by Emily James
I have to ditch this phone, I typed to Nicole. I’ll text you when I have a new one.
A response dinged in almost immediately. Are you okay?
The simple answer was no, but instead I gave no answer at all. Nicole knew more about my situation than anyone. If I told her I wasn’t okay, she’d want to rush in and rescue me. If I told her I was okay, she’d know I was lying, and she’d want to rush in and rescue me. Rescuing people was what she did, especially if she cared about them.
I climbed back into my truck and got back on the road.
My phone rang from the passenger seat. I couldn’t reach it to check who it was. Odds were good it was Nicole. Not answering now would only make her panic. That wasn’t fair. We weren’t close, but she was the closest thing to a friend I had. Maybe I should have waited to text her until I had my new phone. It’d been weakness on my part that I’d felt the need to reach out to someone who hadn’t betrayed me.
I hit the button on my display to answer my phone and said a simple hello rather than my usual spiel.
“Isabel?” The voice from my speakers was Dan’s, not Nicole’s.
“Speaking,” I said, as if I didn’t recognize his voice.
“It’s Dan. Holmes.” He added his last name like he was worried I would know so many Dans that I wouldn’t know which one was calling me. “You left your jacket in my car. I’m heading into work now, but can I meet you somewhere later to return it?”
I glanced at my passenger seat. My jacket wasn’t there. That part of his story checked out, and his voice didn’t give anything away. But Fear was telling me that it was a trap. He was checking in on me. He suspected that I’d heard his phone call.
Either way, I certainly wasn’t going back for it. “I have a full day ahead. Hang on to it for me, okay?”
That should satisfy him since I’d said I would try to make Janie’s play. I took the next exit, thankful that I’d looked up the route beforehand rather than relying on my GPS. The last thing I needed now was my GPS telling me which way to go and giving me away.
“I think it’d be better if we got it back to you today so we don’t forget where we put it or slop food on it.”
His tone seemed light, but there was a forced undercurrent to it.
He was digging. He suspected I was going to run. He might even suspect that I was already running.
“That’s okay,” I said. “It’s an old jacket, so I’m not worried if anything happens to it.”
We were back to circling each other the way we had during that early call when he tried to hire me to bake cupcakes for Janie’s play in order to get my last name. Last time, he’d given up when I’d run him into this type of a corner.
Silence stretched on his end of the line. The telltale static rumble of someone talking on their speaker in their car told me he was still there. We hadn’t lost the call.
He drew in a long breath. “Did you overhear my phone call?”
So we had made some progress in our relationship, if you could call it that when it was built on lies on both sides. We at least knew each other well enough now that he wasn’t going to give up when I called his bluff. It showed me a level of respect.
I’d show him the same respect. “I did.”
Now the question would be whether he would admit that the person he was talking to wanting to serve a warrant on me. Whether he would admit he was a police officer.
“Isabel.” He said my name softly. He had to have guessed by now that it wasn’t my name, but it was still the name I’d given him, the name I went by. The only name he knew. “Did you kill my grandfather?”
My foot jerked on the gas pedal, and my truck jumped forward. Of all the things I thought he might say, a blunt question about whether I was a murderer wasn’t one of them.
I turned off into a service center. This wasn’t a conversation I could concentrate on while also safely driving.
I put my truck into park. I thought about telling him that I wasn’t involved in his grandfather’s death and confirming that I was only there that day because Claire hired me to provide cupcakes. All of that would have been true. I felt like arguing that my investigation into what had happened and trying to find the real guilty party should have proved my innocence.
But I settled on a simple “No.”
He was either going to believe me or he wasn’t. That would be his choice. If he didn’t believe my no, he wouldn’t believe all the explanations in the world. And it didn’t matter what he believed anyway. It shouldn’t matter.
“Have you committed some other crime?”
I rested my head on my steering wheel. That one was so much more complicated. I had, but not the kind he probably meant. I hadn’t killed anyone else. I wasn’t a drug dealer or an assassin. I hadn’t taken anything that wasn’t mine other than a name.
I wasn’t on the run from the law because there was a warrant out for my arrest for some previous crime. I was on the run from the law because my husband was the law and he wanted me dead.
Telling him any or all of that meant trusting him, and he’d proved I couldn’t. He’d lied to me about things more important than a name. Had I not overheard that conversation, he would have helped the police find me and take my fingerprints by force.
But I also couldn’t stand the thought that he’d be assuming the worst of me—that I’d taken part in some other horrible crime and that was why I didn’t want the police to have my fingerprints.
“I possess identification with a name on it other than my own.”
I kept the statement formal, like what might show up on a police report. Keeping it formal was safer. I should have hung up this phone call long ago. I didn’t owe him an explanation.
Another beat of near-silence, as if he were trying to either digest what I’d said or decide whether I was lying. Maybe both.
“How many?”
How many what? Ohh. How many fake names. “Just one. The one I go by. Isabel.” I still didn’t give him my last name. He’d only use it against me. And yet I still stupidly felt the need to explain why I’d have even one. “It was the only way to protect myself from a bad person who wanted to hurt me.”
