Crash & Burn (Tessa Leoni, #3)(102)

“Days on end,” he says now, “you laid on the couch with that damn quilt and whispered under your breath. Long, involved conversations with Vero. Vero flies. Vero cries. Vero only wants to be free. If I interrupted, you flew into a rage. If I tried to comfort you, you slapped my face and screamed at me it was all my fault. You hated me. Vero hated me. Go away.”

I can picture it, exactly as he says. My need, my all-consuming need, to commune with the past. Thomas, walking into the room. Thomas, daring to interrupt. The sharp feel against my palm as I connected with his face.

It’s all your fault, I screamed at him. I know what you did. She told me, you know. She tells me everything!

Thomas, not even bothering to argue. Thomas, walking away.

“The day you fell down the basement stairs, when I returned from the workshop and couldn’t find you . . . I ran around the house frantic. I thought you’d left me, Nicky. I thought, this was it. Given a choice between a future with me or a past with Vero . . . you’d left. The ghost girl had won.”

I don’t say anything.

“Then I finally discovered you sprawled on the basement floor . . . You wouldn’t respond to your name. Any of them. Trust me, I ran through the whole list. All the places we’d been, the names we’d initially tried on. Finally, I called you Vero. And you opened your eyes. You stared right at me. And so help me God, I almost walked away right there and then. You, her . . . I just can’t do this anymore.”

I can’t help myself. I shiver slightly because I know he’s right. There’s a thin line in my mind, and it’s been that way for a long time. “I am you,” Vero tells me. But I wonder what she really means. As in, she’s a piece of my subconscious, maybe even the voice of my guilty conscience? Or . . . something else entirely?

I would like to say I don’t believe in ghosts, but I can’t.

“I only ever wanted for you to be happy,” Thomas says now, his hands gripping the wheel. “I fought a good fight for twenty-two years, thinking if we can just keep moving forward, once more time has passed. But I’m wrong, aren’t I, Nicky? You can’t go forward. You have to go back. Given a choice between Vero and me, Vero has won.”

I don’t speak. I can’t tell my husband what he wants to hear, which makes it easier to say nothing at all.

Instead, I study the dark night rushing behind him. I smell smoke. I feel flames. But I don’t reach out my hand to him.

We have both come too far for that.

I feel Vero then. She is standing in the back of my mind. Not speaking, not sipping tea, not even sitting in the dollhouse, but more like a lone figure, waiting in a black void. I can’t see her face; more like I feel her mood.

Somber. Tired. Sad.

She is not coming to me, I realize, because for the first time in twenty-two years, I am coming to her.

She finally opens her mouth. She utters a single word: “Run.”

But we both know it is much too late for that.

Thomas slows the car. For the first time, I see it. A dirt road has appeared on the right. Nearly overgrown, it would be difficult enough to spot during the day, and almost impossible at night. Except, of course, that Thomas already knows that’s it there.

“Run!” Vero whispers again.

But there’s no place to go. I’m trapped in this car now, just as surely as I was trapped in my Audi three nights ago.

As my husband takes the turn, headlights slashing across a tangle of shrubs, tiny car heaving up the first divot.

“All I ever wanted,” Thomas repeats, “was for you to be happy.”

As he forces the four-wheel-drive vehicle up the rutted road.

Returning to the dollhouse.

Thomas’s childhood home.





Chapter 36




THEY STRUCK OUT on the green Subaru. Kevin was able to trace the partial license plate to a vehicle that had been listed as stolen the day before. Being an older model, it didn’t carry such modern-day amenities as GPS for tracking, and they had no hits on sightings of the vehicle.

Two A.M., Wyatt sat back in frustration, scrubbing his face with the palm of his hand. “We’re still reacting. Thomas runs, we give chase. Nicky taunts us with half a puzzle, we batter our brains trying to deduce the missing pieces. Just once, I’d like to be ahead in this game.”

“As in knowing where Nicky and Thomas went?” Tessa asked him.

“Oh, I know where they went. Can’t find it on a map, of course, but I know where they went.”

“The dollhouse.”

“Who’s in the second vehicle?” he barked impatiently. They were still in the back hotel office, surrounded by the security video they’d watched again and again. Wyatt had sent Brittany out of the room, ostensibly because they no longer required her assistance, but mostly because it was never good to appear stuck in front of an adoring member of the public. “What the hell happened way back when, what the hell is going on now and who did we miss? Because if Nicky is with Thomas, and according to my deputy, Marlene Bilek was returned safely home three hours ago, who’s left to follow our favorite two suspects in a separate vehicle?”

They’d tried zooming in on the security footage of the second car, but that vehicle had stuck to the dimly lit edges of the parking lot. They had a recording of a small, dark compact. Not even a blur of the driver’s face, let alone something truly helpful, such as a glimpse of the license plate. “Madame Sade?” Tessa guessed now.