Unless we weren’t the us she was worried about.
“How’d you get the freezer to West Virginia?” I asked. The trunk of her sporty BMW was far too small to hold such a large appliance.
She raised her chin defiantly. “Steven’s farm truck.”
“Steven’s farm truck has restricted license plates. It’s not registered to drive on the highway. You could have been pulled over and searched.” Theresa would have been a fool to take that kind of risk with a dismembered corpse in the open bed of the truck. That freezer had been nearly four feet long. Even empty, it must have weighed over a hundred pounds. “Who helped you move it?” I demanded.
Theresa’s watery green eyes leapt between Vero and me. “Don’t tell me you wouldn’t do the same for each other. That if she asked you, you wouldn’t do something like this for her?”
My breath caught as Theresa’s meaning became clear. She was talking about me and Vero. About our friendship. About the crazy things we would do for each other. She had no idea how right she was.
“Aimee?” I whispered.
“Please don’t turn her in,” Theresa begged. “She was only trying to help! I called her from Carl’s house. I didn’t know what else to do. It was Aimee’s idea to put him in the freezer. She said she knew where to take Carl. How to make him disappear.”
My heart lurched. Vero’s nails dug into my arm.
Theresa reached for me, tripping over the trash bags as I bolted for the door. “Where are you going?” she cried. “You can’t leave! You can’t leave him here! You can’t—”
I didn’t even think about the body as Vero and I sprinted to her car.
CHAPTER 21
I was out of the Charger before Vero put it in park, my mind too scrambled to think as I unlocked my front door. What if my sister had been chopped into tiny pieces? What if my children were gone? What if they were all stuffed into shiny black trash bags in the back of Aimee’s car?
I threw open the door to a rush of warm air and the smell of burnt popcorn. The living room was dark, the TV left on, the closing credits of a movie scrolling down the screen.
I burst into the kitchen. The microwave door had been left ajar. A burned bag of singed, cold popcorn had been abandoned in the sink.
“Georgia!” I called out. No one answered.
“Finlay?” Vero’s voice was low and choked. She stood in front of the pantry, pointing at a trail of red droplets on the floor.
I followed them from the pantry to the stairwell, gasping when they led to a bright red smear on the wall. The stain was the size and shape of a tiny hand, traveling up the stairwell the same way Delia’s and Zach’s handprints did after they’d eaten something sticky or trailed in dirt from the playground. “No!” I surged up the stairs with Vero on my heels. My sister’s voice carried from the end of the hall, and I chased the sound of it into my bedroom.
Vero grabbed my arm and jerked me to a stop. “Listen,” she whispered.
“You don’t have to do this.” Georgia’s voice was muted through the bathroom door. “If you hold them hostage, you’re only hurting yourself.”
A muffled cry of distress came from inside the bathroom. I tried the knob, a strangled, terrified sound escaping me when I realized the door was locked.
I reached for the key we kept hidden above the doorframe. Vero dragged me backward and held a finger to her lips. “Your sister is in there,” she whispered.
“So are my children!” I whispered back.
“Georgia’s a trained professional. Whatever’s going on in there, she’s qualified to handle it.”
Zach let loose an angry howl. Vero clapped a hand over my mouth before I could call out to him.
“I’ve heard your list of demands,” my sister said in a carefully measured voice, “and I am prepared to be reasonable. But you need to give me something in return. A show of good faith. That’s all I’m asking.”
My throat tightened. I couldn’t breathe. I pried Vero’s hand from my mouth, dragging in a shuddering gasp. Aimee was in there with my kids. She was holding them hostage. Theresa must have called her and told her we knew about Carl the second we’d left her house. This was all my fault.
Zach whimpered through the door, and my heart ripped to pieces. “We have to go in there,” I whispered.
“What if Aimee panics? She might hurt them.”
“They’re already hurt!” They must have fought her off in the kitchen. They must have run to my room to escape, and she’d trapped them. Cornered them in my bathroom and locked the door.