by Sara Shepard
Maddox held up his hands as if to say, Don’t shoot. “All I was doing was hugging you.”
Seneca felt a prickle of annoyance. Maddox sounded defensive. She didn’t want to argue about this right now. “We should be taking this situation as seriously as possible, don’t you think? We don’t have time for distractions.”
Maddox watched the climbing numbers. “Who said I wasn’t taking Aerin seriously?”
“No, I know you are, I just…”
The elevator dinged, which put an end to the argument, though Seneca still felt unsettled. A sleepy-eyed receptionist wearing scrubs the color of pea soup looked up at them curiously. Seneca straightened her shoulders and walked over. “Hi. We’re here to see Chelsea Dawson.”
“Names?” the receptionist asked.
Seneca gave her and Maddox’s names. The receptionist typed something, then frowned. “Sorry. You’re not on the approved visitors list.”
Seneca sniffed. “I really think she’d speak to us. Can you at least ask?”
“If you’re not on the list, there’s nothing I can do.”
Maddox shifted from foot to foot. Rolling her shoulders, Seneca leaned toward the receptionist until their faces were level. “Look,” she said in a low voice. “Miss Dawson was kidnapped. We rescued her. I’m not leaving until you ask, okay? You’re going to have to drag me out the doors.”
The receptionist looked alarmed, then annoyed. Seneca still didn’t break eye contact. Her heart banged in her chest.
Finally, the receptionist reached for the phone. It was a crapshoot whether she was going to call a nurse or security, but then Seneca heard her say, “Dr. Lowenstein? I have some people up here who…” She spoke the rest in a voice too muffled for Seneca to hear.
Seneca straightened and turned around, meeting Maddox’s gaze. He was agape. “You’re going to get us kicked out,” he whispered, though he seemed impressed.
Seneca shrugged. “Not necessarily.”
The receptionist hung up the phone with a clunk and glowered down her nose at Seneca and Maddox. “Chelsea has agreed to speak with you, but we ask that you be brief. Someone will be out momentarily.”
“Thank you,” Seneca said. She shot Maddox a satisfied smile, then ambled over to him and squeezed his hand. He squeezed back. And just like that, the tension between them disappeared.
A nurse in gray scrubs—couldn’t they find cheerier uniforms for the psych ward?—retrieved Seneca and Maddox and escorted them through a locked door. They passed an empty day room filled with tables, bookshelves, a TV, and a soda machine, and then a small pharmacy window, and then into a warren of patient rooms. Seneca resisted the urge to peek through each door—she’d never actually been to a psychiatric floor before, and the patients here didn’t make her feel apprehensive, exactly…more like curious. What differentiated people sick enough to be in the hospital from those on the outside? Sometimes she worried she needed to be in one of these places. Especially the last couple of months, when she’d been hunting for Brett.
The nurse opened a door marked with the number 16 and pushed inside, revealing a nondescript room with a twin bed, a large window, and a pitcher of water on a small side table.
“Here are your visitors, Chelsea,” she said, then stepped into the hall.
Chelsea Dawson was propped up on the bed wearing ripped jeans and a white T-shirt. Her eyes had a glazed look, and the corners of her lips angled down in a frown. Her fingers twitched in her lap, pulling at imaginary threads on her jeans, and her light blond hair was greasy at the roots. This certainly wasn’t the same glamorous, lively It girl with half a million Instagram fans. Seneca’s heart broke. That was Brett’s fault. Just another life he’d destroyed.
“Hey,” Seneca said gently, stepping closer. “How are you feeling?”
Chelsea looked slowly from Seneca to Maddox. “It’s you guys.” Her voice was feathery and uncertain. “You found me today.”
Seneca nodded. “We’d been looking for you. We were really worried.”
“Really?” Chelsea picked at the hem of her jeans. “I thought nobody cared. Nobody cares anymore, that’s for sure.”
The news had painted Chelsea as a fraud, a liar, and a narcissist. Thanks to Brett’s machinations, they all thought she’d staged the kidnapping to gain social media notoriety.
“Well, we care,” she said. “Are they treating you okay here?”
“I guess.”
“Has your family come to see you?”
