Pieces of Her

  They’ll trace it back and find you. Telephone calls, email, anything.

  Andy silently mulled over Laura’s warning in her head. Obviously, they were the ones who’d hired Hoodie, aka Samuel Godfrey Beckett. But what exactly had they hired him to do? Hoodie had told Laura that he wasn’t going to kill her. At least not instantly. He’d said that he was going to scare the shit out of her by suffocating her with the plastic bag. Andy’s knowledge of torture came mostly from Netflix. If you weren’t a torturer in a sadistic, Saw kind of way, then you were a torturer in the badass Jack Reacher way, which meant you wanted information.

  What information did a fifty-five-year-old divorced speech pathologist have that was worth hiring a goon to torture it out of her?

  Better yet, during what period of her life had Laura accumulated this torturable information?

  Everything Detective Palazzolo had said about Laura’s past, from being born in Rhode Island to attending UGA to buying the house on Belle Isle tracked with what Andy knew to be true. There was no unexplained gap in Laura’s history. She had never been out of the country. She never even took vacations because she already lived right on the beach.

  So what did Laura know that they wanted to torture out of her?

  And what was so important that Laura would endure torture rather than give it up?

  Andy fluttered out air between her lips. She could spend the rest of her life circling down this rabbit hole.

  She located the scratch paper and pencils beside the computer. She took several sheets and began to transcribe the directions to Idaho: 75S to 84E to 80E, NE2E, 1-29S, I70E . . .

  Andy stared at the jumble of numbers and letters. She would need to buy another map. There would be a rest stop at the Georgia/Alabama border. First, she would go to the storage facility, change out the truck for the car Laura had said would be there, then head northwest.

  She fluttered her lips again.

  She was taking a hell of a lot on her mother’s word. Then again, following her own instincts would’ve meant that Andy would be at the funeral home right now sobbing on Gordon’s shoulder while he worked out burial arrangements for her mother.

  Andy’s fingers returned to the keyboard. She looked over her shoulder. The librarians had disappeared, probably to log in the returned books or practice shushing people.

  Andy clicked on PREFERENCES under the Google tab. She set the browser to Incognito Mode to mask her browsing history. She probably should’ve done this first thing. Or maybe it was overkill. Or maybe she should stop berating herself for acting paranoid and just accept the fact that she was paranoid for a very damn good reason.

  The first site she went to was the Belle Isle Review.

  The front page was devoted to Laura Oliver, local speech pathologist and killing machine. They didn’t actually call her a killing machine, but they’d quoted Alice Blaedel in the first paragraph, which was the same as.

  Andy scanned the article. There was no mention of a man in a hoodie found with a frying-pan-shaped indentation in his head. There wasn’t even a stolen vehicle report on the black truck. She clicked through the other stories and gave them a quick read.

  Nothing.

  She sat back in her chair, perplexed.

  Behind her, the door opened. An old man shuffled in, heading straight for the coffee as he launched into a political tirade.

  Andy didn’t know who the tirade was for, but she tuned out the rant and pulled up CNN.com. The site led with the Killing Machine quote in the headline. Gordon was right about a lot of things, but Andy knew her father would not be pleased to be proven correct about the focus of the news stories. The patheticness of Jonah Lee Helsinger’s life was highlighted in the second paragraph:

  Six months ago, Helsinger’s sheriff father, a war veteran and local hero, was tragically killed in a stand-off with a gunman, around the same time police believe young Helsinger’s thoughts turned to murder.

  Andy checked FoxNews.com, the Savannah Reporter, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

  All of the stories were focused on Laura Oliver and what she had done at the Rise-n-Dine. There was no mention of Samuel Godfrey Beckett, or even an unidentified murder victim in a hoodie.

  Had Laura managed to move the body? That didn’t seem possible. Andy supposed her mother could’ve refused the police entry into the house, but the 911 text sent from Laura’s phone was probable cause for entry. Even if Laura managed to turn away the Belle Isle cops, the person in that unmarked black Suburban would not have taken no for an answer.

  Andy tapped her finger on the mouse as she tried to think it through.

  Someone with a lot of connections was keeping a tight lid on the story.

  They?

  The same people who had sent Hoodie? The same people Laura was terrified would track down Andy?

