I bite my tongue. Literally.
“So what are you going to do?” she says. “Run and hide, or stay and fight?”
Neither. Both. “Please don’t do this.”
“See, this is your problem.”
“What?”
“You always focus on the wrong things.”
I start to ask her about what the wrong things are but stop myself. I am making her point.
She laughs.
The line goes dead.
Sixty-two
I should get sick. I should vomit up whatever is in my stomach, because when my wife of fifteen years has set me up for murdering multiple women, this should make me sick to my stomach. Instead, it feels like my whole body has been injected with Novocain.
Not a bad thing, because I can think instead of feel.
Run and hide. Stay and fight.
Neither is appealing. Nor is prison, the death penalty, lethal injection.
Run.
First, I take stock. Car, half a tank of gas, panini, partial iced coffee, and about two hundred in cash. Credit cards I cannot use, because Millicent will be watching.
I wonder if there is time to make a cash withdrawal at the bank.
Beyond that, my options narrow considerably. Can’t keep the car for long unless I get rid of the license plate, and then there is the issue of where to go. Canada is too far. By the time I make it there, my picture will be all over the news.
Mexico is the only driving option, and even that would be a stretch. It depends on how quickly this all plays out. My name and picture could be out within hours.
I could fly out of the country, but then I would definitely need to use my passport. They would know where I landed. At no time did I prepare for this kind of escape.
Millicent knows this.
Running will get me caught.
It also means leaving my kids. With Millicent.
Now, I get sick. On the side of the road, behind my car, I empty my stomach. I do not stop until there is nothing left.
Run and hide. Stay and Fight.
I start to consider a third option. What if I just walk into a police station and tell them everything?
No. Millicent might be arrested, but so would I. Claiming innocence is not an option, because it is not true.
There has to be a way, though. A way to implicate her instead of me, because I never killed anyone. A deal could be made with the right lawyer, the right prosecutor, the right proof. Except I don’t have any. Unlike Millicent, I have not been setting up my spouse for murder.
You always focus on the wrong things.
Maybe she is right; maybe the why does not matter. But it will. The why is what will haunt me, what I will think about at night when I am lying in bed. If I am in a bed. Maybe it will be a prison cot. She is right about the why. It’s the wrong thing to think about.
Run and hide. Stay and fight.
The options repeat over and over, like those words written on the wall of the basement. Millicent stated these options as if they were the only ones that existed. As if it were an either-or choice.
She is wrong. The options are wrong.
First, I will stay. Leaving my kids isn’t going to happen.
And if I stay, I have to hide. At least until I can find a way to make the police believe me about Millicent.
That means I have to fight.
Stay, hide, fight. The first is easy. No running.
The police. I could go to the police and tell them everything, tell them …
No. Cannot do that. I have real blood on my hands, and even a rookie will figure that out. And if I cannot go to the police, I will have to avoid them.
Money. I have two hundred dollars in my wallet, and that will not last long. I head straight to the bank and withdraw as much cash as I can without triggering an alert to the IRS. Millicent will know about it, because the tracker is still on my car.
Millicent. How long did she know? How long has she been tracking me? When did she start to plan this? The questions are endless, unanswerable.
With all we have been through, with all we have done together, it is unfathomable to me that she did not talk to me, ask me about it, even give me the benefit of the doubt. Instead, I had no chance, no opportunity to explain.
It seems a little bit crazy.
And heartbreaking.
But I do not have time to think about either one. In less than an hour, my life has been reduced to its most base level: survival.
So far, I am not very good at it. Millicent knows where I am, and I have no idea what to do next.
* * *
• • •
Home. It is still where I always go.
I grab what I can—clothes, toiletries, my laptop. The one we used to search for the women is gone, probably destroyed, but I find Millicent’s tablet and take it. And photographs. I take a couple of pictures of the kids right off the walls. I also send them a text.
Don’t believe everything you hear. I love you.
Before leaving, I turn off the GPS tracker but keep it with me. For a while, she will wonder if I am just sitting in our house. Maybe. But that is assuming I know my wife at all.
I pull out of the driveway and drive down the street, having no idea where to go next.
An empty building, a roadside motel, a parking lot? The swamp, the woods, the hiking trails? I have no idea, but it does not seem smart to be in a place I am unfamiliar with. I need somewhere quiet, somewhere I can think. Somewhere no one will bother me for a few hours.
A complete lack of options and originality sends me to the country club.
As an employee, I have a key to the office, which I never use, along with the equipment rooms and the courts. I make a quick stop at the store for a bag of food, mostly junk, and stay out of sight until after nine o’clock. That’s when the lights are shut down on the tennis courts, and security locks them up for the night.
This is where I go. The club has cameras inside the building. There are none on the courts.
Sixty-three
Everything about the tennis courts is familiar. I grew up here, on these courts. This is where I learned to play tennis, but that wasn’t all I did. My coach made me run around these courts endless times to get into shape. I won trophies here and had my butt whipped, sometimes on the same day.
This was my escape; this is where I came to get away from my friends, school, and especially my parents. At first, I came here to see if they would look for me. When they never did, I used it as a hideout. I even had my first kiss here.
Lily. She was a year older than me and far more experienced, or so it seemed. On Halloween night, about a million years ago, my friends and I dressed up as pirates. She and her friends dressed up as baby dolls. We all ran into each other somewhere in the Oaks, while trick-or-treating, and Lily told me I was kind of cute. I assumed that meant she loved me, and I think she did.
One comment led to another, and it wasn’t long before I asked if she wanted to go somewhere cool. She said yes.
“Cool” might have been an exaggeration, but when I was thirteen I thought it was cool to be outside the house, at night, with a girl. Lily didn’t think it was too bad, either, because she kissed me. She tasted like chocolate and licorice, and I loved it.
For a second, I am so enveloped by this memory that everything seems okay. It is not. I am on this tennis court because the police are after me and I cannot go home.
But thinking about Lily makes me realize I do have somewhere to go.