I had to turn away at that moment and I let go of Brice’s arm and buried my face in Dutch’s chest. I tried so hard not to lose it, because I knew Brice needed some support right now, but I just couldn’t. It seemed every time someone mentioned my best friend, the news that came with it was worse and worse.
Dutch wrapped me in his arms and squeezed me tight. “Hey,” he whispered. “If you want to see Candice, now’s the time, sweetie, and I think we should see her.”
I nodded and tried to squash a fresh sob bubbling up inside of me.
“Hey,” Dutch said again, holding me gently. “Abs. You can’t go in there like this, okay? And she needs you.”
I nodded again and swallowed hard. “I know,” I said, taking a ragged breath. Then I looked up at Dutch, and found him staring at me intently.
“You can do this,” he said.
I took another deep breath and stepped back to take up his hand. “Let’s go.”
We entered Candice’s room amid a flurry of beeps and mechanical knocks. The room was dim, lit mostly by the machines surrounding Candice’s bed and presumably pumping life back into her body.
She lay in the bed tangled in tubes, cords, and white sheets, but even as we edged closer to her still form, I was hard-pressed to recognize her.
Beneath all the bandages my best friend was little more than one giant bruise. Her face was unrecognizable—so swollen and bruised that it was hard to tell even that she was human.
And the rest of her wasn’t much better. Her chest was wrapped in an Ace bandage, and three of her limbs were covered in casts. The only thing exposed that wasn’t black-and-blue was Candice’s left hand, and Brice moved to it to wrap it tenderly in his own. Tears leaked down his cheeks and it was perhaps the saddest sight I’d ever seen.
I felt my lower lip quiver as I watched him, not daring to breathe because I knew I couldn’t lose it in here. Dutch was right, Candice needed us to be strong right now, but Brice needed it too.
I swallowed hard and felt Dutch squeeze my own hand and at last I felt I could inhale without exhaling out a sob. I moved to Candice’s other side and had such an urge to touch her and let her know that we were there, but for a moment I was at a complete loss as to where I could gently place my hand so as not to hurt her. I finally settled for laying my palm at the very top of her head. Her hair felt so soft. Candice always had great hair. I felt a pang as I remembered that she’d had it cut just a few days before and I’d remarked on how beautiful she’d looked after her salon appointment. “Hey, girl,” I said, my voice wavering a little. “We’re here.”
For the next minute or two no one spoke or moved; we simply gazed down at Candice’s broken and battered form as if we were each trying to reconcile what we saw against the vibrant healthy woman we knew.
Our frozen stances were all broken when a nurse came in and smiled sympathetically at us. Brice let go of Candice’s hand to let her check one of the many IVs snaking its way into Candice, and after making a note on her chart, the nurse smiled again at us and moved to leave. Brice spoke as she passed by him. “Her wedding ring?” he asked, and looked pointedly down at Candice’s left hand. Brice had given her a whopper of a diamond when they’d gotten engaged, and had chosen a beautiful diamond-encrusted wedding band to join it and make it one ring.
“We always remove a patient’s jewelry and personal property in the ER,” the nurse said softly. “Check in with the nurse at the nursing station and we’ll get you all of her personal belongings.”
Brice nodded, wiping at his cheeks before turning back to take up the hand of his wife again.
I eyed Dutch meaningfully and he nodded in silent understanding. Brice should have a little time alone with Candice. “We’ll be in the waiting room,” he said, squeezing Brice’s shoulder and holding his other hand out for me.
Before taking it, I leaned down and kissed the very top of Candice’s forehead. “We’ll be back, sweetie. We love you. Please fight with everything you have, okay?”
* * *
Brice found us about forty-five minutes later. In his arms were Candice’s wet clothes, her purse, and a clear plastic bag that held her wedding ring, earrings, a necklace, and her watch. He held the items tight to his chest, as if he were holding a part of Candice to his heart. I got up and led him over to a chair, sitting him down and cupping his cheek. “Hey,” I said. “She’ll make it, Brice.”
