She turned on her ancient stereo and shoved in a Fiona Apple CD as she hit the highway out of town. As always, she’d barely managed to push her shitty car from thirty-five to sixty when it was time to exit and take a left to the underpass that flooded every spring. There was new graffiti again, ACAB spelled out in big red letters. Maybe that was what had Mendelson so pissed off.
She spotted the lurking car as soon as she cleared the threatening shadow of the highway. The same spot she’d seen a car sitting before, on the road that led to the tidy row of houses, but not close enough to be parked in the neighborhood. This time when she drove past, the car pulled out and followed her.
“What the hell?” she whispered, staring into the rearview mirror as she drove. It wasn’t dark, but the sun was setting, and she knew the business park would be deserted at this time on a Saturday.
She could keep driving, though. She could pull a U-turn and head back to town, drop into the library like she’d wanted to. She could even pull into the storage center and close the gate behind her, although it didn’t move that quickly.
She jerked her eyes back to the road before they found their way to the mirror again. The fading sunlight glowed from behind her, so whoever was driving was just a silhouette, a shadow of a threat.
It could be anyone, but she had a terrible feeling it was Mendelson. Still, what if it was a stranger? Jesus, it could even be Jones.
She was supposed to trust her instincts, they all were, but her instincts had failed her disastrously in life, hadn’t they? Or had she just shoved them down because she hadn’t wanted the truth?
Shaking her head, she decided her instincts didn’t deserve her trust. It could be the cop or it could be a madman. She had absolutely nothing to lose by turning around and fleeing, and far too much to lose if she didn’t.
Lily hit the gas for the last fifty yards of road, then pulled quickly into her driveway, pulling the steering wheel as hard as she could. The wheels squealed at the tight circle, and then lights flashed, and she slammed on the brakes in panic, trapped between the road and the gate.
The car that had been following her was now stopped at an angle, blocking her path, and the front had lit up in flashing blue and red lights. Her eyes locked with the driver’s.
Detective Mendelson.
The surge of relief that washed over her was kind of funny in the face of the police lights, but he couldn’t be there to arrest her. She hadn’t done anything illegal, not for a long time, anyway.
He opened his car door and approached. Lily stared at him until he’d reached her window, and then she patted her door, looking for the control.
When she finally got the window open, she first heard the sound of his engine, then the scrape of his shoe as he stepped back and bent down.
“Mrs. Arthur,” he said solemnly. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
This again. This Mrs. Arthur bullshit, the ghost she’d left behind, stirred back to life by whatever stick was up this guy’s backside.
“What do you want?” she ground out.
“I told you I’d be by to talk, ma’am. Maybe you could pull on in?”
She desperately wanted to bite out, Talk to my lawyer, but there were two problems with that. One, she didn’t have a lawyer, and two, she did not want to piss off this man any more than she had to. So she snapped, “Park here,” then eased her car backward and curved around to the gate to enter the code.
The gate closed behind her after she pulled in. For a moment, she thought about simply heading inside and locking her door, but she knew Barbara would be dropping off Everett soon. It wouldn’t be fair to him to present his friend and her mom with a spectacle like that, so she took a deep breath and unlocked the pedestrian gate to let herself through.
“I have no idea where Jones is, if that’s what you’re after. I’d direct you anywhere but here. Try Costa Rica. Try Guatemala. Try Greenland. Wherever he is, I haven’t seen him in six years. If you do find him, tell him to send money for the son he abandoned. Cool?”
“Well, ma’am . . . I wasn’t looking for him the first time I came out, but as I said, your behavior caught my attention. If you’re not hiding Jones Arthur out here, you’re hiding something else.”
Her heart pumped a flush to her face almost immediately, so Lily shoved her hands in her pockets and paced away. “What were you looking for, Detective? You’ve never said.”
A heartbeat ticked by in silence before he spoke. “A woman was reported missing by her husband. Amber’s last reported location was nearby, though I can’t reveal more than that.”