The desk clerk. Jesus. Dea seriously regretted the hundred bucks she’d given him.
“Connor,” Dea said, anxiety prickling in her stomach. “If she found us—”
“That means you can be found,” Kate interrupted her. “Exactly. I don’t want to waste your time.”
“What do you want?” Connor asked. His voice was hard, and he looked hard, too: his face chiseled out of gray light, like a stranger’s.
Kate leaned forward, elbows to knees. “I told you. I want the truth.” The weirdest thing was that Dea believed her. “Look, Connor, I understand why you’ve been avoiding me. Shit, your uncle tried to have me run out of Fielding.” Something flashed in her eyes, a momentary anger that made Kate look unexpectedly older. “But I don’t care about your uncle. You may think I don’t care about your family, that I’ve made myself a pest—”
“I don’t think that,” Connor interjected. “I know that.”
Kate smiled faintly. “Fair. But I do care. I care about the victims.” Connor flinched when she said victims, as if he still wasn’t used to hearing his mother and brother described that way. Her voice got softer. “I care about your mom. I care about your little brother. And I care about you, too.” This made Connor look up. Kate shrugged. “You were a victim. Not in the same way. But definitely a victim.”
Connor’s eyes were hard to read. His mouth started moving, as if he was having to chew up his words before saying them. “So . . . you don’t think I did it?”
“I know you didn’t do it.” Kate paused, letting that sink in. “That’s why I’m writing this book. This case should never have gone cold. Living witness, closed crime scene, likely committed by someone the victims knew. Someone screwed up big time. I want to know who, and why.”
Connor looked away. “It’s over,” he said. “What’s done is done. What’s the point?”
“The point,” Kate said, “is that your family deserves answers. You deserve answers.” She hesitated. “Don’t you want to know?”
Connor turned away abruptly and moved to the window. For a second he stood there without speaking. Finally, he turned around again. “All right,” he said at last. “What do you want from me?”
Kate set her coffee by her feet and spread her hands. “Just to talk,” she said. “Take me through it. Tell me what you remember. Help me, Connor. I can help you, too.” Her eyes flicked to Dea. “Looks like you two could use it.”
In the silence that followed, Dea found herself hoping that Connor would say yes. She realized that she trusted Kate implicitly, now that she’d met her—believed in her, too, though she didn’t really see how Kate could help them. Maybe just by finding out the truth, for Connor’s sake. So the nightmares would stop.
The idea flashed: Did that mean the monsters would stop, too?
Outside, Dea heard the muffled sound of voices. It took a moment for her brain to bring them into focus, but then she stood up, her heart rocketing into her mouth, her body high-wired on alert.
The clerk was babbling excuses. “They paid cash, I had no idea they were in trouble, I never would’ve let them in. Don’t tell my boss, okay?”
“My uncle,” Connor said, even before he turned back to the window to confirm. He yanked the curtains closed all the way, leaning against them, as if that would keep the police from finding them. “My uncle,” he repeated, staring at Dea with a look of pure panic. A second later, someone pounded against the door and Connor flinched.
“Connor? Connor, open up. I know you’re in there.”
Kate was on her feet. “You,” she said in a low voice, pointing at Dea, then jerking her thumb toward the bathroom. “Window. Now.”
Connor cleared his throat and spoke up, so he could be heard through the door. “One second. Jesus Christ. Stop shouting.” Casually, as if running off to some godforsaken motel were totally normal. As if his uncle had woken him early on a Saturday.
“Connor, I’m serious.” The door shook on its hinges.
“Now,” Kate repeated in a whisper, snapping her fingers in Dea’s direction. Dea cast one look at Connor. He nodded, mouthed Go. She grabbed the envelope of cash from the bedside table and stuffed it in her waistband.
The door handle rattled.
“I’m putting my boxers on. Give me a minute.” Connor directed his words to the men on the other side of the door.
She didn’t bother with the shoes—she could barely walk in them anyway, much less run. She slipped into the bathroom and closed the door just as the cops poured into the motel room: rapid-fire voices; walkie-talkie static; Connor’s uncle’s voice, loud and outraged. “What were you thinking?” he kept saying.
And the phrase, endlessly repeated, like a terrible drumbeat: “Where is she? Where is she, Connor?”
Kate was talking over everyone, trying to be heard. “It was my fault. I thought if I could get finally get Connor one-on-one . . .”
There was only one way out: a small, dirt-encrusted window just above the toilet, its frame warped from years of sweltering summertime heat. Dea leaned against the window frame. For a second, it stuck, and she experienced a moment of total fear, full-body panic, like being caught again in the stifling mouth of airless sand.
She pushed. Outside the door, the voices crested and changed melodies, triumphant and terrifying: “The shoes. Look at these shoes. She’s here somewhere. Find her.”
Find her.
The window released. She shoved it open, striking out the screen with a palm. It landed with a clatter. She doubted that anyone had heard, but it wouldn’t matter anyway: in a few seconds, they would find her. Already, she could hear voices coalescing, massing around a single word: bathroom.
Find her. Bathroom.
She climbed up on the toilet and went headfirst through the window, into the cold gray air, struggling momentarily to fit her hips through the frame. She fell the last foot to the pavement, keeping her head protected, skinning her arms and elbows. She barely felt it. She was on her feet. The ground was freezing but she didn’t feel that, either.
She’d emerged at the back of the motel, cluttered with Dumpsters and accumulated trash. A narrow spit of pavement ran up against bare fields, glittering coldly in the new day. Through a line of thin trees, she saw rundown houses, mobile homes, a bunch of rusted cars perched on cinderblocks. Beyond them, she knew, would be more fields, more farms, more woods and hiding places.
She ran.
TWENTY-ONE
She wouldn’t get very far and she knew it. She wasn’t in great shape—she never had been, because of her heart—and her feet were cut up and swollen with cold. She was cold. Once she stopped running, she was freezing. Her nose ran and her eyes stung. The wind felt like it was cutting her straight down the middle.
Still, she managed to evade the cops all morning. She stuck to the woods whenever she could; when she couldn’t, she cut across backyards and ducked under laundry lines where towels swelled like puffed-up sails, always staying off the roads. When she was so cold she thought she might die, she found an abandoned Volvo and climbed inside to get warm for a bit, stuffing her feet into the holes in the upholstery until feeling returned to her toes.
She wasn’t thinking about leaving Connor behind, or how she would reach him, or what would happen to her next. If she began worrying, she would lose hope. She focused instead on her immediate problems: she needed shoes, a jacket, and a hat, or she would die out here.
It was risky, but she decided to stop in the next town she came to: Sawyerville, probably four times the size of Fielding, a dumpy cluster of bars and big-box chain stores. Shoes first. Her toes had lost all feeling again, and she was worried that she might get frostbite and end up having to amputate with a penknife like she’d seen someone stranded in an avalanche do once on TV. She stopped at a Lady Foot Locker—not her first choice for style, but she was in no position to be choosy.