First Girl Gone(78)
When Charlie looked up at her uncle again, his head was tilted back against the chair, and he was snoring quietly. She figured that was her cue to leave.
The springs of the old plaid couch squeaked as she pushed to her feet, but Frank didn’t stir. She gave him a light peck on the cheek, let herself out through the front door, and locked it behind her.
On her drive back home from Frank’s, the sky began to darken, and with nightfall came a steady flurry of snow. A cloud of flakes followed Charlie inside when she unlocked the door to her apartment and pushed it open.
She hovered there on the doormat for a moment, feeling a sense of unease that she couldn’t pinpoint. Her eyes scanned the space, landing on where her laptop sat open on the counter. Her gaze moved on to the bed, rumpled and unmade. Nothing new there.
The lamp on the bedside table caught her attention next. It was on. Had she left it that way?
She took a step toward it, tripping over the duffel bag of gear she’d left near the door. She caught herself on the corner of the bed, narrowly avoiding falling flat on her face. She waited for some comment from Allie—a quip about Charlie’s natural grace and poise—but there was nothing.
In any case, her stumble had jarred her out of her previously paranoid thoughts. In approximately half an hour, she’d be trespassing on the property of one Leroy Gibbs. That was enough to make anyone jumpy.
She snatched the duffel bag by the handle and took it down to the car, skittering over the ice to where she’d parked. She tossed the bag in the backseat and climbed the stairs again to get the rest of her stuff. Back in the apartment, she took down a lockbox and holster from a shelf in the closet and strapped on her Glock 43. Next, she slid her phone from her pocket and turned it off. It was probably an overly cautious move, but phones could only be tracked when they were on. Should things go south on her little excursion onto the Gibbs property, she’d be better off not offering up evidence that could prove she’d been there.
Finally, Charlie tugged on a hat and gloves and gave one last look around the apartment to make sure she wasn’t forgetting anything. Satisfied, she pulled the door shut behind her.
She took a breath. It was time.
Chapter Sixty-Two
The snow picked up as Charlie drove out toward the Gibbs house. The flakes glittered in the glow of the headlights, twisting into spirals here and there like the wind was trying to braid it on the way down.
How many times had she driven this route for no other reason but to drive by the home of Leroy Gibbs, dreaming of getting a peek behind that darkened door, behind all those windows with the shades drawn tight? She’d wondered countless times what might lie inside the ramshackle farmhouse, wondered whether or not the man who lived there had been the one who killed her sister.
Now, after all these years, she was about to peel the place open like prying the top off a can. She was about to get her look inside. It didn’t feel real.
She rounded a curve in the road, taking it slow because of the snow, but also because she was close. And there it was, a dark, huddled shape in the distance, partially hidden by overgrown shrubs and some rough-looking pine trees. She closed in on it. Almost surprised to find no additional twinge of nerves coming over her.
She pulled into the driveway. Wheeling her head around, she glanced back down the drive. The pines blocked her view of the pavement, and she figured that would work both ways, hopefully keeping her car hidden.
She let the headlights shine on the Gibbs place for a few seconds. The run-down farmhouse looked like it would surely drop into a heap of rubble before another decade passed. Everything about the structure sagged, dipped, bulged, slumped, or drooped. Green paint peeled everywhere along the home’s exterior, the exposed bits of weather-stained wood looking like rotting flesh somehow just now. Gray and bare. Gleaming some in the glow of her lights.
She swiveled in her seat, wanting to take in all of her surroundings before she made her move. The fields beyond the house, once producing crops, were now largely overgrown and wooded. It’d been a generation since any of this was farmed. Maybe two.
Finally, she killed the engine and cut out the lights. Her scalp prickled in the quiet.
She reached into the back and unzipped the duffel. Her fingers felt around for the knit material of the ski mask. Found it. The acrylic fabric scratched as she pulled it over her head. Leaning so she could see her reflection in the rearview mirror, she straightened up the eyes in the strange green glow of the dash lights.
Next, she reached back into the bag again. Pulled out the lock pick kit.
Her mind was strangely blank. Some hyper-focus whittled her thoughts down to just the next step and rendered it in images rather than language, omitting all those needless words that usually flowed through her skull.
With the lock picks stowed in her coat pocket, Charlie zipped the duffel up. She climbed out of the car, feet trampling through the crusty snow in the driveway, and hauled the bag out of the back. She didn’t really want to tromp around to the back door, leaving prints in the snow, but it’d be better than trying to unlock the front, where a passing driver might see her.
The snow squeaked and cracked under her feet, and she moved out of the area lit by a distant streetlight and made her way around the side of the farmhouse. The shadows swallowed her little by little, and she was glad for the darkness that wrapped around her like a cloak.