The Prettiest One: A Thriller (6 page)

“My God, Josh . . .”

“They scratched the word
murderer
on the hood of my car.”

“Who did?”

“Neighborhood kids, I think. And they painted it on our garage door.”

“No.”

“After two months, they started throwing rocks through our windows. I had to replace nine of them. They smashed two mailboxes, too.”

“Did you call the police?”

“Sure, but you might not be surprised to learn that they weren’t terribly sympathetic. Said they’d send a patrol car by the house every now and then, but I never saw one. Hell, for all I knew, the cops were the ones throwing the rocks in the first place.”

She kept one hand on the wheel while she reached out and took one of his with her other.

“For the first two months,” Josh said, “the phone rang off the hook. Concerned friends, reporters, cops with more questions. Three different psychics called to say they’d heard from you.”

“Psychics?”

He nodded. “Two of them offered to connect me to you for a small fee. The third one told me, free of charge, that you had run off to Barcelona with a Spaniard named Raul.”

“I don’t know where I was or what I did, but I know I didn’t do that.”

“Yeah, I wasn’t buying that one. Anyway, I was getting calls like crazy for maybe two months. After another month or two, though, the cops called less, the media seemed to have lost interest, and only a few friends were left.”

“Who?” Caitlin asked. “Who was left?”

“Bethany and Carl. Jessica. Andy and Karen.”

“Good for them.”

“A few weeks later, though, they seemed to have lost my number, too. Along with their access to voice mail.”

She squeezed his hand. He squeezed back.

“God,” he said. “Listen to me complain. I’m acting like I’m the only one in this car who went through an ordeal. I can’t even imagine what you went through.”

“Unfortunately,” she said, “I can’t, either. Anything else, Josh?”

After a brief hesitation, he shrugged, which she took to mean that there was something he wasn’t saying. For the briefest of moments, she wondered if he’d met someone. She’d been gone for more than half a year. She had walked out of the house and simply hadn’t come home. She’d never called. What was Josh supposed to think? Was it possible that after some time had passed, enough time for him to wonder if she had actually left him for good, he decided to try to move on with his life? Would it even have been wrong of him if he had? How long could she have expected him to wait in such circumstances?

Ridiculous,
she knew. They were married. They were in love. He couldn’t have gotten over her that fast, even if he
had
thought she had left him. Her disappearance had forced him to consider the possibility that something terrible had happened to her. He would have been devastated. He wasn’t about to start hitting the singles bars. Still, there was something he wasn’t telling her.

“Josh? What is it? What aren’t you saying?”

He opened his mouth to speak, then stopped and shook his head, as if to himself.

“What?” she asked.

After a moment, he said, “I didn’t want to worry you, not so soon after you got home, but . . . well, keeping the house has been a bit of a struggle on just my income. We have almost nothing left in the bank.”

It wasn’t good news, but given the universe of bad things he could have revealed, it could have been far worse. And she wasn’t surprised. She had been gone a long time, and they had always needed both their earnings to save even a little every month after paying their bills.

“When we get home after all this,” he added, “even once we’re both working again, we’re going to have to watch our spending for a while. At least until we build up a little cushion.”

She nodded, though she wondered if she’d even be free to find employment after all this. Her next job might be serving runny mac and cheese to the other prisoners.

Then, in a case of exquisitely irritating timing, Caitlin heard the unmistakable
whoop
of a police siren behind them. Several thoughts elbowed one another for her attention. She was really, really glad they had left the gun back at their house. And the fake hands, too, which would have been tough to explain. Also, she had no idea how they were going to get around the fact that they were driving a car registered to a Katherine Southard. She prayed Josh was right that Ms. Southard had not reported the car stolen, or that she indeed had not been found somewhere with a bullet in her, both of which would have made things very difficult for them.

CHAPTER EIGHT

IN THE REARVIEW MIRROR, CAITLIN watched the silhouette of the state trooper behind the wheel of the cruiser parked on the shoulder of the highway not far behind them. Though he’d pulled them over a minute ago, he had yet to leave his vehicle.

“Why do you think he stopped us?” she asked Josh.

“I’m not sure. Were you speeding?”

