No One Will Miss Her(48)

But Adrienne hadn’t forgotten. Christ, she wished she had. It could so easily have been the truth: that Adrienne had ignored Lizzie’s offer and then simply forgotten all about it. It was exactly the kind of thing she would do. But no: she’d told Lizzie to go ahead and hold the week for them, and she and Ethan had arrived in Copper Falls the previous night, right on schedule. Right on time for everything to go utterly, irretrievably wrong. And what a relief it had been, when Bird finally said the words—Lizzie Ouellette is dead—and she could stop pretending not to know, pretending she hadn’t been there. It had taken every ounce of restraint she had, to keep from leaping around like a lunatic and screaming the truth aloud: Dead, she’s dead, and he’s dead, too.

I don’t know where Ethan is.

Another lie.

She locked the door. She climbed the stairs, ignoring the picture that had caught Bird’s attention, turning left at the top of the landing, moving purposefully. She walked to the bedroom, to the bed, freshly made with clean sheets only an hour before, back when she’d still imagined that there was some kind of happily-ever-after at the end of all this. Gently, she lifted a pillow from the bed.

Then she pressed her face into it and screamed.

All day long, she’d been practicing her lines, telling herself a story, repeating the words until they felt true. This was who she was: a woman who woke up thinking about possibilities. Who realized she needed to take control. A woman who spent the day making plans to secure her future. I don’t want to be one of those women who gets blindsided by life.

And after all that, she almost had been.

Almost.

But now she could see with the most incredible clarity. She knew how things had to be—because she was out of options, a realization that should have been terrifying, but instead felt like freedom. Every door had shut, every exit closed off, save one. Just one. One chance to make it through this, if she was strong enough to take it.



Though she had no way of knowing it, her instincts were correct. By the time the clock struck two a.m., Bird was nearly two hundred miles away; he wasn’t there to see the big, black Mercedes roll down the alley behind the Richardses’ home, easing into the courtyard alongside the smaller Lexus. He wasn’t there to see the tall man with a buzz cut and day-old stubble who got out, glancing cautiously at the dark windows of the row homes to either side of number seventeen, and fumbled with a set of keys until he found the one that unlocked the back door. She had told him to stay away until morning, but of course he hadn’t listened.

He never fucking listened.

She heard the creak of the door and his heavy tread on the stairs, halting and uneven, the brush of his fingertips against the wall as he reached out to steady himself. There was a thump as one foot hit the landing, and then she saw him, a shadow, lurching past the honeymoon photo and emerging into the living room. He was breathing hard, and sweating; she could smell it, rank and sour, an early warning of the withdrawal to come. Soon he’d be saturated in it, his hair damp, his armpits soaked, shaking and moaning with pain. She waited patiently as he moved toward the bedroom, not noticing the shape of her melting out of the shadows and following behind. He bumped against the wall as he stepped halfway through the bedroom door, peering in the direction of the bed.

“Fuck,” he muttered. Then a loud whisper: “Hello? Are you here?”

“Hi,” she said, behind him, and he yelped and whirled to face her.

“Jesus! What the fuck? I thought you would be asleep. You scared the shit out of me.”

“You were supposed to wait until morning,” she said. “Didn’t I tell you that?”

He shifted uncomfortably. “I didn’t know where to go. I was afraid I’d get lost, and then . . . and I don’t feel good, anyway. I didn’t want to spend all night puking in some shitty motel.” He squinted into the dark. “I can hardly see you. What happened? With the police? Did they, I mean, do they . . .”

“The detective came. We talked. I didn’t tell them anything.”

He leaned against the wall, a slump of relief.

“Come on,” she said, beckoning. “I want to show you something.”

With a groan, he followed. Away from the bedroom, farther down the hall. Into the office. She brushed her fingers over the desk lamp, and a soft glow filled the room. He leaned against the doorway, bringing a hand to his face to massage his temples.

“I feel like shit.”

“This won’t take long.” She knelt behind the desk, out of sight. Her fingers touched the keypad.

He cleared his throat. “So, the detective. Was it like you thought? He was looking for Ethan?”

“No,” she said without turning around. “He was looking for you.”

Dwayne Cleaves, sweating and sick and still wearing Ethan Richards’s too-small college sweatshirt, which he’d put on that morning, dropped his hand from his forehead and gaped at her.

“See, he thought you’d come here.” She took a long breath, then turned, glaring. “Because you just couldn’t help yourself, could you? You had to go telling your idiot friends, including that fucking dipshit drug dealer, that you’d been fucking the rich city bitch who was renting your lake house. That’s what the police officer told me.” She kept her eyes on him as he stared back at her. In her left hand, the latch on the safe opened with a barely perceptible click. Her voice became a singsong drawl. “Dwayne and Adrienne, sitting in a tree, F-U-C-K-I-N-G. The cop told me you were bragging about it. He said you were showing people pictures. Is that true? You took pictures?”