Andy unzipped the make-up bag. She opened the phone. No calls.
She pulled the Daniela Cooper driver’s license from the black vinyl bag. Andy had taken the Canadian ID, health insurance card and car registration with her when she left the storage unit. She studied her mother’s photograph. They had always looked like mother and daughter. Even strangers had commented on it. The eyes were a dead giveaway, but their faces were both heart-shaped and their hair was the same color brown. Andy had forgotten how dark her mother used to keep her hair. Post-cancer treatments, it had grown out in a shockingly beautiful gray. Laura wore it fashionably short now, but the Laura in the driver’s license photo wore her hair down to her shoulders. Andy’s hair was the same length, but she always kept it in a ponytail because she was too lazy to style it.
She looked at the mirror across from the bed. Her face was ragged. Dark circles were under her eyes. Mirror Andy looked older than her thirty-one years, that was for damn sure, but could she pass for the woman in the photo? Andy held up the driver’s license. She let her eyes go back and forth. She scrunched her wet hair. She pulled down the bangs. Did that help or hinder Andy’s ability to look twenty-four years older than she actually was?
There was one way to get an honest appraisal.
Andy rinsed her bra in the sink. The hotel soap had made it smell like Miss Havisham’s asshole, but that was actually an improvement. Patting it dry with the towel transferred white fuzz onto the material. She used the hairdryer until the bra was only slightly damp. Then she dried her hair messier than usual, pulling it forward, styling it close to the way Laura wore hers in the Canada license photo. She put on another pair of jeans, another white polo shirt. Andy cringed as her feet slid into the Crocs again. She needed socks and real shoes. And she needed an actual written list to keep track of everything.
She grabbed a $2,000 brick of twenties, split it in two and shoved one half into each of her back pockets. The jeans were old, from a time when manufacturers actually sewed usable pockets into women’s wear. Still, the bills stuck out like large cell phones. She transferred some layers into her front pocket. She looked at herself in the mirror. It worked.
Andy scooped up more handfuls of strapped twenties and hid some between the mattress and boxspring. Others got folded into her wet towel, which she artfully arranged on the bathroom floor. The rest lined the bottom of the tote bag. She put the paperbacks on top along with the first aid kit and make-up bag.
All of her machinations had left one row of bills on the bottom of the suitcase. Ten across, three wide, times $2,000 was . . . a lot of money to have in a suitcase. There was nothing to do but zip it closed and leave it out in the open. If someone broke into the room, they hopefully would be excited enough by the cash in the Samsonite to not look for the rest of the money.
Andy slung the tote bag over her shoulder as she walked out of the room. The night air slapped her face like the sudden blast of heat from an oven door. She scanned the parking lot as she walked down the stairs. There were a few Serv-Pro vans, a red truck with a Trump sticker on one side and a Confederate flag on the other, and a Mustang from the 1990s that had the front bumper held on with duct tape.
The diner was closed. The motel office lights were still on. Andy guessed it was about ten in the evening. The clerk behind the desk had his nose in his phone.
She got behind the wheel of the Reliant and moved the car to the far end of the parking lot. There were security lights on the building, but several bulbs were out. Andy walked to the back of the station wagon and opened the hatch. She checked to make sure no one was watching, then pried open the bottom of the cargo area.
Jesus.
More money, this time hundreds, stacked all around the spare tire.
Andy quickly pressed the floor cover back into place. She closed the hatch. She kept her hand pressed to the back of the car. Her heart was jackrabbiting against her ribs.
Should she feel good that her mother had split up the money the same way Andy had intended to, or should she be freaked the hell out that Laura had so carefully thought out an escape plan that there was over half a million bucks stashed in the trunk of her untraceable car?
This was the part where Andy wondered where she would’ve fit into Laura’s disappearance, because everything Andy had found so far pointed to only one person being on the lam.
So Andy had to wonder: which Laura was her real mother—the one who’d told Andy to leave her alone or the one who’d said that everything she’d done in her life was for Andy?
“Okay,” Andy mumbled, acknowledging the question had finally been asked, but fully prepared not to do any more thinking about it.
The new Andy who did math and planned driving routes and considered consequences and dealt with money problems was wearing the hell out of the old Andy, who desperately needed a drink.
She carried the tote like a purse as she walked toward the bar across the road from the motel. Half a dozen pick-up trucks were in the parking lot. All of them had signs on their sides—Joe’s Plumbing, Bubba’s Locksmith Services, Knepper’s Knippers. Andy took a closer look at the last one, which apparently belonged to a gardener. The logo on the side, a mustachioed grasshopper holding a pair of shears, promised, We’ll knip your lawn into shape!
Every set of eyes inside the place looked up when Andy walked through the front door. She tried to pretend like she belonged, but it was hard, considering she was the only woman. A television was blaring in the corner. Some kind of sports show. Most of the guys were sitting one or two to a booth. Two men were standing around the pool table. They had both stopped, pool sticks in the air, to watch her progress through the room.
There was only one customer sitting at the bar, but his attention was squarely focused on the television. Andy took a seat as far away from him as possible, her ass hanging off the stool, the tote bag wedged between her arm and the wall.
The bartender ambled over, throwing a white towel over his shoulder. “Whatcha want, babydoll?”
Not to be called babydoll.
“Vodka rocks,” she requested, because for the first time since college, her student loan debt didn’t dictate her drinking habits.
“Gottan ID?”
She found Laura’s license in the make-up bag and slid it over.
He gave it a quick glance. “Vodka rocks, eh?”
Andy stared at him.
He mixed the drink in front of her, using a lot more ice than Andy would’ve liked.
She picked one of the twenties off the brick in her back pocket. She waited for him to leave, then tried not to set on the vodka like a wildebeest. “Personality shots,” her roommates used to call the first drinks of the night. Liquid courage. Whatever you called it, the point was to turn off the voice in your head that reminded you of everything wrong in your life.
Andy tossed back the drink. The fiery sensation of the alcohol sliding down her throat made the muscles of her shoulders relax for the first time in what felt like decades.
The bartender was back with her change. She left it on the bar, nodded toward the glass. He poured another, then leaned against the bar to watch TV. Some half-bald guy in a suit was talking about the possibility of a football coach getting fired.
“Bullshit,” the man at the end of the bar mumbled. He rubbed his jaw, which was rough with stubble. For some reason, Andy’s gaze found his hand. The fingers were long and lean, like the rest of him. “I can’t believe what that moron just said.”
The bartender asked, “Want me to turn it?”
“Well, hell yeah. Why would I want to keep listening to that crap?” The guy took off his burgundy-colored baseball cap and threw it onto the bar. He ran his fingers through his thick hair. He turned to Andy and her jaw dropped open in shock.
Alabama.
From the hospital.