Page 24 of Secrets Along the Shore (Beach Read Thrillers #1)

CHAPTER

THIRTEEN

I drove out of Elsie’s driveway, trying not to spin my tires in the gravel.

I needed to call Reuben. I need to get to Reuben.

My job was almost over. I could be Sophia’s voice and give Reuben my final theory that Alan fit the profile.

We could check the service records at Archer’s if we needed.

I didn’t know what the right process was, but Reuben would.

At this point, I was in way over my head and I was more than happy to hand it off to Reuben and hide at Livia’s.

I turned left at the end of the driveway, away from where the road would take me to Stillwater Lake. To where I’d come face-to-face with Sophia that first time, her body hidden in the cattails.

I glanced in the rearview mirror as I reached for my bag and my phone that Reuben had given back to me before I’d left the station.

My eyes locked with the passenger in the back seat.

Only, it wasn’t Sophia I saw.

It was Alan.

“Of course you’re here now.” I voiced the words to his image. He was haunting me. Like Sophia. Like the images of Lilian and Rosalie.

“I am. I’m here.”

Except they never spoke back—not audibly. Not where I could hear them.

My breath stuck in my throat. My heart pumped with such force I could feel it against my ribcage threatening to burst. I grabbed the wheel with both hands, white knuckled, and I tensed.

I cursed the way my mind was suddenly wiped clear of thought.

There was no instant reaction to survive.

It was panic that stole my sense of reason.

I kept driving.

My phone. I needed my phone.

I stared into the rear-view mirror again.

“Turn the car around, Noa.” Alan leaned forward between the seats.

A quick glance and I saw he had a handgun aimed at my side. Was this then, how he’d convinced the three women to leave their homes? To follow him quietly and without argument?

I’d heard once—long after I’d escaped my own situation—that if you were ever threatened with a gun, it was better to run than to submit. But I was driving. I couldn’t run, and if I stopped the car, we were alone on a rural road.

My body began to shake. Every sensation in my brain was misfiring.

“Alan—” A surge of fury coursed through me, accompanied by an extreme rush of fear, and then a numbness.

The kind of detachment that came from shutting out everything and not feeling.

Just doing. I’d been here before. Years ago.

I was here again. And for all my boasting to Reuben about learning to read people, I hadn’t learned anything.

I had worked with Alan the past two years.

Never once I had gotten the feeling that beneath his friendly facade was a troubled man.

“I’m not turning around.” It took every ounce of courage that I had to refuse his instruction.

“Do it,” he commanded.

I didn’t obey. To go back to Stillwater Lake was death. He could kill me now. One thing I’d learned as a victim, was that the sooner one reconciled they were going to die, the easier it was to take risks to live.

A prayer. A whispered prayer was all I could do. And then, I voiced the only other thought I had in my head.

“How’d did you get in my car?”

Alan frowned. “You’re easy to follow.”

But I hadn’t seen his car. I hadn’t seen any sign of him—I shot him a glance over my shoulder. “I don’t?— ”

“I parked at the lake. I walked back once I knew you were Elsie’s. I even stopped to tell Elsie’s husband hello. He’s a nice old guy.”

The awareness in me grew. So thick and so real.

I knew this was it, and if I fought the truth, I stood no chance.

So I went there. In my mind. I allowed myself to accept that today was the last day I would breathe.

The last day I would dare to wonder if I could ever dream again.

If I could be happy. Today was the day I would join the ones I’d left behind to die when I had run and escaped.

When my mind had decided there was too much trauma to remember, and when I became a blank slate.

“Listen to me,” Alan urged. There was a strange desperation in him—it didn’t match my past experience. He wasn’t in control any more than I was. In a way, that was even more frightening. I couldn’t predict what he would do. “You need to turn around. I can’t save you if you go back to town.”

“Save me?” The recollection of his text message from earlier came back with a fury. “You send me a picture of a snake and now you want to keep me safe?”

“You don’t understand!” Alan’s voice changed from an attempt to order me to a desperation I’d never heard from him before. “You have had such a terrible life, Noa!”

I had not expected that.

Alan continued. “Everything you’ve experienced—just like me—the abuses, the lack of a true family—it all came clear to me. I need to save you just like I need to save myself.”

“Save me from what?” I dared to keep driving toward population.

“C’mon, Noa,” Alan begged. “You don’t deserve this. I can keep you safe.”

“Keep me safe from what?” I pressed my foot on the gas a little harder.

