“Thank you,” I bit out, because it was what he wanted to hear. Bishop saw it. She knew Liv hadn’t hurt herself, but would that matter? If Mayor Green told her to drop it, she’d be risking her job to do anything else.
“It’s no problem, hon,” Dougherty said. “Hey, you made my career. I kind of owe you, I figure.”
“Made your career,” I repeated dully. The words didn’t make sense. And then they snapped into focus. “You mean because you were the one who got Stahl.”
He made a demurring sound. “I wouldn’t say I got him, just put the pieces together. My brother-in-law knew a guy working on the case, and he told me all about the guy they were looking at. I’d been carrying his photo around just in case I spotted him. Figured it was only a matter of time before he came hunting around here. As soon as those girls told me what had happened, it clicked.”
Silence stretched. I heard him shift, chair creaking, like he was expecting me to chime in with a bit of praise and was slowly realizing it wouldn’t come. He had no idea what he’d done. The error he’d set in motion.
And now he was doing it all over again. He’d known from the start it was suicide, like he’d known from the start it was Stahl. He was never going to look for another answer or consider that he could be wrong.
“Look, I—” he started. Then nothing. I kept the phone to my ear, waiting for him to finish, for several seconds before I realized the signal had finally dipped to zero.
The walls of the cave were close around me, and I couldn’t tell if it felt like threat or comfort. I clawed myself free, fleeing both, and staggered through the woods. The trees blurred around me as I made my way toward the road, my thoughts an endless inventory of ghosts.
I drove straight out of Chester, anger a sharp pain behind my sternum. Around Sequim, I pulled off at a rest stop to stretch my legs. A family with a little fluffy dog was playing on the grass nearby. Their car was piled with camping gear, tents and sleeping bags strapped to the roof. I sat at a picnic table, watching the dog chase a ball back and forth.
I’d only gone camping once as a kid. It was the year before that summer. Cass hated camping, so Liv and I spent a week in the woods with Marcus and Kimiko, just the two of us. We shared a tent and stayed up late into the right, whispering. I would sneak my hand out from my sleeping bag, and she would find it, and we would let our fingers slide over each other, lacing and unlacing.
I remembered the feeling in the pit of my stomach as we lay in the tent, an excruciating longing. It would be years later and far away that I’d finally recognize what it meant—that I had been more than a little in love with Olivia. Gay was just a synonym for stupid when we were growing up in Chester. Bisexual was a punch line to a dirty joke. I’d been well into college before I realized I was attracted to women. And by then, even if Liv had felt the same way, things were too complicated, Liv’s stability too precarious.
I had wanted that trip to last forever. We were supposed to go again the next year, just the two of us. But the day before we were going to leave, Cass took a fall on her bike and sliced up her calf on the chain. We stayed to keep her company while she recovered, instead. The Barneses talked about rescheduling, but then the mill burned and the Goddess Game began, and the camping trip was forgotten.
A trucker had pulled in right after me, and as he exited the restroom he headed toward me, making the kind of eye contact that could go one of two ways—either he wanted me off-balance or he wanted to make sure I knew he wasn’t trying anything funny. He was a big-set guy with thick hands and hairy knuckles, and I decided to be contrary and assume the best.
“Afternoon,” I said, giving him a nod.
“Sorry to bother you, miss,” he said. “I’ve been heading in the same direction as you for a bit now, and I thought you should know there’s somebody following you.”
“I’m sorry, what?” I said, my intentional calm dissolving. “What makes you think that?”
“There’s a black Toyota Camry that’s been dogging you. Staying in your lane, making sure you don’t get more than a couple cars ahead. I thought you must be traveling together, but then when you pulled off here, he parked on the shoulder just up ahead. Figured I should let you know.”
“I appreciate it,” I said, trying not to sound queasy. He could be wrong. Paranoid and bored after a long stretch on the road.
Except he’d said it was a black Toyota Camry. Like the one I’d seen in Chester, too many times to quite dismiss as a trick of my imagination.
“Want me to follow you out, keep an eye on you?” he asked, adjusting his baseball cap over a thick mop of black hair.
I shook my head. “I can look out for myself,” I said.
“I don’t mean to be rude or sexist or anything,” he said, and I gave him a twisted-up smile. His eyes tracked predictably to my scar, and I could see the question in his eyes.
“You should see the other guy,” I said.
“Oh yeah?” he said. “He missing an ear?”
“He’s dead, actually,” I replied, deadpan. He stared at me a beat, then decided I was joking, and chuckled.
“You be careful,” he told me.
“Sure thing,” I replied with false cheer, and gave him a wave as I headed back to my car.
I pulled out, my nerves jangling. I’d hoped the trucker was wrong, but there was the black Toyota, waiting on the shoulder. I drove past it and hoped against hope that it would stay put. No such luck. When I was a decent distance ahead, it pulled back onto the freeway.
Over the next few miles I tried switching lanes randomly, moving into exit lanes and back out again. He didn’t always stay in my lane, and sometimes he dropped back, but any time it looked like I might be taking an exit he was there right behind me. The windows of the car were tinted. I couldn’t make out anything about him other than a vague silhouette. It might not even have been a man, much less the one I’d seen in Chester.
I memorized the license plate, wishing I’d thought to back in town so I could be sure it was the same car, and tried to tell myself there was nothing he could do to me on the road. When we pulled into the ferry terminal, he was two cars behind me. I shut off my engine.
The ferry was chugging toward us, but still at a good distance. It would be fifteen minutes before it reached the dock, and my stalker was just sitting back there, watching me. I was boxed in, cars to my left and right. On the ferry it would be worse, surrounded by water so I couldn’t even run.
I couldn’t sit here and wait for something to happen. I already felt like I was crawling out of my own skin. I unbuckled my seatbelt and threw open my door, striding down the line of cars to the black Toyota. I rapped on the window, glaring in at the indistinct figure in the driver’s seat. They shifted but didn’t roll down the window, so I knocked on it again.
“I know you’re following me,” I said. I was drawing attention, now, heads swiveling toward me, cell phones emerging as the onlookers sensed a video opportunity. “Roll down the window. Who the hell are you? What do you want?”
“Ma’am, is there a problem here?”
A security officer stood nearby, his hand resting oh-so-casually at his belt next to his Taser. He was a young Latino man, with a long face and intense eyes. I was keenly aware of how this must look. Like I was out of my mind, the classic white woman on a tear because the world hadn’t lined up just so to cater to her.