  She felt her heart bang against the base of her throat. Half the police force would have been outside Laura’s bungalow. Probably Palazzolo, maybe even the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. That would mean they had some kind of pull with the governor, maybe even the feds.

  Andy checked behind her.

  The old man was leaning on the check-in desk, trying to engage one of the librarians in a political discussion.

  Andy looked at the time on the computer again, watched the seconds turn into minutes.

  The unit number is your birthday. One-twenty.

  Andy put down the coffee. She typed in January 20, 1987.

  January 20, 1987, was a Tuesday. People born on this day are Aquarius. Ronald Reagan was president. “Walk Like an Egyptian” by the Bangles was on the radio. Critical Condition starring Richard Pryor topped the box office. Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising was #1 on the New York Times bestseller list.

  Andy counted back nine months in her head and entered April 1986 news into the search. Instead of a month-specific timeline, she got a general overview of the year:

  US bombs Libya. Iran–Contra. Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Perestroika. Halley’s Comet. Challenger explosion. Swedish Prime Minister murdered. Oslo G-FAB assassination. Pan-Am 73 hijacked. Explosion on TWA jet over Greece. Mercantile bombing. FBI Miami bank shoot-out. Oprah Winfrey Show debuts. 38,401 cases of AIDS worldwide.

  Andy stared at the words, only some of which seemed familiar. She could spend all day backtracking the events, but the fact was, you couldn’t find something if you didn’t know what you were looking for.

  Paula Koontz.

  The name had been edging around Andy’s thoughts for the last few hours. She had never, ever heard her mother mention a woman named Paula. As far as Andy knew, all of Laura’s friends were in Belle Isle. She never talked to anyone else on the phone. She wasn’t even on Facebook because she claimed there was no one back in Rhode Island she wanted to keep in touch with.

  I could talk to Paula Koontz.

  I hear she’s in Seattle.

  Austin. But good try.

  Laura had tried to fake out Hoodie. Or maybe she was testing him? But testing him for what?

  Andy searched for Paula Koontz Austin TX.

  Nothing Austin-specific came back, but apparently, Paula Koontz was a popular name for real estate agents in the northeast.

  “Koontz,” Andy whispered the word aloud. It didn’t sound right to her ears. She had been thinking more like Dean Koontz when Hoodie had said it more like “koontz-ah.”

  She tried koontze, koontzee, khoontzah . . .

  Google asked: do you mean koontah?

  Andy clicked the suggested search. Nothing, but Google offered khoontey as an alternative. She kept clicking through the do you means. Several iterations later brought up a faculty directory for the University of Texas at Austin.

  Paula Kunde was currently teaching Introduction to Irish Women’s Poetry and Feminist Thought on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. She was head of the women’s studies department. Her book, The Madonna and Madonna: Like a Virgin from Jesus Christ to Ronald Reagan, was available in paperback from IndieBound.

/>   Andy enlarged the woman’s photo, which had been taken in an unflattering side profile. Black and white, but that didn’t help matters. It was hard to tell how old Paula was because she’d obviously spent way too much time in the sun. Her face was worn and craggly. She was at least Laura’s age, but she did not look like any of her mother’s usual friends, who wore Eileen Fisher and sunscreen every time they left the house.

  Paula Kunde was basically a washed-out old hippie. Her hair was a mixture of blonde and gray with an unnatural-looking dark streak in the bangs. Her shirt, or dress, or whatever she was wearing, had a Native American pattern.

  The sunken look to her cheeks reminded Andy of Laura during chemo.

  Andy scrolled through Kunde’s credentials. Publications in Feminist Theory and Exposition, several keynote speaker slots at feminist conferences. Kunde had earned her undergrad at the University of California, Berkeley, and her master’s at Stanford, which explained the hippie vibe. Her doctorate came from a state college in western Connecticut, which seemed weird because Bryn Mawr or Vassar would’ve better suited her field of study, especially with a Stanford master’s, which was to Andy’s unfinished technical theater arts degree as diamonds were to dog shit.

  More importantly, there was nothing in Paula Kunde’s résumé that indicated she would ever cross paths with Laura. Feminist theory did not overlap with speech therapy in any way that Andy could think of. Laura was more likely to ridicule an old hippie than befriend one. So why had her mother recognized this woman’s name smack in the middle of being tortured?

