But it is a mistake.
The minute I hit the sidewalk, I’m blindsided, football-tackled and pushed to the dark side of the building. I yelp once—a swallowed cry—then find myself looking up into Heath’s eyes. They glitter, catching the light from the street lamps lining the sidewalk behind us. Or maybe it’s the reflection from the sparkly cutout jack-o’-lanterns and ghosts tied to the lamps.
Heath snatches the iPad I’m clutching and tucks it into the back of his jeans.
“Is that why you’re running from me? Because of what you heard on that?” He’s in my face now, and I can see that even though he’s wiped most of Cerny’s blood off, a trace of it has settled into the creases around his eyes. The bloody crow’s-feet give him a demonic look.
“Please, Daphne,” he says. “Can’t you see that running’s not a possibility for you now? Too much has happened. What you’ve done, what I’ve done . . . we’ve gone too far. We can’t go back.”
I can’t answer. My throat feels used up, rusted out.
“We have to face this together. Can’t you see that I’m the one person in this world who understands you? I read you like a book from the first moment I met you. I read you, and I gave you everything you ever wanted. A hero, a rescuer, the strong, silent type, right out of a romance novel, who wouldn’t ask too many questions, who wouldn’t get too close. I played it perfectly and you believed me. And now we’re a team. I know you. And now, finally, you know me.”
I don’t answer, and I can tell it frustrates him.
“I was going to tell you about who I was, but I wanted to do it on my own terms. That’s why I took the extra key from the Nissan. I couldn’t take the chance of you running away. But then Cecelia wouldn’t let up, constantly trying to meet with you, acting like the two of you were friends. I told her to stop—that it was my story to tell—but she wouldn’t listen. She was jealous of you, how much I loved you. She was going to tell you everything just to spite me.”
He lets go of me and rakes his fingers through his hair. The crazy thing, the thing that doesn’t make an ounce of sense, that the most astute therapist in the world couldn’t untangle, is that even after all I know, I still have the impulse to comfort him.
“I’m smarter than this,” he says. “I swear, I just miscalculated.” His eyes are wide pools of innocence. I wonder how he makes them look that way, how he fakes it so well. “You have to believe—I only killed the other ones, the other girls, because I wanted to prove to Cerny that he had hurt me. I thought it would make him feel guilty when I told him how he’d driven me to do it. But the man has no remorse. He didn’t care, not about the girls, not about the fact that telling you about my past had to be handled very delicately.”
The girls.
Girls, plural . . .
“You’re lying, Heath.” My voice is shaky. “You told him you wanted him to help you adapt what you did. Make it SUSTAINABLE.”
He claps a hand over my mouth, but I claw it away.
“You didn’t kill anyone to prove a point to Dr. Cerny. You did it because you enjoy it.”
His eyes widen. “Okay, yes. Yes. See how bad he messed me up? Do you see? But it doesn’t matter, does it? The bottom line is, Cerny couldn’t cure me. I am who I am. We are who we are.”
“What do you mean, ‘We are who we are’?”
“What you did,” he says, like I’m unbelievably dense. “What you had to do to survive. It was just like me.”
“What I did? You mean . . . hiding Chantal’s medicine?”
He’s cocked his head and is regarding me with an amused expression.
“No, Daphne. I mean what you did to Holly Idlewine.”
“What I . . .”
“At the bar last week,” he continues. “You flipped her off, then gave the bartender your credit card. You told him to charge all Holly Idlewine’s drinks to you.”
He’s right. I did do that.
“That doesn’t prove anything,” I say weakly, but I know it doesn’t matter. He has been planning this day, this moment, for a long time. He is way ahead of me. I am outmatched in every way.
“You paid for all her drinks because you wanted her so completely smashed that when she stumbled out of Divine, you could easily drag her to your car. Put her in the trunk and drive her to some dark, isolated location.”
My lips part.
“A nothing piece of property so far out in the country, nobody would ever think to look there. That’s where you tied her up. Tortured her and killed her.”
I can no longer feel my fingers and toes. The electrical impulses in my skull have dulled to a low buzzing. It feels like my body is shutting down.
“They haven’t found her yet, and they won’t until I want them to. What they do know is a woman named Daphne Amos, a woman who was once questioned in the suspicious death of a fourteen-year-old girl in a state park in north Georgia, paid for Holly Idlewine’s drinks the same night she disappeared.”
He pulls me by the wrist into a hug, and around his shoulder I see Cerny’s silver Mercedes parked just a couple of feet away. It’s idling. Then Heath speaks again, low and soft.
“When they find this on the ground near her body, the case will be closed.”
I jerk back. He’s holding up my engagement ring. Cecelia’s ring. I feel like I’m having a heart attack. My hand dips toward my boot, fingers between the leather and wool, and I draw up the knife.
“No, no, no . . .” is all I can say. I am shaking and crying, swinging the knife in wild arcs.
He catches my wrist easily, wrenches the knife out of my grasp, and tosses it into the bushes beside the police station. I can’t stop crying—nose running and mixing with the tears—as he hustles me to the car.
“Don’t worry, Daphne,” he says once we’re locked in. His voice is soothing and he pulls the seatbelt across me. “If they find her with the ring, I’ll tell them that you were with me all night that night. That you couldn’t have kidnapped Holly or taken her to the woods and tied her up. That you couldn’t have done all those horrible things to her.” His face splits into a grin, but one so full of evil I cannot move. “You see? We can’t go back.”
Heath stops for gas on 515, at a place just south of Ellijay. It’s one of those shiny new mega-stations with endless rows of gleaming pumps and a combo convenience store and Ye Olde Donut Shoppe. And it’s hopping, even this late at night. Inside, I walk past a bank of cappuccino machines sandwiched between the sizzling hot-dog rollers and slushie station. I’m starving, but Heath’s got my purse with him in the car, and he hasn’t given me any money.
The ladies’ room is down a short corridor, a spacious, exceptionally clean single. He’s let me go alone—there’s no reason for him to follow me in there. If I run, he’ll just plant the ring and then tell the police I killed Holly Idlewine.
After I use the bathroom and wash up, I stare into the mirror. I remove my smudged glasses and splash water on my face, then wash my glasses. My face looks so normal—pink and healthy. I touch my cheeks. My skin is warm. I am still alive. Still breathing. Still able to think and to reason and to act.
I am still myself.
When I emerge from the bathroom, a yellowed old woman with a thick head of glossy chestnut hair and a purple terry tracksuit is waiting. A brown fake-crocodile purse is slung over her stick arm.
“Whew,” the woman says in her Marlboro-roughened voice. “Thank you, sugar. You’d think they’d have more than one potty in a place this big.”