Page 66 of Pieces of Her (Andrea Oliver 1)

Had she put other people’s lives at risk by abandoning the truck? Had she put her own life at risk by looking up the directions to Idaho? Andy tried again to mentally walk through the morning. Entering the library. Pouring the coffee. Sitting down at the computer. She had looked up the Belle Isle Review first, right? And then clicked to private browsing?

She was giving Google Incognito Mode a lot of credit. It seemed very unlikely that something so standard could fool a forensic computer whiz. Andy probably should’ve cleared out the cache and wiped the history and erased all the cookies the way she had learned to do after that horrible time Gordon had accidentally seen the loop of erotic Outlander scenes Andy had accessed from his laptop.

Andy wiped her nose again. Her cheeks felt hot. She saw a road sign.

FLORENCE5 MI

Andy guessed she was heading in the right direction, which was somewhere in the upper left corner of Alabama. She hadn’t stopped to buy a new map to plot the route to Idaho. Once she’d left the storage unit, her only goal was to get as far away from Carrollton as possible. She had her highway and interstate scribbles from the library, but she was mostly relying on the back of the Georgia map, which had ads for other maps. There was a small rendering of The Contiguous United States of America available for $5.99 plus postage and handling. Andy had grown up looking at similar maps, which was why she was in her twenties before she’d understood how Canada and New York State could share Niagara Falls.

This was her plan: after Alabama, she’d cut through a corner of Tennessee, a corner of Arkansas, Missouri, a tiny piece of Kansas, left at Nebraska, then Wyoming, then she would literally fucking kill herself if she wasn’t in Idaho by then.

Andy leaned forward, resting her chin on the shaky steering wheel. The vertebrae in her lower back had turned into prickly pears. The trees started to blur again. She wasn’t crying anymore, just exhausted. Her eyelids kept fluttering. She felt like they were weighted down with paste.

She made herself sit up straight. She punched the thick white buttons on the radio. She twisted the dial back and forth. All she found were sermons and farm reports and country music, but not the good kind; the kind that made you want to stab a pencil into your ear.

Andy opened her mouth and screamed as loud as she could.

It felt good, but she couldn’t scream for the rest of her life.

At some point, she would have to get some sleep. The five-and-a-half-hour drive from Belle Isle had been draining enough. So far, the drive from Carrollton had added another four and a half hours because of traffic, which Andy seemed pre-ordained to find no matter which route she took. It was almost three p.m. Except for zonking out for a few hours in her apartment and the catnap in the Walmart parking lot, she hadn’t really slept since she got up for her dispatch shift two days ago. During that time, Andy had survived a shooting, watched her mother get injured, agonized outside of the surgical suite, freaked out over a police interrogation and killed a man, so as these things went, it was no wonder that she felt like she wanted to vomit and yell and cry at the same time.

Not to mention that her bladder was a hot-water bottle sitting inside of her body. She had stopped only once since leaving the storage unit, pulling onto the shoulder of the highway, hiding between the open front and back car doors, waiting for traffic to clear, then squatting down to relieve herself in the grass because she was terrified to leave the Reliant unattended.

$240,000

Andy couldn’t leave that kind of cash in the car while she ran into Burger King, and taking the suitcase inside would be like carrying a neon sign for somebody to rob her. What the hell was Laura doing with that kind of cash? How long had it taken for her to save it?

Was she a bank robber?

The question was only a little crazy. Being a bank robber would explain the money, and it jibed with the D.B. Cooper joke on the Canada ID and maybe even the gun in the glove box.

Andy’s heart pinged at the thought of the gun.

Here was the problem: bank robbers seldom got away with their crimes. It was a very high risk for a very low reward, because the FBI was in charge of all investigations that had to do with federally insured funds. Andy thought the law’s origins had something to do with Bonnie and Clyde or John Dillinger or the government just basically making sure that people knew their money was safe.

Anyway, she couldn’t see her mother pulling on a ski mask and robbing a bank.

Then again, before the shooting at the diner, she couldn’t see her mom knifing a kid in the neck.

Then again—again—Andy could not see her reliable, sensible mother doing a lot of the crazy shit that Laura had done in the last thirty-six hours. The hidden make-up bag, the key behind the photograph, the storage unit, the Thom McAn box.

Which brought Andy to the photo of toddler Andy in the snow.

Here was the Lifetime Movie question: Had Andy been kidnapped as a child? Had Laura seen a baby left alone in a shopping cart or unattended on a playground and decided to take her home?

Andy glanced in the rearview mirror. The shape of her eyes, the same shape as Laura’s, told her that Laura was her mother.

The Polaroids showed Laura so badly beaten that her bottom lip was split open. Maybe Jerry Randall was an awful man. Maybe back in 1989, he was beating Laura, and she snapped and took Andy on the run with her, and Jerry had been looking for them ever since.

Which was a Julia Roberts movie. Or a Jennifer Lopez movie. Or Kathy Bates. Or Ashley Judd, Keri Russell, Ellen Page...

Andy snorted.

There were a lot of movies about women getting pissed off about men beating the shit out of them.

But the Polaroids showed that her mother had in fact had the shit beaten out of her, so maybe that wasn’t so far off base.

Andy found herself shaking her head.