Don't Look for Me(15)

“You can heat the water with the stove. The generator should have it working,” the man says.

I smell coffee so it must be his dead wife who liked tea. He wants me to have some now. Maybe he wants to put my mind at ease—because there is no need to worry. He will contact my family. They will come for me.

As he turns to leave the kitchen, a thought rushes in and I call after him.

“My purse!” I say. “Is it with my clothes?”

He shrugs. Ponders.

“I think you left it in the truck. I didn’t see it last night in the house.”

I can’t remember either, but it’s unlike me to leave my purse. I carried it with me into the storm.

“Can you bring it inside? Before you go?”

“Sure thing,” he says.

He leaves the room. Alice and I make tea. I listen for the door, for the man to return with my purse.

But the next sound I hear is the truck driving away.





6


Day thirteen





Roger Booth owned the Hastings Inn, the diner next door, and the fifty acres of land that sat behind them. The businesses shared a parking lot of cracked, potted asphalt. The painted white lines had all but faded. A parking free-for-all.

The inn was rarely occupied, as Nic had learned the last time she’d been here. It was mostly the diner that kept the business afloat. Booth lived in an apartment on the first floor.

He owned it all free and clear, a parting gift from his father who had been an executive at the pharmaceutical company before it closed. Booth Senior had managed to get out before the crash, retiring to Florida with his wife of thirty-two years. There was a sister, as well, though she had married and moved to Buffalo. Booth was left with the family’s properties and was the unofficial mayor of Hastings because of it.

None of this was information Nic had intended to gather. But one of the waitresses liked to talk. So did the bartender across the street. The Booth family are the Kennedys of Hastings. That depiction had been dead on.

Nic parked in front of the entrance to the inn. It was a pristine, fabricated white farmhouse with a wraparound porch, one of the few with that style of architecture that sat along the road. Most of the original farmhouses lined Route 7. The Booths’ inn was sadly out of place.

The diner, however, was true to form—a rectangle with a silver roof. Black smoke billowing from a chimney. Big windows. Neon sign.

The two structures sat side by side, a small row of shrubs and about twenty feet between them.

Nic reached for the car door, opened it, but then pulled it shut. She stared at the inn with its white porch and red shutters. Four days she’d spent here with her father. Four days that had just been the start of the dismantling of the life they’d hobbled together after Annie died. The cornerstone of that new, disfigured life was her mother soaking up whatever abuse they handed out. She could see that now. Nic had been cruel to her. She’d paraded her bad behavior with fantastic fanfare, and massacred any attempts her mother made to help with harsh vulgarities.

You’re not your mother, her father had texted. You don’t owe your life to Annie’s death.

But he had no idea. He hadn’t been there the day Annie died. He didn’t know what Nic owed her death. Owed to her.

He wasn’t the one who’d seen Annie running away from the house, hair flying around her face. Then looking back with a mischievous smile. Running. Smiling. Reaching the end of the driveway. He hadn’t been the first to see the car. To know what was about to happen. Annie!

Her mother had been racing home from work because Nic hadn’t answered the phone. She’d been in charge of them, Annie and Evan. And at sixteen, she’d had things to do—serious things back then when she still cared about her life. It wasn’t as though they were babies. But Annie was so precocious. She never listened.

She’d wanted ice cream. She’d heard the truck. And she’d run.

Her father hadn’t been there. He hadn’t heard Nic screaming for her to stop. Too far away to reach her. The screeching tires on the asphalt. Annie lying in a pool of blood. Lying dead in the road. And her mother behind the wheel, driving the car that had struck her. There were no words to describe it.

Maybe Nic wasn’t her mother. But they were bound together by their actions that day, the bow and stern of a sinking ship.

She let Annie recede back into her place of hiding. Hair flying. Smile pulled clear across her face.

She grabbed her duffel, then made her way up the steps to the front door.

Inside, the air smelled stagnant as it had before. Nic walked to the reception desk, and set her mother’s key down on the lace runner which lay unevenly across the counter. There were small bowls with soft mints, toothpicks, business cards, a guest register where people could write things about their stay before leaving. And a silver bell, which Nic rang.

Footsteps, creaking wood, a door closing. Booth emerged from his apartment in the back, startled.

“Miss Clarke?” He said her name like it was a question, like he couldn’t believe she was here again.

“One and the same,” Nic said.

Booth looked sleepy, as though she’d disturbed him from an afternoon nap, but he was also freshly groomed. She could smell the aftershave. She remembered that about him now, the way he wore his part in this town, gave it reverence with his appearance. Khaki pants. Button-down shirt. Clean shave. He was fit, though slender. He’d mentioned something about cycling. He was lean like a cycler. And his hair was short. Neat.