She made herself sit up straight. She punched the thick white buttons on the radio. She twisted the dial back and forth. All she found were sermons and farm reports and country music, but not the good kind; the kind that made you want to stab a pencil into your ear.
Andy opened her mouth and screamed as loud as she could.
It felt good, but she couldn’t scream for the rest of her life.
At some point, she would have to get some sleep. The five-and-a-half-hour drive from Belle Isle had been draining enough. So far, the drive from Carrollton had added another four and a half hours because of traffic, which Andy seemed pre-ordained to find no matter which route she took. It was almost three p.m. Except for zonking out for a few hours in her apartment and the catnap in the Walmart parking lot, she hadn’t really slept since she got up for her dispatch shift two days ago. During that time, Andy had survived a shooting, watched her mother get injured, agonized outside of the surgical suite, freaked out over a police interrogation and killed a man, so as these things went, it was no wonder that she felt like she wanted to vomit and yell and cry at the same time.
Not to mention that her bladder was a hot-water bottle sitting inside of her body. She had stopped only once since leaving the storage unit, pulling onto the shoulder of the highway, hiding between the open front and back car doors, waiting for traffic to clear, then squatting down to relieve herself in the grass because she was terrified to leave the Reliant unattended.
$240,000
Andy couldn’t leave that kind of cash in the car while she ran into Burger King, and taking the suitcase inside would be like carrying a neon sign for somebody to rob her. What the hell was Laura doing with that kind of cash? How long had it taken for her to save it?
Was she a bank robber?
The question was only a little crazy. Being a bank robber would explain the money, and it jibed with the D.B. Cooper joke on the Canada ID and maybe even the gun in the glove box.
Andy’s heart pinged at the thought of the gun.
Here was the problem: bank robbers seldom got away with their crimes. It was a very high risk for a very low reward, because the FBI was in charge of all investigations that had to do with federally insured funds. Andy thought the law’s origins had something to do with Bonnie and Clyde or John Dillinger or the government just basically making sure that people knew their money was safe.
Anyway, she couldn’t see her mother pulling on a ski mask and robbing a bank.
Then again, before the shooting at the diner, she couldn’t see her mom knifing a kid in the neck.
Then again—again—Andy could not see her reliable, sensible mother doing a lot of the crazy shit that Laura had done in the last thirty-six hours. The hidden make-up bag, the key behind the photograph, the storage unit, the Thom McAn box.
Which brought Andy to the photo of toddler Andy in the snow.
Here was the Lifetime Movie question: Had Andy been kidnapped as a child? Had Laura seen a baby left alone in a shopping cart or unattended on a playground and decided to take her home?
Andy glanced in the rearview mirror. The shape of her eyes, the same shape as Laura’s, told her that Laura was her mother.
The Polaroids showed Laura so badly beaten that her bottom lip was split open. Maybe Jerry Randall was an awful man. Maybe back in 1989, he was beating Laura, and she snapped and took Andy on the run with her, and Jerry had been looking for them ever since.
Which was a Julia Roberts movie. Or a Jennifer Lopez movie. Or Kathy Bates. Or Ashley Judd, Keri Russell, Ellen Page . . .
Andy snorted.
There were a lot of movies about women getting pissed off about men beating the shit out of them.
But the Polaroids showed that her mother had in fact had the shit beaten out of her, so maybe that wasn’t so far off base.
Andy found herself shaking her head.
Laura hadn’t said he can trace you. She’d said they.
Going by the movies, they generally meant evil corporations, corrupt presidents or power-hungry tech billionaires with unlimited funds. Andy tried to play out each scenario with her mother at the center of some vast conspiracy. And then she decided she should probably stop using Netflix as a crime sourcebook.
The Florence exit was up. Andy couldn’t squat on the highway again. She hadn’t had lunch because she couldn’t bear to eat another hamburger in another car. The part of her brain that was still capable of thinking told her that she could not make the thirty-hour drive straight through to Idaho without sleep. Eventually, she would have to stop at a hotel.
Which meant that, eventually, she would have to figure out what to do with the money.
Her hand had pushed down the blinker before she could stop it. She glided off the Florence exit. Adrenaline had kept Andy going for so long that there was hardly anything left to move her. There were signs off the exit for six different hotels. She took a right at the light because it was easier. She coasted to the first motel because it was the first motel. Worrying about safety and cleanliness were luxuries from her former life.
Still, her heart started pounding as she got out of the Reliant. The motel was two stories, a squat, concrete design from the seventies with an ornate balcony railing around the top floor. Andy had backed crookedly into the parking space so that the rear of the station wagon never left her sight. She clutched the make-up bag in her hand as she walked into the lobby. She checked the flip phone. Laura had not called. Andy had depleted the battery by half from constantly checking the screen.
There was an older woman at the front desk. High hair. Tight perm. She smiled at Andy. Andy glanced back at the car. There were huge windows all around the lobby. The Reliant was where she had left it, unmolested. She didn’t know if she looked weird or normal swiveling her head back and forth, but at this point, Andy didn’t care about anything but falling into a bed.
“Hey there,” the woman said. “We got some rooms on the top floor if you want.”
Andy felt the vestiges of her waking brain start to slip away. She’d heard what the woman had said, but there was no sense in it.
“Unless you want something on the bottom floor?” The woman sounded dubious.
Andy was incapable of making a decision. “Uh—” Her throat was so dry that she could barely speak. “Okay.”
The woman took a key from a hook on the wall. She told Andy, “Forty bucks for two hours. Sixty for the night.”
Andy reached into the make-up bag. She peeled off a few twenties.
“Overnight, then.” The woman handed back one of the bills. She slid the guestbook across the counter. “Name, license plate, make and model.” She was looking over Andy’s shoulder at the car. “Boy, haven’t seen one of those in a long time. They make those new in Canada? Looks like you just drove it off the lot.”
Andy wrote down the car’s information. She had to look at the license plate three times before she got the correct combination of numbers and letters.
“You okay, sweetheart?”
Andy smelled French fries. Her stomach grumbled. There was a diner connected to the motel. Red vinyl booths, lots of chrome. Her stomach grumbled again.
What was more important, eating or sleeping?
“Hon?”
Andy turned back around. She was clearly expected to say something.
The woman leaned across the counter. “You okay, sugar?”
Andy struggled to swallow. She couldn’t be weird right now. She didn’t need to make herself memorable. “Thank you,” was the first thing that came out. “Just tired. I came from . . .” She tried to think of a place that was far from Belle Isle. She settled on, “I’ve been driving all day. To visit my parents. In I-Iowa.”
She laughed. “Honey, I think you overshot Iowa by about six hundred miles.”
Shit.
Andy tried again. “It’s my grandmother’s car.” She searched her brain for a compelling lie. “I mean, I was at the beach. The Alabama beach. Gulf. In a town called Mystic Falls.” Christ, she was crazy-sounding. Mystic Falls was from the Vampire Diaries. She said, “My grandmother’s a snowbird. You know, people who—”