“The app?” I asked, picking my way through the brush to get closer. When she nodded, I said, “He went to the airport. Started to check in. But he felt like something was wrong, so he changed his mind and went back to town.”
Her fingers curled into fists over her mouth. “No.”
I kneeled beside her. “If you don’t come back with me, he could go to prison for the rest of his life.”
She squeezed her eyes shut. “I never wanted this. I never wanted to hurt him.”
“So, you didn’t think your murder would hurt him? Maybe just a little?”
“I mean, I never wanted him involved in this.” She locked her gaze with mine. “I tried to just break up with him, but I couldn’t.”
There was so much wrong with that statement, but I decided to drop it.
“He had nothing to do with this. This is all on my father.”
I figured as much. “If it helps, he’s riddled with guilt. He’s even contemplating suicide.”
Her chin rose in defiance, refusing to feel anything for the man. But I could feel the pain well up inside her. She was only fooling one of us, and it wasn’t me.
“He wouldn’t have gone through with it. Suicide. He doesn’t have the spine.”
“He’s heartbroken either way.”
“In his eyes he’s guilty of murder. I wanted him to feel what I felt when he placed that bet.”
“You overheard the conversation between your father and Fernando.”
She nodded. “They told him. They said that if he lost and couldn’t pay up this time, they wouldn’t bother coming after him. They’d kill me. They told him point-blank. And do you know what he did?”
I lowered my head, knowing all too well.
“He placed the bet.” Her breath hitched in her chest. “He bet my life on a fucking game.”
“I’m sorry, Emery.”
She curled into herself and sobbed until the night was cold enough to freeze the tears on her cheeks. I led her inside the cabin and made some coffee old school.
After taking her a cup, I said, “It was pretty ingenious, how you did all this.”
“Clearly not ingenious enough. You figured it out.” She shook her head. Wiped her brow with the back of a hand. “I can’t believe they think Lyle killed me.”
“When he couldn’t get ahold of you, he used the app to find you, but that was your backup plan, wasn’t it?”
She nodded and wrapped her hands tighter around the cup. “I didn’t know if anyone would find my car out there, so I had a plan for him to tell the police that he had an app to find me. I thought they would find the car. Not him. And certainly not on the same day I did it.” She glanced up at me. “How did you know?”
“There were several clues. Your phone was in the charger in your car, for one. Lyle mentioned that it was the kind that kept charging even if the car was off. And he said it was your idea to get the apps. It took me a while, but I realized you did that on purpose.”
Embarrassed, she lowered her head.
“The blood part was what threw me initially, until I realized where you were caught crying at the hospital. In the lab. You’d had a blood test two days earlier. A lab tech mentioned it in an interview, so why would you have been in there again? You weren’t pregnant. Your white blood cell count was way high, but you didn’t have an infection. You’d been seen almost fainting more than once, and you were taking iron.”
She didn’t refute anything I said.
“And if you were just crying, why was there blood on your skirt? Little clues like that. How long did you save your blood?” I knew she’d been saving her blood. The white blood cell count gave it away. When someone gives blood, they lose red blood cells that must be replaced. The blood. The fainting. The iron. It added up to only one conclusion.
“Two weeks. I knew exactly how much I’d need to make it look like I couldn’t possibly have survived the attack. I didn’t have quite enough, but I supplemented and made sure that blood was soaked deep in the seat cushions.”
“So, you came up with this plan—”
“That night. When he made that bet, something inside me died. But that still doesn’t explain how you got onto my scent in the first place. What gave me away?”
“It started with a conversation I had with Fernando. He said he’d made that threat two weeks before you disappeared. And before that, all your friends and family said you’d started behaving strangely at around the same time. I put two and two together. Also, there was no tissue in the car. No skin or hair or gray matter.”
She closed her eyes. “I thought of that, but short of cutting pieces of flesh off my body or chunks of brain out of my head, I couldn’t leave any behind. Even if I got some from the morgue, they would’ve known it wasn’t mine eventually.”
“By the way, you’re going to want to sell that car.”
“Oh, my god, I can’t believe they arrested Lyle.” She dropped her face into her palms. “He’s going to hate me. I’ve ruined … everything. All for that man. That man wins again. Somehow he wins every time.” Her chin quivered as she thought back. “There was this one time he got me a really nice CD player. I was maybe twelve. I knew I wouldn’t have it for long. He’d lose money at the track or at the bar, and come to hock it. But I loved it. I wanted to keep it so bad, so I hid it in the crawlspace under our house.
“It’s so stupid. I mean, I couldn’t even listen to it. But I just wanted it, so I told him it was stolen. That someone broke into our house while he was at work and took it. I came home from school two days later, and it was gone.”
When she looked at me again, the fury she felt deep inside her billowed in the depths of her irises. “He never even mentioned it. Neither of us did. We just went about our lives like I’d never had it. A CD player is one thing, but my life.” Her voice cracked. “He bet my life like it was an object. Like it was disposable. Like I was disposable. He deserves all the pain he’s experiencing right now.”
I certainly couldn’t argue that. I made bacon and eggs as she packed her things. She’d even thought that far ahead. She took nothing from her house. She bought all new toiletries and clothes. We ate in relative silence, both of us miserable.