“Okay,” she said.
They sat there, looking past each other in the silence that followed. Then Annalise picked up the box of Theraflu from her tray and struggled briefly with the blister pack before popping two pills out. She swallowed them, chasing them with water. She sank back against the pillow. “I still need to tell you what happened …”
“Later,” Nick said. “Get some rest.”
“No,” she said. “I need to tell you now. While I have the nerve to do it.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
In the story Annalise told her uncle, she was dreaming that her phone was ringing and she was looking for it on the golf course, of all places. It was bright noon and she was the only one on the fairway, the only person she could see at all, in fact, as if she were the last person on earth. The phone continued to ring, insistent on being answered. She approached the green, walking across a sand trap, trying to follow the sound. Her phone seemed to be ringing from inside the hole, which had a limp red flag. She reached out toward the hole, and a sudden breeze made the red flag flap wildly—
She opened her eyes to find herself in Eric’s bedroom. It was dark and her phone was ringing somewhere on the floor. Just as she started to get out of bed, it stopped ringing. She sat on the edge of the bed, still woozy from the vodka, and looked back at Eric. He was lying facedown on the bed, his head turned away from her. He was still naked, while she had pulled on her T-shirt and panties. She looked across the room at Eric’s clock. It was 12:06 AM. They’d been asleep maybe an hour.
Her phone started ringing again, and now she registered the ring tone—“The Imperial March” from The Empire Strikes Back. Her father. Shit. She looked for her jeans on the floor and plucked her ringing phone out of the hip pocket, then hurried out of the bedroom into the hall and closed the door behind her so Eric wouldn’t wake up, wouldn’t hear her placating her father.
She took a breath and answered. “Hi, Daddy,” she said, pacing the hallway.
“Thank God,” her father said. “Moosh, I’ve been calling you.”
Annalise groaned. Her father’s insistence on calling her “mouse” in Dari—something his own mother, whom Annalise had never known, had called him when he was younger—was beyond embarrassing at this point, and she made a point of protesting whenever he used that term.
“Where are you?” he said. “Are you still at Eric’s?”
“No,” she said. She passed Eric’s parents’ bedroom—they were in Las Vegas. “I’m over at Kit’s house. I told Mom I was going to sleep over?”
“Moosh, listen to me—”
Annalise groaned again.
“Annalise!” He snapped her name in a way that made her stop pacing. Her father rarely spoke with such urgency and … was that fear? “Your phone says you’re at Eric’s. Are you still there? It’s okay, just tell me.”
Anger flared in her briefly. Your phone says you’re at Eric’s. “Did you put spyware on my phone again?” she said.
“Moosh, please.”
She paused, closed her eyes. “Yeah, I’m at Eric’s.”
“Okay,” her father said. “Your mother and I are coming to get you. We—”
“Daddy, please,” she said. “Don’t do that, I’ll … I’ll come home—”
“No,” her father said. “Listen to me, Annalise. We have to leave. All of us. Tonight.”
“Leave? What do you … where are we going?”
“To your Uncle Nick’s. Can you put me on speaker?”
“I … yeah, okay,” Annalise said, and she held her phone away and tapped the icon so her father’s voice was now on speaker. “What—”
His voice was tinny on the speaker, echoing in the dark hallway. “You need to disable location tracking on your phone,” he said. “I’ll walk you through it.”
“What’s going on, Dad?”
“There’s no time, Annalise,” he said. “I need you to do this.”
She stood in the hallway, staring at her phone. “You’re scaring me,” she said.
“Good,” he said. “I’m sorry, but I need you to pay attention. Go into your settings on your phone, okay? Then you—”
“I know how to disable location tracking, Dad.”
“You need to do it for everything. No apps at all, nothing. Now.”
“I just—Jesus! Okay, okay, I’m doing it.” She started tapping. In fifteen seconds she was finished. “Done,” she said. “Now tell me what’s going on. We’re going to Uncle Nick? Where does he even live?”
