Obsession Falls (5 page)
Outside, the sun was descending. Temperatures were falling.
The house was warm. Newer than her childhood home, but not so fancy as she had expected. For the first time in days, the taut fear that had kept her terrified, fleeing, always looking behind her … faded. Not completely. But enough that she was able to put her soup in a bowl, sit down at the table with a spoon in her hand, and eat like a civilized person.
She put her bowl in the sink. My God, she’d tracked dirt and broken glass all over the floor. She unlaced her hiking boots and removed them. She retrieved the broom and dustpan from the pantry and swept up.
She found the half bath off the kitchen and used it. Actually peed in a real toilet. And flushed it.
She pulled the honeycomb blinds down over the broken window—they cut the cold breeze.
She wandered into the living room and sank down on the couch. Nice room. It looked like the family had saved the knotty pine paneling from Taylor’s old house to use on the walls. The paneling gave the space a warm, golden feel. Homey. Like her home. Like … she leaned her head back on the pillows, then laid down and pulled the afghan over herself.
Just for a moment …
Taylor woke up as the sun peeked over the eastern horizon.
She sat up with a jerk. How had she fallen asleep like that? After so many hours and days of no sleep, fearful sleep, freezing cold sleep, how had she …
Well. She had answered her own question.
She had slept the night through. She had been without sleep for so long she had broken into a family’s house, slurped their soup, and fallen asleep on their couch as if she didn’t have a worry in the world. Which she guessed she didn’t, since the cops had never shown up to haul her ass away.
So what was another can of soup? She was
starving
.
She headed back into the kitchen, found the bathroom again, peed in the real toilet—again—and flushed it.
Man, that
never
got old.
Back in the pantry, she found a can of clam chowder
and
a can of Spam.
She
loathed
Spam. But right now, it sounded like the best breakfast ever.
Today, her hands weren’t shaking so much. She made quick work of cutting the Spam and putting it in a pan to fry. She found a loaf of bread in the freezer and popped two slices in the toaster. She used the electric can opener and opened a can of peaches. And she made coffee. She sat down and ate breakfast: the whole can of Spam, the whole can of peaches, three slices of bread, a healthy helping of preserves, and a bowl of clam chowder. When she was done, she meticulously put the kitchen back into order. If anyone came in the back door now, they would notice nothing out of place except the spattering of glass shards on the tile floor close to the window.
She unlocked the door and headed outside.
With food in her stomach and a good night’s sleep behind her, the air felt brisk rather than brutal, and the limb that had defeated her last night was manageable. She pulled it up onto the porch and positioned it so it looked as if it had broken off in the wind and smashed the window.
She was very aware of the crime she had committed, and also very aware that if the residents of this house returned, she would quickly have to make herself scarce. She did not want to be shot as a trespasser.
Going back inside, she shut the door behind her and felt the heat soak into her chilled skin. To be warm was a luxury she would never again take for granted.
Starting with the upper level, she took a tour of the house.
The upstairs held three bedrooms and a bath. The main floor was the living room, the kitchen, the half bath, the master suite. There, on the wide wooden desk in the bedroom, was a computer. Walking over, she turned it on. While she waited for it to boot, she checked the modem. It was unplugged. She plugged it in. The modem lights came on.
She had power. She had a way to communicate with the outside world.
She put her hand on her heart. It fluttered like a trapped bird beneath her palm.
God. In just a moment, she would be free. She would send an e-mail to the authorities, and the police would take her away and protect her until the monster who had killed—or tried to kill—that child was taken into custody.
Anticipation hummed like fine wine through her veins.
Seating herself on the upholstered Queen Anne armchair, she waited for the computer to load. The browser came up. The home page was set to
USA Today.
The headline flashed on the screen. She was connected.
WHO WAS TAYLOR SUMMERS
?
She shook her head. That was the headline? What the hell did that mean?
She leaned forward. Read it again.
WHO WAS
TAYLOR
SUMMERS
?
Her name. Why was her name in a national newspaper? In the headlines?
And why … why were they talking about her in the past tense?
She scrolled down.
Her picture was inserted into the text … and a photo of her rental vehicle, charred and broken.
She read the words.
She read them again.
The article dissected everything about her: her appearance, her parents’ divorce, her education, her career as a successful interior decorator. In cold, cool prose, everything about her life was laid out for the world to see. And the story continually asked—
why would a woman with so much going for her kidnap the nephew of the wealthy and powerful Kennedy McManus? And do so with no more motivation than to kill the child and bring misery to those who loved him?
“I didn’t do that. I didn’t do that!” She was talking to
USA Today.
The article continued,
When the child escaped and she had failed, how could she have been so naive as to die in an explosion set by her killer lover?
She shouted at the monitor, “My killer lover? Who was my killer lover?”
The picture showed the skinny guy who had dragged the boy out of the trunk, Ramon Hernandez, a guy with a criminal record stretching back to grade school. But he was dead, too, killed by the strike force that had saved the boy.
Taylor sat back and tried to absorb what she had learned.
The boy was still alive. At least her actions had helped him.
But how had the truth become so twisted? The article said the boy was unhurt. He had to know she had nothing to do with holding him.
Didn’t he tell the authorities what really happened?
Or rather—
why
didn’t he tell the authorities what really happened? He had been whisked away by his uncle and not seen since. Was he hurt? Had he had a mental breakdown? Was he in a coma or something?
Taylor read the article again. Yes. There it was. Kennedy McManus stated his nephew had fallen while escaping, had brain damage, and although he was recovering from the ordeal, he was not expected to regain his memory.
There was no one to bear witness to her innocence.
Worse, the article contained no mention of Dash. None.
How could they have missed Dash?
