False Step

by Victoria Helen Stone

  How could that man have so thoughtlessly put a tiny child in danger? He wasn’t evil. She knew he wasn’t evil. But . . . he was immature and gullible. He always had been. Someone had talked him into this scheme, and—instead of being strong and standing up to his friends—he’d gone along with it.

  Despicable.

  When her conscience raised its weak voice and reminded her that she was going along too, Veronica slapped it down hard and shook her head. The deed was already done. Given the chance, she would have stopped it. But she hadn’t been given that chance. Now it was too late to take it all back.

  She set her jaw and crouched back over her phone to do more research.

  Johnny might have been right about one thing: the police didn’t seem to have any leads. They were asking the public for help finding a small cabin, possibly with a dirt floor, but they couldn’t offer any details on a search radius or even what kind of car might have been parked outside it. The boy could have been driven hours from the Holcomb estate. He didn’t remember, and he’d been drugged either before or after arriving.

  She wanted to wake Johnny right now and ask about the cabin, but she understood that she was better off not knowing. Hopefully Johnny really didn’t know either.

  Unless he’d been there at some point.

  Frowning, she tried again to re-create the days after the kidnapping. Had there been any unusual gaps? She didn’t think so, but there had been the usual gaps, hadn’t there? He’d gone to work, she’d slipped away for a jog, he’d driven to the store. He’d run other errands, surely, but maybe all those trips had been a pretense? How would she ever know? He’d changed everything for their family forever.

  It didn’t matter how much information she found online. No set number of facts would satisfy her. She’d never feel secure again.

  Veronica curled lower in the couch and opened her messaging app to review the few messages saved from Micah. She ached with the need to reach out to him. Her skin felt tight and cool from the lack of his touch. Johnny had taken this from her too, finally. She couldn’t lean on Micah any longer or she’d have to reveal something he could never know. Loss burned like a cold stone in her belly.

  She wouldn’t be able to see him Wednesday. Maybe she’d never be able to see him again. She’d felt free with him. Beautiful. New. But the beauty was smashed to bits now. She’d have to hide the glaring, howling horror that was her whole world from now on, and how could she set that aside for even a moment?

  I miss you, she typed out, hitting SEND as her vision blurred with desperate grief. Without even hoping for a response, she pulled the blanket higher and shoved a pillow beneath her head. It was too late to stagger back to the bed she shared with Johnny. She closed her eyes and dreamed of shadows running through a forest. Most of them looked like her.

  CHAPTER 23

  “Mom?”

  Veronica sat up with a gasp that turned into a grunt of shock when an empty mug rolled off her thigh and thumped onto the carpet. “Hey,” she croaked. “Hey, sweetie. What’s up?”

  “Why are you sleeping on the couch?”

  “Uh. I fell asleep watching TV, I guess.”

  Sydney turned narrowed eyes toward the blank screen.

  “Oh,” Veronica croaked. “I meant . . . I must have fallen asleep after watching TV.”

  Her daughter shrugged, but her gaze swept down her mother’s body before she turned to head toward the kitchen. Veronica looked down to see a pale-brown tea stain on the front of her baggy shirt. “Crap,” she whispered. The couch was black leather, at least, and wouldn’t be stained, but bourbon fumes drifted up from her body when she shifted.

  Great. One more sparkling memory between mother and daughter. She’d had only one spiked mug of tea, but now it looked like she’d passed out sloppy drunk. Not that she hadn’t earned the right, but if Sydney was going to remember it that way, Veronica would’ve preferred to have actually indulged in a drunken night.

  Johnny strutted into the living room, eyebrows flying high at the sight of her. “Hey, babe. There you are!” His voice shone bright with relief, as if he’d worried she’d snuck out in the night.

  Ignoring Johnny and still bundled in the bourbon-scented blanket, she pushed up from the couch and brushed past him on the way to the bedroom. She didn’t have to be at work for two hours, but she could tell that the last wisps of sleep were past her. Still, she climbed back into her bed, determined to enjoy the space now that it was blissfully husband-free.

