Keep Her Safe

by Sophie Hannah

“I see.” She started driving again. We didn’t exchange another word all the way home. I cried, and she pretended not to notice.

  When we pulled up outside our house, she said cheerfully, “Don’t think I don’t know you lied to me, Melody. You can’t fool me. Woody’s not your boyfriend. You told the truth the first time: he’s Sharona’s boyfriend. I was chatting with her mom while I was waiting for you at the gates. She told me all about it.”

  With that, my mother went inside, leaving me alone in the car, glued by terror to my seat. She had to come out and get me a half hour later. She pretended not to be able to imagine why I hadn’t just followed her into the house like I usually did.

  I couldn’t allow myself to think about it while I was with her, so I did my best to act normal. Later, in bed, I tried to figure it out, but the more I thought about it, the less it made sense. Nothing like this had ever happened before. I wondered if trying to get me to lie was going to be her new game, but she never did it again.

  If I met her today, or in twenty years’ time, and asked her what the Woody Finnigan incident was all about, would she tell me? Would she even remember?

  15

  October 15, 2017

  Lynn Kirschmeier’s hair was shorter. She’d had it cut into what Priddey thought of as a “serious woman” style. It was a haircut that female politicians seemed to go for—Hillary Clinton, and Angela whatever-her-name was, the German chancellor. In her pale-gray suit, Lynn could have been a president or a prime minister. In other ways, she hadn’t changed at all. She still drank orange juice straight from the bottle, still wore no makeup and too much perfume.

  She had a colleague with her—a young black man in a blue suit, which he wore with a shirt that was the exact same shade of blue. His tie, at least, was a different color: dark red. Lynn introduced him as Agent Jomo Turriff. It was he who asked Priddey for the full story and told him to omit no detail. If Turriff had ever heard of small talk, he showed no sign of it—not even a one-line icebreaker.

  Three black coffees later, the two agents were up to speed. Lynn had smiled at Priddey’s description of Janelle Davis and Stoppit; Turriff had not.

  “Let me get this right,” he said. “Tarin Fry admitted she lied about being a detective to get the trash from room 324 from the maid, and she also admitted she never saw Melody Chapa alive—she only said so to make sure you took the other sightings seriously?”

  “Yes, and yes,” Priddey confirmed.

  In response, Turriff’s face moved not an inch.

  “Do you have the drawing she gave you—the Doodle Dandy one?”

  Priddey produced two evidence bags from his pocket and handed them over. “The doodle and the notes from the crystal grotto,” he said. Turriff took them without a thank-you. The guy was no charmer, that was for sure. After her experience with Sanders, maybe Lynn deliberately avoided working with that type of man.

  “What’s your impression of Fry?” she asked Priddey.

  “She’s smart. Single-minded. A little ruthless, but not necessarily in a bad way. I think she’s worried about Cara Burrows and didn’t think anyone was taking her disappearance seriously enough.”

  “A liar’s a liar,” said Turriff flatly.

  Lynn made a face at him that he couldn’t see, but Priddey saw it. It was a “For Christ’s sake, get the stick out of your ass” face.

  “Liar or no, I agree with her,” she said. “You should have called us in as soon as Cara Burrows went missing, Orwin.”

  We don’t always do what we should, Lynn. As you know.

  “Not that I’m blaming you,” she added. “Detective Sanders should have brought us in, if he’s the one calling the shots.”

  She said his name without missing a beat.

  “There’s something you need to know.” Priddey addressed his words to Turriff. “The jury service Riyonna Briggs wanted to avoid . . .”

  “What about it?” said Turriff.

  “At first I thought that might somehow link to the Chapas’ trial, which was the same year, but I was way off the mark there. Riyonna wouldn’t have known in advance which case she’d get as a juror, and anyway Melody’s parents were tried in Lehigh County, not Philadelphia. But I couldn’t let it go that easy. I thought, there has to be something, some connection.”

  “And you found one?” Lynn asked.