He’d been staring distantly out into space, even when he’d come over to us, but his eyes focused on me now. “Are you sure?”
And there it was. The question I desperately wanted to avoid. My radar kicked in automatically—that’s the thing about asking a psychic a question; we become so conditioned to tuning in that it’s like a reflex. The answer came immediately and I felt a mix of information. Some good. Some terrible.
I owed it to Brice to tell him the truth. “She will,” I said, holding his gaze. “But I don’t know that she’ll ever be the same.” Motioning with my head toward Candice’s room, I added, “She’ll have a hell of a long road back, Brice. And at the end of that road . . . it’s hard to say that she’ll ever feel much like the old Candice again.”
My words hung heavily in the space between us. Brice’s expression wavered between relief and regret and finally settled to something that looked like reluctant acceptance. Bowing his head, he said, “Thank you.”
I leaned over and kissed his cheek. “Hey,” I said after straightening up. “Why don’t you let me take those things from you. They’re wet and getting you wet in the process.”
Brice handed me Candice’s clothes dully, including her purse and her jewelry while he was at it. “I’m gonna stay here awhile,” he said. “I’ve gotta find out what the hell happened.”
I blinked. The news of Candice’s accident had been so shocking that I hadn’t even thought to ask how Candice had ended up driving her car over a bridge into the river. And when I thought about it, I became even more shocked, because Candice had a secret fear of bridges, being that her sister had lost control of the car she was driving while crossing a bridge.
And Candice and I had been involved in two other bad car accidents, one involving a bridge and another involving a slick road and rushing water. It seemed crazy that she could’ve been involved in yet a similar fourth incident.
“Want some help?” Dutch asked Brice, and I was so glad that he had. Brice didn’t look capable of ordering breakfast much less finding out what’d happened on that bridge.
Brice nodded and I got up with Candice’s things. “I’ll take these home,” I said to Dutch. “Call me later and I’ll come back to pick you two up.”
He reached into his pocket and handed me the keys. Then he leaned in and gave me a kiss. “Drive safe, you hear?”
I knew then just how rattled seeing Candice in such a state had left him. But for a twist of fate it could’ve been me in that hospital bed.
I went out to Dutch’s car and got a towel from the gym bag in his trunk to place on the passenger seat before setting Candice’s clothes down. I then unzipped her purse and tucked the bag with her jewelry inside before I got in the car and drove home in a bit of a haze. As I pulled into the driveway, I realized I didn’t even remember the trip. After parking Dutch’s sedan in front of the garage, I leaned over and grabbed Candice’s wet clothes and her purse, but as I was getting out of the car, the purse fell to the pavement, landing upside down and scattering the contents. “Dammit!” I swore, trying to juggle her clothes while I gathered up the items that’d fallen to the pavement. I scooped up Candice’s jewelry, lipstick, her wallet, spare set of keys, and a ziplock bag with a folded piece of paper inside that I realized belatedly had my name on it.
I paused in the gathering of stuff to sit back on my heels and carefully unzip the bag and retrieve the paper from inside. Moving under the fog light atop the garage, I unfolded it and inspected the contents. It was a letter and it r
ead,
Abby,
What I’ve done is unforgivable. I can’t go to jail. This was the only way. Help Brice. He wouldn’t understand but I know you do. I hope you two can forgive me.
Candice
I gasped as I read the lines, then reread them several more times. “No!”
Standing up, I looked around, as if I could find someone nearby who would help me make sense of the apparent suicide note Candice had left for me.
But there was no one about. And I suddenly felt extremely exposed—as if an unnamed person was watching me. Goose pimples lined my arms and I wasted no more time standing in the middle of my driveway, but hustled my butt inside.
Shutting the door, I made sure to secure the dead bolt. A seriously creepy feeling had come over me and I didn’t like it. Shuffling into the living room with the letter and the rest of Candice’s things, I was greeted by a sleepy Eggy, who’d come out of his bed to check on me. I bent down and dropped Candice’s things before picking up my pup and holding him close. His warm little body did me a world of good. Of course the kiss he gave my cheek also helped. And after a minute Tuttle came out of her bed too, and with their help I shed the goose pimples and the creepy feeling.
