With Marissa gone, Quinn couldn’t help but wonder if her disappearance had anything to do with what happened to Evie. Or whether the business was involved somehow. Everyone swore their allegiance to Evie, all behaving as if they mourned her death like they would the loss of any valued friend or family member. Did they really? Or was there one loose cannon in the bunch? Remove the right piece in Jenga’s infrastructure and everything comes crashing down. The real question was—which piece would lead to the killer?
Questions dominated Quinn’s mind as she took the short trek from Rowdy’s house to the car—in the dark, with nothing but Rowdy’s shoddy porch light to guide her. Roy was innocent, Marissa was missing, and Rowdy was hiding something. She didn’t know how she knew it—she just did. And she suspected it had something to do with Marissa.
Who could she trust anymore?
Aside from Bo and her parents, no one.
A faint breeze blew rhythm into a wind chime dangling from a string between two wooden slats on Rowdy’s porch. And then cracking, a faint rustling sound vibrating from the edge of the property, between a few aggregations of trees. Quinn squinted, like she expected the gesture to magnify the darkness somehow. When the noise reproduced, she increased her speed while reaching down, grappling for the cold, hard security only Evie’s gun could offer. The steel felt good gripped around her fingers, made her feel secure. Brave.
From the safe confines of the car, she pressed down on the door locks, flipped the high beams on, and pulled out of Rowdy’s driveway. She leaned toward the dashboard, her head protruding so far forward her chin practically rested on the top of the steering wheel, like scooting her body closer to the windshield made things any better than they were. The sky was dark. Pitch black. And the road leading away from Rowdy’s wasn’t fit for night driving. The few street signs she passed were fuzzy, the words blending together like a cloudy bowl of alphabet soup.
Hands nervously clutching the rubber grips of the steering wheel, she tried to focus. It wasn’t working. And there was a simple reason why—she didn’t have her glasses. She despised glasses, despised wearing them, so she almost never did. They made her feel old. And forget contact lenses. She’d tried them once, dipping a finger into the soft, squishy wetness of the see-through lens before stabbing it onto her eyeball. It didn’t seem natural. It felt weird. And she felt weird in them, like the bionic woman but without any super powers.
She was sure she’d been circling the same three streets for over a half hour now, seeing the same signs repeatedly, all sense of direction dashed inside a car with a GPS that mapped her current location as an “unverified area.” Of the five street lamps she’d passed, one of them was out, and another was blinking, flashing off and on, taunting her like, “now you see me, now you don’t.” The town had changed over the years. New subdivisions, more homes being built on the outskirts of town. Rowdy’s was one of them. She felt like Marco Polo, the thirteenth-century Venetian explorer who hadn’t the slightest clue where he was going either. Poor guy. The only legacy he left behind when he died was a silly swimming game. A mockery, really.
Lights twinkled in the distance, and she could see the roadway leading back to town. She reached the stop sign and turned on the main road, exhaling what felt like the first real breath she’d taken since dipping inside her car at Rowdy’s. Old lady or not, she made a vow to herself—no more night driving without her glasses.
She’d driven less than a quarter of a mile when she saw the vehicle approaching from behind. It was fast, relentless, coming in hot. Brights beaming so violently through her back windshield, it was like they had the ability to penetrate her brain. Did the driver see her? There was little time to assume he had, mere seconds for her to react. She jerked the wheel to the right, attempting to yield to the oncoming vehicle, give him the road.
It should have worked, but it didn’t.
The vehicle sped up, ramming into her back bumper before swerving around, darting up the road and out of sight. She braced the wheel for support as the car spiraled out of control, spinning off the road like spokes on a windmill. The hood of the car bowed into an upside-down “V,” crashing into a brick noise-barrier wall surrounding an upscale neighborhood.
Car fully stopped, she remained still for several moments, allowing the swift beating of her heart time to slow, her brain time to process. The truck was gone. The street empty. The nightmare over. For now. Something she’d done in her pursuit to find the killer had finally made an impact, triggering the events of the evening. She just needed to find out what that something was and how it was tied to Evie’s murder.
The soft blur of headlights slowed to a stop behind her. Her first instinct was to panic, to assume the man was back, that he was coming for her. Then she noticed it wasn’t a truck that had stopped. It was a car. And inside the car, a woman. Quinn released her seatbelt, opened the car door, and looked up, thanking God for keeping her alive.