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—”
“Of course I remember you, Sarah. How are you?”
“Good. I’m good. I was just…I’m trying to get ahold of Anna, and I was wondering if you might happen to know where she is?”
The line went silent. I could hear my own breathing, cycled through the electronic circuits, amplified back to me in the receiver. The call was still active. The father just wasn’t talking.
“Father?” I said. “Are we still—?”
“Where are you right now, Sarah?”
“I’m with my…I’m sorry, but why would you ask that?”
“Where are you?” he repeated, his tone cold, clinical.
“Why would you want to know where I am?”
“I think you know why.”
I felt suddenly bloodless. The Costellos had judges and commissioners on their payroll. Why not a priest as well? What better informant than the man who hears confession for all the neighborhood cops and thugs?
“I don’t,” I lied. “It isn’t obvious at all.”
Aunt Lindsey was standing in the doorway now, looking me up and down, trying to figure out what had gone wrong and how she could set it right.
“Let me give you a piece of very generous advice,” Father Priatto said. “You don’t know who you’re up against. Jail might be the best of your options at this point. I suggest you tell me where you are. I can create a degree of amnesty for you.”
“It wasn’t me who—”
“Stop right there,” he said. “You know what you did. They will come for you. I guarantee it. And when they find you—”
I left him talking to a dial tone.