I could hear a siren, far away now but getting closer. Toby’s mother held the phone to her ear with one hand, and she dropped her other absently to her son’s shoulder, keeping him close.
Everything spun, and I gripped the swing chain tighter. “Toby,” I said, “I want you to promise me something. If you ever see that lady again, don’t talk to her. Run.”
I thought maybe he nodded. But I couldn’t be sure, because the world faded and I closed my eyes.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
October 2017
SHEA
When I awoke, the first thing I saw was Michael.
He was sitting next to my hospital bed, absorbed in reading something I couldn’t see. He was wearing a black zip-up hoodie, and he had several days’ worth of dark stubble on his jaw. He had a frown of concentration between his eyebrows, but when he heard me move it disappeared as he looked at me.
“The drugs are wearing off,” he said in a gentle voice.
They’d been wearing off for a while. I’d opened my eyes once before, though I had no idea how long ago. That time, no one had been in the room. I saw the empty coffee cup next to Michael and guessed why he’d been gone last time.
“I can’t move,” I said, my voice a croak.
Michael reached to a table out of my line of sight and brought a cup of water with a straw, putting the straw to my lips. “Your elbow is broken,” he said as I drank. “So is your knee. Two fractured ribs, the gash on your forehead got ten stitches, and you were halfway to hypothermia. Still you walked three miles. No one knows how you did it.”
Lily, I thought as I let the straw go. But no, that wasn’t right. Lily had been there somewhere as I walked, but she hadn’t done it for me. I’d done it myself.
Lily might have pushed me over the edge, but everything after that had been me.
“Your sister was here,” Michael said as he put the cup of water away. “She wanted to take leave from work, but I told her to go and I’d call her if you woke up. Which I’m going to do shortly.”
Esther would be worried. Really, really worried. What she wouldn’t know yet was that now, at what looked like my lowest point, it was finally time for her to stop worrying about me. “I have to tell you something,” I said to Michael.
“Yes, you do,” he said. He was calm, confident, and sure, concerned without being rattled, and I knew to my bones that I’d picked the right man. That he’d be what I needed him to be. “I hope it’s a story about how you fell over the cliff behind the Greer mansion and ended up in the ocean.”
“How did you know that’s where I went over?”
“Because Beth Greer says her motion sensors went off and you told her you were at her house.”
I felt my first pulse of trepidation. “Beth is here?”
Michael gave me a look. “Of course not. She called someone, though it wasn’t me, and told them. I heard it through official channels.”
That sounded like Beth: manipulating as much as she could without getting directly involved. I felt the fire of something burn deep in my belly. Revenge, maybe. “Listen,” I said to Michael.
He turned his dark eyes to me. “I’m listening.”
I took a breath, organizing my thoughts, and then I started. “When I was nine, I was walking home from school. A man pulled up beside me in his car.”
This wasn’t the story he was expecting. I saw a flicker of recognition cross his eyes, but he didn’t interrupt.
“He asked if I was cold, and then he told me my parents were waiting for me and he had to take me to them. He told me to get into his car, and I did.” I lay back against the pillows. The painkillers were definitely wearing off, and everything was starting to hurt, but I was used to pain now. I had to get this out before they gave me pills that put me to sleep again. “I knew something was wrong almost right away,” I told Michael. “It was a gut feeling, even though I was only a kid. We weren’t heading in the direction of my house. I asked if I could get out, and the man said no. Then he put his hand on my leg, trying to push it under my uniform skirt.”
There was silence in the room except for the busy murmur of the hospital outside. Michael looked tense, but still he didn’t interrupt, and again I knew I’d picked the right man. “I won’t go into details,” I said. “We struggled. He didn’t manage to sexually assault me, because he was still driving the car. He did hit me hard enough to make me bleed. The car slowed down and I got the door open. I jumped out and ran.”
Michael closed his eyes. His breathing was a little harsh.
“I was sure the man was chasing me,” I said. “I thought he would get out of the car and run after me, or that he’d circle the block, looking to grab me again. I didn’t think he’d just let me run.” Pain throbbed up from my broken elbow, and I tried not to wince. “I ran into a stranger’s backyard and hid in the garden shed. I crouched in there, barely daring to breathe, jumping at every sound. I had no idea how long I stayed in there, but I found out later it was three hours. It was winter, and by the time I got home it was fully dark and I couldn’t feel my hands or my feet.”
Michael opened his eyes again, his jaw working as he bit back whatever he wanted to say.
“My parents were frantic,” I said. “There were police at my house. My father was crying. I’d never seen my father cry. I didn’t think it was possible. They were in a panic because I hadn’t come home from school, and when my parents called the police about it, the police had showed up in minutes. They were alarmed because a girl had been found dead fifteen miles away, and they wanted to be sure it wasn’t me.”
Finally, Michael spoke, and though his voice was tense, he kept it low. “Anton Anders,” he said.
“He didn’t chase me,” I said. The words were harder to get out, because I was gritting my teeth through the growing pain. “He didn’t come after me at all. When I ran, he drove to a different neighborhood and waited near a schoolyard. He picked up a girl named Sherry Haines. She was nine, just like I was. He raped and murdered her and dumped her body by the side of a two-lane highway. He did all that in the three hours while I was hiding in the shed.” I looked at Michael. “You know the Anton Anders case, I assume, since you were a cop, and so were your father and uncle.” When he nodded, I said, “I was Girl A. I am Girl A. She’s me.”
“I wondered about it,” Michael admitted. “The way you reacted when I said that Joshua Black solved the Sherry Haines case. It seemed personal somehow. You’re the right age to be Girl A. I could have gotten access to the files, found your name for myself. But I didn’t.”
“You’re supposed to be nosy,” I said.
He looked at me and saw that I was trying, however weakly, for humor. A smile touched the corners of his handsome mouth. “Professionally nosy,” he corrected me. “If you wanted to tell me, I figured you would.”
He was right. “If I hadn’t hidden in the shed,” I said, “if I’d gone straight home and my parents had called the police, maybe Sherry Haines would still be alive.”
“Or maybe not,” Michael said. “Maybe he would have found a different victim on a different day. They’ve never been able to tie Anton Anders to any other cases, but no one who looks at the Sherry Haines case believes she was his first victim. He was too practiced. You were a terrified nine-year-old girl who had just been assaulted, Shea. Nothing was your fault. Nothing at all.”
“I know,” I said. “I’ve thought about every angle for the past twenty years. I know I’m not to blame. But I’m not a little girl this time around.” I shifted in the bed as the pain got fiercer. “Don’t call a nurse yet,” I said when Michael reached for the call button. “Just listen. Beth Greer murdered her half sister, Lily, in 1978. She hit Lily over the head with an ashtray in the master bedroom of the Greer mansion, then drowned her in the bathtub. Then she dumped Lily’s body in the thick of the woods at the end of Claire Lake. Lily has been there all this time, until her remains were found a few weeks ago.”
“Jesus Christ, Shea,” Michael said, shocked. “Did Beth confess?”
“Of course not.”