“North Carolina,” he said. “In a town called Cashiers, in the mountains. Your mother and I will come pick you up soon, maybe half an hour. Be outside, okay? We might walk over there, so wait for us on Eric’s patio.”
“You might walk here?”
“Someone’s watching the house. We can’t drive—”
“Someone is watching our house?” she said. “What the fuck, Daddy?”
Eric’s bedroom door cracked open, and Eric looked out. What’s going on? he mouthed.
She waved him away, then turned the speaker on her phone back off and held it up to her ear. “Just call the police!” she said to her father.
“I can’t do that, honey,” her father said.
Eric walked into the hall, wearing a pair of boxers. “Are you in trouble or something?” he asked.
“Shut up,” she hissed at him.
“Annalise?” her father said on the phone.
“Not you,” she said to her father. She glared at Eric and waved him back toward the room. He shrugged and rolled his eyes and went back into the bedroom, closing the door behind him.
“What did you do, Dad?” she said. Her father’s job as a contractor took him all around the world, and he dealt with lots of different people—some of them less than savory, as her best friend Kit would say. In the back of her mind ever since she was thirteen, she had this imagined scenario where the FBI or the IRS or some other alphabet agency would come to arrest her father for cheating on his taxes or bending some sort of business regulation to the breaking point. Her father was always looking for corners to cut, for the next easy deal, the next big pile of money. More often than not it eluded him, but he was successful just often enough to whet his appetite for more. And, as he was fond of pointing out, to keep her and her mother in the lifestyle to which they had become accustomed.
But this was different. Now her father was asking her to turn off her phone’s location settings and meet him and her mom after midnight at her boyfriend’s house, a boyfriend her father either ignored or vaguely disliked, depending on his mood, all so they could escape some unseen stalker and go see Uncle Nick, her father’s older brother whom he never spoke about and whom she had never met. And he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—call the police.
“Annalise,” her father said, ignoring her question about what he had done, “just in case, if you have to leave without us, you need to go to a public storage place on Benjamin Road by the airport and get something out of a locker. It’s a backpack. There’s cash in there and some clothes. There’s also a piece of paper that’s folded up with the cash. Take that paper to your uncle. You have to give it to him—no one else. The locker number is twelve and the code is your mother’s birthday reversed. You can use the cash to help you get to your uncle. You fly to Atlanta and then take a bus up to north Georgia or South Carolina; you can find your way to Cashiers from there.”
She shook her head. “I don’t even understand what you’re saying. And I’m not going anywhere without you. You’re coming here, right?”
“We are,” he said. “Just being careful. Here’s your mother.”
There was a fumbling sound, and then she heard her mother say, “Hi, baby.” At the sound of her mother’s voice, something in Annalise broke and she began crying, hard jags like her confusion and fear were trying to claw their way out of her.
“It’s okay, baby,” her mother said, which only made Annalise cry harder. “It’s going to be all right. I’m with your father,
and we’ll both be with you very soon. Is Eric there with you?”
Annalise wiped her nose on her T-shirt. “Yeah,” she said. “Yes, he is.”
“Stay with him. We’ll be there soon. Here’s your father.”
The same fumbling sound, and then her father said, “One more thing, about your uncle. If you get there before we do, he lives off of Whiteside Cove Road outside of Cashiers. Number 1066. And make sure it’s really your Uncle Nick. Ask him how old I was when I fell off the roof.”
“You fell off a roof?”
“No. That’s the trick. He fell off the roof when he was ten. Only your uncle will know that story.”
“This is the most bizarre phone call I have ever had,” Annalise said.
Her father chuckled. “I love you, moosh.”
“Love you too, Daddy.”
“We’ll see you soon. Wait outside with Eric.” He hung up.
Annalise stood in the dark hallway, staring at her phone, until Eric poked his head back out of his room. “What was that all about?” he said. “Hey, are you crying?”
“Something’s wrong,” she said. “My dad and mom—something happened. They’re coming over here to pick me up.”
