“I don’t think that’s true,” Abby said. “Hank’s dead, and I sound like a lunatic, telling this story. Today you’ll tell me that it will all work out, but tomorrow? Then the charges come. And you’ll promise me that it’s still not a threat because a good attorney will work it out, but I’m not sure. Hank Bauer of Coastal Claims and Investigations was murdered over a car accident involving a girl from Hammel College and a guy from Brighton who is already dead? That’s going to keep me out of jail?”
“If it’s the truth, it will,” Meredith said, and Abby smiled grimly. She was watching the side-view mirror, looking for police cars; her scratched and bruised face stared back at her. She reached up and pulled a pine needle from her hair.
“Get started on proving it,” she said, “and then I’ll consider coming in. Talk to Shannon Beckley, talk to Sam at that salvage yard, and you can verify my movements through the day. That’s worth something. Then work that scene right. Look for bullets, look for damage to the generator, get them to run toxicology tests on Hank’s blood that will find anything unusual. Get some forensics expert to see if he can tell whether he was tied up. Most important? Find out whose phone matters so much that people will kill over it.”
She didn’t say that she had the phone. All Abby understood so far about the phone was that if she’d given it to the kid last night, she’d certainly be dead by now. She wasn’t inclined to hand it off to anyone else just yet.
“When I call you next,” Abby said, “you can tell me what progress you’ve made. Then we’ll talk about me coming in.”
“This is a suicide move, Abby,” Meredith said, and he was angry now. Fine. Let him be angry. Abby just needed him to do the work.
“Two people have been murdered over that accident already,” Abby said. “I was supposed to be the third. I’m not inclined to make my location known to the world right now.”
“Even if you did get charged, which shouldn’t happen if you’re telling me a legit story, then you’re safer with us than on the run, hiding from killers and cops.”
“He said he has friends in jail.”
“We’ll have you in protective custody.”
“He said some of those friends are in uniforms.”
“This is insane. If there is anything to what you’re saying, then we’ll find plenty of evidence to support it, and we’ll do that fast.”
“See, I don’t like the way you phrased that. If there’s anything to what I’m saying. Already, you’re skeptical.”
“That’s my job.”
“And that’s why I called you,” Abby said. “To give you a head start doing your job. I’ll be in touch.”
“Abby, damn it, if you—”
She disconnected, powered down her phone, and stepped out of the Tahoe. She put the phone just beneath the front tire, backed up over it, pulled out of the service plaza, and got back onto the Maine turnpike. She drove north, toward where the towns were smaller and the woods were darker.
26
Blinks are coming.
They’re not all the way there yet, but not far off either. Not impossible, certainly. Tara has worked on them with ferocious intensity, and while she hasn’t succeeded, something about her eye motion feels different. It’s promising, at least, a sensation like a door being forced open, just like when she was in the basement of that house on London Street.
She thinks it’s an upward motion. She tries to blink, she demands that her eyelids lower... and while they do not obey, her focus seems to shift. A small difference, and a dizzying sensation, but she’s almost certain she’s looking upward. Her eyes are so damn dry that it’s hard to tell, though. They’re dry even though they constantly leak with tears at the corners. People dab the tears away from time to time, but people also avoid the kind of direct, hard stare that could tell her if indeed she’s making any progress here. The motion she thinks she’s achieving is so slight that thorough scrutiny would be required to observe it. In the early hours, people would look hard into her eyes, searching for her as if she were submerged in dark water. Shannon. Dr. Pine. The strange boy in the black baseball cap — his scrutiny might have been the most intense of all, actually.
Those deep stares are rare now, though. Everyone has become more evasive, as if they’re fearful of Tara’s gaze, as if a coma is contagious. Or embarrassed by it, as if her eyes are a mirror offering an unflattering image.
If anyone would look hard now, though, they would see that she is close to blinking. As close as you can be without succeeding, and she feels like that should be noticeable. If Shannon would just pay attention, she would notice. Tara is almost certain of this. But Shannon is immersed in a phone call, and she seems concerned.
She’s holding her cell phone to her ear with her left hand and a ballpoint pen hovering above a notepad in her right, and her all-business attitude just crumbled with whatever has been said. Tara watches her face and feels a cold and certain assurance that this is the inevitable call that means the decision has been made. They are going to end her life. If life was what you called this frozen purgatory. Then Shannon speaks, and Tara realizes that it has nothing to do with her at all.
“She might have killed someone? The same woman I spoke to? Abby Kaplan, yes, that was her name, but what in the world...” She stops, clearly interrupted.
Tara is trying to follow the conversation, but it’s confusing — Abby Kaplan was one of the two strangers who’d visited her. Older than the second one, the one who pretended to be Justin Loveless and stared into Tara’s eyes like a hunter looking through a scope. That man seems right for a murderer; Abby Kaplan does not. Abby Kaplan is supposed to be part of her team, someone to help. The college hired her.
Top-notch recruiting, Hammel, Tara thinks, put that one in your brochures. She wants to laugh, and even though she can’t, it is still a pleasant sensation. Terror is often present, and frustration is constant, but humor is beginning to appear now and then to leaven these, as if her brain has tired of the relentless sorrow. She sometimes thinks that if she could simply communicate her mere existence, the rest could be endured. She could learn to have a life with some pleasure, then. Not the life she’d imagined, of course, but still one worth living. If they just knew that she was in here. But without that...
“Her own boss?” Shannon says into the phone. “Are you kidding me? I just... no, listen, I don’t give a damn about how Hammel is going to find a better firm, what does that even mean? Your first hire just killed her boss, and now you’ll admit that you could have done better?”
Bless you, Shannon, Tara thinks.
The pen descends to the notepad, but no words are written, and Shannon’s mouth screws tight. Then she says, “I know I’m not a police officer, that’s not a revelatory bit of information, but I still possess common sense, and maybe I should talk to the police, don’t you think?”
Shannon lifts the ballpoint pen away from the pad and clicks it rapidly while she listens. The sound seems large to Tara; something about that small click embeds in her brain in a different way than other, louder things. Why was that?
Suddenly, Tara’s thumb twitches.
Stunned, she tries to do it again, without success. But... it just moved. She is positive of that. Now that her attention is on it and she can’t replicate the feat, though, the sensation begins to feel false, a phantom movement, a cruel illusion. And yet, for an instant, she’d been certain. It came from the sound, almost, from watching Shannon click that pen and hearing the accompanying sound and then it was as if her muscle memory had fired and Tara had mimicked the gesture.