Chelsea lowered her eyes and shrugged. “My family…it’s weird right now.”
Seneca waited for more explanation, but none came. Was it weird with her family because her family also thought she’d lied about being kidnapped? But if that was the case, why hadn’t they listened to Chelsea’s side of the story? Seneca hated how air-tight Brett had made Chelsea’s disappearance: He’d chosen a person who was already seen as narcissistic and flighty, made her look like the girl who cried wolf. How disempowering that must feel to have no one believe you. How utterly hopeless.
The nurse stuck her head back in. “Guys, you have ten minutes.”
Seneca blinked. Only ten minutes? She had hoped to ease into this interview, get Chelsea comfortable first. It seemed callous just to barge in and ask questions. Annoyed that she didn’t have a choice, she eased closer to Chelsea’s bed. “I’m sorry to do this, but we have a couple of questions about what happened to you. Is that okay?”
Chelsea squinted. “Are you the police? Because they already asked me questions.” She made a face as if to say, and a lot of good that did.
“No, we’re…investigators. But we want to help you. And we think you can help us.”
Chelsea’s gaze dropped to her sheets. A commercial for Dunkin’ Donuts blinked mutely on the TV in the corner. “Some of the counselors told me I shouldn’t think about it. No one kidnapped me. It’s all in my head.”
Maddox scoffed. “You know that’s not true.”
Chelsea glanced toward the door nervously. “But denying I was ever kidnapped might be the only way I’m going to get out of here. They want me to admit I’m self-absorbed. That I set everything up because I crave attention. Maybe it’s better just to go along with it.”
The bright overhead light was starting to make Seneca’s head hurt. Poor Chelsea was trapped in a nightmare. Everyone in her life, even doctors, were trying to tell her that Brett wasn’t real.
“Look,” she said sternly. “I’m no doctor, but you were kidnapped. If you help us, we might be able to find the guy who did this to you. Then you’ll be able to get real treatment instead of whatever this crap is.”
Chelsea began to chew on her bottom lip. Seneca could see the ambivalence rolling across her features. A bell rang somewhere on the floor. Nurses passed back and forth in the hall. Finally, Chelsea breathed in. “Okay. What do you want to know?”
Seneca breathed a sigh of relief. “Well, let me first tell you that we know Gabriel, too.”
Chelsea blinked slowly. “How?”
Seneca and Maddox glanced at each other. How, indeed. Then Maddox shifted forward a little. “It’s a long story, but he hurt all of us. He murdered our friend’s sister.”
“And my mother, too,” Seneca said, her voice cracking.
Chelsea’s eyes widened. “Are you serious?”
Seneca nodded, then stared at Chelsea’s fingers as they tightly clutched the bedsheet. Blue veins popped out on the back of her hand. “Are you sure you’re okay with us talking about this?”
“I think so,” Chelsea said, though she didn’t stop grabbing the sheet.
“Okay, so now Gabriel…well, he’s kidnapped our friend, Aerin,” Seneca said slowly. She checked for a negative reaction from Chelsea. The horror tumbling back, maybe. But Chelsea just stared at them, her mouth set, her eyes wide, almost like she felt vindicated, in some weird way, that it had happened again. That she wasn’t crazy. That Gabriel truly was a monster.
“But we can’t go to the cops
or he’ll kill her,” Seneca went on. “And we have nothing to go on to find this guy, so we were hoping you could help. Anything you could tell us about him when you guys were in that house would be huge. If there’s anything he told you, any way he acted, a strange habit he had, patterns he kept—”
Chelsea cut them off. “Wait. Isn’t Gabriel dead?”
Once again, Maddox and Seneca looked at each other. How to say this, exactly? Was Chelsea going to freak? It was so unconceivable.
“He faked his death,” Seneca finally blurted. “He put someone else in his car that looked enough like him.”
For a moment, Chelsea just blinked. “So then he’s still out there?” Her chin wobbled. “What if he finds me in the hospital? What if he hurts me for telling the cops about him?”
“He won’t,” Maddox insisted. “We’ll make sure.”
“Absolutely,” Seneca seconded. “We promise.”