“Shit,” Eric said. “Busted.”
“You’re not listening. It’s not that. There’s … someone’s watching our house. My dad says we have to leave town.”
“Wait,” Eric said. “Someone’s watching your house? You don’t mean, like, a house sitter, right? Like surveillance or something?”
She nodded. “Dad sounded scared. He never sounds scared.”
Eric frowned. “Why doesn’t your dad just call the cops?”
“He said he can’t.”
Eric’s frown deepened. “Why not?”
Annalise shook her head. He wasn’t listening to her—didn’t he get that something was really wrong? And yet his questions made perfect sense. Her father, as usual, had been long on drama, short on details.
“You’re shivering,” Eric said, and he hugged her. Annalise leaned her head against him and closed her eyes. Her eyes filled with tears. What was wrong with her? “It’s okay,” Eric said, rocking her gently. “Are your parents really coming?”
She nodded against his chest. “That’s what they said. They wanted me to wait for them outside, on your patio. They’re walking over from our house.”
Eric didn’t say anything for a moment, and Annalise wondered if he was trying to figure out some smartass thing to say. She loved him, but God, he could be such a boy sometimes.
“Then let’s go out there and wait for them,” he said. “And then we can figure out what to do.” He leaned back to look at her face. “Okay?”
She nodded, relieved but also feeling guilty about thinking of him as a boy. Then she reached up on her tiptoes and kissed him. “Okay,” she said.
They got dressed and went downstairs, through the kitchen—Annalise saw the empty shot glasses on the kitchen counter, and her stomach roiled—and then they were out the sliding glass door and on the stone patio. It was dark, but the tree frogs were singing up a storm. Past the trees at the edge of the backyard was the golf course, the vast empty stretch of the fairways lying under a quarter moon. She sat down on a chaise longue that had a good view of the seventh hole, and Eric sat next to her on the same chair. She scooted over to make room. They lay back in the seat together, Eric with his arm across the back of Annalise’s shoulders, both looking out at the golf course, waiting for her parents to arrive.
ANNALISE WOKE UP suddenly. She was wet, covered in dew—in Florida at night the temp dropped but the humidity shot up, leaving a fine lace of water on everything. The chaise longue was damp, as was Eric, who lay next to her snoring softly. The house behind them was dark.
She pulled her phone out of her hip pocket and blinked her eyes clear of sleep. It was 1:27 in the morning. Panic stabbed her. Her father had called over an hour ago. Where was he?
She looked out at the golf course. Across the fairway, behind the mansions that fronted the golf course, was her house. She couldn’t see it from here, but it was close. Then, as she watched, where it had been dark just a second ago there was now a flicker, like a candle moving among the trees. No, it was bigger than that, a ruddy orange glow. It wasn’t a streetlight; it looked more like someone had started a—
She bolted up and out of the chaise longue, sprinting across the golf course. Behind her Eric called her name, but by that point she was already halfway across the fairway. It was the strangest run she had ever made in her life—the night air, the singing of the tree frogs, the wide-open fairways where, like in her earlier dream, she was the only person in sight. Her pulse beat in her throat, her lungs drawing in air and forcing it out. Then she reached the far side of the fairway and ran across the street without looking, right into the Andersons’ yard. She went around the side of the Andersons’ house and in their backyard skirted the blue glow of their swimming pool, heading for the gate in the privacy fence that separated their yard from her own. She could see a fiery glow reflected off the leaves of the trees above her.
When she opened the gate, the heat rolled over her first, and then the noise. It was as if her house were roaring. Her kitchen and den were already aflame, the windows like doorways to hell. Thick smoke boiled out the back door, which was open. She stood staring, arms slack at her sides, her brain refusing to process what she was seeing. Her home was on fire. She did not see her parents. “Dad!” she screamed. “Mom!”
