Aftermath(84)

I really don’t.

Skye

The police arrive with an ambulance for Jesse and Tiffany. Jesse’s parents are right behind them, whipping along at the same speed. Mae follows a few moments after, as does Chris’s mom. Jesse gets taken to the hospital right away, leaving me only time to say a quick goodbye as Dr. Mandal assures me she’ll text as soon as she has news.

I give my statement, and then I hear Tiffany’s voice rising, as if in panic, and I jog over there as Mae talks to the police.

“I just want to go home,” Tiffany is saying to the paramedics. “Please. I don’t need the hospital. I’m okay, and I just want to go home.”

“You need to be checked out. Your parents —”

“I’m eighteen. And there’s no sign of my parents, is there?”

I catch a note of bitterness in her voice, but then she says, evenly, “I told my parents there’s no reason for them to come. If someone can drop me off at home, I’ll be fine. Really, I will.”

The paramedics insist. She is the victim of a crime; the police will require a full report from the hospital.

“Can I come along?” I ask the paramedics. I look over at Tiffany with a wry smile. “I’ll keep you company while you wait for a doctor. That always seems to take forever.”

“Hanging out in a hospital is the last thing you need tonight,” she says. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be whining.”

“You’ve earned it.”

“I’m just tired and…” Her gaze goes to Chris’s mom, who is hovering over him, her face drawn in worry.

“Maybe you should tell your parents to come —” I begin.

“No.” She tears her gaze away. “There’s no need.”

“You were kidnapped.” And they should have come running, no matter what you said.

“I’m fine. My stepmom works nights, and my stepbrother is only five, so Dad needs to stay home with him.”

Whatever my family issues, I cannot imagine I could keep Mom or Gran – or even Aunt Mae – away if I said I’d been kidnapped. Tiffany keeps glancing down the road, as if hoping to see headlights. But the road stays dark.

“Can I come with her?” I ask the paramedics again.

One nods, and I hurry to tell Mae.

Mae follows the ambulance to the hospital, but she’s going to stay in the waiting room unless I need her. They take Tiffany into a room where, yes, she has to wait for the doctor. I sit with her. We don’t talk much, but it’s a comfortable silence, as if we both know that any small talk right now would be awkward.

When a man shouts in the hall, she jumps, but it’s just a drunk guy, and he’s quickly shuffled off.

“You’re safe now,” I say.

“Am I?” She rubs her hands over her face. “Owen’s still out there.”

I speak carefully when I say, “I don’t think he’ll come for you. He’ll know you’ve already given a statement and identified him. I’m not sure why he kidnapped you, but this wasn’t… it wasn’t about…” I swallow. “This was my fault. He was after me. You just made the mistake of being nice to me, trying to help. I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry.”

She moves beside me and puts an arm around my shoulders. “You didn’t do anything wrong, Skye. Your coming back to Riverside just set him off. He was…” She inhales. “Unhinged, I guess that’s the word for it. He acted normal, at school, but the guy who kidnapped me was a different person. Like Jekyll and Hyde. He kept ranting about how you shouldn’t have come back, how it was an insult to the families, how he had to make you leave.”

“So why abduct you?”

“His cousin – Vicki – hacked into your cell phone. He could see all your texts, including the ones I sent. That’s how he knew you’d be at Fletcher Park. He planned to grab you there, but then Jesse showed up with you. Owen was leaving – running out – when he saw me. And I saw him. I recognized him. I asked what he was doing there… and then I spotted the knife. He came at me so fast I couldn’t… I tried to…”

She blurts the rest. “He knocked me out. He was panicked because I recognized him, and he remembered the texts – the ones where I said I knew something about the newspaper hack. I woke up with a knife to my throat, and Owen demanding to know what I found out about the newspaper.”

She gives a sharp laugh. “Do you know what it was? My important information? I remembered that the newspaper computer had a cloud-drive backup, and I found the files you saved. That proved someone tampered with the newspaper and deleted the hard-drive backups. That’s it. That’s all I had.”

I put my hands on hers, and she squeezes them.

“I think, after that, he realized what he’d done,” she says. “He’d stabbed you. He’d kidnapped me. Those are serious crimes. Really serious. I heard him arguing with Vicki on the phone this evening. He said he was through. That’s when he left. Left me…” Her voice wavers. “He left me to die, Skye. He just walked out and left me to die.”

I put my arms around her and hug her as tightly as I can.

I’m outside the hospital room. They’ve given me a chair, and I appreciate that, so I don’t want to seem ungrateful by wandering off. But I can hear through the examination room door, and that’s really awkward.