Andy tried to move, but the wound and her long confinement made it impossible.
“Christ.” Paula jerked Andy up by her arm.
Andy could only roll, falling against the bumper and stumbling to the ground. There was so much pain in her body that she could not locate one source. Blood dribbled from her mouth. She had bitten her own tongue. Her feet were beset by pins and needles as the circulation returned.
“Stand up.” Paula grabbed Andy’s arm and pulled her to her feet.
Andy howled, bending over at the waist to stop the spasms.
“Stop whining,” Paula said. “Put this on.”
Andy recognized the white polo button-down from the blue Samsonite suitcase. Part of Laura’s go-bag from the Carrollton storage unit.
“Hurry.” Paula looked around the parking lot again as she helped Andy into the shirt. “If you’re thinking about screaming, don’t. I can’t shoot you, but I can shoot anybody who tries to help you.”
Andy started on the buttons. “What did you do to Clara?”
“Your second mommy?” She chuckled at Andy’s expression. “She raised you for almost two years, her and Edwin. Did you know that?”
Andy was desperate not to give her a reaction. She kept her head down, watched her fingers work the buttons.
Had Edwin looked at her like her father because he was her father?
Paula said, “They wanted to keep you, but Jane took you for herself because that’s the kind of selfish bitch she is.” Paula was watching Andy carefully. “Seems like you’re not surprised to hear that your mother’s real name is Jane.”
“Why did you kill Edwin?”
“Jesus, kid.” She grabbed some handcuffs from the trunk. “Did you go through your entire life with a fish hook in your mouth?”
Andy mumbled, “Evidently.”
Paula slammed the trunk shut. She picked up two plastic bags in one hand. The gun went into the waist of her jeans, but she kept her hand on the grip. “Move.”
“Is Edwin—” Andy tried to think of a clever way of tricking her into admitting the truth, but her brain was incapable of any acrobatics. “Is he my father?”
“If he was your father, I would’ve already shot you in the chest and shit in the hole.” She waved for Andy to get moving. “Up the stairs.”
Andy found walking relatively easy, but climbing the stairs almost cut her in two. She kept her hand on her side, but there was no way to stop the feeling of a knife twisting her flesh. Each time she lifted her foot, she wanted to scream. Screaming would probably bring people out of their rooms, then Paula would shoot them, then Andy would have more than Edwin Van Wees and Clara Bellamy’s deaths on her conscience.
“Left,” Paula said.
Andy walked down a long, dark hallway. Shadows danced in front of her eyes. The nausea had returned. The dull pain had become sharp again. She had to put her hand to the wall so she would not trip or fall over. Why was she going along with everything like a lemming? Why didn’t she scream in the parking lot? People didn’t run out to help anymore. They would call the police, and then the police would—
“Here.” Paula waved the keycard to open the door.
Andy entered the room ahead of her. The lights were already on. Two queen-sized beds, a television, a desk, small bistro table with two matching chairs. The bathroom was by the door. The curtains were closed on the window that probably looked out onto the parking lot.
Paula dropped the plastic grocery bags onto the table. Bottles of water. Fruit. Potato chips.
Andy sniffed. Blood rolled down her throat. She felt like the entire left side of her face was filled with hot water.
“All right.” Paula’s hand rested on the butt of the gun. “Go ahead and holler if you want. This entire wing is empty, and anyway, this ain’t the kind of hotel where people worry if they hear a gal begging for help.”
Andy stared all of her hate into the woman.
Paula grinned, feeding off the rage. “If you need to piss, do it now. I won’t offer again.”
Andy tried to close the bathroom door, but Paula stopped her. She watched Andy labor to sit on the toilet without using her stomach muscles. A yelp slipped from Andy’s lips as her ass hit the seat. She had to lean over her knees to keep the pain at bay. Normally, Andy’s bladder was shy, but after so long in the car, she had no problem going.
Standing was another matter. Her knees started to straighten and then she was back on the toilet, groaning.