He could interpret that however he wanted—that I was a drug dealer’s girlfriend who knew too much, that I was a witness who didn’t want to testify because I was afraid. He might even figure out that I was on the run from an abuser or a stalker, assuming he believed me.
“Then come back,” Dan said. “If you didn’t do anything wrong, you don’t need to keep running. I’ll help you figure this all out.”
Yeah, right. And Jarrod was truly sorry every time he hurt me and promised to never do it again. I’d believed that for too many years and look where it got me.
I wouldn’t let myself be fooled again. The only one I could trust was myself. “Is that why you lied to me about being a police officer?”
I couldn’t keep the anger out of my voice. But I had the uncomfortable feeling, like my skin was too tight, that it wasn’t only him I was mad at. I was mad at me too. I’d put myself into another position where someone could hurt me.
“I didn’t lie to you,” Dan said. “You never asked what I did for a living. I just didn’t tell you the truth.”
Those were the kind of semantics Jarrod liked to use too. “So are you a police officer?”
“A detective, yes. I worked undercover until my brother died, then I moved back to Lakeshore and took a job in homicide.”
That explained why he was so hard to read and was so good at adapting his personality to fit. Just when I thought I couldn’t feel stupider, I did. He must have figured out that I was lonely and loved children, and he played me. Just like Jarrod. “Are you working your grandfather’s case?”
“Not officially. It’d be a conflict of interest. But I couldn’t sit back and do nothing either. A buddy of mine’s lead on the case, and he’s keeping me filled in.”
Was that a hint of pleading in his voice?
Even if it
were, he could be faking that too. “But you were trying to prove I’d done it.” Don’t let your voice crack, I prompted myself. Keep it together. “That’s why you offered to work as a team.”
“I wasn’t sure.”
It was as good as admitting that everything I’d thought was real—the real trust, the real caring for my health—hadn’t been.
It didn’t matter. I was on the road again. I had a plan. Soon nothing that happened in Lakeshore would matter.
The noise in the background had stopped. He must have pulled over as well and switched the call to his phone from his car. “We checked out Amy Miller. She’s the wife of an FBI agent. She’s been missing for over a year.”
My throat went raw. He knew. “Did you talk to her husband?”
He made an affirmative noise. “He’s worried about her. He thinks she may have gotten into something dangerous that she didn’t know how to get out of. He wants to know she’s safe and to have her come home no matter what she’s done.”
Forget repainting and new plates. I had to scupper the truck as soon as I reached Detroit.
“Her husband’s a liar.”
I disconnected the call and pulled back out onto the road. I’d have enough money to pick up a new name and get myself a bus or a train ticket to somewhere else. Maybe even to Canada where Jarrod would have no authority.
Chapter 21
Fake identities were harder to come by in Detroit than I’d thought they would be. A day later, I still didn’t have a new identity. The only thing I’d managed to do since leaving Lakeshore was dump my old phone and get a new one, with a new number.
My trouble with buying a new identity might have been because I didn’t have the connections here to find the right people. In Florida, I’d been staying in a woman’s shelter. I wasn’t the only one who wanted to disappear rather than hope I wouldn’t become a statistic. One of the employees quietly facilitated that for women who wanted it.
Here, everyone I asked looked at me like I had to be working for the police. No one wanted to admit to anything, and I wasn’t brave enough to go into the parts of Detroit where someone might. The one guy I had managed to find showed me product that looked like it’d only fool a cashier if you were underage and wanted to buy beer or cigarettes.
Every additional day I waited was one more day that the police might find me. Jarrod had even won over Dan with his sad story.
I had to leave my truck and get a new identity somewhere else. Staying with my truck any longer had become too great a risk.
I parked it on a street where half the houses were boarded up. If I were lucky, someone would see it and decide it’d be worth stealing. If and when it was found, that would provide an extra layer of confusion that could allow me the time to get a new identity.
I rifled through each drawer, taking out anything important that would fit in a duffle bag. It was shocking how much I didn’t have. Most of my belongings were cooking gear for the truck or too big to carry along like the portable heater I’d starved for weeks to be able to afford. I’d accumulated a few too many clothes to take along, but not even enough to fill up a small closet. I had a handwritten thank-you card from Nicole from her wedding and my dad’s old Bible. Nothing else mattered.
I climbed out of the back of my truck and slammed the door shut. I’d leave the back locked, but the front unlocked and the keys in the glove box.
I went around to the front of my truck and popped the glove box open.
A paper fluttered out.
The part of me that had learned to be neat to survive living in such a tight space couldn’t stand to leave it lying on the floor even if I was abandoning the truck. I picked it up.
It was the invitation to Janie’s school play. The smiling cat on the front looked like he was laughing at me. Words at the bottom that I hadn’t noticed before seemed to jump off the page.
Family and student party to follow. Please bring a dessert to share. No nuts or bananas allowed.
