You Can't Catch Me(18)

I got it. What for?

I want to talk about what happened to me. Did it happen to you too?

There’s a pause. She’s writing something, then stops. Writing again.

It won’t do any good.

Can we discuss it in person and then we’ll see?

Another long pause.

Fine.

I smile as I close my phone. “We have contact.”





Chapter 8

The Third Jessica

“Contact?” Liam asks as he pushes his aviators onto his head, his eyes squinting against the sun.

“With Jessica Three. She’s agreed to meet me.”

“Jessica Three?”

“You know, the one in Wilmington who we’re driving to see? I find it’s easier to refer to us like that.”

“I thought you said her name was Jessie.”

“Yeah, so?”

“I would’ve thought that you, of all people, wouldn’t be so cavalier with people’s names.”

“A name is a name is a name.”

Another Toddism has Liam shaking his head. “Okay, I deserved that. But that’s your one free pass for the day.”

“We’ll see.”

The last time I was in Wilmington, it was a run-down town with a Santa’s Workshop near Whiteface Mountain. My parents took me there once before Todd moved the kids up the hill. It still fits that description. Many of the houses are falling apart, with rusted-out trucks littering the lawn, and the motel we pass where Liam mentions that he’s reserved a room has definitely seen better days. But there’s a fancy chocolate shop now, and cute decorated roadside stands where you can buy firewood. When we turn down the dirt road Jessie lives on, I catch a glimpse of several large houses with high peaked roofs and walls of windows facing the ski hill.

We pass a short woman with brown hair tucked into a baseball cap who’s running on the road. Liam slows down to give her a wide berth. A minute later, we arrive at our destination.

Jessie’s house is surprisingly large and imposing, a timber-frame with gray cladding and the requisite tall windows facing the hill. There’s a perennial garden in the front yard full of daffodils and tulips that dance in the pleasant breeze. The lawn is freshly cut, and the box hedge along one side of the house is neatly manicured. Despite this, the house has a deserted air, even though there’s a car, a dark-blue hybrid, in the driveway.

We get out of the car. Crickets grind in the air, and somewhere in the thick wood behind the house, a woodpecker taps at a tree.

I ring the front doorbell, but no one answers. There’s no shifting presence inside. Even though Jessie is expecting us, I didn’t give her a precise ETA.

“We should’ve called ahead,” Liam says.

“Ha, ha. I did, dummy.” I wave my phone at him.

“Maybe she changed her mind.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“Looking for me?” a woman’s voice says behind us. It’s the jogger we passed a few moments ago.

I feel that prick of excitement again. “Jessie?”

“Jessica?”

“Yes.”

“And this is?”

“Oh, Liam. He’s with me.”

She looks at him nervously.

“Don’t worry,” I say. “He’s harmless.”

“What do you want?”

“I’d like to know what happened to you.”

Jessie approaches us cautiously, her eyes shifting from me to Liam and back again. There’s a sheen of sweat on her forehead. “Why should I trust you?”

“She took your money, didn’t she?” I say. “Jessica Williams?”

Jessie closes her eyes for a moment, perhaps wishing us away.

“Yes,” she says finally, then opens her eyes. “You’d better come in.”

Inside, Jessie offers us water and asks for ten minutes to clean herself up. She takes eight and returns in a loose pair of boyfriend jeans and a screen-printed T-shirt with the New York skyline on it. Her hair is scraped back, revealing a high forehead and watery blue eyes. Like me, she’s not wearing any makeup. About five feet tall in her bare feet, she looks to be about my age, which, of course, she is.

She pours herself a glass of water from the tap and sits down across from us, tucking her legs under herself in a lotus-like position. She holds her glass of water as if she might lose her grip on it.

“How did you find me?”

I decide to leave Liam and his background favors out of it. “I put up this post on Facebook, and two of your friends tagged you in it. When I reached out to them after you didn’t answer my message, they told me where you lived.”

“Friends! Sure.”

We wait for her to say more. It’s a technique Liam taught me years ago—wait for someone to fill the silence when you want to get information out of them. Sometimes the questions in their minds are larger than the ones you might ask.

“It was Leanne, wasn’t it? That’s who you talked to?”

“That’s right.”

She makes a small noise of disgust. “The town gossip.”

“All small towns have them.”

“Yeah, that’s true. But she . . . likes to stir up trouble.”

“Oh?”