The One I Trust (29 page)

“I was shaking so much that I could hardly drive and I realized I hadn’t had anything to eat all morning. I knew I needed to get some food in my stomach and make myself calm down or I wasn’t going to be able to figure anything out, so I went to a drive-thru and I ate in the parking lot. After I finished, I went inside to use the bathroom, and that’s when you called.

“I didn’t answer,” she said, “but as soon as I listened to your message I knew they thought I’d set Hale’s beach house on fire. I turned my phone off because I was afraid that if it was on they could find me somehow, and then I went to the library.”

“The library?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I needed to talk to Wyatt.”

“Who’s Wyatt?”

“The private eye I hired.”

“Oh,” I said. “Yeah. Why’d you want to talk to him?”

“I wanted to read some of those emails from Tiffany,” she said. “Remember how they kept disappearing?”

“Yeah . . .”

“Well,” she explained, “I started forwarding them to him before they could disappear and I wanted to read them again to see if I could figure anything out, so I was going to email him and ask him to send them to me.”

“Okay . . .”

“So I backed my car up against some bushes at the rear of a parking lot about two blocks away and I walked. The whole time, I was sure that a bunch of police cars were going to come screeching up to me with their sirens blaring.

“I logged on to one of the computers when I got to the library and emailed him,” she said. “It only took him about ten minutes to respond, but those were the longest ten minutes of my life. I was sure my face was plastered all over the noon news or something and that he was going to call the police and turn me in. I kept waiting for the police to swarm into the library with their guns drawn or something.”

“They wanted to talk to you about
arson
, Emily,” I said, raising my eyebrows. “Not murder.”

“I know,” she admitted, “but I was scared, okay? I was paranoid and I was scared and I was all alone.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Anyway,” she went on. “I’d already spent a whole week trying to figure out who would want to break us up and I figured it had to be a woman.”

“Why?”

“Remember when that detective called me and told me you were under investigation?”

“Yeah . . .”

“She called me back the next day,” Emily said, a knowing look in her eyes.

“She called you back,” I repeated.

She nodded solemnly.

“You didn’t tell me that.”

“She told me not to,” Emily confessed. “She said that I couldn’t trust you and I was in danger, and somehow she knew that you’d called Dale so I believed her . . .”

Her voice faded away and I realized why she’d been acting so upset the day I told her I wanted to get Gracie. It hadn’t had anything to do with me wanting to get a dog . . .

She looked at me guiltily.

“It’s okay,” I assured her.

Emily nodded.

“So anyway,” she went on. “When I remembered that phone call, I pretty much figured out it was a woman and I was pretty sure it was someone who had been in my classroom that very first day of school when my keys disappeared.

“At first I thought maybe it was Julie, but whoever it was took my keys, went and had copies made, and then put them in my car—and Julie had been with me all day, so I knew it couldn’t have been her.

“I also figured that it wasn’t anyone else I knew like Denise or Brianna because I would have recognized them if they’d come into my room. Whoever it was used the fact that there was going to be a lot of chaos and a whole bunch of people in my room that I didn’t know. All they had to do was blend in with a bunch of strangers.”

“Okay . . .”

“And so I figured if it wasn’t someone
I
knew, it had to be someone that
you
knew, and after I got the emails from Wyatt, I read each one again with that in mind. The more I read the ones from that person named Tiffany, the more I realized . . .”

She paused, clearly reluctant to go on.

“What?”

“Whoever it was knew you,” she said. “I mean, they really
knew
you . . .”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, like they knew things about you that . . .”

She hesitated again.

I glanced at her and repeated, “What?”

“Things that only a wife would know,” she finally said in a small voice. “Or at least things that only a wife
should
know.”

“Like what?”

“Like your tattoo.”

“Uh . . .” I lifted my left hand from the steering wheel, giving my wrist a small turn to indicate my “Noah” tattoo. I glanced at her hopefully.

“No,” she said dryly. “The other
one.”

The other one. The one that only a few people had ever seen. The result of an ill-placed bet made with Hale before we’d even turned twenty . . .

“There were other things, too,” she went on in a small voice. “Whoever sent me those emails . . .”

She turned her face away.

“They’d definitely slept with you,” she forced herself to say. “That’s why I was so sure you were having an affair at first.”

I couldn’t imagine what else the emails had talked about, but I didn’t ask because I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

“So anyway,” Emily continued. “Once I allowed myself to wonder if Tori was actually still alive, everything started making perfect sense. I knew you’d told me that there’d been so much blood that she had to be dead, but I figured she could have easily stockpiled it and—”

“Stockpiled it?”

“Yeah. You know,” she said. “Siphoned off a little bit every day—saved it up in the fridge or freezer or whatever. It happens in books and movies and stuff all the time. It’s not all that original.”

I really was going to make a terrible PI . . .

She said, “The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. I mean, I always wondered why she let her mom know that she’d lied. If she was as smart as you said she was, the only reason she would have done that was so that you’d let your guard down and agree to meet her that day.”

I had never thought about it that way . . .

“And then there were the drugs,” Emily went on.

“The drugs I found in your pocket?”

“No, the drugs she gave Noah,” she said. “That didn’t make any sense either. Why would she have drugged him before she killed him?”

“Because she didn’t want him to suffer . . .”

“Okay,” Emily agreed. “But why would
you
have drugged him? Surely she knew that that wouldn’t make any sense if she was trying to frame
you
for murder. If you were going to murder two people on a public beach, would you really have taken the time to drug one of them before you killed them?”

I considered her argument.

“If what Tori really cared about was making sure you were framed for murder,” she went on, “Noah’s blood wouldn’t have had opiates in it. She knew you weren’t going to get framed for murder . . . she knew her mom was going to get you off the hook. That’s not what she was trying to do.”