“Fucksakes.” Paula yanked up Andy by the armpit. She zipped and buttoned Andy’s jeans like she was three, then shoved her into the room. “Go sit down at the table.”
Andy kept her back bent as she navigated her way into the rickety chair. The side of her body lit up like a bolt of lightning.
Paula shoved the chair underneath the table. “You need to do what I say when I say it.”
“Fuck you.” The words slipped out before Andy could stop them.
“Fuck you, too.” Paula grabbed Andy’s left arm. She clamped a handcuff on her wrist, then jerked her hand under the table and attached the cuff to the metal base.
Andy pulled at the restraint. The table rattled. She pressed her forehead to the top.
Why hadn’t she gone to Idaho?
Paula said, “If your mother caught the first flight out, she won’t be here for at least another two hours.” She found an ibuprofen bottle in one of the bags. She used her teeth to rip off the safety seal. “How bad does it hurt?”
“Like I’ve been shot, you fucking psycho.”
“Fair enough.” Instead of being mad, Paula seemed delighted by Andy’s anger. She put four gelcaps on the table. She opened one of the bottles of water. “Barbecue or regular?”
Andy stared at her.
Paula held up two bags of potato chips. “You have to eat something or you’ll get a tummy ache from the pills.”
Andy didn’t know what to say but, “Barbecue.”
Paula opened the bag with help from her teeth. She unwrapped two sandwiches. “Mustard and mayo?”
Andy nodded, watching the madwoman who’d shot and kidnapped her use a plastic knife to spread mayonnaise and mustard onto the bread of her turkey sandwich.
Why was this happening?
“Eat at least half.” Paula slid over the sandwich and started adding mustard to her own. “I mean it, kid. Half. Then you can take the pills.”
Andy picked it up, but she had an idiotic flash of the sandwich squirting out of the hole in her side. And then she remembered, “You’re not supposed to eat before surgery.”
Paula stared at her.
“The bullet. I mean, if—when—my mom gets here, and—”
“They won’t operate. Easier to let the bullet stay inside. It’s infection you should be worried about. That shit’ll kill you.” Paula turned on the television. She channeled around until she found Animal Planet, then muted the sound.
Pitbulls and Parolees.
“This is a good episode.” Paula swiveled back around. She squirted mayonnaise onto her sandwich. “I wish they’d had this program at Danbury.”
Andy watched her use the plastic knife to evenly spread the mayo across the bread.
This should’ve felt strange, but it didn’t feel strange. Why would it? Andy had started the week by watching her mother kill a kid, then Andy had murdered a gun for hire, then she was on the run and kicking a thug in the balls and getting one, maybe two more people killed, so why wouldn’t it feel natural to be handcuffed to a table, watching parolees try to reform abused animals with a psycho ex-con college professor?
Paula pressed the sandwich back together. She tugged at the scarf around her neck, the same scarf she had been wearing two and a half days ago in Austin.
Andy said, “I thought you’d been suffocated.”
Paula took a large bite. She spoke with her mouth full. “I’m getting a cold. You gotta keep your neck warm to stop the coughing.”
Andy didn’t bother to correct the
asinine health advice. A cold explained Paula’s raspy voice, but Andy said, “Your eye—”
“Your fucking mother.” Food dropped from Paula’s mouth, but she kept talking. “She whacked me in the head. They didn’t do shit for me in jail. The left one went white, I got an infection in the right one. Still sensitive to light, so that’s why I wear the sunglasses. Thanks to your mom, that’s been my look for thirty-two years.”
Interesting math.
Paula said, “What else you wanna know?”
Andy felt like she had nothing left to lose. She asked, “You sent the guy to Mom’s house, right? To torture her?”
“Samuel Godfrey Beckett.” Paula snorted, then coughed when the sandwich went down the wrong way. “Worth the money just for his stupid name. I thought for sure Jane would give it up. She’s never been good at confrontation. Then again, she killed that kid in the diner. I about shit myself when I recognized her face on the news. Fucking Laura Oliver. Living on a goddamn beach while the rest of us rotted in jail.”
