Page 96 of This is Why We Lied

10:47, 11:10, 11:12, 11:14, 11:19, 11:22: Missed calls to Dave

11:28: Voicemail to Dave

11:30: First scream from compound (Howl)

11:40: Second scream from bachelor cottages (Help)

11:40: Third scream from bachelor cottages (Please)

11:50: Body discovered

Midnight: Death pronounced (Sara)

Faith was still not happy with the multiples of ten. She had to get up to that property and find that map. Her first goal was to establish the areas where the Wi-Fi worked so she could figure out where Mercy had been when the calls to Dave were made. From there, Faith could plot out the different possible routes Mercy could’ve taken to the bachelor cottages. Will might be off by as much as five minutes on either side, which didn’t seem like a lot, but when you were building a murder case, every minute mattered.

At least Mercy had done them the favor of making so many calls. The voicemail had already been sent to the lab for sound analysis, but that would take at least a week to get back. Faith picked up her phone from the cup holder. She tapped the recording she’d made of Mercy’s last message to Dave. The woman’s voice sounded desperate as it echoed inside the Mini.

“Dave! Dave! Oh my God, where are you? Please, please call me back. I can’t believe—oh, God, I can’t— Please call me. Please. I need you. I know you’ve never been there for me before, but I really need you now. I need your help, baby. Please c-call—”

Faith hadn’t noticed before, but Mercy had started sobbing when she’d muffled the phone. In the car, Faith silently counted down the seven seconds of the woman’s soft cries.

“What are you doing here? Don’t! Dave will be here soon. I told him what happened. He’s on his—”

Faith glanced down at her timeline. Thirty-two minutes later, Mercy was pronounced dead.

“What happened to you, Mercy?” Faith asked the empty car. “What was it that you couldn’t believe?”

The woman had seen or heard something that terrified her enough to shove her clothes and notebook into the backpack to flee. She hadn’t taken Jon, which meant whatever happened was only threatening to Mercy. Threatening enough that she needed Dave to show up for her after years of not being there. Threatening enough that she didn’t go to her own family for help.

Faith’s bet was that the bad thing had kicked off during the thirteen-minute gap between the first call to Dave and the frantic five missed calls that had started at the 11:10 mark. Mercy would’ve been inside the house at some point to pack her backpack. Faith wasn’t sure what items she would take if she had to leave her house for ever, but chief among them would be the letter that her father had written to her before he’d died of pancreatic cancer. There was no way Mercy had taken the notebook unless it had incredible value.

And there was no way the lab would be done with the analysis in less than a week.

Dave will be here soon. I told him what happened.

Faith thought about all the times she had told a man that another man was on the way. Usually it happened when she was trying to enjoy a night out alone. There was always some dude who would sidle up to flirt. The only way to get rid of him was to make it clear that another man had already pissed on the fire hydrant he was sniffing.

Which brought Faith back to the locked-room mystery of it all. One of the tenets of the genre was that the person you didn’t think did it had actually done it. Dave was so obvious that he practically had a neon arrow pointing at his head. The most dangerous time for a domestic abuse survivor was when she was leaving her abuser. The strangulation was a textbook sign of an escalation in violence. But being a reprehensible shitslug didn’t make you a murderer. And Faith kept coming back to the voicemail. Mercy wasn’t telling Dave that Dave was on the way. There were only a handful of men at the lodge who could’ve caused Mercy to invoke his name.

Chuck. Frank. Drew. Max, the investor. Alejandro, the chef. Gregg and Ezra, the two waiters from town. Gordon and Paul, because you never knew. Christopher, because he and Mercy were basically raised inside a VC Andrews novel in the north Georgia mountains.

Faith let out a heavy sigh. She needed more information. Hopefully, Penny Danvers, the bartender and cleaner at the lodge, would be as insightful and talkative as Delilah had been on Will’s recording. Hotel cleaners saw your character in its harshest light, and God only knew Faith had dropped a few truth-bombs on unsuspecting bartenders in her day. Which was probably not a rabbit hole she needed to go down right now. Instead, Faith focused on the never-ending gravel road. She glanced into her rear-view mirror. Then at the road. Then out the side windows. Everything looked the same.

“Fuck me.”

She was completely and totally lost.

She slowed her car to look for signs of civilization. All she had seen in the last fifteen minutes were fields and cows and the occasional low-flying bird. Her GPS had told her to take a left at the fork in the road, but she was beginning to think it had lied. She checked her phone. No signal. Faith performed a three-point turn and headed back the way she’d come.

Somehow, the fields and cows and the occasional bird looked different on her way back. She rolled down both windows and listened for cars or a tractor or some indication that she was not the last woman on earth. All she heard was a stupid bird cawing. She turned the dial on the radio, expecting to hear either alien voices or the farm report, but she was rewarded with Dolly Parton singing “Purple Rain”.

“Thank God,” Faith whispered. At least something was still good in the world. The wind blew into the car, drying some of the sweat on her back. She heard her phone chirp. Faith looked down at the screen. The signal was back. She had two text messages.

Faith tapped in her code, telling herself it was okay to text and drive because the only person she could kill was herself. Which she almost did when she saw the text from her son.

He was at Quantico. He loved it there.

Faith had secretly been hoping that Jeremy would hate it. She did not want her son to be a cop. She did not want him to be an FBI agent. She did not want him to be a GBI agent. She wanted him to use his fancy degree from Georgia Tech and work in an office and wear a suit and make lots of money so when his mother crashed her car on the side of the road from texting and driving, she would wind up in a nice facility.