“What was she trying to do?” I asked. I was trying to keep up, I really was . . .

“All she wanted was for you to think that Noah was dead. She knew it would have made perfect sense for
her
to drug him before she killed him. She knew you would have clung to the hope that he hadn’t suffered before he’d died. But the main thing is that you would have
thought that he had died
. . .”

I kept my eyes on the road and gripped the steering wheel tightly. It was a long, tense moment before I dared to glance at her again and ask, “Do you think he’s still alive?” My voice was a hoarse whisper.

“I don’t know . . .”

“But what do you think?”

She’d been right about everything so far . . .

“I . . . I think . . .”

Did her voice trail off because she didn’t want to get my hopes up or because she didn’t want to crush them?

“Tell me,” I urged pleadingly. I had to know.

She looked at me reluctantly.

“I think she gave him something every night for weeks to knock him out,” she finally said. “After he fell asleep, I think she drew blood and stockpiled it. The day it happened I think she probably put him in a little pink coat and purple tennis shoes and pulled a flowered hat down over his head or something and the two of them walked hand in hand along the shore until they got to Atlantic Beach. She’d been planning it out for a long time. She probably had a car parked there at one of those shops and a new life ready to step into. They were probably off the island before the park had even been searched.”

“She couldn’t have driven two cars down there,” I pointed out.

“How hard would it have been for her to get someone to help her?” Emily reasoned. “Some ex-convict or delinquent or something who wanted sex or drugs?”

Emily had all the answers . . .

“Do you think he’s alive now?” I dared to ask.

I took my eyes off the road and looked at her.

She looked back at me for a moment and then gave me a little nod.

I looked out the windshield again.

“Where?” I was gripping the steering wheel again.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“No.”

“Well what do you think?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said again.

“But if you don’t know where he is,” I cried, “why did you let me turn her in? If she’s the only person who can tell me where he is then—”

“I told you it was your decision . . .”

“But you said she was lying!”

“About telling you where he was,” she said. “Not about him being alive.”

My stomach knotted.

“I should have let her go,” I said, shaking my head as panic choked me. “I should have listened to her . . .”

“No,” Emily argued. “She wouldn’t have told you the truth. She would have figured out how to get away and you wouldn’t be any closer to finding him than you are right now.”

“You shot her
five
times,” I said. “How could she have possibly gotten away?”

“Again,” Emily said, “she probably had someone helping her.”

I didn’t say anything else until we turned on to Hale and Anneka’s street.

“Do you think someone has Noah?” I asked. “Do you think whoever’s been helping her has been taking care of him?”

“I don’t know.”

How could she have everything else figured out but not this?

As upset as I was that Emily didn’t know where Noah was or how I could find him, I knew that she was right—it would have been a mistake to have trusted Tori. The only thing I could do right now was trust God. I needed to trust that God was taking care of Noah and that—if He wanted to—He was going to bring my little boy back to me.

THE SUN WAS coming up by the time we finished filling Hale and Anneka in on everything.

“But how did Tori kill Gracie?” Anneka wanted to know. “Why wouldn’t Gracie have fought her or barked or something?”

“Tori had the house bugged,” Emily reminded her. “And Reid told me in the living room that very first day that Gracie would bond with whoever was feeding her.”

“Tori probably brought a steak or something with her as soon as we went to work on Monday,” I explained. “Gracie’d been meeting all sorts of new people that weekend and didn’t have any reason to feel threatened at the point. Tori probably came in every day while we were at work and petted her and fed her. Gracie didn’t think anything of it when she came in yesterday morning.”

“But neither one of you heard anything when she was being killed?”

“Tori probably waited until I was in the shower,” Emily said. “And she knew that Reid would sleep through anything.”

“Besides that,” I said. “Gracie had probably bonded with Tori by that point. If she saw her every day and was feeding her every day, Gracie would have trusted Tori—even if she was being hurt.”

“How did she get into the house after you had the locks changed?” Hale asked.

“I don’t know,” Emily said. “That’s the only thing I can’t figure out.”

“How did
you
get in there yesterday afternoon?” I wanted to know. “Your purse was here on the couch and your keys were in it.”

“Last week I gave Wyatt an extra key because he was going to look for bugs,” she explained. “After I figured out that Tori was alive and that she was probably going to come after you, I emailed him back and asked him to meet me so I could get into the house. I’d only been there for about twenty minutes when you got home.”

“You were there the whole time?”

“Yeah.” She nodded. “I tried to get into the gun safe, but when I couldn’t find the keys I went into the closet and set the combination on the bow case so it would be ready if I needed it. I climbed up into the attic right before Hale dropped you off.”

I’d never even thought about checking the small door in the ceiling of our closet that accessed the unfinished attic.

“I waited until I heard you snoring,” Emily went on, “and then I dropped down into the closet and got ready.”

“But you don’t have any idea how Tori got in?”

She shook her head and sighed wearily.

“Did you hear anything?” I asked. “Like could you tell if she came in from the front of the house or the back of the house or—”

“I don’t know,” she said. Her eyes were closed now. “I already told you—that’s the one thing I can’t figure out.”

“I wonder if she talked to whoever changed the locks and got them to give her a key,” I mused. “You know, I bet she heard you make the phone call to the locksmith and then she called them after it was done and asked for an extra set or something. We already know from the video that she wore a wig to look like you, so maybe she put in brown contacts and—”

“She couldn’t have looked
that
much like Emily,” Anneka argued. “Looking like her on a gas station security camera is a whole lot different than looking like her in person.”

“Well, maybe she called and made arrangements to pick up an extra set from the shop,” I said. “Then it probably would have been a different person.”

“Do locksmiths really even
have
shops?” Hale asked. “Don’t they just work out of their truck?”