The Darkest Corners (29 page)

A police cruiser with its lights on and siren off pulls up to the curb. Two uniformed officers step out and survey the house. The one who was in the passenger seat—a woman—says something into her radio.

“Where's Detective Elwood?” I ask.

“Are you the one who put in the call?” the other officer asks. I recognize him from the night Daryl attacked Callie.

“Yeah, and I asked them to send Jay Elwood—”

He holds up a hand. “I need you to calm down and tell me what happened.”

I know how this looks. There's no sign of a struggle in the kitchen. It looks like Callie just wandered off, and I don't have time to explain why I know she wouldn't do that. Not now.

“She didn't come upstairs when I called her, so I ran to the front of the house, and I saw a man forcing her into his van,” I lie. “He had a gun.”

“Tessa?”

I turn to see Maggie at the end of the driveway, in shorts and a sweat-soaked T-shirt. She takes off her headphones; her eyes are saucers as she takes in the police officers. “What's going on?” she calls to me. “Where's Callie?”

“Ma'am, let's go into the house,” the woman officer says.

“No, I want to know what the hell is going on.” Maggie steps onto the lawn, coming toward me. An officer steps in front of her, putting an arm across her chest.

“Tessa, what happened?” Maggie shouts.

I can't make my mouth form the words. Down the street, a siren blips. Two more cop cars. A blue Ford Escape is behind them. Jay Elwood is at the wheel.

Maggie's shouting at the female officer now. I take the opportunity and run for Jay Elwood's SUV. He hops out and heads straight for me.

“What happened?”

“He took her,” I say. “We saw him at the courthouse this morning, and he must have followed us home—”

“Who?” Jay barks, quieting his radio.

“Jimmy Wozniak. He had a gun,” I lie again, because the truth won't buy us enough time to find Callie before he kills her.

“What was he driving?” Jay barks.

I hesitate, and Jay looks like he wants to throttle me. As though he can tell I'm lying. I think fast; there's no way Wozniak had time to go get his Subaru if he followed us here.

“A white van,” I blurt. “From the prison.”

Jay wipes a hand down his chin. The officer who was interviewing me trots over, confused.

“Put an alert out on a white prison transport van. I want units out looking for her,” Jay tells him. He rounds on me. “You, get into the car. I need to put you with a sketch artist.”

“I told you, it was Jimmy Wozniak—”

“I can't release his picture, but I can release a sketch. Get in the car.”

I look back at Maggie. One hand holding her cell phone to her ear, the other covering her mouth. I imagine her begging Rick to come home. Another screw loosens in me.

I nod mechanically and get into Jay's car.

Jay backs the SUV away from the curb with one hand and uses the other to radio a message to the station. We hit a pothole, and my stomach rockets into my throat.

“We're not going to get to her in time,” I say, my voice a choked-up warble.

Jay mutes his radio. “The next couple hours are critical. So if I were you, I'd try to be helpful instead of arguing with me.”

I clench my jaw, grinding my back teeth against each other. I repeat my lie about Jimmy Wozniak forcing Callie into the prison van.

Jay's police scanner blips midstory. “Got reports of an abandoned vehicle. Wooded area off 74.”

Two drops of rain glide across the windshield, and Jay turns his wipers on, but I can tell the scanner has his attention. “Sending highway patrol to check it out…”

I stare at Jay until he looks at me. “I-74 is where he dumped his victims.”

Jay pinches the bridge of his nose. Mutters something under his breath. He holds his radio to his face. “Wait for backup. Officer en route.”

He slaps a blue orb onto his dashboard. The light revolves around its center. Jay glances at my belt buckle and hits the gas. He passes the turn for the police station and gets onto the highway.

“You stay in the car,” Jay says to me. “No matter what we find up there, you stay in here, understood?”

He thinks she's dead already. The scene blurs around me. Green and brown trees, blue light, gray highway—they spin into each other like paint on an art wheel.

This is not how any of this was supposed to happen.

The police dispatcher radios in the exact location of the car. I glance at Jay's speedometer. He's doing ninety. I dredge up an old physics formula from the place where I store information I'm not sure I'll need again. The force of this moving car is equal to one half its mass multiplied by its volume, squared.

I don't know how much this car weighs or how to convert it to kilograms anyway. The force is enough to kill us if we hit anything, I decide.

It would probably be fast. Painless. At least less slow than hearing the police explain to Maggie how letting me into her home could have destroyed so many lives.

Jay slows when we reach a break in the guardrail. Wooded area on each side of the highway. Miles until the next rest stop. He gets out of the car and locks the doors. Surveys the embankment.

There's a white van at the bottom.

Jay gets back into the Escape and starts the engine. “Hold on,” he says.