That was when she saw the two men in her driveway. Her house had a side-entry garage, so she had a clear line of sight from the back gate all the way down the driveway to the street. The two men stood in the shadows, looking at her house on fire as if watching it on television. She couldn’t see them clearly, but then part of the roof of the garage collapsed and flames shot up, throwing light on their faces. One of them had short blond hair and a sharp, stubbled jaw. Neither man made a move toward the house. Behind them, down on the street, she could see a car idling, a four-door sedan, someone in the driver’s seat. “Hey!” she screamed. But the two men gave no sign of hearing her over the noise of the burning house. They walked down the driveway to the idling car, opened the back doors, and got in. As soon as they closed the doors, the car took off, vanishing from sight.
SITTING IN HER uncle’s bed, Annalise drank half a glass of water, her throat sore and dry. She had told him everything except the part about the paper. It was still folded up and safely behind her driver’s license in the sleeve on the back of her phone—she had checked earlier when her uncle had gone to make her tea. She lay back in the bed, feeling spent. Her uncle sat brooding in the chair by the window. When he spoke, she jumped, startled.
“Did you talk to the police?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I didn’t wait,” she said. “Maybe I should have. Maybe if I’d —”
Her uncle cut her off, although his tone was kind. “Your parents were dead,” he told her. “Those men probably set the fire to cover up the crime, at least for long enough to give them a chance to get away. You couldn’t have done anything, Annalise.”
She didn’t know how to respond to that, so she just sipped more water. A wave of fatigue swept over her. The Theraflu must have finally started working.
“What did you do next?” he asked.
“Eric drove me to the storage place,” she said. “There was a backpack in the locker, like Dad said. It had a roll of cash in twenties and … some clothes. They were Dad’s.” For a moment she felt as if she would cry, and then she didn’t. “Then Eric took me to the airport and I bought a plane ticket to Atlanta, worked my way up here.”
“What about Eric?”
“He stayed home,” she said. “He offered to come with me, but I said no. I didn’t want him to get in trouble for skipping school and just taking off. His parents can be kind of psycho. I think he was relieved, to be honest.”
Her uncle nodded, thinking. “Where’s your backpack?” he asked.
“I lost it,” she said. She was fading, but the shame cut through her exhaustion. “Somebody stole it from me. When I got off the plane in Atlanta, I was looking at my phone for a way to get to Cashiers, and someone snagged the backpack. I put it down for a second and then it was gone.” She shook her head, angry. “I’d taken the cash out of it, thank God. All that was left in it was some of Dad’s clothes.”
“That must have hurt,” her uncle said softly.
She nodded, then closed her eyes and rode another wave of fatigue.
“How’d you get here from Atlanta?” he asked.
“Took a bus to Gainesville,” she said, her eyes still closed. “I went into a hardware store across from the bus station, bought a big knife. Felt like I needed some kind of protection.”
“Next time buy a hammer,” he said. The comment was so odd that she opened her eyes to stare at him. “Won’t look as suspicious and it’s easier to carry,” he explained, then gave her a little smile. “What happened next?”
She closed her eyes again. She was so sleepy. “Called a taxi to take me to Clayton, then another one up here. Tried looking you up in the phone book at a gas station, but I couldn’t find you listed. My phone was dead. Cell service sucked anyway. But Dad gave me your address, so I looked at a map on the gas station wall. I found it. Then I walked.”
She couldn’t open her eyes, but she heard her uncle say one last thing. “You were brave,” he said. She was too worn out to process anything else, but as she slipped away, she held on to the understanding in her uncle’s voice, the kindness. For the first time in three days, she felt safe.
A small voice deep in her mind said, He’s just a history teacher. Then she struggled feebly to grasp another thought that lay just out of reach. Before she could, she slept.
CHAPTER NINE
Nick watched Annalise for a few minutes as she slept, then quietly got up, picked up the food tray with the soup bowl and plate, and took it to the kitchen. Then he went back to the bedroom, made sure Annalise was still sleeping, turned off the light, and closed the door.
A Fire in the Night Page 6