Then I called Dutch. “Hi, dollface,” he said when he answered. “You make it home okay?”
“Did you find out what happened?” I asked, not even bothering to answer his question; I was so anxious about the note.
There was a pause, then, “Yes and no. A couple of eyewitnesses told the police that they heard the roar of an engine, and Candice’s car went straight at the guardrail of the bridge, crashing through it into the river. According to the initial report, Candice never hit the brakes. We don’t know if she might’ve fallen asleep at the wheel, or something else happened to her, but the event seems to have more questions than answers right now.”
My heart was racing. I couldn’t believe that Candice, of all people, would choose to commit suicide. It just seemed unfathomable, and completely inconsistent with the woman I’d called my best friend for the past four years.
“Abs?” Dutch said. “You there?”
I blinked. “Yeah, honey. Sorry. I’m here.”
“You okay?”
I stared down at the note still clutched in my hand. I was on the verge of telling him, but hesitated. I knew he’d tell Brice about it, and I just didn’t think I could do that to Brice right now. “I’ll be okay. I’m just really tired.”
“Go to bed,” he said. “I’ll be home in an hour or two.”
“But I have your car—”
“Oscar’s here. I’ll have him bring us home.”
I sighed wearily. All the adrenaline of the evening was taking its toll, and I suddenly felt weary down to my DNA. “Okay, honey. I’ll see you when you get home.”
Before heading to bed, I threw Candice’s clothes on the drying rack we had in the laundry room. Her fine clothes were always dry-clean only, and I vowed to take them to the cleaners the first chance I had. Her coat wasn’t among her personal effects. I figured it’d gone down with the car. I set her purse on the dryer and got out everything still left inside. The purse was ruined, but I’d probably be able to salvage most of the contents. As I set out the contents, I realized that Candice’s phone was missing. Not especially unusual, as she typically tucked it into the cup holder when she drove. I figured it’d probably gone down with the car, but then I eyed Candice’s purse again and a weird thought occurred to me. “Why did they send your purse to the hospital, Candice?”
I closed my eyes, trying to picture the accident. I imagined Candice in the driver’s seat, stomping down on the accelerator, and her purse would’ve been in the passenger seat. Unsecured.
Then, crash, Candice’s Porsche hits the guardrail and the contents inside the car most certainly would’ve been jostled around, then a second crash as Candice’s car hit the water, and the contents of the car would’ve been tossed around even more. . . . So how had her purse survived the plunge into the water? Wouldn’t it have gone down with the car? I hardly thought the first responders would’ve been worried about retrieving her pocketbook.
I held up the purse, and noticed for the first time that the strap had been severed. I put the two ends together. The strap hadn’t been torn; it’d been cut by something very sharp, like a pair of scissors.
With a furrowed brow I put the strap over my left shoulder across my body and realized that the strap had been cut right across the sternum. The only explanation I could come up with was that Candice had been wearing her purse when she went into the water—but that made little sense.
In all the time I’d known Candice, I’d never once seen her drive while wearing her purse. It got in the way of the seat belt after all. Then again, if Candice had really been trying to commit suicide, would she have bothered with the seat belt?
“Probably not,” I muttered. “And you probably wore your purse so that when they pulled your body from the water, they’d find your identification. And the suicide note.”
I reached for Candice’s wallet again and flipped it open. There was her driver’s license. I fished it out of the plastic casing, and studied it. On the license her eyes were hazel and her height was five feet seven inches.
Feeling a ping from my radar, I hurried to the bedroom and into the closet, using the step stool to retrieve the folder I’d tucked away for safekeeping.
Comparing the license in Candice’s wallet with the one in the file, I saw that she’d purposely changed those two details, maybe to conceal her identity in Vegas, or maybe to honor her sister, but then I noticed something else that puzzled me. The address on the Nevada license was the same as the apartment listed on the lease agreement.