Chelsea widened her eyes. “So he has a totally different look now? What if he’s already nearby and we don’t know it’s him? What if he’s a nurse at this hospital?”
“He’s not,” Seneca assured her, though Chelsea’s point wasn’t a bad one. What if Brett was hiding in plain sight again? And how were they going to keep him from sneaking in and tormenting Chelsea? Then again, Brett sort of had his hands full right now with Aerin. He’d be foolish to come back here and face his victim. Besides, hospitals had cameras. Security. Strong narcotics they could inject Brett with if they caught him.
Then again, the doctors didn’t believe Brett was real.
Once Chelsea seemed to have calmed down, Seneca took a deep breath. “Let’s talk about before Gabriel kidnapped you. How long did you know him? Did he tell you anything about his family, where he was from?”
Chelsea’s gaze fixed on a marker board across the room. Only the date was penned at the top, nothing else. It took her a while to answer. “We knew each other for two years before he…you know.” She lowered her eyes, a look of shame and fear crossing her features. “I only saw him in the summers, when my family came for vacation. He might have lived in the condo year-round…I’m not sure.”
Seneca tapped her lip. “Did he ever mention family? Maybe a sister?”
A light came on in Chelsea’s eyes. She snapped her finger. “Yes. This one time, he said his sister taught him to play Monopoly. And he mentioned a few times they were close.”
“Did he ever visit her? Do you know where she lives?”
Chelsea shook her head. “I don’t think he visited her—or at least he never told me about it. But they sometimes talked on the phone.”
“On a cell?”
“Actually, on a landline. I thought it was super weird that he had a landline, actually—I mean, who has one anymore? But he was always complaining that the cell reception wasn’t great in his building.”
Seneca thought about when she’d been in “Gabriel’s” condo—he’d let them chill there one afternoon when he had to go to work, and it horrified Seneca now that they’d spent so many hours in Brett’s private space and still had no idea he was Brett. She didn’t recall having any cell issues in the condo, but maybe Brett used a different wireless carrier.
“Do you remember what they talked about?” she asked.
“Definitely not. He shut himself in the bedroom whenever he talked to her.” Chelsea seemed to think about this for a moment. “Come to think of it, that was a little strange. I always wondered why he did that.”
Maddox crossed his arms over his chest. “Did Gabriel have any unusual hobbies or interests?”
“I can’t think of any interests except for surfing. He wasn’t very good at it, though. Not like Jeff or the other guys. I always found that funny—the waves would pound him. But some people love things they aren’t good at, you know?”
“I love playing mini golf, but I generally suck at it,” Maddox agreed. “So you guys were close, right?”
“Yeah.” Chelsea ducked her head. “Stupid me, huh?”
“Not at all,” Seneca assured her. “Gabriel’s a master at tricking people into thinking he’s a safe person to be around. He did it with us, too.”
“And what did you guys do together, as friends?” Maddox asked.
Chelsea shrugged. “Hung out. Went to this make-your-own frozen yogurt place a lot. Went to this other place where you paint your own pottery. I made him a mug.” She looked away, embarrassed. “He was always up for listening to my problems—maybe too much.” She laughed self-consciously. “I told him all kinds of stuff. Complained about my boyfriend, or school, or my family. He was so good at just sitting there and…absorbing it.”
Seneca gripped the arms of the orange plastic chair beside Chelsea’s bed. When Brett had helped them on the Helena case in Dexby, he’d listened to her problems, too. When she’d talked about her murdered mom, he’d sat there quietly, never interrupting, a big sponge sopping up her pain. Little did she know at the time that he was licking up every miserable crumb of her confession, probably thinking, Ha. I caused this pain. I did this to her. I’m the freaking king of the world.
“And when you hung out, was it always in Avignon?” Seneca asked. “Never in another beach town, or somewhere inland, or in another beach house?”
“Nope,” Chelsea said. “Mostly we were on the deck of his condo. Rarely anywhere else.”
Seneca knew that deck well. She and Maddox had sat there, too—face-to-face with Brett as Gabriel, and they hadn’t even realized it. “So how about after he kidnapped you? Did his personality change?”