Andy pressed her tongue to the roof of her mouth. The gun was still tucked into Paula’s jeans, but her hands were occupied with eating. Could Andy push the table into Paula’s gut, reach over with her free hand and grab the gun?
“What else, kid?”
Andy mentally walked herself through the motions. None of them worked out. Her handcuffed wrist was stretched too far under the table. She would end up impaling herself if she reached for the gun with her free hand.
“Come on.” Paula bit off another chunk of sandwich. “Ask me all the questions you can’t ask your mother.”
Andy looked away. At the ugly floral bedspread. At the door almost twenty feet away. Paula was offering her everything, but after searching for so long, Andy didn’t just want answers. She wanted an explanation, and that was something she could only get from her mother.
Paula looked for a napkin in the bag. “You turning shy on me?”
Andy did not want to, but she asked, “How will I know you’re telling the truth?”
“I’m more honest than that whore you call a mother.”
Andy chewed at the tip of her already sore tongue to keep from lashing out. “Who did you kill?”
“Some bitch who tried to stab me in prison. They couldn’t prosecute me for Norway. Maplecroft wasn’t my fault. Quarter was the one who snatched her. The other stuff wasn’t on me.” She stopped to chew. “I pleaded guilty to fleeing the scene of a crime. That got me six years, the bitch I shivved was self-defense, but they took me up to two dimes. Ask another question.”
“How did you get your job at the university?”
“They were looking for a diversity hire and I lucked up with my sad sack reformed felon story. Ask another.”
“Is Clara okay?”
“Ha, good try. How about this: why do I hate your dumb bitch of a mother?”
Andy waited, but Paula was waiting, too.
Andy made her tone as bored and disinterested as she could, asking, “Why do you hate my mother?”
“She turned on us. All of us except Edwin and Clara, but that was only because she wanted to control them.” Paula waited for a reaction that Andy could not give her. “Jane was put into witness protection in exchange for her testimony. She got a sweetheart deal because the clock was literally ticking. We had another bomb ready to go, but her big fucking mouth stopped it all.”
Andy searched Paula’s expression for guile, but she saw none.
Witness protection.
Andy tried to wrap her brain around the information, to figure out how it made her feel. Laura had lied to her, but Andy had become accustomed to the fact that her mother lied. Maybe what she was feeling was a slight sense of relief. All of this time, Andy had assumed that Laura was a criminal. And she was a criminal, but she had actually done something good by turning them all in.
Right?
Paula said, “The pigs still put her in prison for two years. They can do that, you know. Even with witness protection. And Jane did some heinous shit. We all did, but we did it for the cause. Jane did it because she was a spoiled bitch who got bored spending her daddy’s money.”
“QuellCorp,” Andy said.
“Billions,” Paula said. “All from the suffering and exploitation of the sick.”
“So you’re holding me ransom for money?”
“Hell no. I don’t want her fucking blood money. This has nothing to do with QuellCorp. The family divested years ago. None of them have anything to do with it. Except raking in the dough from their stock options.”
Andy wondered if that’s where the cash came from in the Reliant. You had to pay taxes on stock gains, but if Laura was in witness protection, then everything would be above-board.
Right?
Paula said, “Jane never told you any of this?”
Andy didn’t bother to confirm what the woman already knew.
“Did she tell you who your father is?”
Andy kept her mouth shut. She knew who her father was.
“Don’t you want to know?”
Gordon was her father. He had raised her, taken care of her, put up with her maddening silences and indecision.
Paula gave a heavy, disappointed sigh. “Nicholas Harp. She never told you?”
Andy felt her curiosity rise, but not for the obvious reason. She recognized the name from the Wikipedia page. Harp had died of an overdose years before Andy was born.
She told Paula, “You’re lying.”
