why did I say that? I should have said, Yes, I’m positive, but I don’t trust my memory now, after such a serious slipup. I need buttons, like my hire car. M1, M2—one for Hayley, one for Helen.

  No. None for Helen. There is no Helen.

  What’s wrong with me? Am I going crazy?

  Memory button one. Memory button two.

  I frown as something occurs to me: a strange detail. Does it change anything? I’m not sure, but it strikes me as odd. It’s such a tiny, niggly detail. And yet . . .

  Leon’s put down the iPad. He’s holding me by my arms, shaking me. “Cara, are you sure they said Hayley?”

  “Yes,” I whisper, and then, “Shh.” As if I’m still trying to listen to something outside the trailer.

  He believes me. Releasing my arms, he heads for the trailer door, treading slowly and gently so that no one outside can hear him.

  As if he hasn’t got a prisoner to guard. As if we’re an ordinary married couple and our burglar alarm has gone off in the middle of the night. He’s the brave husband, creeping downstairs to check . . .

  I calculated right. He never saw me talking to Tarin and Zellie at Swallowtail—he and Melody left too soon after I got there. As far as he’s aware, there’s no way I could know about Hayley.

  At the door, he pulls his gun out of his pocket. Armed against the outside world, off in search of the imaginary target I created for him.

  He’s gone. I’m alone. The door’s closed, but he didn’t lock it.

  He didn’t lock the door.

  I hear running footsteps.

  The iPad, unlocked. The door, unlocked. What should I do? I have so little time. Maybe no more than seconds.

  The iPad first. I grab it and start to type a comment beneath Jess’s latest photo: “I’m in trailer don’t know where. 2 hours (guess) from Swallowtail. Tell police: interview Jeff Reville colleague again re M bloody sock in car. Car seat move forward—did Kristie mo”

  I hear footsteps again. Closer. Walking around the trailer, crunching on something.

  This is crazy. I’m typing when I should be getting the hell out of here.

  I drop the iPad and start work on the ropes around my ankles. It’s easier than I expected: a simple series of knots. I don’t need ingenuity or strength, only patience. Hard, when he could reappear any second.

  By the time I’ve undone all the knots, the noise outside has stopped. No footsteps, nothing.

  I stand up. My legs are in agony from being tied together for so long, and I fall after my first three steps.

  Get up. Get out.

  Ignoring the pain, I force myself back onto my feet, take a step, then another.

  I’m nearly at the door when I think about Jess and Olly. Are they lying awake at night wondering if I’m dead?

  Moving as quick as I can, I go back to the iPad, praying it won’t have switched itself off. If I need the access code, I’m in trouble.

  The screen’s darker, but not black. I tap it and it lights up again. There’s my unfinished comment still sitting in the box. What should I add? That I’m fine? Safe? What if I’m not? What if Leon shoots me as I try to run away?

  His name: Leon, or Dandy—that’s the most important thing to add. And Hayley, fake Hayley with her fake cancer . . .

  I’m about to start typing again when I hear footsteps in the distance . . .

  Think, Cara. Move.

  My heart thumping like a wild thing, I post my comment as it is: incomplete. It’s the best I can do. Then I run: to the door, out of the trailer, in a random direction. Past an electricity pylon, into a cluster of trees. There are no other trailers, no houses that I can see.

  I stop suddenly, frozen by the enormity of what I’ve just done. My breath feels dangerously audible and visible, as if it’s announcing my presence to everyone for miles around.

  Move. Can’t stand still—he’ll run after me and catch me. When I start to run again, my brain screams at me to stop, that it’s a trap—I’m not running away from him, but somehow toward him. Not knowing where he is, I won’t be able to avoid running smack-bang into him at any second. The idea is so terrifying, it’s almost enough to make me want to turn back. At least when I was locked up and held at gunpoint in the trailer, I knew I would see him. Now, when I might not, a surprise glimpse of him in the distance would be enough to stop my heart.

  Ignoring all threats from the panicked voice in my head—that he will step out from behind the next tall cactus or the next rock, or the next, or the next—I run and run. I have to believe I’ll get back safely.