But why?
Had she been planning on disappearing from our lives altogether and setting up a new life in Vegas under her sister’s name? And if so, then why change that plan and drive her car over the side of a bridge? Candice was incredibly resourceful—if she’d wanted to make it out of town and set herself up in Vegas, she definitely could’ve done that—so why had she done something so desperate as to drive her car into the lake?
As I stood there pondering, I realized where I knew the name Salazar Kato from. It was one of the names on the DNA test results. But why did Candice have his DNA results, and who was Olive Wintergarden? And, further, what was so important about the contents of this file that Candice needed to keep it out of the hands of the law?
I stepped down and sat on the stool, trying to put the puzzle together, but the more I thought about it, the more questions I had. None of the scenarios I came up with made any kind of sense and after twenty minutes of simply sitting there and thinking, I gave up and replaced the folder, adding to it the suicide note. I didn’t want Brice to find it. At least not yet. I’d tell him about it all later. Maybe.
At last I changed and called to the pups, lifting them into our massive bed because I couldn’t bear the thought of falling asleep alone. Curling myself around Eggy and Tuttle, I fell into an exhausted sleep within seconds.
Chapter Eight
• • •
I woke up to the soft snores of my husband. Blinking my eyes against the light filtering in from the windows, I saw that Dutch was now the one curled around Eggy and Tuttle, while I was left a small section at the edge of the bed. “Traitors,” I whispered to the pups as I eased quietly out of the bed and tiptoed from the room.
I found Brice sitting alone at the kitchen table, half of a cup of coffee in front of him as he stared blankly off into space. He didn’t even seem to notice me.
When I put my hand on his shoulder, he jerked. “Sorry!” I said softly. “Didn’t mean to startle you.”
“I couldn’t sleep,” he said, rubbing his eyes.
“Can I fix you something to eat?”
Brice shook his head. “Not hungry.”
I s
at down across from him and waited for him to lift his gaze to mine. “She’s alive,” I said. “And that’s something, Brice. We have to hold on to that. While she’s breathing, there’s hope.”
Brice’s gaze fell back to the tabletop. “That’s just it, Cooper. Even if she made some kind of miraculous recovery, she’s wanted for murder. Either way we’ll never get Candice back. Either she’ll be a vegetable, or she’ll end up in jail for the rest of her life, and I’ve been sitting here for hours wondering which of the lesser evils to wish for.”
I had no answer to that, so we simply sat in silence for several moments before Brice said, “I still can’t believe this is happening. I mean, last weekend Candice and I were looking at lots for sale. We even interviewed a couple of builders.” Brice looked up at me again. “How did we go from there to here, Abby?”
I reached out and squeezed his hand. “I don’t know,” I said honestly. “But the one thing I do know is that there is more to this story. There has to be. I refuse to believe that Candice isn’t the loyal best friend to me, and devoted wife to you, she seemed to be.”
Brice’s eyes watered and he turned his gaze to the ceiling. “I don’t know,” he said. “I mean, all of this . . .” He waved his hand to indicate the magnitude of recent events. “If any of it’s true, then I’ve been living with a total stranger for the past two years. It’s like she’s not even the same person.”
Something clicked in my mind; maybe it was my intuition, maybe it was all my history with Candice, a woman who had never, ever let me down, but something made me get up then and say, “Brice, I’m gonna find out. I’m gonna get the other half of this story and put all this together so that it makes sense. Okay?”
But Brice was back to staring at his coffee cup, and he nodded absently. “Yeah, okay, Cooper.”
I squeezed his shoulder and headed back to the bedroom. Dutch had rolled over and slung an arm across my pillow, but otherwise he was still sleeping soundly. Gathering some jeans, a light sweater, my boots, and my purse, I headed to the bathroom to change. Once I was dressed, I checked my purse to make sure I had everything I’d need, and that’s when I retrieved my phone. Clicking the home button to check the time, I was startled to see a text from “Cassidy.” Candice had sent me a text.