“No, I’m not. Nick is the leader of the Army of the Changing World. Everybody should know his name, but especially you.”
“Wiki said that Clayton Morrow—”
“Nicholas Harp. That’s your father’s chosen name. Half of that bullshit on Wikipedia is lies. The other half is speculation.” Paula leaned across the table, excited. “The Army of the Changing World stood for something. We really were going to change the world. Then your mother lost her nerve and it all turned into a shitshow.”
Andy shook her head, because all they had done was kill people and terrorize the country. “That professor was murdered in San Francisco. Most of the people in your group are dead. Martin Queller was assassinated.”
“You mean, your grandfather?”
Andy felt jarred. She had not had time to make the connection.
Martin Queller was her grandfather.
He had been married to Annette Queller, her grandmother.
Which meant that Jasper Queller, the asshole billionaire, was her uncle.
Was Laura a billionaire, too?
“Finally putting it together, huh?” Paula tossed a stray piece of deli meat into her mouth. “Your father has been in prison for three decades because of Jane. She kept you away from him. You could’ve had a relationship, gotten to know who he is, but she denied you that honor.”
Andy knew exactly who Clayton Morrow was, and she wanted nothing to do with him. He was not her father any more than Jerry Randall was. She had to believe that, because the alternative would have her curled into a ball on the floor.
“Come on.” Paula wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Give me some more questions.”
Andy thought through the last few days, the list of unknowns she had jotted down after meeting Paula. “What changed your mind back in Austin? One minute you were telling me to leave, the next minute you were telling me to look for Clara Bellamy.”
Paula nodded, as if she approved of the question. “The pig whose nuts you marshmallowed. I figured you wouldn’t have done that if you were working with your mother.”
“What?”
“The pig. The US marshal.”
Andy felt a flush work its way up her neck.
“You fucked up his shit. That bitch was lying on my front porch for an hour.”
Andy leaned her head onto the table so that Paula couldn’t see her face.
Mike.
The Marshal Service was in charge of administering the witness protection program. They could make all th
e driver’s licenses they wanted because making new documents was part of their job—fake birth certificates and fake tax returns and even fake obituaries for a made-up guy named Jerry Randall.
Andy felt her bowels swirl.
Mike was Laura’s handler. That’s why he was at the hospital when she came out. Was that why he was following Andy? Was he trying to help her because she had unwittingly been in the program, too?
Had she taken out the only person who might be able to save them from this monster?
“Hey.” Paula rapped her knuckles on the table. “More questions. Spit ’em out. We got nothing better to do.”
Andy shook her head. She tried to put together Mike’s involvement since the beginning. His truck in the Hazeltons’ driveway with his rabbit’s foot keychain. The magnetic signs he changed out with each new city.
The GPS tracker on the cooler.
Mike must have planted it while Andy was passed out in the Muscle Shoals motel. Then he’d gone across the street for a congratulatory beer and improvised when Andy walked through the door.
She had assumed that he was friends with the bartender, but guys like Mike made friends wherever they went.
“Hey,” Paula repeated. “Focus on me, kid. If you’re not going to keep me entertained, then I’m gonna truss you back up and watch my shows.”
Andy had to shake her head to clear it. She lifted her chin up, rested it against her free hand. She didn’t know what else to do but return to her list. “Why did you send me to find Clara?”
“Bitch refused to talk to me back when she had her marbles, and Edwin threatened to rat me to my P.O. I was hoping seeing you would trigger her memories. Then I could snatch you up and you could give me the information and happy ending for everybody. Except Edwin got in the way. But you know what? Fuck him for working Jane’s deal to keep her out of prison for thirty years.” Paula crammed a handful of chips into her mouth. “Your mother was part of a conspiracy to kill your grandfather. She watched Alexandra Maplecroft die. She was there when Quarter was shot in the heart. She helped drive the van to the farm. She was with us one hundred percent every step of the way.”
“Until she wasn’t,” Andy said, because that was the part that she wanted to hold onto.