  She listened to the sounds of breakfast, then the sounds of packing up; then their voices faded as Sydney and Johnny left the house. The engine of Johnny’s truck rumbled, which meant he was dropping Sydney off instead of walking her to school. No doubt he wanted to head straight to work to avoid Veronica’s glares and questions. Fine. She’d have plenty of both waiting for him when he got home.

  Once the house was quiet again, she rose and headed straight for the basement door.

  She barely noticed the grit and dust against her bare feet as she descended the old wooden stairs. For once she didn’t cringe at the feel of a cobweb brushing her elbow. She lived in a house with a giant slithering snake of a husband. Everything else felt easy now. She could certainly handle a tiny arachnid touching her arm.

  When she lifted the flaps of the box, Veronica was almost surprised to see the money still there. After all, what did she really know about Johnny? How could she have been certain he wouldn’t just take the money and run? She certainly hadn’t expected him to be involved with kidnappers, so anything was possible at this point.

  In fact, maybe she should have been concerned that he might skip town with Sydney. Take the money and his daughter and start a new life somewhere. For a moment Veronica dared to wonder whether Sydney would go along with it. She was a daddy’s girl, after all. Would she really even care if Veronica was out the picture?

  The thought made her dizzy, because the answer was very possibly no.

  Nonsense. That was just her feeling pitifully sorry for herself. Her daughter wouldn’t just blithely write her off and move on. That was the whole reason Veronica had stayed in this marriage. Because Sydney idealized family to an unhealthy degree.

  It was meaningless dramatics, anyway. The money was still nestled in its box, safe from Johnny and any plans to escape. But it wasn’t safe from her, was it? She lifted the bag and felt the remarkable heft of it again.

  If she took the money and ran, would that make her an accomplice or just a double-crosser? If it were five hundred thousand it might be worth finding out. But fifty thousand . . . Johnny didn’t pay the bills. He probably thought this was a genuine fortune. But if they used it to pay off their debt, they’d be left with about thirty thousand, and they would easily blow through that in three years of normal household expenses. Her husband was a cheap grifter on top of everything else.

  They had to get it out of here, just in case the police came poking around again. She supposed that at this point they could refuse a request to search the house just on principle. Johnny was a hero, so why did they keep bothering him? But a refusal would only make the police look harder, and they certainly couldn’t risk that. The money had to go.

  She briefly considered that she could hide it in her mother’s house. Bury it beneath a pile of old board games in her mom’s closet, tell Johnny she’d taken care of it, and it would be emergency money if they needed it. But she considered that option for only a few seconds. It wasn’t fair to put her mother in danger for Johnny’s sake.

  So where? Maybe bury it on public forest land, and they could dig it up later? She pictured Johnny running from tree to tree sometime in the future, certain the treasure was at the foot of this pine tree or maybe the identical one next to it, or maybe they’d taken the wrong fork in the logging road a mile back.

  Snorting, she tucked the bag back into the box and closed the flaps again. There was no point moving the money until they had a plan. She might just make the situation worse.

 
Then again . . .

  She shoved her hand between the cardboard flaps and drew the bag back out; then she opened it, withdrew two of the bundles of bills, and sealed the bag again. Whatever plan she concocted with Johnny didn’t mean she couldn’t have a plan for herself. If everything went sideways for him, she’d still have a daughter to support.

  Two thousand dollars fisted in each hand, Veronica stomped up the stairs and into the kitchen. She wrapped the stack of bills in foil first, then in a kitchen towel; then she stuffed the whole bundle into a new plastic bag and sealed it tight.

  She couldn’t pull her family into this, and unfortunately they didn’t have any inherited land nestled in the foothills somewhere. She’d have to make do with what she had.

  After shoving her feet into an old pair of tennis shoes, she headed out the back door to the garage to grab gloves and a shovel. Old Man followed her and flopped onto a sun-warmed square of grass. “No, not there,” she murmured to him.

  Not the backyard. That was too obvious. Paused on the cement patio lodged between the back door and the detached garage, she turned in a slow circle. There was a narrow side yard, but it was mostly a stone walkway and a privacy fence. The fence ran all the way behind the garage to their property line at the alley.