  If I could only know where he is . . . That he’s behind me, not ahead . . .

  Think about something else.

  I think about Jess. What if she reads my message and thinks I didn’t finish it because something stopped me: a knife in the gut, or a bullet through the brain? That’s what I’d think. The idea makes me want to howl, but I can’t risk Leon hearing me.

  I’m not dead, Jess. I’m going to live. I’m on my way home.

  Priddey was deleting messages from Sanders when his phone buzzed with a new call. No caller ID. He was in the back of a cab, nearly at Swallowtail. He expected it to be Sanders, but the voice was a woman’s. “Orwin, it’s Lynn. I got your message.”

  “Lynn?”

  “You want the full title? Assistant Special Agent Lynn Kirschmeier, FBI.”

  “I know. I didn’t think you’d call back so soon.”

  “Yeah. This Melody Chapa story was on our radar before I got your message. Bonnie Juno’s in town, huh?”

  “Yeah. Lucky us.”

  “We need to talk,” Lynn said. “Where are you? At the Swallowtail Resort and Spa?”

  “That’s where I’m supposed to be.”

  “And where Bryce Sanders is, yes?”

  “Yeah. My superior officer.”

  A sharp drawing-in of breath from Lynn. “Life doesn’t always go the way we want it to,” she said.

  Priddey, Lynn Kirschmeier and Sanders had all started in the police at the same time. It wasn’t long before it became obvious to Priddey that Sanders had no principles. He was a moral vacuum, a predator without conscience who did whatever he felt like doing at any given time. He violently assaulted those he arrested if they looked at him “the wrong way,” took bribes, some of them sexual, and made it clear—to Priddey at least—that he had a lot of fun doing all these things. He seemed, from the start, proud of his bad behavior, and told Priddey there was nothing he could do about it—it would be Sanders’s word against his if he were to say anything, and it was obvious who’d be believed. That Priddey knew Sanders would present a more compelling version of events than his own more truthful one only made him hate the man more.

  Then one day Lynn Kirschmeier had confided in Priddey: thanks to a private investigator, she had proof that Sanders had been making a pile of money on the side, selling drugs he’d seized from a suspect’s apartment. She’d asked Priddey if he knew anything about Sanders’s antics—anything he’d be willing to share. Priddey told her—all the details he’d been bottling up for nearly a year. The knowledge that there existed concrete evidence against Sanders changed everything for him. But Lynn, it turned out, wanted to offer Sanders a less humiliating way out. With an unhappy Priddey by her side, she told Sanders that if he left the police and left Arizona and never came back, she’d bury the incriminating evidence and make sure it never surfaced.

  Priddey didn’t agree with her way of handling it, but he could see the logic. Handsome, blond, charming Bryce Sanders, in spite of his cruel streak and nonexistent morals, was popular with his colleagues—more so than either Lynn or Priddey. “They’ll never forget we did it, Orwin,” she’d said. “Even those who
think we did the right thing, they’ll feel differently about us. It’ll be a black mark against us forever.”

  Priddey had convinced himself that he didn’t mind doing it Lynn’s way. Sanders would be gone, never to return; that was all that mattered.

  Except he did return. Lynn Kirschmeier joined the FBI, and, once she’d been out of the way for a few years, back Sanders came with the same detestable charming smile all over his perfect boy-next-door face. The Paradise Valley police force could hardly contain its excitement, especially the women.

  Sanders must have known Lynn would say nothing now—no way she’d risk her stellar career as an FBI agent. If she told the truth, Sanders would, too: he’d go public with her failure to report his crimes all those years ago. Priddey, if asked, would have to reveal that, yes, Lynn Kirschmeier had known Sanders had stolen drugs and then profited from their sale, and that he’d known, too. Priddey would willingly have trashed his own career for the sake of ruining Sanders, but he couldn’t bring himself to do that to Lynn, who, he suspected, must have known for some time now that Sanders was back and had conspicuously failed to contact Priddey to discuss what they ought to do about it—about as conspicuously as he’d failed to contact her.

