“But he forgot to warn you to lock your doors.” I was suddenly curious about Sylvie’s parents.
“No,” she said, sighing. “He did. Keep your keys between your fingers when you’re at the pump or in the parking lot. Park under streetlights, always lock your door, check the car to make sure nobody’s hiding in the back seat. He’s a dad, you know, telling me all the ways to stay safe, but I was twenty-two. I thought I knew everything. Stuff like that didn’t happen where I lived. I mean, maybe it did, but I didn’t know about it. Until it was me.”
“The guy just made you drive?”
“Yeah. Kind of. It was—he took me to a section of town I’d never been to before, made me park behind a warehouse, took the keys, got out, ranted, paced back and forth, made a phone call. I was afraid more people were going to show up. I tried to get out of the car, and then he shot.”
“He shot you?”
“He didn’t hit me. He shot near me, I think, just to scare me, which it did. I got back in the car. God, there’s so many things I remember from that day. The cold sweat under my arms—I stank of it. And it just got worse. My palms were slippery on the steering wheel. I was so scared. Every time he yelled, it was like fingers on a chalkboard. I just wanted him to stop, to be quiet, to let me go.”
“Did he, eventually?”
“Kind of,” she said. “He got back in the car. We drove in circles around the city. I thought about ways to signal other drivers, to ask for help, but I was afraid to set him off if I was too obvious. I flashed my lights and tried to make eye contact, but nobody figured it out. We drove, and then he made me stop. We pulled up in front of a house, and hedragged me across the seat, tried to make me go in with him, and I knew?—”
She paused and sucked in a sharp breath.
“I knew if I went in that house, things were going to get really bad. I refused. And he hit me with the gun. I still wouldn’t get out of the car, so he grabbed my hair and started to drag me. And then the door of the house next door opened, and a lady came out with a broom, and she said, ‘What are you doing with that girl?’ He let go and I ran. I was afraid to go back to the car. I thought the time it would take me to get in and get it started—I’d be too slow. So, I ran. He followed but he couldn’t keep up. I just kept running until I found a corner store, and I called the police.”
“Did they catch him?”
Sylvie shook her head. “No. They’d already found Rachael by the time I got away. She was dead. He’d shot her in the head. They told me it was quick. She probably never knew what happened. She went from celebrating her new job to dead just like that.”
Sylvie’s voice was thick as she wiped beneath her eyes. She pulled her heel back up on the seat so she could rest her cheek on her knee, her face turned to me.
“My car was gone by the time we got back to the house,” she went on. “They found it a couple of days later. It was stripped. The insurance company totaled it and wrote me a check. The police told me they’d keep me posted. I went to therapy. And that was it.”
“He got away with it.”
“Yep.”
And that was the piece I’d been missing from the puzzle of Sylvie Calloway. My irritation melted a bit, down to a simmer. I understood her more now. She wanted justice.She hadn’t been able to get it for Rachael or for herself. She wanted it for these other women, these victims of crime, because she knew what it was like to be hurt and scared. She knew how close she’d come to being one of those victims. If she’d gone into that house…
Acid rolled through my stomach. I could picture it so clearly. “You were smart,” I said.
“Not smart enough to lock my doors.”
“True,” I agreed. “You were also young, so you get a little leeway for that. But you were smart.”
She grunted, clearly disagreeing, but I wasn’t going to let it go.
“Sylvie. Whatever that guy was on, he was unpredictable, didn’t give a shit about the law, was in possession of a gun, and you knew he was willing to use it. You’re very lucky that you’re not dead. And a lot of that is because you made good decisions when shit went down. Keeping him calm—that was smart. Because if you’d irritated him enough, it’s a good chance he would have just shot you and taken the car. And then, not going in the house, knowing the right moment to dig your heels in and say no—that was also smart.”
She stayed quiet long enough that I looked over. She had that thinking expression on her face again.
“He could have shot me when I refused to go into the house,” she said.
“And you knew that, didn’t you?”
She nodded, eyes staring out the windshield, seeing thousands of miles in the distance. “Yeah. And somewhere in my gut, I knew taking a bullet on the sidewalk would have been preferable to whatever was waiting inside.”
“Exactly. You had a pile of shit decisions, and you made the best one. You kept yourself alive because you’re smart,and you don’t fold under pressure.” I tapped the phone in my pocket. “I’m still having multiple heart attacks thinking about you clinging to the edge of that shelf while the timer on the bomb ticked down.”
“I’m not sure that goes in the column of all my good decisions,” she said.
“It might, it might not. If I had to choose, I’d pick you staying alive over whatever’s on this phone.”
“Good to know,” she said under her breath, and I smiled.
