I thought back to Cerny’s strange toast last night in the kitchen: I wish I were a girl again, half-savage and hardy, and free.
I took Wuthering Heights to the sofa and flipped the pages, the story coming back to me in bits and pieces. Mr. Earnshaw, appearing back at his home, Wuthering Heights, presents a surprise to his children, Catherine and Hindley. Heathcliff, a dark-skinned, dark-eyed Gypsy child who speaks gibberish. The interloper immediately sparks in Hindley an intense jealousy, as Hindley is a bully, racist, and overall dickbag. Catherine, on the other hand, is instantly smitten and sticks to Heathcliff like an imprinted duckling.
I read for a while, then let the book drop to the floor and stretched out on the sofa, my legs and lower back aching from the hike. I knew how the story ended, how Heathcliff and Catherine devoted their lives to loving, then destroying, each other. Emily Bront? may have been melodramatic, but she’d hit on something real. It was true—similar souls sought each other out. Damaged gravitated to damaged, the same way Heath and I had recognized ourselves in each other, then locked into our unshakable orbit. It was too bad the story ended so tragically. Too bad Heathcliff and Cathy couldn’t have just admitted that they belonged together.
Because surely they did belong together.
Sleep stole over me quickly. I woke sometime later, and the book was gone, returned to the Bront? section of the shelves. Whoever had done that had also left a bottle of water and a plate of small coconut-dusted cookies on a nearby table. I swung my feet down and chugged the water. In a daze, I headed for the front stairs. My legs felt like tree trunks, my head three sizes too big. Even after the nap, I still felt wrung out. Maybe it was the hike—or the fact that I’d told Glenys about the ranch. I checked the clock on the mantel in the front hall. Five after three. Great. In our room, the camera would be up and running again.
I climbed the stairs, thinking about Catherine’s and Heathcliff’s lovely doomed lives. About how good it had felt to tell Glenys about the Super Tramps and Chantal and Mr. Al while standing at the precipice of a mountain. Maybe there was a pattern to it all. Maybe the universe had brought me here because it knew what I needed—to be hardy and free, to finally let go of my burden and soar.
Friday, October 19
Evening
I’m standing in the middle of the road before it occurs to me that I’ve finally made it out of the woods. The sun is obscured by clouds, but I can feel the knife edge of twilight in the air. I know I still have a long way to go before I get to town.
There are no sounds—no car engines in the distance, no crunch of feet through the leaves. But it feels like there’s a hurricane whipping up in my head, so it’s possible I’m not hearing so well. I’m also panting like someone who’s never done a jumping jack. I failed to factor in the concentration it requires not to trip on a path studded with boulders and roots and hidden holes.
Part of me knows it’s not the exertion that’s getting to me, it’s the fear. Which is ironic. All those times I was charging around the track like a lunatic, I never considered the way fear could fill a person, weigh them down. I never knew fear had actual mass.
Suddenly I realize why the silence is bothering me so much. I thought the police were coming. I’ve been expecting them the whole time, but there are no sounds of cars or sirens. The police aren’t coming. They never were.
I take a minute to get my bearings—make sure I’m headed down, not sideways across the mountain or, God forbid, back up. I adjust the iPad in the back of my jeans and set off at a trot down the gravel road.
I’ll find the police myself.
Chapter Nine
Tuesday, October 16
Three Days Before
I decided all that stuff about the universe knowing what I needed was bullshit. The universe could go suck an egg; what I really needed was some Internet and a Domino’s pizza.
And an email from Annalise Beard telling me what she knew, if anything, about Heath’s past.
Not that it was going to be easy to hear, whatever it was she might have to say, but it was for the best. Getting Heath away from this weirdo doctor, this creepy mountain and ancient house, was in Heath’s best interest as well as mine. What I was doing was for us.
But it was Tuesday already. Three days since I’d gotten the Instagram message from her. And I was losing faith that I was going to be able to get into the car to retrieve the iPad. And if I did get to it, there was still the possibility that Annalise knew nothing. So what would I do then?
My brain raced. Like me, Heath was a loner. Not extremely so, just a little on the introverted side, and mostly focused on getting his career off the ground. He had friends, just not many older ones from his years at University of Georgia. That guy at Divine, the one in the bad suit, was one, but they hadn’t been roommates. I’d only met a roommate once—Evan Something-or-Other. Graham? Gilbert? If Annalise was a dead end, maybe I could track him down on Facebook or Instagram. Ask him if Heath had ever talked in his sleep.
I paced the length of the room. Baskens was getting to me, fraying my nerves and making me jumpy. When I first arrived, I was so run down from the nightmares, part of me had hoped Baskens would be the break I needed. But I didn’t know how to amble and piddle and lounge like a delicate Victorian lady. My body was used to the exhilarating busyness of dealing with clients, the daily analgesic of sprinting around a track until the copper taste filled my mouth and every bone in my body ached. The relentless quiet of this place was driving me insane.
I needed to find our car keys before I ended up strangling somebody.
After breakfast, I followed Heath down the stairs, then down the hallway that led to the kitchen. I heard the doctor usher him into his office and close the French doors behind them. I waited a few seconds, then, backtracking, inched closer to the glass doors to see if I could get a better view.
All that was visible was the anteroom of the office—a small, unfurnished nook that blocked any view of the doctor’s office beyond it. On the wall adjacent to the door, a row of metal hooks held multiple sets of keys, including the Nissan’s, which I recognized from the red-and-black Georgia Bulldogs fob. I pushed at the door, and it creaked open a couple of inches.
“How are you feeling this morning?” I heard Dr. Cerny say from the other side of the wall.
“Better,” Heath answered. “It’s not like I hadn’t anticipated the—”
His voice dipped in volume, and I couldn’t hear the rest of what he said. But it didn’t matter. I was here for the keys, not to eavesdrop on my fiancé’s therapy. I slipped through the open door and crept toward the hooks.
“Do you think having her here was really a good idea?” I heard the doctor say.
I froze. Who was he talking about? Me?
“It’s so funny to me”—Heath again—“the assumptions you people make, you doctors, that you know what’s best for the rest of us. You leave . . .” His voice lowered.
My God, he sounded so brusque. It seemed a little premature to have already developed such a combative relationship with the doctor. But maybe that’s how Cerny operated—maybe he encouraged bluntness in his patients. I lifted the keys gently, easily, off the hook and slid them into my pocket, then backed toward the door, tugging my sweater down to hide the bulge.
I slipped out the front door and headed around the side of the house. At the row of cars, I stopped beside the Nissan and unlocked the passenger’s-side door. Ducking in and shutting the door behind me, I reached under the floor mat. The iPad powered to life, and as the bars filled in, a thrill ran through me.
“Hi, you,” I crooned.