  “Don’t worry, OP—I’m a changed man,” Sanders had said to Priddey with a wink, soon after reappearing. “This time, I’m gonna be good as gold.” When he’d heard those words, Priddey had known not only that Sanders didn’t mean them, but also that his intended meaning was the precise opposite. What he was trying to say, knowing Priddey would understand the true message, was “You’ll see nothing, you’ll be able to prove nothing, but I’ll be doing whatever the fuck I want, as I always do.”

  On the surface, Sanders had indeed been good as gold since his return—so good, he recently got the promotion Priddey had earned. “You’ll be next, bud,” he’d consoled Priddey with fake magnanimity. Or at least Priddey assumed it was fake; after what he and Lynn had done, he couldn’t believe Sanders’s friendliness to him was genuine. He wasn’t the forgiving sort; no, he’d worked out that he could wound Priddey more effectively by pretending to be his best pal, appearing to play by the rules, and forcing Priddey to fake his side of an apparently great working relationship.

  Priddey’s response to Sanders being promoted above him was to stop caring about anything and everything that related to work. From now on, he’d take his paycheck and put no heart or initiative at all into his job until he thought of something else he could do. He’d found that easy until this Swallowtail thing cropped up. Most of what his workdays threw at him was pretty unoriginal; this Melody Chapa business was different. He couldn’t think of a single scenario to explain and reconcile all that seemed to be happening here. That frustrated him and made him want to try and find the answer.

  “Meet me at Cartel Coffee Lab, 7124 East Fifth Avenue in Scottsdale, soon as you can.” Lynn was gone before Priddey could answer. He understood: together, they’d attempted a heroic act that had failed, and now she didn’t want to talk to him any more than he wanted to talk to her.

  He told the cabdriver the new destination, then keyed “Chapa murder trial” into the search box on his phone’s screen. He’d been right: Annette and Naldo Chapa had stood trial in 2013—June of that year—but not in Philadelphia, as he had assumed. Instead their trial had taken place in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, after it had been decided they were unlikely to get a fair hearing in their home city. Bonnie Juno’s belief in their guilt had proved contagious all over the country but nowhere more than in Philadelphia, where some people had started wearing T-shirts emblazoned with Juno’s motto of the moment, GUILTY AS HELL!, with MELODY R.I.P. in smaller letters underneath.

  Was it crazy that he now believed it might be true—that Lilith McNair and Cara Burrows might have seen fourteen-year-old Melody—purely because an FBI agent was taking an interest? Probably. Chances were, Kirschmeier was only interested in the missing-British-tourist angle.

  If the Chapas were tried in Lehigh County, then Riyonna Briggs, who lived in Philadelphia at the time, wouldn’t have been in the running for that particular jury even if she hadn’t opted out by moving to Arizona. No connection there, then. So why did it feel as if there had to be one?

  Priddey typed, “Riyonna Briggs, murder trial, Philadelphia” into the search box.

  Here we go . . .

  Riyonna Briggs was one of several jurors who had given interviews to the press after a man named Benjamin Chalfont had walked free from a Philadelphia court, acquitted of the murder by strangulation of his wife, Elyssa.

  Reading small print in a moving vehicle was making Priddey feel nauseous. He pressed the button to open the window a little.

  There had to be a link, via Riyonna Briggs, between this Chalfont case and the Chapas. Or maybe there didn’t. Either way, Priddey wasn’t ready to give up.

  He keyed “Benjamin Chalfont Melody Chapa” into the search box and pressed Return. No joy. He tried every combination of names he could think of: Elyssa and Annette, Naldo and Riyonna. Nothing.

  “Excuse me?” said the cabdriver.

  “Are we here?” Priddey looked up.

  “Not yet. The road’s blocked up ahead, see? So you can either get out and walk one block that way”—he stuck his arm out of the window and pointed—“or I can drive you to the door, but it’s gonna take a while longer.”

  “Longer’s okay,” said Priddey, who wasn’t done searching yet. Besides, weren’t cabs supposed to take you right to where you wanted to go?