  “I did. It goes back to Riyonna Briggs’s first jury experience—the trial of Benjamin Chalfont. Far as Riyonna was concerned, Chalfont was undeniably guilty. Others thought so, too, at first, but got persuaded by a few of his defenders on the jury. In the end, only two jurors stuck with guilty and wouldn’t be talked out of it. I know this because Riyonna gave an interview shortly after the trial. She talked about her distress at the injustice of Chalfont’s acquittal—her own, and the distress of the only other juror to stick with a guilty vote. When I saw the name of that other holdout juror, the one who wasn’t Riyonna Briggs, my eyes damn near popped out of my head.”

  “Who?” asked Turriff.

  “Kristie Reville.”

  Lynn whistled.

  At last, a facial expression from Turriff: a frown. “So Melody Chapa’s neighbor and babysitter sat on a jury alongside Riyonna Briggs. Who works at the resort where guests are claiming to have seen Melody Chapa alive.”

  “Yep,” said Priddey. “And that’s not all.”

  “It sure isn’t.” Lynn pulled her phone out of her pocket, pressed a few keys, then passed it across the table to Priddey.

  “What’s this?” he asked.

  “We’re pretty sure Cara Burrows wrote it. She left it as a comment beneath a photo her daughter posted on Instagram. Daughter told father, who told Sanders, who—eventually, way later than he should have and not exactly willingly or graciously—handed it over to us.”

  She looked at Priddey to see if he’d understood: in all ways that counted, she was now more powerful than Sanders.

  It didn’t matter. That didn’t make anything okay.

  Priddey read the message twice: “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.”

  “‘Did Kristie move the sock?’ we think,” said Lynn. “Cut short, obviously.”

  Why hadn’t Cara Burrows been able to finish typing that sentence?

  Priddey agreed that “mo” was probably the beginning of “move.” But the last full use of “move” was in relation to the car seat, not the sock.

  “Orwin? What are you thinking?”

  He was thinking that he wanted to keep thinking awhile longer.

  Kristie Reville was in the driver’s seat when Nate Appleyard noticed Melody Chapa’s bloodstained sock on the floor of her car. She moved her car seat forward to cover up the sock, but it was too late—Appleyard had seen it and told police.

  Wait. Wait.

  “I think I know what this means,” Priddey murmured. He half stood up, then sat down again. “If I’m right . . .” But why had nobody spotted it at the time? It was so obvious once you thought about it. Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was only blindingly obvious if you knew what Priddey knew. Which, currently, Lynn and Turriff did not.

  “I need to tell you something. Something big.”

  “Is this the ‘That’s not all’ you mentioned a minute ago?” Lynn asked. “Go ahead, tell us.”

  So Priddey told them.

  At last, a road. Tall cacti and jagged rocks on the other side and, in the distance, the mountain.

  Camelback Mountain or a different one? I can’t tell.

  No cars on the road. Not a single one.

  The road is red sand, like the floor of the crystal grotto.

  I have to stop here. I can’t go any farther. I’ve been running for more than an hour, maybe two. Stumbling, really, more than running. All the bones in my body feel broken and every part of my insides aches. My bare feet are covered with blood, my ankles swollen.

/>   I sink down to my knees when I hear a noise, in case it’s a gun being fired, but it’s okay. It’s nothing. I’m safe. For now.

  The silence builds around me, making me nervous, and I begin to wonder what the noise was if it wasn’t a gun. A car engine starting?

  Please let a car come. Or a van, or a person. Anything. Anyone but him.

  Please. I have to get back home, back to safety. Have to make sure my baby’s okay.

  No, not a car, please, on second thought. If a car comes, he might be driving it. He’s bound to be. I picture myself at the center of a circle that he’s drawn a red line around. He can still get to me, wherever I am in the circle. I have to get out of it—but how can I, when I don’t know where the boundary is?

  I should stand up, in case I need to run again, but my legs won’t move. The thought of putting my weight on my feet makes me cry.