The engine revs. Branches scrape against the windows as Jay drives us to the bottom of the embankment. He parks next to the van and leaps out of the car. He approaches the back window, his gun drawn.

The look on his face says it's empty.

A scream rips through the air.

Jay raises his gun and spins on his heel; I see her first.

Callie, pressed against Jimmy Wozniak like a shield. He has one arm wrapped around her body, the other aiming a gun at her temple. Twenty feet away from the van.

“Get back into the car,” Wozniak barks at Jay, loud enough for me to hear through the window. His face is calm, like someone who is used to giving orders.

“I can't do that,” Jay calls back. “Jimmy, is it? Let's talk about this, Jimmy.”

Wozniak jerks Callie upright. From here, I can tell she's crying. “I can't go to prison,” he says. “I'd rather die than eat and shit with those animals.”

“Put the gun down, and we'll talk about it,” Jay yells. “Come on, Jimmy. You got a wife? Kids?”

“I know what you're doing,” Wozniak shouts back. “You have any idea what they'll do to a guard in there?”

“You won't have to go there.” Jay's arms waver as he holds up his gun. “They'll transfer you somewhere no one knows who you are—”

Wozniak smiles. “There isn't a place in the world where they won't know who I am.”

Wozniak's cheek is pressed to Callie's—even if Jay were a sniper, he wouldn't be able to shoot Wozniak without hitting her too.

Wozniak knew it would end like this. He knew we knew who he was, and that they'd find him after all these years. The Monster came here to die, and he brought Callie with him.

“Don't do this, Jimmy!” Jay shouts. “Think of your family.”

Callie jerks under the Monster's grip. She says something to him that I can't hear. He looks down at her.

Wozniak's finger moves on the trigger. A gunshot. I scream and lunge at the dashboard.

The Monster crumples. Callie backs away, presses against a tree. Her mouth is open in a silent scream. Blood and brain matter in her hair, on her face.

Jay Elwood looks at the gun in his hands, stunned. I stop shaking for long enough to stumble out the passenger door.

“You could have killed her,” I scream.

Jay turns and looks at me, stricken. “I didn't fire.”

Callie is still pressed against the tree. “I…I asked him if he killed Lori.”

She lowers her eyes to his body. I can't look. And I already know the answer, because Wozniak's lips didn't move before he blew his brains out.

If the Monster killed Lori Cawley, the truth just died with him.

It's dark by the time an officer drops me off at the hospital. They won't let me see Callie until they process both of our statements separately. The receptionist tells me that Maggie and Rick are in the room with Callie. An officer hasn't interviewed her yet, but they'll send someone down to talk to me.

I sit in a chair outside the gift shop. I'm cold, and my cell phone is dead.

I'm not alone. A little girl prances in front of me, arms out, spinning semicircles with her torso. Her braids spin along with her, the beaded ends thwacking against each other. She watches me from beneath her hair. I wave to her, and she scampers into the gift shop.

I tell myself that if Maggie comes down to see me, everything will be okay. If she sends Rick, it means she's angry with me for almost getting Callie killed.

The little girl with the braids leaves the gift shop, clinging to a woman on her cell phone. I watch other people file out after them, and I rank them from least serious reasons for visiting to most serious. A woman with a balloon and a teddy bear. Least. A man with two children and a ghastly look on his face. Most.

They all make their way to the elevators. There's no sign of Maggie, or Rick.

It's been fifteen minutes. I can't bring myself to ask the receptionist to call up to Callie's room again.

Twenty minutes. Two police officers enter through the sliding doors. They walk right past me as if I weren't even here.

Half an hour. I watch a woman approach the reception desk and wrap her arms around her body, like she's cold.

“Is Tessa Lowell here?” she asks.

I sit up straight. That voice…I'm transported back to the night of the gas station.

Tessa, baby, get into the car.

Where are we going, Mommy?

I stand up. Stare at the woman's back. “Mom?”

She turns to me, her eyes going wide. She hurries over to where I'm standing. Stops in her tracks, as though she were looking at a ghost.

“Tessa,” she whispers. She throws her bony arms around me. Even if I wanted to, I couldn't hug her back, she's squeezing me so tightly.

“You're hurting me,” I croak out.

My mother lets go of me. Smiles and runs a hand through my waves. I was in such a hurry when I discovered that Callie was gone that I didn't even put my hair up. “You cut it,” my mother says in a single sad breath.

“How—how did you know I was here?” I can't believe
she's
here. “Did you get my message?”

My mother nods. “This morning. I've been calling you for hours,” she says. “I kept getting your voice mail, so I drove down here. I went to the Greenwoods, and a neighbor said everyone was at the hospital—Tessa, I was so worried.” My mother grasps my forearms. She lifts a hand to my face. I turn away.

