Now the manager was staring at her. “You’re right,” she said to the barista. “I’m sorry,” she added to Celeste. “Do you have a sister? Because a woman who looks almost exactly like you was in here yesterday, and she tried to steal a twenty-dollar bill off a table. I mean, she had the same coloring, same eyebrows, eyes, facial features… Her hair was longer than yours, now that I look at you, and she didn’t have that scar.”
Jennifer. She was alive.
“Excuse me,” she said faintly. She hurried over to Grant.
“We need to talk,” she told him. “Now.”
Jeffrey was sitting next to Grant, sullenly pushing his cookie around the plate with a spoon. He was still being quiet and moody.
She and Grant stepped outside the shop, and she told him what the manager had just told her.
“She’s alive,” she said to him. “There’s no other explanation.”
“There was a dead person with her ID, found burned to death in a car,” Grant protested. “How could that be?”
Celeste hugged herself as conflicting emotions warred inside her. Her sister wasn’t dead. She didn’t want Jennifer to be dead, but she didn’t want anything to do with her, either. Jennifer was poison. She ruined everything she touched.
“All right, I’m thinking out loud here,” she said. “Let me go over everything I know about the accident. The car was found on the outskirts of Somerville. It went around a curve and hit a tree, exploded and burned, around two a.m. The body in it was burned beyond recognition – they couldn’t even tell what sex it was. The only way they traced it was they found a wallet lying in the road outside the car with several fake IDs and also Jennifer’s real ID. The cops told me that when they called me. I was still listed as her emergency contact.” She frowned. “It’s a small town. Jennifer was a nobody. It looked like a one-car accident. I imagine they rushed the police report and didn’t do much of an autopsy, probably just wanted to wrap everything up quickly.”
“Does it strike you as suspicious that the body and the car were destroyed, but a perfectly intact wallet with her ID was found outside the car?” Grant asked.
“Well, it does now that you mention it. That’s a great way to fake your own death.” She grimaced. “I haven’t seen Jennifer in ages, but would she actually kill a person? Because she would have to have put a person, probably female, in that car and set up the accident. As awful as she is, I’d hate to believe that about her.”
“Another question. Why did Jennifer need to disappear? And why leave Jeffrey behind? Granted, she was the worst mother in the history of mothers, but... What?” he asked, looking at Celeste.
“I just remembered something. When I first met Jeffrey, he was talking about a time when he and Jennifer were living somewhere under fake names, hiding from the bad man. In fact, I got the impression that he and his mother always lived under fake names. Seven years ago, she told me that she’d broken up with you, and then there was some weird thing with Boone… She didn’t specifically say why, but she told me that if he contacted her, I had to pretend I hadn’t heard from her. He called me a few times and he was really threatening, demanding to know where she was. I changed my number because of that.”
“Hmm. You think Boone might be the one who was after Jeffrey?” He scowled. “I’ll call Cliff and put the word out, but that makes it tough. Lone wolves are hard to catch. They live off the grid – they can hunt their own food and survive in the woods in extreme temperatures.” At the look of dismay on her face, he hugged her. “It’ll be okay. Once we get back to our pack property, I promise you, he’s not coming anywhere near us. And now that we’re close to having the database up and running, it’ll be easier to find these guys. I’m going to stop traveling and stay home with you and Jeffrey. We just have to make it past the full moon, and we’ll be fine.”
* * * * *
Celeste looked at her reflection in the mirror of the courthouse bathroom and grimaced. Even with makeup on, she had circles under her eyes. She hadn’t been sleeping well. She couldn’t wait to get the hell out of Somerville and never come back.
The door to one of the stalls banged open, and Rhona Millhouse walked out. She came over to use the sink next to Celeste, avoiding her gaze. Weird. There were two other empty sinks that she could have used.
Rhona had been a little more subdued in court today. She had stopped demanding that Jeffrey be handed over to her; it was obvious the judge wasn’t going to do that.
“So, how’s Jeffrey doing?” she asked Celeste, pasting a big, fake smile on her face.
“Talk to my attorney,” Celeste snapped.
“My goodness, there’s no need to have an attitude.” The smile never wavered as Rhona pulled out a little canister of breath spray from her purse. “I’m just doing what’s best for Jeffrey. If you cared anything about him, you’d have let me help him. You’re really not a fit mother. You’re no better than your sister was.”
“What did you just say to me?” Celeste turned to stare at her in alarm.
“You heard me…Celeste.” Rhona squirted the breath spray in Celeste’s face, and Celeste felt a wave of dizziness sweep over her.
When she woke up again, she was lying face down on something fuzzy, and her hands were tied behind her. She kept her eyes closed as she waited for dizziness to subside. The floor bumped underneath her, and she heard music. She was in a car, and somebody was playing the radio. Country music.
“Turn that shit off,” a male voice growled from somewhere above Celeste’s head. She was pretty sure it was Boone, sitting in the back seat of the car.
The music stopped. “My goodness,” Rhona chirped in her annoying, syrupy voice. “You people use the most foul language.” So she was driving.
“We’re fucking paying you well enough, so do what I fucking say.”
“Remember, I get to see that woman punished,” Rhona said. “I get to watch. She was very disrespectful to me. She threatened tohitme.” Her tone was deeply aggrieved.
Fear and rage mingled in Celeste’s gut. What were they going to do to her? Why did they even want her? At least they didn’t have Jeffrey. Thank God for that.
