“I have to check something out.”
He grabbed her arm. “I am sorry,” he said. “I should have come right to you after I spoke to Edith.”
Nic stopped, turned. “It’s okay. But I have to go,” she said again.
“Wait—there’s one last thing,” Kurt said. “Edith never saw your mother. But the thing she knew about your mother’s purse—Reyes told her to say that. How did he know?”
Nic realized then what must have happened. The only explanation. “Reyes knew because he saw my mother that night.”
She pulled away from Kurt Kent, and raced back to her mother’s car, down Hastings Pass to the inn. And the fence. And the hole that someone had started to make.
47
Day seventeen
Alice does not get the key. Instead, she sits in the kitchen with Mick for hours, it seems. I hear him moan and choke. I hear her sob. I think I have miscalculated. I think that now I am surely going to die.
But then another sound. A car.
I race from where I stand by the grate and look out the small hole in the wood. I see another police car. Another police officer. This one wears short sleeves and patches. He walks to the front porch and I think,call out! Call for help!But then I wonder—Mick is a cop. What if they’re in this together?
I return to the grate when I hear the shuffling. Mick is on his feet, and he drags Alice toward me. He is pale, his shirt covered in sweat and vomit. But he has survived the poison. This will not end well.
He says nothing because the doorbell has rung and now the new cop is knocking. He calls out a name.
“Reyes? You in there?”
Mick has a name.Reyes.
He is worried. I can see it on his face. Worried and weakened by the cyanide.
The cop again—
“Reyes—come on. I see your car out here.…” A pause as he listens outside the door. And then—
“I spoke to the owners. I know you take care of this place. Listen—it doesn’t matter, okay? You’ve been working on the side for them. Right? Moonlighting? Doing security here and at the gas station? I’ve seen the utility bills—buddy? Are you in there? You been living in there when you’re not supposed to be? It’s okay, we can work it out. We can work everything out.”
When the cop falls silent again, Mick, Reyes, the man—he opens the grate with the key that he wears on his belt. He shoves Alice inside the room with me, and locks it shut.
I pull Alice close. We are one now, in our fate. And we move as one back to the grate where we can see what’s about to happen.
48
Day seventeen
Nic ran through the lobby of the inn to the back door. Then across the patio to the shed where she took a rock to the padlock, beating it until it opened.
Inside the shed, she found a pair of wire cutters. Then she ran to the fence, straight back like before, though it was harder to navigate with the sun so high in the sky.
Nic was out of breath when she reached the place where the hole had been cut. Nerves, exhaustion—all of it was crashing down.
She’d forgotten about the barbed wire and she didn’t have gloves. She took off one sneaker and put her hand inside it. She pushed the fence to see where it needed to be cut. The wire cutters were strong and they cut through it in seconds.
When she was on the other side, she put her sneaker back on, caught her breath.
She had just one thought now—Reyes knew where her mother was. He’d known the entire time. And he knew she was in a place that she couldn’t leave. That was why he risked waiting to get the reward money. He knew he had the time.
And the reason he wanted the time? It was absurd, this thought, but his behavior, his obsession with her had to go back to Daisy Hollander. Nic and Daisy—that had to be why he waited. He wanted Nic to come back to Hastings. And come back alone.
