Josh was alive. He was alive, and he’d been talking to Chase.
Maybe she was hallucinating again. Falling into the paranoia trap she’d fallen into before. Had she just imagined those men coming to the door?
Just in case, she went to the medicine cabinet and took out the prescription bottle of Risperdal. She dumped two pills in her hand and washed them down with a Dixie cup of water. If she was seeing and hearing and imagining things again, the drugs would help.
Aubrey went back to the bedroom and opened up her laptop. She went to the email, searched through it, hoping against hope there was something, anything, that might give her a clue as to what was happening.
She saw nothing.
Josh’s fingerprints in Chase’s hotel room? Why would he go to Chase instead of coming to her?
And Chase . . . She forced his sexy half smile out of her mind. She couldn’t afford to think about him right now. If she allowed herself even the smallest moment, she’d break into a thousand pieces.
Think, Aubrey. Think.
She couldn’t dare hope. She couldn’t.
A shower. Wash off the grime of the run. Think.
In less than three hours, her entire world had been turned upside down. Her boyfriend was using her for a story. A crazed drug runner was after her money. Her husband was . . . alive?
It was too much to fathom.
Call Chase. Call him, and find out what’s happening.
She was reaching for her cell when she heard a phone ringing. It wasn’t the landline or her cell. Had one of the TBI agents left his phone behind? She moved out of the bedroom downstairs toward the living room, but the sound grew fainter.
The ringing stopped as she came back into the bedroom, then, after a few moments, started again.
She followed it to the source, realized it was coming from her pillow.
Secreted inside the pillowcase was a small black mobile phone.
Shaking, she answered it.
“Aubrey?” She recognized the voice. His voice. Her Josh’s voice.
Her legs buckled, and the bed stopped her from hitting the floor.
The past five years of her life was lies. All of it.
Her voice broke. “Oh, my God, Josh. Where are you?”
“Aubrey, honey, listen to me very carefully. You need to get out of the house, right now. They aren’t watching. I’m distracting them, but I don’t have much time. In your closet, on the top shelf, behind the shoe boxes, there is a blue gym bag. Don’t open it. Take it, and go to the train station. I’ll meet you there. And Aubrey, this is the most important of all. If I’m not there, you get on the 9:02 p.m. to Grand Central in New York. You have to run, honey. Don’t take anything but this phone and the bag. Don’t tell anyone. Derek Allen is coming for you.”
“But Winston—”
“I’ll take care of him.”
“Josh, I—”
His voice was like steel. “Go, Aubrey. Go, right now.”
The phone went dead. She stared at it for a second, then forced her mouth closed and went to the closet. Exactly where he said it would be was a blue gym bag. She didn’t know how long it had been in there. She didn’t recognize it, hadn’t seen it before, but it had clearly been in her closet for a while; there was a fine layer of dust on the top.
She threw on clothes, two layers of everything, just in case, pulled a baseball cap over her curls, then fed her arms through the handles of the bag and hoisted it onto her back like a backpack. It wasn’t terribly heavy, but she could feel it was full.
Of what?
He’d warned her not to open it.
Why was she listening to Josh? He’d deserted her, put her through hell, and had just murdered the one spark of hope she’d had in years.
You love Josh, Aubrey. You always have. He is your everything.
It was simpler that way. The warm buzz of the pills made it all good. Smooth.
All in all, it took her less than two minutes to get out the door. She went out the back instead of the front, just in case, and took off at a run. She could smell something burning, saw thick black smoke rising from down the street. I’ve distracted them.
By lighting a fire. Smart.
It was 8:40 p.m. right now; she needed to set a fast pace to get down to the train station on time. She ducked through the neighbor’s yard, and went out the back of the subdivision. There was a path that would cut straight across town to the station, probably a mile as the crow flew. During the school year it was quite active, with kids walking back and forth to school. Today, the students still gone for spring break, it was quiet. She jogged past the Montessori school, wondering what in the world she’d tell Linda about all of this.
As she ran away from her house, her life, her world, she smiled. Because in just a few minutes, she’d be with Josh again. And that was all that mattered.