There was a ding in the hall that almost sounded like a timer going off. Chelsea stared at the door for a moment, then looked at Seneca again, her expression grave. “He did a total one-eighty.” She shivered. “It was like I was meeting a totally different person…just with his same face. He was in total control. Icy. Terrifying.”
Seneca exchanged a loaded look with Maddox. That was what Brett did time after time, wasn’t it? Earn someone’s trust, then snap, becoming his true self. And then he disappeared and did it all over again.
She leaned forward. “Did he ever say why he’d kidnapped you?”
“I asked. I wanted to know if I’d done something wrong. But he never said. He just talked about my Instagram followers.” She laughed ruefully. “He kept wanting me to dress up and take pictures for Instagram, show everyone how pretty I was.”
Seneca gritted her teeth. Of course Brett did that—it was all part of his plan to make people think that Chelsea had faked the kidnapping.
Chelsea started to wind a tendril of hair around her finger. “I will say this, though. He didn’t actually treat me that badly. I had food. I had clean clothes. And he kept saying things like, Aren’t you happy about your new dress? Don’t you like the shampoo I got for you? Like he was trying to make it the Four Seasons of kidnapping situations.”
“He wanted you to like him, even when you were his victim,” Seneca mused aloud. “He wanted you to feel grateful, maybe. Like he was doing you a favor.”
Maddox scoffed. “Some favor.”
“And then there was this weird thing when he turned on the TV. The news was on, and it was a story about Gabriel Wilton being a suspect in my kidnapping. And I turned to him and was like, They’ve got you…but Gabriel was so collected. He said, No, they don’t. He didn’t seem bothered at all. It made me realize: Maybe this wasn’t the first time he’d done this. He was so confident, so certain he was going to go free.” She peeked up self-consciously. “Does that make any sense?”
“Perfect sense,” Seneca said, feeling chills go up her spine. Brett was so confident about everything, wasn’t he?
“Is there anything else you remember Gabriel doing the week he held you in the house?” Maddox asked. “Anything?”
Chelsea shook her head. “I don’t think so. I’m sorry.”
“One more thing,” Maddox said. “Did Gabriel ever mention someone named Damien Dover…or maybe Sadie Sage?”
Chelsea thought
for a moment. “Neither of those names sounds familiar.”
Then the door creaked open. The same nurse pointed at the clock on the wall. “Okay, people. Time’s up. Miss Dawson needs to rest.”
Seneca turned back to Chelsea regretfully. She hated dropping all this on the poor girl and then leaving her a mess. It seemed like new circles under Chelsea’s eyes had formed even since they’d been here. Her shoulders drooped. Seneca had no idea what kind of drugs the doctors had her on, but it was clear their interrogation had worn her out and put all sorts of new fears into her mind.
She brushed her sweaty palms against her dress. “Thank you. This meant so much. And don’t worry, okay? We’re going to find him. We’ll make everyone believe your side of the story. And we’ll make sure he never hurts you again.”
“Uh-huh.” Chelsea looked like she was about to burst into tears.
Noticing a pen and paper by the bed, Seneca scribbled down her cell phone number and e-mail. “If you want to talk, call or write. I’m serious. We know what you’re going through. We don’t want you to feel alone.”
“Thanks.” Chelsea gave a weak smile and clutched the pad to her chest. “Maybe I will.”
They backed out of the room quietly, then headed for the exit. Once they were alone by the elevators again, Seneca breathed out, feeling even more despair than she had before. “Poor thing.”
“Seriously.” Maddox ran his hands over the back of his head as they stepped into the elevator.
The doors slid shut, and the motor began to whir. “Brett giving Chelsea the royal treatment strikes me as odd. Do kidnappers usually care for their victims like that?” Seneca said as the car passed from floor three to floor two.
“Maybe if they love them, they do,” Maddox turned red at the word love. Seneca looked away, wondering if Brett thought he loved Aerin, too.
When they reached the main floor, they found Madison sitting on a chair near the entrance, her gaze intent on her phone screen. She leapt up when Seneca and Maddox approached. “Well, Chelsea confirmed Brett has a sister,” Seneca announced. “But we didn’t really learn anything new about him.”