I made it to the nearest gas station, parked in front of the convenience store, and sat gripping the steering wheel.
“Get ahold of yourself, Sarah,” I said out loud. “Think.”
First things first: I needed to stop the bleeding. I pulled a handkerchief from my purse, took off my belt, leaned forward, and fashioned a makeshift tourniquet. As I was straightening back up, I saw it: a PBS tote bag resting on the seat beside me.
All I knew was that it couldn’t be mine. I’m not the tote bag type, and I’ve never given a dime to public television. Slowly, as if something might jump out and bite me, I reached across and pulled the straps open.
Instead of a rat, I found pearl necklaces, a tiara, a gem-encrusted bracelet. Anna’s collection. She’d shown it to me more than once. I’d even say she rubbed my nose in it. Any one of those pieces cost more than I make in a year. Maybe a decade.
“And still you didn’t call the police?”
“Are you kidding? That bag was one more reason not to call the police. Someone had put it there. Someone was trying to frame me.”
And what could I do but run? From Vincent and the police.
“Any idea who that someone might be?”
“There are only two possibilities,” I said.
“Let me guess: the missus and the maid?”
I nodded. It had to be one of them.
“Serena, maybe,” Haagen said. “But you think Anna Costello would part with her personal fortune? On purpose?”
I shrugged.
“She’d get it back, wouldn’t she? Once I was caught. Meanwhile, she’d count on you asking that very question. What better way to throw you off the scent? And Vincent, too, for that matter. She’d been robbed. She was a victim, like her husband.”
Haagen took a sip of water while she mulled things over.
“Not bad,” she said. “But I have an alternative theory.”
I waited, knowing full well she’d share it with me whether or not I asked.
“Maybe you really did black out,” she said. “But it had nothing to do with diabetes. Maybe Anthony caught you robbing his wife. Maybe you only saw one way forward. You hadn’t planned on killing him. You figured they’d blame the theft on the maid. Everyone blames the maid. But stabbing a man to death—that’s more than a fluctuation in blood sugar. That’s a real shock to the system, the kind of thing a mind might try to erase. Don’t you think?”
Of course that made sense, but it wasn’t what happened. The question was how to convince Haagen, who seemed bound and determined to throw away the key.
“There’s just one problem,” I said. “If I was planning to blame Serena, then why did I run?”
It was her turn to shrug.
“Maybe you’re not that bright,” she said. “Or maybe you’re the type who’s always dreamed of running away, starting over.”
CHAPTER 10
I TOLD her I wasn’t that type at all. Not consciously, anyway.
As usual, Haagen wasn’t buying it.
“Let’s focus on the timeline,” she said. “I’m guessing you didn’t gun it straight for Texas?”
“No,” I said, “I didn’t.”
“So where’d you go next?”
With the tourniquet in place, I pulled out of the gas station, thinking, Sarah, you need to be anywhere but here. I needed a safe haven. Someplace where I could patch up my leg, find some insulin, and above all else devise a plan.
Only one destination came to mind.
No way, Sarah, I told myself. No way do you bring this to her doorstep.
Aunt Lindsey: my mother’s sister, and my only surviving relative. The woman who raised me. An ER nurse who spent her weekdays coaxing strangers away from death’s door and her weekends managing a community garden. Aunt Lindsey, the purest heart I knew. She’d give her last possession to anyone who asked.
Which is exactly why you can’t ask, I thought.
But there wasn’t anyone else. Least of all Sean. If Vincent was looking for me, if the police were looking for me, then Sean would be their first stop. And if he needed to serve me up to save his skin, I had no doubt he’d do it.
An hour later I came skidding to a halt in Aunt Lindsey’s gravel driveway. I grabbed my glasses from the glove box, hesitated before reaching for the tote bag. I couldn’t leave it in the car, but how would I explain the contents to my aunt? Not that she was likely to demand an explanation.
I dragged my injured leg up the splintering steps and burst through the door. No point in knocking: she never wore her hearing aid at home, and she didn’t believe in locks.
“Aunt Linds!” I called out, standing between the twin rubber plants in her narrow, gleaming foyer.
I waited, heard nothing besides the ticking of an antique clock. I set the tote bag beside an umbrella holder and started down the hallway, checking the living room, the dining room, the den. In the kitchen, I stared out the back window, scanning the foliage she let run wild because, as she put it, repairing the ozone was more important than having a neatly trimmed lawn. Never mind the periodic infestations of mice and spiders: every creature had a right to live.
“Aunt Linds? Are you upstairs?”
“I’ll be right with you,” came a voice from the greenhouse off the kitchen. “I’m just trying to resurrect this basil plant.”
A few beats later, she rounded the corner in her rubber clogs, her apron wet and streaked with soil.
“Hey, sweetie,” she said. “It’s so nice to—”
She stopped short once she got a close look at me.
“What on earth …?”
We stood at arm’s length while she studied my wounded leg, my torn clothes, my panicked expression. I could see her counting to five in her head as she took a breath, a technique she’d picked up at the ER.
“You sit down now,” she said, pulling a chair away from the table. “Tell me all about it. I’ll get you a glass of water.”
The promise of a brief rest made me realize just how long I’d been teetering on collapse.
“I will,” I promised. “I’ll tell you everything. But I have to make a call first.”
No need to say it was an emergency. She pulled a cordless phone from the wall, handed it to me, and turned to leave the room.
“I’ll just be in the greenhouse,” she said.
I called Anna. Twice. The second time, I gathered myself and left a message.
“Anna, this is Sarah. I’m assuming you know by now … Listen, I have your jewelry. I have no idea how your collection wound up in my car, but I don’t want any part of …”
I stopped. I didn’t hang up. Instead, I pressed the number 3: message deleted. No good would come from a voice mail. Anything on tape could be manipulated, entered into evidence. I took a breath, then called Anna’s pastor, the person most likely to know where she was. Anna’s not religious by nature, but sitting on the church’s board of directors made her feel a little better about being a mob wife, and she and Father Priatto had grown close. Maybe too close. Sometimes I wondered …
The good father picked up on the first ring.
“Hello,” I said, my voice already breaking. “This is Sarah Roberts-Walsh, Anna Costello’s personal chef. I don’t know if you remember me, but we—”