Page 62

62

BLAKE

I throw up onto the sidewalk until my ribs hurt.

By the end, I’m dry heaving, but I don’t want to stop. Not until I’m sure that every trace of those cookies is out of me.

When I’m pretty sure my stomach is empty, I get to my feet unsteadily. I close my eyes, trying to remember exactly when I ate the cookies. It hasn’t even been an hour. How long does it take for something you eat to get into your bloodstream? I don’t know the answer to that. I’ve emptied my stomach, but it could be too late.

I feel awful, but mostly because I’ve been throwing up. Are my fingers tingling, or am I just imagining it? I can’t tell.

Mostly, I can’t keep my thoughts from racing. Krista—the woman I loved—is not who I thought she was. She is… Well, if the things her mother was saying are true, she’s a psychopath. She killed her boyfriend. She killed the girl her boyfriend was cheating with. She probably killed Mr. Zimmerly and Stacie.

Oh God, Stacie… It’s all my fault.

I take stock of my body. I feel…okay. I have a headache, and I’m mildly nauseous, but I can chalk that up to the fact that I’ve been throwing up for several minutes. I think I got all the poison out of my system before it started working, whatever it was.

Krista poisoned me. She tried to kill me.

I don’t quite understand what happened or who Whitney really is, but there is no doubt in my mind that Krista is the daughter of that woman I just met. Aside from the resemblance, everything sounded familiar. Telmont sounded familiar because Krista mentioned it before. And now that I think about it, she also mentioned once that she spent time in Braga, plus she loves that wine from Porto. That’s why it rang a bell for me. I’ve sure never been there.

Krista lied to me about her whole life. She claimed she was from Idaho and moved to the city with a friend after high school—a lie. I don’t know who that middle-aged woman we had dinner with was, the one who waxed nostalgic about Krista’s childhood. She clearly wasn’t her mother—another lie. She told the truth about her father having a heart attack, although she failed to tell me it was the stress of all the awful things she did that caused it.

Now what?

I think back to the suicide note Krista wrote on my behalf. The whole thing is horrifying, but there’s one sentence in particular that keeps tugging at me:

After all the lives I’ve taken, I can’t go on.

She clearly wants me to take the fall for the murders of Mr. Zimmerly and Stacie, but is that all? The note was so nonspecific. She’s not going to want the police to have any doubt about what I’ve done.

After all the lives I’ve taken…

She’s going to kill Whitney.

A sudden certainty comes to me—that’s her plan. She is going to murder Whitney in my home so there will be no doubt about what I’ve done. But now I’ve taken a trip to New Jersey and put the kibosh on her plans.

Or have I?

If Krista assumes I’m going to eat the cookies either way—which is a pretty good bet considering my weakness for her snickerdoodles—she might decide to kill Whitney anyway. After all, the suicide note is in my pocket.

I’ve got to call the police.

I take my phone out of my pocket. I start to dial 911, but before I reach the third digit, I hear the story in my head and realize how ridiculous and convoluted it sounds. Nobody is going to take me seriously if I tell them the whole story. I’m even having trouble wrapping my head around it. They’ll have me committed before they believe it. Or worse—they’ll think I made it up to take suspicion off myself for Zimmerly’s murder.

I’ve got to talk to Krista. If she knows I’m alive and threw up the cookies, maybe she won’t do anything stupid.

Maybe.

I select Krista’s number—the first on my list of contacts, because I call her more than anyone else I know. The phone rings on the other line, again and again. She’s not picking up.

This is Krista… Leave a message!

I clear my throat. “Hey, uh, Krista? It’s Blake. Look, I’m… I’m in Telmont because… Well, you know why. And I’ve been… I talked to Whitney’s mother—I mean, your mother—and I… I just… Can you please call me back? Please, Krista? I need to talk to you. I still… I just want to see you. I’m so sorry about everything, and… Look, I’m driving back to the city now and…just wait for me. Please.”

It’s a long, rambling message, and by the time I finish speaking, I wish I hadn’t left a message at all. Krista might be the woman I love, but I need to remember that she tried to kill me. She wants me dead.

I type a text message that’s a little more succinct:

Call me.

I check my watch. If I leave now, I’ll be back in the city by about seven, depending on traffic. I’ll be going in the reverse direction of traffic, so hopefully the highway won’t be a parking lot. Maybe I can stop anything bad from happening.

A voice in the back of my head tells me that I should call the police right now. Even if they think it’s a wild story, they might still send a patrol car over.

But Whitney is rarely home before ten or eleven, and I’ll be back in the city in two hours. I can make it back in time to stop anything bad from happening.