Every Single Secret(87)

The girls.

Girls, plural . . .

“You’re lying, Heath.” My voice is shaky. “You told him you wanted him to help you adapt what you did. Make it SUSTAINABLE.”

He claps a hand over my mouth, but I claw it away.

“You didn’t kill anyone to prove a point to Dr. Cerny. You did it because you enjoy it.”

His eyes widen. “Okay, yes. Yes. See how bad he messed me up? Do you see? But it doesn’t matter, does it? The bottom line is, Cerny couldn’t cure me. I am who I am. We are who we are.”

“What do you mean, ‘We are who we are’?”

“What you did,” he says, like I’m unbelievably dense. “What you had to do to survive. It was just like me.”

“What I did? You mean . . . hiding Chantal’s medicine?”

He’s cocked his head and is regarding me with an amused expression.

“No, Daphne. I mean what you did to Holly Idlewine.”

“What I . . .”

“At the bar last week,” he continues. “You flipped her off, then gave the bartender your credit card. You told him to charge all Holly Idlewine’s drinks to you.”

He’s right. I did do that.

“That doesn’t prove anything,” I say weakly, but I know it doesn’t matter. He has been planning this day, this moment, for a long time. He is way ahead of me. I am outmatched in every way.

“You paid for all her drinks because you wanted her so completely smashed that when she stumbled out of Divine, you could easily drag her to your car. Put her in the trunk and drive her to some dark, isolated location.”

My lips part.

“A nothing piece of property so far out in the country, nobody would ever think to look there. That’s where you tied her up. Tortured her and killed her.”

I can no longer feel my fingers and toes. The electrical impulses in my skull have dulled to a low buzzing. It feels like my body is shutting down.

“They haven’t found her yet, and they won’t until I want them to. What they do know is a woman named Daphne Amos, a woman who was once questioned in the suspicious death of a fourteen-year-old girl in a state park in north Georgia, paid for Holly Idlewine’s drinks the same night she disappeared.”

He pulls me by the wrist into a hug, and around his shoulder I see Cerny’s silver Mercedes parked just a couple of feet away. It’s idling. Then Heath speaks again, low and soft.

“When they find this on the ground near her body, the case will be closed.”

I jerk back. He’s holding up my engagement ring. Cecelia’s ring. I feel like I’m having a heart attack. My hand dips toward my boot, fingers between the leather and wool, and I draw up the knife.

“No, no, no . . .” is all I can say. I am shaking and crying, swinging the knife in wild arcs.

He catches my wrist easily, wrenches the knife out of my grasp, and tosses it into the bushes beside the police station. I can’t stop crying—nose running and mixing with the tears—as he hustles me to the car.

“Don’t worry, Daphne,” he says once we’re locked in. His voice is soothing and he pulls the seatbelt across me. “If they find her with the ring, I’ll tell them that you were with me all night that night. That you couldn’t have kidnapped Holly or taken her to the woods and tied her up. That you couldn’t have done all those horrible things to her.” His face splits into a grin, but one so full of evil I cannot move. “You see? We can’t go back.”



Heath stops for gas on 515, at a place just south of Ellijay. It’s one of those shiny new mega-stations with endless rows of gleaming pumps and a combo convenience store and Ye Olde Donut Shoppe. And it’s hopping, even this late at night. Inside, I walk past a bank of cappuccino machines sandwiched between the sizzling hot-dog rollers and slushie station. I’m starving, but Heath’s got my purse with him in the car, and he hasn’t given me any money.

The ladies’ room is down a short corridor, a spacious, exceptionally clean single. He’s let me go alone—there’s no reason for him to follow me in there. If I run, he’ll just plant the ring and then tell the police I killed Holly Idlewine.

After I use the bathroom and wash up, I stare into the mirror. I remove my smudged glasses and splash water on my face, then wash my glasses. My face looks so normal—pink and healthy. I touch my cheeks. My skin is warm. I am still alive. Still breathing. Still able to think and to reason and to act.

I am still myself.

When I emerge from the bathroom, a yellowed old woman with a thick head of glossy chestnut hair and a purple terry tracksuit is waiting. A brown fake-crocodile purse is slung over her stick arm.

“Whew,” the woman says in her Marlboro-roughened voice. “Thank you, sugar. You’d think they’d have more than one potty in a place this big.”

I smile and she locks herself in. I stand there, letting the information filter through my consciousness: that was a wig she was wearing, and her skin had a yellow tinge to it. She’s ill—cancer, most likely. And then, I can’t help it, I picture myself waiting until she unlocks the door, then pushing my way into the bathroom with her before she realizes what’s happening. In my mind, I snatch the wig, the tracksuit, and her purse. Disguise myself and walk out right under Heath’s nose like something out of a bad spy movie.