“Look at me,” she whispers. “I can't believe it's you.”

I can't form a response. I want to look at her, to press my face into her shoulder and see if she still smells like old leather and the peppermint oil she took to calm her stomach.

She's my mother, but she's a stranger.

“Is Joslin here?” I ask her.

Annette blinks. “Why would your sister be here?”

“She came to see Daddy,” I say. “Right before he died.”

My mother's face falls. “Glenn is dead?”

I can't help it. I grab her forearm and dig my nails in. “Where the
hell
have you been? Where's Jos?”

“You're making a scene,” my mother hisses. “Let's talk in the cafeteria.”

I want to say that I'm not going anywhere with her until she tells me the truth about my father, Joslin, and Macy Stevens. But a hospital cafeteria is as public a venue as I'll get, and if there's one thing my mother hates, it's a public scene.

I find us a table as she buys a coffee for herself and a hot chocolate for me. I keep my eyes on her back as she moves down the line, as if she might disappear again if I look away for even a second. As she's paying, she glances over her shoulder. Like she's afraid I'm not still here.

She smiles as she collects the cups and makes her way toward me. I look away. Pretend to be fascinated with the man in scrubs next to me as he dumps hot sauce onto his burrito. I wonder how the doctors can eat in a place like this; how they can go from stitching someone's skin back together to cutting through a slice of roast beef.

“Here you go—hot chocolate.” Annette places a Styrofoam cup in front of me. She sits and watches me expectantly as I lift the cover off to let some of the steam out.

“Thank you,” I say. Annette looks pleased, as if I'd done her a favor. She watches me blow and sip, her hands knitted together on top of the table. “I couldn't get you to stop eating the dry mix with a spoon. I had to hide the container above the fridge.”

And Joslin would climb on top of the counter to be able to reach it for me.
I burn my tongue on the hot chocolate.

Annette eyes me over the rim of her cup. “How is she? Your grandmother.” My mother swallows. “Maggie brought me here that night, you know.”

“Here?” I ask. “The hospital?”

Her eyes flick downward. “The psychiatric unit. I stayed for a week. I was so low, Tessa, after your father, and your sister…I failed you. But as soon as I got better, I wanted you back. Only, by then, your grandmother had already come to get you.”

I'm quiet. I never knew that Maggie went back for my mother that night. How come she never told me?

“How is she?” Annette asks. “Your grandmother.”

“She's fine,” I say.

Annette hasn't touched her coffee. “She probably told you things about me—lies—”

“Don't talk to me about Gram,” I say, anger igniting in me. “She's the one who was there for me for the past ten years.”

Annette's eyes flash. “Has she told you once in all that time that she loves you?”

I can't look at her.

“She never, ever told me she loved me.” Annette's eyes glisten. “Never—”

“I said I don't want to talk about her.”

Annette seems to shrink in her seat. “Even if I'd had the money to get to Florida, I wouldn't have been welcome in my mother's home. She wouldn't have let me
see
you.”

I slam a hand down onto the table. “You didn't call. Not once. You could have been dead, for all I knew.”

“Tessa, I was dead inside. I'd lost both my daughters—”

“Don't say that.” My head is cloudy. “You don't get to pretend that we died, when I'm right here.”

Nausea hits me, swift and hard. I force myself to look my mother in the eye. “Did Joslin run away because she knew the truth about who she was? That you
took
her?”

“What are you talking about?” My mother sounds nervous. “Tessa, are you feeling okay?”

My head feels like it weighs nothing. Black spots dance in front of my eyes.

“I'm fine.” The words stick in my mouth. “I want to talk about Jos. About
Macy.
”

Annette takes my hand in hers. Her face blurs. “Macy? Who's Macy?”

I'm slumping in my chair, and my ears are ringing. “I think—I think I'm gonna pass out.”

“Let's get you to the lobby. I'll find a doctor—”

I turn my head to the side, where the man in the scrubs with the burrito was, but he's gone. Annette helps me to my feet, and the blood rushes to my head.

“You're okay,” Annette whispers into my ear. I'm fading, and I think people are looking at me.

“We have to go out to the ER,” my mother says. She leads me through the visitors' entrance. A cold blast of air in my face, then thick humidity on my skin.
This isn't the way to the ER.
We're outside. I double over, and Annette helps me so I'm standing, tells me it's just a bit farther—

A car door opens, and I'm crawling into the backseat, a pickup truck, I think, a hand on my back. A voice somewhere far off screams
No, no, NO,
but my limbs won't work.

The last thing I hear before everything goes black is my mother's voice.

“We were finally safe, Tessa. Why did you have to do this?”