  What about Jeff and Kristie Reville? They never stood trial for anything, but still, it was worth a shot. You never knew where you might find a connection. He put “Jeff Reville Benjamin Chalfont” into the search box and pressed Return. Next he’d try, in conjunction with Chalfont’s name, Victor Soutar, then Larry Beadman or maybe Nate Appleyard—all the names he’d read while refreshing his memory of the Melody Chapa case last night.

  Deep in his bones, Priddey couldn’t believe Riyonna Briggs’s experience as a juror in Philadelphia—so traumatic it ultimately made her relocate to Arizona—wasn’t connected to Melody somehow.

  Benjamin Chalfont. Annette and Naldo Chapa. Two murder trials, both the same year, both in Pennsylvania. Both with a connection to Riyonna Briggs . . .

  The search results appeared on the screen. Priddey did a double-take. “Holy freaking hell,” he breathed.

  He blinked and looked again. Still there. He clicked on the top result and started to read, his heart pounding.

  The driver had to tell him twice that they’d arrived at Cartel Coffee Lab. Priddey got out of the cab. He rotated his right shoulder, which had stiffened up during the ride—too much jabbing at his phone with his thumb.

  There was only one question he wanted answered now: Did Assistant Agent Lynn Kirschmeier already know, or was he about to give her the shock of her life?

  Sometimes I think I’d like to see my parents again. Not in the real world, but in a safe, fantasy way, where I’d know they couldn’t harm me. There are questions I’d like to ask them. By “them,” I guess I mean my mother. She’s the one with the answers. I’m not sure my father ever understood any of it—not even his own part in it.

  I’d ask about the time my mother was waiting for me after school when she was supposed to be working in a place called Oakmont. I was surprised to see her, and for once she looked happy to see me. She told me to sit in the front seat, and as we drove home she said, “So, I hear you have a boyfriend.” She said it in a confiding, best-pal tone I’d never heard her use before.

  I was six years old. Of course I didn’t have a boyfriend. The whole idea scared me. Sharona in my class had told everybody that Woody Finnigan was her boyfriend, and they’d walked around the playground holding hands a few times and looking pleased with themselves, as if they knew a secret the rest of us didn’t.

  We all knew it was only pretend, but it still made me feel horrible to think about it. What if he tried to kiss her and she coul
dn’t make him stop? What if he had stinky breath? This was what my friends and I had been discussing all that day, fascinated and horrified at the same time. I wondered if my mother had heard something from someone and misunderstood, thinking it was me instead of Sharona. All the same, I couldn’t imagine who would have told her.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t have a boyfriend.”

  “C’mon,” she said with a little laugh. “You can tell me. I’m your mom. If you can’t tell me, who can you tell?”

  “But I haven’t got a boyfriend.”

  “Don’t lie, Melody.”

  “It’s not a lie. Boys are disgusting.”

  “So how come Kristie told me different? She says you have a boyfriend called Woody something.” Her voice had lost its pally warmth.

  “No! Woody Finnigan, but he’s Sharona’s boyfriend, not mine.”

  How could Kristie have said that to my mother? She always listened to me and remembered things I said. That was why I loved her more than I loved my own parents, though I felt guilty for that. And whatever I told her, she knew not to tell my mother. She understood what life was like for me at home.

  “I told Kristie about Sharona and Woody, not me and Woody,” I explained.

  My mother pulled the car over to the side of the road, switched off the engine and turned to face me. “Melody, you are going to tell me the truth. You have one last chance. Is that clear? Only one chance.”

  Frozen in my seat, I nodded. As so often when I was with her, the only part of me that could move was the tears. It didn’t occur to me to wonder what would happen if I failed at my last chance. I took for granted that my fate would be so unimaginably horrible—so much worse than my day-to-day life, which was plenty bad enough—that it wasn’t worth risking.

  “Do you have a boyfriend by the name of Woody Finnigan?”

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  “You do?”

  “Yes.”

  “Uh-huh. Since when?”

  “Last week.”