  It wasn’t their fence, of course. The neighbors had asked them to contribute, but the old chain-link fence had worked fine for Veronica and Johnny, as it had been more in keeping with their fence budget for the year: zero dollars. Their neighbors had huffily paid for the fence themselves, and Veronica had left them to it, but she’d taken advantage of the clearing done by the fence company. Once the brambles along the back of their garage had been ripped out to leave working room for the installers, she’d planted a few shade-loving vines and never set foot there again.

  She eyed the two-foot space between the fence and the wall, wrinkling her nose at the thought of how many spiders must live back there. Hundreds, certainly. Thousands? There were probably black widows lurking in their strong, wiry webs, waiting for her to brush against them.

  “Oh God,” she whispered, shaking her head in admonishment for even thinking of sliding into that space. But she knew it was mostly dirt there. She’d run into only a thin layer of gravel and a few rocks when she’d dug in before.

  “I fucking hate you, Johnny,” she said. He wasn’t forcing her to hide some of the money for an emergency, of course, but she certainly wouldn’t be in this position without his help. He wouldn’t be facing prison. He wouldn’t be facing bond and attorney fees and unemployment. How would she support Sydney through all of that?

  Content with blaming him even for her betrayal, she blew a long breath through pursed lips and nodded. “Get it over with,” she urged herself, tightening her hold on the shovel. She’d get in, get out, and race into the shower to scrub off the creepy-crawlies.

  The first foot wasn’t so bad. It was fairly clear of cobwebs. She forced herself to push into the second foot of space, waving the shovel ahead of her, scraping it over the garage wall and then along the ivy leaves, hoping to scare away any danger.

  Something scuttled through the dead leaves on the ground ahead of her, and she froze with a little whine of terror. Far enough! her brain shouted at her, and she agreed and dug the shovel into the ground. It clanked against a rock but then sank an inch into soil. She dug out a chunk and then another.

  Something tickled her cheek, and she failed to bite back a scream. When she jerked away to swipe at her face, her elbow scraped along the garage, but she barely noticed the sting of pain as she swatted her cheek in panic. A wisp of her own hair flew in front of her eyes, scaring her even more deeply. It was only as she drew her chin in that she realized it had likely been her hair tickling her all along.

  She held her breath and waited to see whether she felt anything else moving on her skin. After a few moments she convinced herself she was fine, but she couldn’t slump against the wall to regain her strength. That was just an invitation for more spiders to explore her body.

  “Get it over with,” she reminded herself, then dug frantically into the dirt. Once she had a decent-sized hole, she kicked the package into it and scooped the dirt back into place. No matter how hard she stomped on it, she couldn’t make the mound perfectly flat, so she leveled it out as well as she could, then scraped some old leaves on top of it.

  “Not bad,” she muttered as she eased back to look. “Not bad at all.”

  “What are you doing?” a voice asked from behind her.

  Veronica shrieked and tried to spin toward the threat, but she flung out the shovel at the same time and it bounced against the garage wall with a bone-jarring clang. Plaster flew up and chittered against the leaves behind her.

  “Hey! I’m sorry! It’s just me.”

  When she finally craned her head enough to get the person in view, she realized it was Neesa, fresh and beautiful and standing in the backyard like she belonged there.

  “Oh God!” Veronica yelled. “You scared the crap out of me.”

  “I guess so.” She cringed and then chirped out another “Sorry!”

  Veronica felt like she was on the verge of a heart attack. “What are you doing here?”

  “I wanted to talk and no one answered the door. I thought I heard someone back here.”

  “So you let yourself into the backyard?”

  “I’m sorry. I thought maybe I could catch you guys before you left for work.”

  She pushed her way past the last vines to get out of the claustrophobic space. “Johnny’s not here. It’s just me.”

  “You’re the one I wanted to talk to, actually.”

  Her heart was already beating so hard, it felt like her whole chest was shaking. She’d been caught doing something very, very wrong. Something utterly incriminating. And now her husband’s lover or partner in crime or whatever she was wanted to have a talk?

