29
The doorbell rings less than twenty minutes later, and my heart climbs into my throat. How could Will be here, already? Where was he hiding, in the garden shed? And why ring the doorbell instead of using his key or, better yet, busting through the window in a surprise attack? None of it makes any sense.
Corban checks his watch and frowns. From the looks of his expression, he’s thinking much the same.
There’s a smattering of sharp knocks, followed by Evan’s muffled voice. “Hey, Iris, you still up? I think I left my wallet.”
“Busy night,” Corban quips, but he’s talking through gritted teeth.
I lean my head into the adjoining den, spot a patch of shiny leather sticking out from the stack of court record printouts on the coffee table. Evan’s wallet. He took it out of his back pocket to sit down, then must have tossed it there and forgotten about it.
“Now what?” I say.
Corban watches me for a few seconds, working out what to do, how to fix this problem. He’s not worried about Evan; I can tell that much. He’s worried about me somehow alerting Evan. I’m the problem.
“Disarm the alarm from your phone. I don’t want you anywhere near those panic buttons.”
Evan knocks again, this time harder and with his fist. “Iris, are you in there?”
“Never mind, I’ll do it.” Corban pulls up the alarm app on his phone—his phone, which explains how he got past my alarm—and the pad by the front door gives a trio of staccato beeps. He grabs me by the biceps and pulls me close, his fingers clamping down hard enough to leave a bruise. “Give him his wallet and get rid of him, do you understand? Otherwise I’ll break his neck and make you watch.”
I nod, swallowing. I don’t doubt he could do it, too, despite Evan’s size.
“Good girl.” Corban turns me around by the shoulders and gives me a hard shove. “Now, go.”
There are a number of things I could do here. Slip Evan a sign. Use the distress code when I rearm the system. Bolt out the door and run for my life. But I believed Corban when he said he would hurt Evan and make me watch, and I couldn’t bear either. Besides, leaving or alerting the police means I won’t get to see Will again.
Which is why I fetch the wallet, plaster on a smile and head down the hallway, tossing as casual a wave as I can manage to Evan through the glass. He looks relieved to see me, though his shoulders stay up by his ears like giant humps swallowing his neck until I pull open the door.
“Where were you?” Evan says. “I tried to call.”
“Sorry.” Out of the corner of my eye, I catch a flash of movement in the front parlor. Corban slipping into the shadows. “I had my ringer turned off.”
“Oh.” He lifts a foot as if to take a step inside, but I don’t move out of the doorway. I stand there stiffly, holding the door and blocking the entry with my body.
There’s a long pause.
I push his wallet into the space between us. “Here. I found it on the table.”
He takes the wallet with a curious look, then leans far left and peers through the front room window. My heart stops. Other than the beige sofa, the room is practically empty. If Corban is still standing there, pressed against the opposite side of the wall, Evan will surely see him.
But then Evan straightens, blinking down at me like the only thing he saw was an empty room. “I talked to Zeke. The 678 number is a dead end, unfortunately. A prepay with no name or address attached. There’s no way to trace it.”
I scrunch up my face, feigning disappointment. “Oh. Okay. Well, thank him for trying. Good night.” I push against the door, but Evan stops it with a palm.
“What’s up with you?”
I make sure to hold his gaze as I shake my head. “Just beat. I was getting ready to head upstairs to bed.”
He cocks his head, frowning slightly. “You look like you’ve been crying.”
“It’s been a rough day.”
“Oh. Well, if you want to talk...” He lets the rest trail while his gaze fishes over my shoulder, craning his head into the house as much as I’ll let him, which is not far. Besides my staircase and the lit-up hallway behind me, he probably can’t see much. “All right, well, I don’t want to keep you. Thanks for this.” He holds up his wallet, wagging it as he mouths two words: You okay?
I push up a reassuring smile. “You’re welcome. Call you tomorrow.”
And then I shut the door in his face, flip the dead bolts and head back down the hall.
I’m shaking all over by the time I step into the kitchen. Corban slides from the shadows, holding up a finger. We listen for the sound of Evan’s car door banging shut, his motor starting up and the growl of his engine as he drives away.
“Now what?”
Corban’s grin is Cheshire wide. “Now we wait.”
*
The clock on the cable box says it’s nearing eleven. More than an hour since I pushed Evan’s wallet through a crack in the front door, which means I must have been convincing. The police, if he’d alerted them, would have been and gone by now.
But the police didn’t come, and we’re still waiting for Will.
“Max Talmey,” Corban says, stopping his incessant pacing to turn to me, slumped on the den sofa. “Bet you don’t know that name, do you?”
I shake my head. I’ve been awake for what feels like weeks, and now that the adrenaline has burned off, I can barely sit up straight.
Corban hits the end of the carpet and whirls around, punching a fist into the air. “What about Dennis Sciama or Andrea del Verrocchio? No?”
“No.” I stifle a yawn.
“Mentors to Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Leonardo da Vinci, respectively.”
“Oh.”
It doesn’t help that Corban has been talking nonstop. Long, rambling verbiage that goes round and round and nowhere at all...except maybe crazy town. I stopped listening ages ago.
“Why is Will getting all the credit? What is wrong with our society that we only acknowledge the quarterback and not the rest of the team? The lead singers and not the band? When in reality, we’re the brilliant ones here. Without us to lift them up, they’d have never made it out of obscurity.”
Corban’s narcissistic personality disorder is textbook. A grandiose sense of self, a preoccupation with power and success, an outrageous sense of entitlement and a distinct lack of empathy. The symptoms are all there. In his manic state, he’s no longer bothering to disguise any of them.
“Kind of like Neta Snook,” I say. What a narcissist wants, more than anything else, is the accolades he feels he deserves.
“Who?”
“The female pilot who taught Amelia Earhart to fly.”
“Exactly!” He stabs a finger at my face. “You understand what I’m talking about.”