  I fall onto my side and lie there for a while on the edge of the grass, where it meets the road. There’s a cactus near me with leaf-tips sharp enough to be lethal weapons.

  Hearing a rumble, I pull myself into a seated position.

  It’s a car. An engine. That’s what I heard, and now it’s getting nearer. I can see it coming toward me along the road.

  My mouth fills with bile.

  Oh, my God. It’s him. It must be. He can’t have got me to the trailer without a car, and who else is this likely to be, really, if not him looking for me?

  I look again at the sharp-leafed cactus. There’s no way I could tear off one of those thick rubbery tentacles and pierce his heart with it; if I could, I would.

  All I can do is try to drag myself off the road, away from him. I sob as I half roll, half crawl, trying to hide in the dirt and gravel and rubble by the roadside.

  I hear a door slam.

  “Excuse me, lady? You okay? You need help?”

  It this a dream? Because that voice didn’t sound like him.

  I don’t want to allow myself to hope. Maybe it’s a dream. I don’t care if it is. I like it so far. “Yes, help, I need help.”

  “We need to get you to a hospital. Or maybe the police. No, hospital first.”

  “No. Swallow.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Swallowtail.” Part of me still can’t believe that something good has happened. A voice in my brain whispers, “This might be him in disguise. Or a friend of his, sent by him.”

  “The spa place?”

  I force myself to look at the man’s face. He does not look too kind, or suspiciously helpful. He looks a little bored, and irritated, and innocent. Unconnected to Leon Dandy Reville.

  He’s my best bet.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Lady, I don’t think you’re going to be allowed in there in your condition.”

  “I’m staying there.” I lift my right arm and look at it before sliding my hand slowly into the pocket of my shorts, wondering if I can trust my memory from what seems like so long ago.

  Yes. It’s there.

  I pull out the key card for my casita. It has the Swallowtail logo on it. I try to hold it up to show it to the helpful man, but my fingers won’t work properly and I drop it.

  “Swallowtail,” I say again. “Please take me to Swallowtail.”

  I figured something out today, something that links back to a conversation I had with my mother years ago.

  “Would you like a little brother or sister?” she asked me one day at the breakfast table. My father was there, too. He looked surprised. I think I must have been about four years old at the time.

  “Not a sister,” I said quickly. Emory was my sister. Having a sister, to me, meant having a dead sister, and I already had one of those. A brother was different. I could imagine having a not-dead brother, but that would be unbearable in a different way. I would love him, and I would have to watch him suffer. Or, if my parents planned to be much kinder to him than they were to me, then he would have to watch me suffer, and, if he was anything like me, that would make him sad and scared.

  “And not a brother,” I added once I’d thought it through.

  “Neither?” said my mother. “Why not? I know you don’t love Emory, but you might love a new sibling.”

  This was designed to make me feel guilty. I did love Emory, or at least the idea of her. At the same time, I wondered: How can you love someone who died before you were born?

  “I suppose some people are too selfish to love anyone but themselves,” said my mother in a matter-of-fact tone.

  My father ate his toast and drank his coffee, looking out of the window as if nothing important was being said, nothing he needed to pay attention to.

  “Actually, I would love a baby brother,” I said. I must have felt braver than usual that morning. “But I’d be afraid he’d die.”

  “Is that so?” said my mother. “Well, they say you always kill the thing you love.” She glanced at my father, who ignored her.

  I didn’t know what she meant. Was she saying she thought I would deliberately kill my own little brother?

  At that moment, she seemed cut off from my father and me in a way I couldn’t quite fathom. When she next spoke, her voice had a faraway sound, as if she’d drifted off into a private world. “You know, I don’t think that’s right,” she said. “I think it’s the other way around: you love the thing you’ve killed. But only once it’s too late.”

  “Annette,” said my father in a warning tone. “No more.”

  My mother responded instantly, snapping back to her normal conversational mode. “Yes,” she said. “What a horrible, morbid subject.”