The article claimed she had been identified by papers with her name on them. Yes, that was what Taylor had been afraid of. But those papers—“They were drawings. Not sinister plotting. How could you print stuff that’s not true?”
How could the reporter have researched Taylor’s obscure background and nailed the facts so precisely, but not have gotten one damned thing right about the crime? How could the cops be so stupid?
Taylor followed another link and found shocked quotes from her coworkers, friends and her first fiancé … and tearful quotes from her mother wondering why Taylor had returned to her childhood home to commit her crime, and if Pete Summers’s suicide had warped her daughter’s youthful psyche.
“How can you say that?” Taylor asked the computer screen. “He did not commit suicide!” Just like her mother to transfer all the blame for Taylor’s messed-up childhood away from herself and onto Pete Summers, with no care about maligning a good man’s memory … Taylor wiped a tear off her cheek.
It wasn’t simply that the whole story was wrong, reporting her as one of the kidnappers, saying she was in the car when it exploded and her body had been unrecoverable—it completely missed the fact that someone else was behind the kidnapping, some guy named Jimmy, someone who was willing to commit a heinous crime to make Kennedy McManus miserable.
Taylor had to do something.
But what?
This story made her a fugitive.
No, worse than that.
She was dead.
She didn’t exist.
She had nowhere to go.
She searched and found the story repeated in every major newspaper in the country. For some reason—slow news week—this story had caught the country’s imagination. Predictably, the
Idaho Mountain Express,
Sun Valley’s weekly newspaper, had featured her as a local girl gone wrong, complete with her fourth-grade school photo, big teeth and crooked bangs, and a picture of the Summers’s home before demolition.
She rubbed her sunburned forehead. Rubbed her cracked, blistered lips. Rubbed her bloodshot eyes. She felt as if she needed to wipe herself clean from this terrible injustice. She got up and paced away, came back and sat down, and read more articles that restated those same wrong “facts” as if they were gospel, searching for some version of the facts. The truth. But it wasn’t there.
She did find that the few remains of Taylor Summers the FBI had been able to recover were now buried in a cemetery in Maryland.
Her mother knew perfectly well Taylor wanted to be buried in Idaho.
Or maybe her mother didn’t. They’d never discussed Taylor’s desires when it came to her death. Why would they? Taylor was twenty-nine, in excellent health, both physical and mental, although to read these articles, it was clear her mental health was now in doubt. In fact, when she made the mistake of reading the comments, it became clear she was a woman despised and reviled throughout the world. She was a pariah—or would be, if she was alive.
The comments finally drove her from her morbid fascination with her own demise and into the bathroom. She turned on the water. She peeled off her clothes and stuffed them into the trash under the sink. She pulled the plastic bag out of the can and put it by the door. She stepped into the glass shower enclosure and into the steamy warmth, and scrubbed herself hard, peeling off a week’s worth of grime, scrubbing under her nails, trying to avoid the memory of the erroneous articles and the harsh comments. How dare those people, total strangers, read about her life and presume to make judgment?
She found herself talking out loud, arguing with unseen opponents, defending herself for a crime she hadn’t committed.
“I was trying to help that kid. I put my life on the line for a child I didn’t even know. I didn’t do it blindly. I knew I was putting myself at risk. Maybe it wasn’t the best plan. I mean, it was a stupid plan. But it worked! It’s not like I expected any thanks. I didn’t. But I didn’t expect to freeze and starve and live in constant fear from every beast in the forest. I didn’t expect to have my car booby-trapped and exploded, and in the process, almost get blown up. I didn’t expect to descend into such desperation that I broke into my own house…” Her voice broke. She gave a hard, dry sob.
She washed her hair, using copious amounts of shampoo and conditioner, trying to remove pine sap and needles and dirt and tangles …
“I’m a criminal. I’m afraid to go back to civilization. I’m afraid they’ll put me in prison. I’m afraid Dash, who is evidently as free as a bird and not a suspect at all, will find and kill me. How did this happen? No good deed goes unpunished, and all that? Winter’s coming. How can I survive? I’m going to die up here.”
She heard her voice echoing off the tile. She was ranting. She sounded like a crazy woman. Maybe she was a crazy woman.
She used the squeegee to clean the shower—this place had saved her life, and she wanted to leave it the same way she’d found it. She got out, wrapped one towel around her head and one around her body. She stood indecisively, then started toward the closet. She had to have something else to wear. She hoped to hell the lady of the house was approximately her size.
As she turned, she caught sight of someone in the mirror. She jumped violently, and swung to look behind her.
She was alone.
Incredulous, she turned back and stared. She took a step forward. She touched her cheek.
Who was that woman in the mirror?
Her face had been pleasantly rounded, a placid face with brown eyes and lips that smiled often.
She dropped the towel.
Her body had been curvy, with soft hips, a well-defined waist, and generous boobs.
That face was gone. That body was gone. They had vanished as if they had never been. In their place were features refined by terror, by hunger, by pain. Her chin was squared-off and determined, her cheeks gaunt, and the gash on her left cheek had barely begun to heal. Her artfully highlighted hair was growing out, showing her brunette roots. Sunburn had blistered her pale skin, time and again, until it was raw on her cheeks, forehead, and arms. Her eyes were too big, like a starving African child’s.
But those eyes contained none of the innocence of childhood; they had stared into the heart of darkness and seen her own death. The veneer of civilization had been stripped away. She was a beast like any of the other beasts in the forest; she would take whatever action necessary to survive.
Coldly, deliberately, she would survive.
For the first time, Taylor understood who she was and what she was made of, what she would do and say and be to continue on this earth … and, someday, to get her revenge on the men who had destroyed her life, and find justice for herself.