I took a deep breath. She thought I was guilty. “If you thought I was faking, don’t you wonder how I knew what I did?”
Mom put her glass down on the coffee table on top of an outdated People magazine she’d nicked from the beauty salon. “You have abilities.”
I stared down at my knees. “I didn’t have a vision. Not then, not ever.”
She sighed. “You won’t want to hear this, but your skepticism keeps you from seeing the truth. You have the ability, but you get in your own way.”
I opened my mouth to argue, but she cut me off.
“You were involved with what happened to Paige.”
If I hadn’t been sitting down, I would have fallen. For a few beats, the only sound in the room was the ticking of the clock in the kitchen. “What do you mean?”
Mom picked up her glass and drank half of the wine in one long swallow. “I had a vision of the two of you. It didn’t make a lot of sense at first, but I think Paige wanted to disappear and you helped her somehow.”
I was lightheaded, and a thin sheen of sweat broke out all over my body. There was no way she could know. “That’s why you told him we were together the night she died.”
She nodded tersely. She took me by the chin and turned my head so our faces were inches apart. “I will do whatever I need to do to keep you safe. You are my child. I won’t take even the slightest chance that the police will blame you.” She leaned forward so our foreheads touched for a second. “You’re a part of me. We don’t always get along, but never doubt that I would do anything for you.”
“Even if you thought I killed Paige?”
She closed her eyes as if the words coming out my mouth hurt her, then she kissed me on the cheek. “I don’t need psychic abilities to know you didn’t kill Paige.”
I sagged back on the sofa. My entire body ached as if I’d run a marathon. I hadn’t realized how I’d been tensing my muscles. “I know who did it. It was her dad.”
Mom blinked for a moment and then stood. “This calls for more wine.” She topped up both of our glasses and came back. “Tell me everything.”
Forty-Four
I lay in bed, the covers pinning me in place. I hadn’t been tucked in since I was a small kid, but my mom had insisted. She came into my room, jabbed the blanket under the mattress, and then sat at the edge of the bed. She kept telling me how it was all going to be okay, trying to convince me, or herself. Eventually, she turned off the light and left me there.
I felt hollow, like after you’ve had the flu and everything inside you has been hurled violently out. The rest of the afternoon and evening had been unreal. We sat in the darkening room, our feet tucked under us, making a plan. The wine made my head swim, since I wasn’t used to drinking, but I was still able to lay out, step by step, how the situation started and then unraveled. At times I got confused on what happened when, but I kept circling back until Mom knew everything. How Paige had approached me with the idea. I told her about Paige changing the plan when her dad didn’t pay the ransom. Finally, I told her about the note and the realization that her dad had been involved.
I’d expected my mom to gasp in shock or throw her hands up in the air, one of her typical overly dramatic reactions, but she stayed silent. I could see her mentally taking notes. If anything, she became calmer the wilder my story became.
“Does he know about you?” she asked when I finished.
“I don’t think so,” I said. Mom stared toward the sliding glass door that led to our tiny patio, but I could tell she wasn’t really seeing the headlights going past on the road outside.
“You can’t tell anyone,” she said. “He’ll say you did it for the money.”
“But he never paid the ransom.”
Mom looked at me with a hint of scorn. “Do you think that will matter? He’ll say he did pay and you killed her so you wouldn’t have to split the cash, or he’ll say that you killed her in revenge because she never had the money. His kind always comes out on top.” Her voice was bitter. “He’ll be believed because people like him always get the benefit of the doubt. But us? We’re expected to be losers. You come forward with what you know, and trust me, you’ll be the one to pay.”
I’d never heard her talk like that. Her anger was pulsing in every word she’d said.
“I can’t just walk away. He killed her.”
“He’s a judge. You’re a teenager. Who do you think people will believe? Your best bet is to graduate and then get out of this town. Get to where he can’t hurt you. You’re eighteen. You’d be tried as an adult. You’d have already admitted to lying to the police about her disappearance.”
“One lie doesn’t mean I’m lying about everything,” I said.
She clucked her tongue. “Do you hear yourself? You’re supposed to be the skeptic out of the two of us.”
My head fell back on the sofa. “I don’t know what to do. I thought I could give the police a vision that would make them investigate him. He must have left evidence somewhere. But now that they think I’m a fake, they won’t believe me.”
We sat in silence. The wine was long gone. What unnerved me was the fact that I’d so badly misjudged everything. Paige, Drew, Lucy, my mom. I prided myself on my ability to read people, to peel back their layers and know their motivations, but I’d missed so much. I hadn’t even been aware of my own motivations. Drew was right. I had talked about moving away, but I hadn’t saved. I could have gotten a second job, I might not have had all the money I needed, but I gave up on myself years ago. I’d been scared to go away. It was easier to stay and complain than go and figure out that maybe I didn’t have what it took to make myself over. If I couldn’t even know why I did things, it made me wonder what else I hadn’t seen. Or what I was still missing. I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was a detail that was just outside of my view. But the harder I tried to figure out what it was, the more difficult it became to focus.
My mind ran over and over every interaction I’d had with Paige. Everything that came out after she died. What I knew and when I knew it. Something was out of place, but I couldn’t spot it.
My mom broke the silence. “You can’t go to the police. “
“I know.” I sagged.
She smiled. “But I can.”
Forty-Five
When I slipped through the metal detector, I half expected the alarms to blare as if I were smuggling in a gun, but my plan of attack came with less hardware. The armed guard rummaged through my bag, but then handed it back and waved me through.