The Boy from the Woods(93)

“Do you work for Bernard?”

“No.”

“Swear?”

“I care about your daughter, not your ex-husband. Yes, I swear.”

Pia slipped the sunglasses back onto her face. “Naomi called me.”

“When?”

“A few days ago.”

“What did she say?”

“She said someone working for Bernard might call me again asking for her. Like you did last time. She said not to say anything.”

“Why would she say that?”

“I think…I think she planned on running away from her father. She thought that maybe if people thought she was with me, it would throw him off the scent.”

“And you were okay with that? With her running away?”

“I was happy about it. She needed to escape from him.”

“I don’t understand,” Hester said. “You say he’s abusive. Your ex, I mean.”

“You have no idea.”

“And yet,” Hester said, trying to keep her voice even, “you left your daughter with him?”

She took off the sunglasses again. “I’ve gone through a lot of therapy. You have no idea how much, how weak I was, how troubled. There was nothing I could have done. And there was a hard truth I had to face, Ms. Crimstein—in order for me to recover and heal and move on.”

“What hard truth is that?”

“Bernard was right about one thing. I didn’t want to adopt her in the first place. The hard truth is—and it took me a long time to forgive myself for this—I couldn’t connect to Naomi. Maybe it was because she wasn’t my blood. Maybe at the time, I just wasn’t cut out to be a mother. Maybe it was my chemistry physically reacting to hers or the bad situation with her father. I don’t know. But I could never really connect with the girl.”

The bile rose in Hester’s throat. She swallowed it back down. “So you just left Naomi with him.”

“I had no choice. You have to see that.”

Hester pulled back her chair and stood. “If you hear from Naomi, have her call me immediately.”

“Ms. Crimstein?”

Hester looked down at her.

“Who do you believe?”

“You mean you or Bernard?”

“Yes.”

“Does it make a difference?”

“I think it does, yes.”

“I don’t,” Hester said. “You either abused your daughter or you selfishly left her behind. Either way, you abandoned a little girl to a man you just described as a monster. Even when you ‘recovered’ and ‘healed,’ even when you got married and moved into this ritzy town house, you just left that poor girl alone with a damaged man. You didn’t protect her. You didn’t think about her. You just ran away, Pia—and you left Naomi behind.”

Pia kept her head down, her eyes on the table.

“So in the end, I don’t care if he’s lying or you are. You are scum either way, and I hope you never have a moment’s peace.”

*



When Dash and Delia Maynard saw their son’s severed finger, they reacted in two very different ways.

Dash dropped to the ground, totally collapsed, like a marionette with all its strings cut at the same time. His fall was so sudden that Wilde jumped back a step, careful not to jar the finger from its perch atop the ice pack. Not that the jarring would have any effect. If that was the case, the fact that Wilde had just rushed back from that spot in the woods, more sprinting than jogging, would surely have been the culprit.

Delia froze. For a few moments, she didn’t move, didn’t even react to her husband’s fall. She just stared down at the finger. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, her face began to cave. Her head fell to one side. Her lips quivered, her eyes blinked. She reached out toward the finger, a mother wanting to offer some kind of comfort. Wilde pulled the cooler back, not wanting her to touch or contaminate it.

“The EMTs will be arriving soon,” Wilde told her as gently as he could. He glanced at the gate behind him. “They’ll do their best to preserve it.”

When he closed the cooler, Delia let out a moan. Wilde handed the cooler to Rola and nodded. She took it outside the gate for the ambulance. There was, Rola had already learned, a decent chance that the finger could be reattached if they ran the proper medical protocols.

On the grass, Dash pushed up with his arms and made his way to his knees.

Delia finally spoke. “What do they want? What do they want?” Her voice started off in pure monotone, but slowly grew louder, more frenzied. “We gave them the tapes. What do they want from us? What do they want?”

There was a ping.

It took them all a second to react to it, but then Dash, his eyes doing the thousand-yard stare, reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone. His hand shook.

“What is it?” Delia asked.

Dash read it, got to his feet, and handed his wife the phone. Wilde moved close to read over her shoulder.

Send the tape we want in the next thirty minutes or we will send the coordinates for your son’s entire arm. If you contact the police, he will die in terrible pain.



“What tape?” Delia shouted. “There is no tape. We don’t have…”

Dash started hurrying up the drive toward the house.