Good as Gone: A dark and gripping thriller with a shocking twist. Amy Gentry

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СКАЧАТЬ the end of the block, she slipped the phone out of her pocket and turned it on, grateful for her last-minute inspiration to ditch it with her IDs in the front bushes before ringing the doorbell. Losing consciousness had not been part of the plan. Maybe it was the heat and all the walking, but when Jane stepped into the hallway, Julie had thought she was seeing Charlotte’s ghost. The hospital had not been part of the plan either, but at least the doctor had shed light on certain particulars.

      Particulars that, of course, Anna now knew too.

      No wonder she’d felt so weak. This whole time she’d thought it was love she was fighting against, or tearing herself away from, that feeling of warm belonging that threatened to betray her whenever Cal looked at her. Now she knew the betrayal ran deeper, down into her blood, bones, and tissue. No wonder she’d felt violated. No wonder she’d felt possessed.

      It was a lucky thing he never found out what was inside her.

      Recovering the phone had been tricky, since they watched her so closely those first few days. But on the third day she’d slipped out for the mail and picked it up on the way back in. Thank God the phone had stayed dry under the awning, and the IDs were all still there, rubber-banded to its back. When she’d powered it up, the screen flashed on, and there was Cal, smiling at her with that infuriating expression of faith and love she’d drunk in so deeply and grown so strong on — strong enough to remember who she really was and why he couldn’t find out. By the time she saw the article in the library that day — Cal had dropped her off there to study the GED books — she was strong enough to tear herself away.

      She’d scrubbed everything else off her phone before she was out of Seattle, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to get rid of Cal. She felt as if he were with her still in some indefinable way. When, at the hospital, she’d learned what it was, she’d thought, maybe, somehow, when she was finished here, she could go back.

      She knew it was a stupid idea, and her body agreed. It had made the decision for her.

      She took one last, long look at the face on the screen, and for a moment she was lying next to him again, her fingers tracing his chest lightly, his fingers twined in her hair, listening as he described his mother’s white face, one eye swollen shut, framed in the rear window of his aunt’s Volkswagen. Sending one last, blank look in the direction of the small black boy crying at the kitchen window before twisting her blond head away and turning her back on him forever.

      She got the point, and it wasn’t just that she, too, was a blond. Sometimes people had to leave, she’d thought to herself. She took a deep breath and pressed delete.

      Then she noticed the new voicemail message. Not recognizing the number, she pushed play and listened but a moment later jerked the phone away from her ear like it had bitten her. How many times would she have to delete him before he was gone? And how many times would it still hurt? She’d never picked up, and she’d stopped listening to the messages after the first few; they all said the same thing. Now he was trying her from different numbers, hoping to catch her off guard. She glanced once more at the unknown number, and then with a jolt recognized the area code: Portland, Oregon. It might be a coincidence, a cell phone borrowed from a friend. But what if he actually had gone to Portland? It might mean he was trying to find her, following her trail, starting with Will. Of course that’s where he would start. He’d always wanted an excuse to confront Will and get her stuff back; he’d said facing the past was important, as if he’d know the first thing about it. He could be finding out, though, right now. And once he started in that direction, how long would it be until he found her?

      Looking around at Tom and Anna’s neighborhood, she could barely believe she was here, much less picture Cal turning up. Empty of pedestrians in the heat of the afternoon, the neighborhood had high white curbs but no sidewalks, and she walked in the street, stepping around straggling ropes of soft tar. She passed house after house, all of them huge to her after Cal’s pinched Seattle apartment, their plush lawns trimmed with fat shrubs and clumps of begonias so perfect and motionless in the dead air, they looked like silk flowers. Some of the porches had columns, like plantation houses.

      Following the noise of traffic, she stepped out of the subdivision and started walking along a busy thoroughfare. Cars spat hot breath and gravel at her ankles as they raced by. There was no sidewalk here either, no curb even, just a narrow trail worn in the crabgrass near the greasy roadside before it plunged into runoff ditches padded at the bottom with tangled weeds. She walked past a rambling strip mall: Kroger, Qwik Klean, Jenny’s Gifts, the streaky glass box of a Dairy Queen. The only logical destination of this ragged path was the bus stop. She cast a glance toward the kiosk and saw three women waiting for the bus in service uniforms, each with a rolling cart full of bottles. Cleaning ladies. Her back hurt just looking at them.

      As she passed a McDonald’s, she saw a long blue awning peeking out from the strip center behind it: BOBBY’S POOL HALL, in dingy white block letters. She walked toward it in relief. So there were hiding places here, after all. Although the other stores in the strip center had glass fronts, she noted that Bobby’s windows were covered with weather-beaten plywood and wondered if there was any business in the back. Not that she needed any, she hurriedly told herself; she was going to be here only a few weeks. But it wasn’t a bad idea to find out what was around. Besides, she had money in her wallet, and maybe what she really wanted was to sit for a few hours away from the roadside, drinking away the pain in her gut.

      At this time of the afternoon, there were only a few barflies. They sat close to the entrance, talking with a curly-haired woman behind the bar who laughed loudly as she wedged limes on a cutting board. None of them paid any attention to her until she leaned against the bar. Then the bartender stopped laughing abruptly.

      “What do you want, honey?” She squinted. “Job? You gotta be eighteen.”

      “Corona, please.”

      The woman laughed. “You’re going to have to show me some ID, hon.”

      Julie dug through her new wallet and pulled out one that said she was twenty-four. Even as she handed it over, she felt a moment of panic. It was a California driver’s license, a real one, the kind you can get in a lot of trouble for stealing.

      The bartender gave it a long, hard look, then glanced at her, then back down at the ID. “Mercedes Rodriguez?” she said, drawing out the syllables like it was an impossible name for anyone to have.

      “Mercy,” she said automatically. The last time she’d used Mercy, she’d had short brown hair, but it was dark in Bobby’s Pool Hall, and the wide-cheekboned face and blue eyes looked close enough. Mercy, Mercy, she told her face, look like Mercy.

      It almost worked. She could feel the woman struggling to care. Then someone called “Bev!” from the end of the bar, and the bartender glanced anxiously over her shoulder, and by the time she looked back at Mercy, she was having none of it. “Sorry, señorita,” she said, all the patience draining from her voice. “You don’t look twenty-four, and it’s an out-of-state ID. I gotta be careful in this neighborhood. For all I know, you wandered over from the high school.” Bev threw the ID down on the counter and hustled off.

      This goddamn city. She wasn’t planning to be here long, but she’d already flashed a fake ID within ten blocks of Tom and Anna’s house and been turned down. Don’t shit where you eat meant something different when she was working at the Black Rose, but it applied here too. She grabbed the ID off the counter and shoved it back into her pocket.

      Now the two men at the bar were staring at her. One of them said, “Come on, Bev, have a heart!”

      The other chimed in, СКАЧАТЬ