  Wait, wait. Those words ran through my mind so often when I lived with my parents. Wait, wait, that’s wrong. Something’s not right. I just need a chance to figure out what it is.

  While my mother and my father talked about plans for the day ahead, I silently replayed what I’d heard:

  Her: You love the thing you’ve killed. But only once it’s too late.

  Him: Annette. No more.

  I’d only ever known my mother to show love for one person: Emory. After she was dead. While she was alive, I wasn’t around to witness anything, so I can’t speak for how my mother felt about her then.

  I wondered if my mother had deliberately killed Emory. She’d told me Emory had died in her tummy. My father had said so, too, but maybe it wasn’t true.

  As soon as I was old enough to understand, the Kind Smiles told me about Mallory Tondini and showed me the famous interview she did on TV. After that, I had no choice but to believe that Emory had died in my mother’s womb. In one way it was a relief to know this, but it also confused me. I’d thought I understood, and clearly I was wrong. Mallory Tondini worked at the hospital and had been there when my parents had lost Emory, so if she thought it was a natural death then it must have been.

  I asked the Kind Smiles what they thought about all this, but they didn’t seem to want to talk about it. I asked if there was a way my mother could have eaten or drunk something that made Emory die inside her, without Mallory or anyone at the hospital noticing. They said they didn’t think so. I couldn’t work out why they looked so sad if that was true. It was obviously better if my parents hadn’t killed my sister.

  I don’t know how it took me until today to see it: I was only with the Kind Smiles in the first place because of what they feared my parents would do to me. My mother was talking about me, not Emory, at the breakfast table that day. She was unhappy about her inability to love me, and she knew that the only way she could manage it was if she killed me first. I think that’s what she was trying to communicate to my father: “You want me to love Melody? Fine, but the only way it’s going to happen is if I kill her first. Loving Emory’s easy—she’s dead.”

  No wonder the Kind Smiles felt they had no choice but to get me out of my parents’ house.

  16

  October 16, 2017

  Orwin Priddey steeled himself as he got out of his car, seeing Bonnie Juno striding toward him across th
e resort parking lot. As someone who spent much of his life trying to prevent any honest expression of his thoughts or feelings from making its way into the outside world, he’d never felt comfortable around people who spoke their minds no matter what the consequences. And when that quality was coupled with a ferocious determination to get your own way at all costs, as it was in Juno . . .

  “Hey, Detective!” she yelled at him over the rows of cars. “There you are! Where the hell have you been? Now, you’d better tell me right this second and not feed me some bullshit line: Where’s Cara Burrows?”

  Determination was one of Priddey’s qualities, too, though he was less demonstrative about it. As a result, people rarely expected him to stand his ground. Often they didn’t realize that was what he was doing until a gradual awareness started to creep up on them: I asked him to do X, and he didn’t say he wouldn’t, so why hasn’t he done it yet?

  It was a feature of human interaction that had interested Priddey for some time: that unless you told the world explicitly who and what you were—“I’m a kickass blowhard who takes no prisoners and you’d better believe it”; “I’m a home-loving soccer mom who’s all about her kids”—there was a strong chance that even those closest to you would perceive you incorrectly, or, perhaps more depressingly, not have any ideas about you at all.

  “Quit stalling!” Juno bellowed, her red face now nearly touching Priddey’s. “Where is she?”

  “I’m sorry if you haven’t been kept in the loop.” It never did any harm to start with an apology. “Cara’s safe. She’s been found. Or rather, she found her way back without any help from us.” He wasn’t about to claim credit for someone else’s achievement.

  “Are you for real? You think I don’t know that? Lord in heaven, please don’t tell me I know more about what’s going on than you do.”

  “I don’t know about that, ma’am.”

  “I know Cara got back here yesterday—hitched a lift, got looked over by doctors, all of that.”

  “She sustained a few minor injuries in the process of escaping, but she’ll be fine. So will her baby.”