The Neighbor - Lisa Gardner [154]
He rubbed the back of her hand. “Except …”
She looked at him, “Except I started to realize that nothing I did would be enough. Wayne works for the state police. He has a key to our house. Maybe he didn’t kill me that night, but what about the next, or the next? It’s not like a guy shows up with a baseball bat when all he wants to do is talk. He might press charges against you for the computer image, putting my husband in jail. Or heaven help us, he might go after Ree. She thinks he’s a friend. She’d get in a car with him. I started to realize … I started to realize that I’d made a huge mess of things.”
“So you ran away.”
She smiled thinly, catching the edge in his voice even as he tried to flatten it out. “I thought the only way to be safe from a man like Wayne was to have public knowledge of our relationship. If it was known that he was involved with me, then he couldn’t hurt me or my family, right? He’d be an automatic person of interest.”
Jason couldn’t follow her train of thought. “I guess.”
“So, I decided to disappear. Because if I disappeared, then the police would investigate, right? They’d learn about Wayne, then when I reappeared, I’d be safe. He wouldn’t dare do anything; it would cost him his career. So I retrieved your lockbox from that attic—”
“I never told you about the lockbox.”
“Ree did. She saw you after Christmas, when you were putting away the ornaments. She spent most of January chattering away that you had a treasure chest in the attic and now constantly demands to go ‘treasure hunting.’ I thought she meant that you had a box of mementos or something, but then, in the past few months, given everything that’s been going on, I’ve been reconsidering you. How easily you changed your name from Johnson to Jones. Our considerable cash reserves, which you never talk about, but I know are there from reading the bank statements. I decided to do a little digging around in the attic. It took me a couple of tries, but I finally discovered the metal box. The cash was very useful, the fake IDs … troubling.”
“Escape plans are important to me,” he said.
“There’s only ID for you. Not for a family.”
“I can change that.”
She smiled, more warmly now, and he found himself taking her hand again, tucking her fingers inside his.
“I threw on your old clothes, all in black,” she said. “I stuck the cash and IDs in my pocket—cash for me to use, IDs for me to hold so you didn’t disappear while I was gone. I used one of our spare keys to lock the door behind me, then I hid behind the bushes until you returned.”
“You hid in the bushes?”
“I couldn’t leave Ree alone,” she said earnestly. “In case Wayne returned. I couldn’t just leave her. It was hard—” Her voice broke. “It was very hard to walk away. You have no idea. Leaving the two of you … I kept telling myself it would only be for a few days. I’d lay low, stay at some cheap hotel, paying cash. Then, when the police started questioning Wayne, I’d reappear, say I’d gotten overwhelmed, some sort of Mom excuse, and after a few embarrassing days, the dust would settle and we’d continue on with our lives.
“I never expected my father would show up. Or they’d put Ethan through the wringer. Or … I don’t know. Everything grew bigger than I expected. The media attention, the police scrutiny. It’s all gotten out of hand.”
“You have no idea.”
“I had to cut through four back yards just to sneak into my own home tonight. It’s crazy out there.”
“So how are you going to do this?”
She shrugged. “Throw open the front door and declare, ‘I’m back….’ Let the photographers click away.”
“The reporters will eat you alive.”
“I have to pay for my mistakes sooner or later.”
He didn’t like it. And pieces of the story nagged at him. Sandy’s lover hadn’t taken no for an answer, so she’d thought to expose the relationship by disappearing? Why not just go public with the affair? Tell him, notify the state police.