“I don’t know. Probably. Doesn’t everyone? But I don’t think I was
speeding
speeding.”

“
Speeding
speeding?” Josh repeated. “Well, it certainly didn’t seem like you were going too fast to me.”

“You realize he’s going to ask for my license and registration . . . the registration that’s in Katherine Southard’s name.”

“Yeah, he will.”

“And he’s going to see that they don’t match.”

“Yeah,” Josh said, “and we’ll tell him that she’s a friend of ours, that we borrowed her car. He’s already checking to see if the car’s been reported stolen. He’ll find that it wasn’t, so he’ll have no reason to doubt our story.”

That made sense.
If
, of course, the online police blotter Josh had checked was accurate, and
if
Katherine Southard hadn’t reported the car stolen since they’d checked the web earlier or since the police blotter website had been updated. Then she thought of something else.

“You said my disappearance made local news. Even national news.”

“For a while. Oh, I see where you’re going.”

“Yeah,” she said. “What if he recognizes me? Suppose he wants to know where I’ve been and why the heck I haven’t told anyone that I’m back?”

“You look pretty different, hon. Your hair’s short and red instead of longer and blonde.
I
barely recognized you.”

“Okay, but suppose when he sees my license, he remembers my name? Maybe then he’d recognize my face.”

Josh squinted and pursed his lips. He often did that when he was concentrating. She hoped he came up with something good. “Well, I guess that would be it, then,” he finally said.

“What?”

“I hate to say it, Caitlin, but that would be it. We can’t deny who you are. We’d have to come clean about everything.”

“But—”

“Hey, it’s not like we knocked over a bank. We’re not on the run here. I don’t think there’s a crime against being missing. Or failing to report in when you’re no longer missing. Relax, we haven’t done anything wrong.”

“Maybe you haven’t. Remember the gun and the blood?”

“I do, but you don’t . . . at least not where it came from. If they find out about all that, be honest. You didn’t do anything wrong. I know it in my heart. The truth will bear that out.”

He was right. Not necessarily that she hadn’t done anything wrong, but that there was nothing they could do about it if the trooper realized who she was.

Finally, in the mirror, she saw the trooper climb out of his vehicle.

“Here he comes,” Caitlin said.

He was stocky and a little shorter than she expected. She tried to read his body language. Did he walk slowly, warily? Not particularly. Did he have his hand on his gun? Nope, but he had his thumb hooked in his belt very near his gun.

“I guess we’re about to find out whether I stole this car,” she said. “And whether he recognizes me.”

She lowered her window. “Hi,” she said and thought the little crack in her voice probably made her sound guilty of
something
.

“G’morning, ma’am. Can I see your license and registration, please?”

He was being polite, which Caitlin imagined was a good thing. Unless he just didn’t want to tip her off that he was suspicious about the car, and about her, too, now that he’d seen her face. She couldn’t read his eyes, though, because they were hidden behind dark sunglasses. For all she knew, he didn’t even have any eyes. She glanced at the nameplate on his chest. Banuelos.

“Of course,” Caitlin said. She lifted her purse from the floor of the car, fished her wallet from it, and slid out her license, which she gave to the trooper along with the vehicle’s registration, which Josh handed to her.

Trooper Banuelos gave the documents a quick look before focusing on her again. He seemed to be checking out the car’s interior, too, though it was hard to tell with those sunglasses.

“Do you know why I pulled you over?” he asked.

“I honestly don’t,” Caitlin said. “I’m sorry.”

“You were speeding,” he said. Caitlin had never been happier to hear a state trooper say those words. “I clocked you at seventy-three.”

Relief washed over her. “Oh, I was speeding,” she said almost giddily.

He frowned. That probably wasn’t the reaction Trooper Banuelos usually witnessed after delivering such news. “Yes, ma’am, you were,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” Caitlin said. “I really am. It didn’t feel like I was going that fast. If you have to ticket me, I understand. Really.”

He seemed to be staring at her face for a moment, though his eyes could have been spinning wildly in their sockets for all she knew.

“I guess that won’t be necessary,” Banuelos said. “Promise me you’ll slow it down a bit, though, okay?”

