Even though he’d summoned her, he couldn’t believe she was standing in front of him. Seeing her here, in a context that he’d never expect, outside of the familiar and routine, left him disoriented. If she was here, then who was back in the spot where she should be? His mind pinged strange thoughts back and forth like a video game he used to play as a child.
Right now, he’d give anything to be that young again.
“I’m here to help,” she explained. She pulled on a pair of gloves. She’d drawn her hair back severely, pulled tight into a knot that sat at the back of her neck.
There was a smash and a scream behind them. A hiss sounded for a few seconds. Something cracked the night air like a bomb exploding, throwing Simon down into the snow. Stones and grit ground into the heels of his hands. When he managed to stand up again, he’d lost her.
CHAPTER SIXTY JOYCE
That hissing. What was that hissing?
Joyce couldn’t place the sound. While she swiveled her head to look, Laura slipped out of her grasp.
Joyce started to go after her, but then the hissing stopped.
The trailer exploded.
The flames expanded from nothing to covering her entire field of vision in a few seconds. Where she was standing, the wall of heat smacked into her and made her stumble back until she could steady her feet again.
The light of the fire was so bright Joyce almost missed the beam of headlights flooding from the driveway. A glimmer of hope sounded in her mind.
Poor, manic Susan. She hadn’t thought to take Joyce’s phone.
Because who could you hurt with your phone?
Joyce’s body crumpled to the ground in a tangle of pain.
But, despite the pounding in her ears, Joyce was able to think about those headlights. About the possibility that, even if she failed, she wasn’t going to lose.
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE LAURA
Even though she’d dragged Addy and hidden them both behind the oak tree for protection, Laura still felt the wave of energy from the propane tank exploding. Her head pounded from the roar of the flames.
Her hands immediately went to her stomach. She was bleeding, not from a wound, but from inside.
The baby. Was she losing the baby?
Someone was crying. Her home burned.
Laura thought about her parents, and what they might have looked like after that car accident. How they would have been husks of who they were a few moments before that truck hit them.
That’s what she felt like. A husk that was once human.
Addy took steady breaths below her. At least she’d helped protect her friend from the explosion.
Something snapped inside Laura’s abdomen and a fresh flood of blood soaked her pants. Surveying the wreckage around her, Laura didn’t know what to feel. She needed to get to a hospital.
A numbness began to creep from her core to her limbs. Someone walked up to her, a woman she didn’t recognize, and in an instant, the numbness went away. And then there was nothing.
Sweet nothing.
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO SIMON
“Clara.” He said her name like a curse and a prayer.
She pointed her gun at him, the metal glinting in the light of the flames. “Mr. Morgan, you shouldn’t be standing so close to the fire.” She flicked the gun with her wrist to propel him backwards. Simon noticed white edges peeking out from the hem of her coat. She still had her apron on.
“We need to get out of here,” he reminded her.
He’d called the house when he left the police station, after the questioning left him unsure of what his next steps were. He didn’t know why he’d called. Part of him hoped Joyce would answer, that she would come and find him and tell him what to do. The other part must have hoped Clara was there, because when she answered his whole sordid story spilled out of him like a dose of bad milk coming back up.
She listened quietly on the other end of the line, and Simon waited for her to exclaim surprise or disappointment or something else on her part. He’d just told her he was having an affair with a young man who’d been murdered, that Joyce was also sleeping with him, and that he’d told the police Joyce was dangerous.
Now, watching Clara hold the gun in her hand, he realized none of it was a surprise to her. The explosion hadn’t rattled her in the slightest, her body like steel against the flames as the fire grew to consume the trailer.
“I need to find Joyce,” he told her.
“I have her,” Clara replied. She bent down and, in the smoky fog of the fire he saw that what he thought was just debris over the ground mixed with the now-melting snow was in fact his wife and two other bodies.
No, not bodies. They were both breathing. Laura and Addy. They were dirty and bloody. Laura had a pool of blood spreading from the crotch of her pants. But they were both moving, ever so gently.
Susan was dead. He felt the weight of that fact deep inside. She’d looked so different from the photo he saw once at Dermot’s apartment. Susan’s face was round and joy-filled, blowing out candles on a birthday cake in the picture. Life had given her a rawness by the time he met her in person.
It was the only personal photo Dermot had up in his apartment when Simon visited him there. He’d commented on it to Dermot, remarking about how lovely the young woman was in the photo, just a small sliver of jealousy sitting in the back of his compliment.
The next time Simon visited Dermot, the photo was gone.
Clara held Joyce by the shoulders, and although Joyce’s face was covered in dirt and red scratches from when she was pushed by the explosion to the ground, she was alert and able to stand up with Clara’s help. Simon surveyed her and didn’t register any major wounds. She wasn’t bleeding anywhere.