  Desperately trying to hide her panic, Veronica said, “Oh, sure,” and tugged off her gloves. She left the shovel where it had fallen and stepped into the open. “I caught a mouse,” she explained. “Sydney doesn’t like it when we throw them in the trash.”

  “So you bury them? That’s sweet.”

  “Thanks.”

  Neesa paused as if she were waiting for something.

  “Did you want to come in?” Veronica asked finally. “I can pour you a cup of coffee, but I really need to jump in the shower soon.”

  “No, that’s okay. I need to get to work too. I just wanted to stop by and let you know that I’ve put together some good numbers on the gym. It’s not just off-the-cuff. I really believe we can make this work. K.C. and I have so much experience running the garage, and it’s doing really well, so . . . Johnny has the spreadsheets already, but can I email them to you?”

  Veronica cleared her throat, attempting to look serious as she tried not to scream that she didn’t give one damn about their stupid gym right now. “That’s good. Sure. I’ll look at what you have, I guess. Johnny and I haven’t really had a chance to discuss it yet, but money is pretty tight, so . . .”

  “Of course. But I know Johnny has been saving up, and I just hope you’ll hear him out, Veronica. He’s really good at what he does.”

  Irritation bloomed in her veins to join all the other emotions rioting inside her. “I know he’s good at training, Neesa. I’ve known him a long time. In fact, we’re married.”

  “Right. Of course.”

  She kept talking, but Veronica’s irritation had already fizzled out and she was thinking about what Neesa had said. That Johnny had been saving money. Johnny hadn’t been saving money. There hadn’t been any extra money to save. Not until Tanner Holcomb had come along.

  “Where did you get your half?” she asked.

  Neesa had been speaking, but she paused to let her mouth hang open and her eyes stare in shock at Veronica’s question. “Excuse me?” she finally asked.

  “You said Johnny has been saving money. You two have obviously been discussing this
for quite a while. It’s a big investment. How much money would it take? Fifty thousand? A hundred?”

  “I . . . I have the numbers drawn up. Like I said, you can—”

  “Where did you get your half of the money, Neesa?”

  Neesa pulled her chin in. For a moment she looked as if she wouldn’t answer, but then she relaxed her tight hands and nodded. “Well . . . Like I said, we have the garage . . .”

  “The garage,” Veronica repeated doubtfully before waving a dismissive hand. “Whatever. I need to get ready for work.” She couldn’t think about this now. Not in front of Neesa. It could be Trey, but it could also be Neesa and her husband. He could very well be running stolen vehicles through that garage, honing his criminal skills, making connections, making plans.

  “Okay, but—”

  “Thanks,” Veronica shot out for no reason, and darted toward the back door. “I’m late.”

  “Sorry!” Neesa called after her, sounding sweet and helpful again. But was she? Or had she actually planned this with Johnny to finance her dreams?

  Veronica slammed the door behind her and pressed her back to the wall, ears straining for any suspicious sound.

  But she was being ridiculous, right? Neesa was just a harmless little fitness buff. And Veronica was losing what was left of her mind. But if Neesa was involved, if there was any possibility at all, she’d just watched Veronica bury part of the ransom behind the garage.

  “Fuck,” she breathed, then froze at the crunch of footsteps along the side of the house. A few dozen heartbeats later she heard the thump of a car door closing, and then the purr of an engine that soon faded.

  What the hell was she doing? Why was she digging herself deeper? Her entire focus should be on making sure she didn’t make things worse.

  Silently repeating a few choice curse words on a loop in her head, she checked the front window to be sure Neesa was actually gone; then she rushed back outside, tugged on the gloves, and plunged into the narrow space behind the garage without thinking once about spiders.

  A few minutes later she had the wrapped stacks of bills in hand. Making sure to keep the gloves on, she tossed the plastic bag in the trash and even managed to work the foil off before returning the cash to Johnny’s hiding place in the basement. For good measure, she dumped the bills out of the plastic bag she’d touched when she’d discovered it, then raced upstairs to hold a match to it over the trash can. The plastic quickly curled and melted, taking her fingerprints into the ether.