“I will,” she said. “I promise. Thank you so much.”

She watched in the mirror as the trooper swaggered back to his car. After he was behind the wheel again, he sat and waited for Caitlin to pull out. He would follow her for a mile or two, she knew, before turning around and finding someone else to pull over.

Caitlin slipped carefully back onto the highway and, as expected, the trooper pulled out right behind her. She nudged the car close to the speed limit. The cruiser was still behind them after a mile. Soon after that, though, she looked into the rearview mirror and it was nowhere in sight. Caitlin exhaled with relief.

“So, you weren’t speeding, huh?” Josh said.

“I said I wasn’t ‘
speeding
speeding.’ And seeing as Trooper Banuelos didn’t give me a ticket, he must have agreed with me.”

“I wonder what the legal threshold is for
speeding
speeding,” Josh said, smiling. “We dodged a bullet there. He barely looked at your license and the registration. Maybe it’s getting near the end of his shift and he’s tired.”

“Maybe he didn’t look at them at all. Maybe he
couldn’t
. Did you see those black glasses? I expected him to have a seeing eye dog with him.”

Josh smiled and Caitlin did, too, but her smile faded quickly. She wondered what lay ahead. Wondered whether she could live with what they would find. They were getting closer to Smithfield. Closer to where she had been when she’d awakened from her fog. And, for good or ill, closer to maybe finding some answers.

CHAPTER NINE

ONLY A FEW PEOPLE CALLED George Maggert by the name on his driver’s license. Most called him Chops. He was fine with that. He understood where the name came from, how he’d earned it. And he
had
earned it. The first few times he’d heard it, he didn’t like it and had made that fact plain to the person who’d said it. But he soon realized that whenever he heard the name, it was being spoken with either respect or fear, depending on the speaker and the circumstances, and that worked for him. He had not only come to like it, but he actually started thinking of himself as Chops. He even tried now, whenever the situation allowed, to do things to make sure that no one forgot that name.

He washed his hands at the sink, being very careful to clean under his fingernails. After he dried off, he slipped out of his coveralls and left his workroom, pulling the door shut behind him and locking it with a dead bolt. He walked through the outer room of this two-room workspace, where he kept a few tools, a computer, and some file cabinets—all of which made his contractor business seem completely legitimate. Anyone taking a casual look around this little office could believe that he derived all of his income from general contracting work, rather than a mere 25 percent.

Once outside, he walked across half an acre of green lawn—well, he noticed, it was brown in a few places . . . grubs, maybe . . . he’d have to do something about that—toward a contemporary house he shared with two of the handful of people in the world who didn’t call him Chops. One called him George, and had since they’d first met six years ago, and the other called him Daddy, which she had done since she started talking two years ago.

Chops climbed the steps to the back door, noticing yet again that the second stair was starting to rot. It wouldn’t do for someone who was supposed to be a contractor to let his own house fall into disrepair. He’d have to replace the board.

He entered the kitchen to find his daughter, Julia, sitting at the table in her pink booster chair, buttered toast cut into tiny little pieces spread out on the plate in front of her. He could see that it was the plate with the clown on it, her favorite. A matching sippy cup sat beside it.

Rachel turned from the stove with a sausage-and-cheese omelet on a plate.

“This okay?” she asked, looking up at him. She had no choice but to look up, even though at six feet she was the tallest woman Chops had ever dated, because he still had five inches on her. He sometimes thought her height was half the reason he’d married her. The other half was that he loved her. And she loved him. He could tell. He had no idea why. He wasn’t a handsome man by any stretch of the imagination. Not even close. He was too tall. He wished his eyes were a little closer together. And for some reason he just couldn’t hold a tan, even living in Southern California. But still, Rachel had fallen in love with him, which was a cause of endless wonder for him. It wasn’t as though she was a head-turner or anything like that, but she was definitely the Beauty to his Beast. He didn’t feel deserving of her love. And not merely because they weren’t a good match in the looks department. No, it was because of other things about him . . . things his wife didn’t know. He often wondered if she would still love him if she knew those things. He hoped he would never have to find out. But she did love him and he was grateful for that.