“For God’s sake!” Alan waved the gun in the air. “You want to go back to that ? After everything I’ve done for you?”

There had never been a hint that Alan had been obsessed with me. His reaction didn’t fit.

“I’ve rebuilt a home for us.” Alan shook the gun at me. “Now slow down and turn around! ”

“Not until you explain what you mean.” I knew I was goading him and that was dangerous.

I felt a tear trickle down my cheek. I was angry.

I was petrified. I was infuriated that I was in this position again and was still as assaulted by terror as I had been the first time.

I had to be careful too. If I irritated him too much, I’d push him to the point that he’d pull the trigger.

He’d killed Sophia. She had probably angered him too and it didn’t seem that it took very much for Alan to switch from obsessively protective to enraged killer.

“Grandma and Mom abused you, Ashley. They abused me. ”

Dear God, he thought I was his sister.

His hand shook. I could see it in my peripheral vision. “The snakes. You hated them.”

“What about the snakes?” I had to distract him. We’d just passed the thin, green metal Whisper’s End, population 12,800 sign.

Alan let out a bark of laughter. “Don’t hide it from me, Ash. All those times we were told we were wrong—that we’d been bad ? Don’t you remember what Mom would say? What Grandma would say?”

“No, Alan, I don’t.” I tried to sound far more collected than I was. I glanced at the shoulder on either side of the road. I could drive head on into a tree. It would engage the airbags. Stun Alan. But it might stun me too and then where would I be?

“We hated snakes! We were terrified of them. And if we were bad, they lock us in the closet with snakes from the garden. ‘Be good,’ they said, ‘and you can come out and be rid of the serpents that cause you to sin.’ You don’t remember that?” Alan stared at me as if I’d lost my mind.

He’d lost his mind.

“I—I— yes . I do.” I played along. A little bit further and I would see the edge of town.

If I could get close enough before Alan did anything crazy, I could drive the car into a ditch or tree and hopefully, someone would be around to see—to bring help.

It was better than crashing the car on a rural road with no one around.

I needed to keep him talking. “What about Sophia, Alan? Why did you kill her?”

He grew ominously quiet, but wherever his thoughts had taken him, they kept him from focusing on the fact I was still driving in the direction of town.

“She didn’t want my help. I was going to make her happy. We would have a new grandma and a new mother, a home, and—she was just like Ashley. I’d have a new Ashley too.”

Ok, he had totally lost it.

“Noa?” Alan’s voice was actually thick with emotion, and he had come back to the realization I wasn’t his sister. If I had empathy for him—which I was far from it—I would have cared.

“I just want a family. You know? And I put those snakes right under their windows and told them they couldn’t control me any longer. I killed those snakes. That’s why I sent you the picture of one. To tell you. I can take care of the serpents in your life too.”

I almost choked. He had tied himself to the Serpent Killer by believing he was a savior. My rescuer!

“Where is Rosalie, Alan? Where is Lilian?” I had to ask. Maybe, if I got lucky, he would tell me.

I could see town. Houses dotted the landscape around us. A gas station. A church. A drive-through restaurant.

“Where are they, Alan?”

“I said turn around, Noa!” Awareness flooded Alan’s face. He took note of where we were, where I’d brought him. “Don’t—Noa—turn around.”

“Where are Lilian and Rosalie? Did you kill them too? Are they dead?” I demanded. I saw the gas station coming closer. No one was at the pumps. The lot was mostly empty, save for two cars parked at the side of the main building.

“Turn around!” he screamed into my ear.

“Did you kill them?” I screamed back. I could turn the car and floor the gas pedal. If I did, the curb was low. I’d probably hit a gas pump first. But I would aim for the center post.

My breaths came short and quick.

Black shutters began to close over my eyes.

“Turn around!” Alan yelled.

My foot pressed down, and I heard my engine accelerating.

Alan screamed something in my ear. I felt his spit on my face. The gun jolted from his hand as the car hit the curb, and for a moment—a strange and slow motion moment—I wondered if I’d actually made the car go airborne?

The crazy thing is, when you’re faced with extreme circumstances, when chaos should be at its worse and when your world is imploding, you’re seeing the face of death drawing close, and emergency sends your body into shockwaves of reaction . . . the entire moment slows to a crawl.

That’s what it was like.

In that moment.

I saw the grave he had dug for me.

I felt the dirt he shoveled over my body.

I held my breath.

I clawed my way out.