My duffle bag suddenly felt like I’d loaded it up with rocks, not clothes. I lowered it to the ground and gripped the invitation with both hands.
No nuts allowed.
The thing that I couldn’t figure out, that had been bothering me since Janie and I were almost run down by the car, tried to wriggle to the surface.
Her class had a picnic earlier this year, Dan had said when he called me about baking something for Janie’s play, and she almost ate a brownie with nuts in it because someone forgot and didn’t label them properly.
What were the odds that Janie would almost die from her nut allergy twice in such a short span of time when both her school and her family knew that she couldn’t eat them?
And then almost be run down by a car.
One near-death experience was a tragedy. Two near-death experiences could be a weird coincidence. Three near-death experiences made a pattern.
I slumped against the side of my truck. Janie’s questions about secrets might not have been only because she heard Dan telling someone he thought I was keeping secrets. She came to talk to me about secrets because I was someone who also had a secret. She’d been reaching out, too afraid to come right out and say anything after she’d been accused of lying.
She knew something—something someone made her promise to keep secret, but felt threatened enough by to kill her over. Janie had been the real target all along. Harold Cartwright had been the innocent collateral damage.
The police were looking in the wrong direction for the killer. Even if Dan convinced them it was someone trying to hurt him, they’d be looking in the wrong direction. They might not realize the true target until the killer succeeded in killing Janie. Even after that, they might continue to think it was about someone from Dan’s past wanting to get even with him. As a former undercover cop, he no doubt had many dangerous enemies.
I had to call Dan.
I pulled my phone out of my pocket. Then called myself every name I could think of and some I made up.
I didn’t have Dan’s phone number in my new phone. It’d been stored in my old phone. The one I’d tossed into a dumpster yesterday after buying this one.
Maybe there was another way to get his phone number. I opened the internet browser on my new phone and went to the 411-online phonebook. I typed in Dan’s name.
He wasn’t listed.
Claire might be. I changed my search for her name. No results.
Arg. Of course there wouldn’t be. Claire’s legal name wasn’t Claire Cartwright. I knew her as Claire Cartwright because I’d met her after her husband left her and she started using her maiden name again.
I pulled up Harold Cartwright’s obituary. VanDyke. Claire VanDyke.
I put her name into the 411 search. Michael and Claire VanDyke came up. I called the number. The phone rang six times before sending me to a message in Claire’s voice that sounded like it’d been recorded on a traditional landline answering machine. I left a message.
Her cell phone wasn’t listed.
And since I never thought I’d need it again, I’d thrown out the paper Alan Brooksbank gave me with Blake’s phone number on it.
I couldn’t call the police. All I had was a hunch. The Lakeshore police wouldn’t give out a detective’s number to some random, anonymous woman calling for it. They’d make me leave a message.
That might be too late. If the car that almost ran her down was intentional, the killer was getting desperate.
The only solution I could think of involved going back to the dumpster where I’d thrown my phone and digging around to see if it was still there. While I knew dumpster-diving was a thing some people did, rotten meat made me squeamish. The smell and the maggots and…
I swallowed hard and turned my mind away. Maybe I shouldn’t think about what I might find in the dumpster along with my phone. I put my truck into drive and headed back out onto the road.
The dumpster was in a part of Detroit near the airport, behind a pizza place. I’d chosen it because it
seemed low traffic, and I didn’t want to be spotted dumping my phone. Hopefully that meant I also wouldn’t be spotted trying to retrieve it.
I parked beside the dumpster, effectively blocking any garbage truck that came by to empty it. People died every year from dumpster diving. I wasn’t about to become one of them.
I took my last breath of clean air and climbed up into the dumpster. Flies buzzed up off the black garbage bags, disturbed by my entrance. My eyes watered and bile burned up into my throat.
Breathe through your mouth, I reminded myself.
But I’d have sworn that when I did that, I could taste the smell instead. At least if I threw up in here, I wouldn’t have to clean it up.
The dumpster was fuller than I remembered by a quarter. That meant my phone would be down a layer.
A dumpster wasn’t the best place for methodical sorting. I moved the bags of garbage from one side to the other, and then felt around in the clearing I’d made. Some of the bags tipped back into the hole.
This wasn’t going to work. I’d have to move the bags out and back in again. I hefted eight bags out. My shoulders and back spasmed, and the dumpster felt like it was swaying. It had to be from my lack of food. I hadn’t eaten anything since leaving Lakeshore yesterday.
I lifted two more bags. My phone still wasn’t in sight. Could it have tumbled down into the very bottom? The garbage was up above my knees. If I had to remove everything, I’d collapse first.
I stuck my hand down between the remaining bags and felt around. My fingers hit something squishy. I jerked back, and my hand came up covered in red goo.
“It’s probably pizza sauce or ketchup.” I spoke out loud to myself, hoping hearing the words would convince me.
I stared at my hand.
Ketchup. The red rectangle with the white label on Janie’s drawing had been a ketchup bottle. The thing that represented her great-grandpa’s birthday BBQ to Janie was the special ketchup that they always had.