  “Hey, hon.” The librarian smiled down at Andy. “Sorry, but we’re gonna have to ask you not to drink coffee around the computers.” She nodded toward the old guy, who was glaring at Andy over his own steaming cup of coffee. “Rules have to apply to everybody.”

  “I’m sorry,” Andy said, because it was her nature to apologize for everything in her orbit. “I was leaving anyway.”

  “Oh, you don’t have to—” the woman tried, but Andy was already getting up.

  “I’m sorry.” Andy stuffed the scribbled directions to Idaho into her pocket. She tried to smile at the old man as she left. He did not return the gesture.

  Outside, the intense sunlight made her eyes water. Andy had to find some sunglasses before she went blind. She guessed Walmart would be the best place to go. She would also need to purchase some essentials like underwear and jeans and another T-shirt, plus maybe a jacket in case Idaho was cold this time of year.

  Andy stopped walking. Her knees went wobbly.

  Someone was looking inside the truck. Not just glancing as he walked by but looking with his hands pressed to the glass the same way Hoodie had peered through the garage door a few hours ago. The man was wearing a blue baseball cap, jeans and a white T-shirt. His face was cast in shadow under the brim of his hat.

  Andy felt a scream get caught up in her throat. Her heart boxed at her ribs as she walked backward, which was stupid because the guy could turn around any minute and see her. But he did not, even as Andy darted around the back of the building, her throat straining from the scream that she could not let out.

  She ran into the woods, frantically trying to summon up the Google Earth view, the high school behind the library, the squat storage facility with its rows of metal buildings. The relief she felt when she saw the high fence around the football field was only dampened by the fear that she was being followed. With every step, Andy tried to talk herself out of her paranoia. The guy in the hat hadn’t seen her. Or maybe it didn’t matter if he had. The black truck was nice. Maybe the guy was looking to buy one. Or maybe he was looking to see how to break in. Or maybe he was looking for Andy.

  You think I can be scared?

  Depends on how much you love your daughter.

  The Get-Em-Go office lights were off. A sign on the door read CLOSED. A chain-link fence, even taller than the one at the high school, ringed around the storage units. The low one-story buildings with metal roll-up doors looked like something you’d see in a Mad Max movie. There was a gate across the driveway. A keypad was at car-window height, but it didn’t have numbers, just a black plastic square with a red light.

  She unzipped the make-up bag. She found the white, unlabeled keycard. She pressed it to the black square. The red light turned green. The gate screeched as it moved back on rubber tires.

  Andy closed her eyes. She tried to calm herself. She had a right to be here. She had a keycard. She had a unit number. She had a key.

  Still, her legs felt shaky as she walked into the compound. There would be answers inside the storage unit. Andy would find out something about her mother. Maybe something that she did not want to know. That Laura did not want her to know—not until now, because they were after her.

  Andy wiped sweat from the back of her neck. She checked behind her to make sure she was not being followed. There was no way of knowing whether or not she was safe. The complex was huge. She counted at least ten buildings, all of them about fifty feet long with rolled doors like dirty teeth. Andy checked the signs until she found building one hundred. She paced down the aisle and stopped in front of unit one-twenty.

  Her birthday.

  Not the one she’d had all of her life, but the one Laura told her was real.

  “Christ,” Andy hissed.

  She wasn’t sure what was real anymore.

  The padlock looked new, or at least it wasn’t rusted like the other ones. Andy reached into the make-up bag and retrieved the tiny key. She could not keep the tremble out of her hands as she opened the padlock.

  The smell was the first thing she noticed: clean, almost sanitized. The concrete floor looked like it had been poured last week. There were no cobwebs in the corners. No scuffs or fingerprints on the walls. Empty particleboard shelves lined the back. A tiny metal desk with a lamp was shoved into the corner.

  A dark blue station wagon was parked in the middle of the space.

  Andy found the light switch. She closed the rolling door behind her. Instantly, the heat started to swelter, but she thought about the man looking inside the truck—not her truck, but the dead man’s truck—and figured she had no choice.

  The first thing she checked out was the car, which was so boxy it looked like something Fred Flintstone would drive. The paint was pristine. The tires had to be brand new. A sticker on the windshield said the oil had been changed four months ago. As with everything else inside the unit, there was no dust, no grime. The car could have been sitting on a showroom floor.

  Andy peered inside the open driver’s side window. There were rolly things, like actual cranks that you had to turn to open and close the windows. The seats were dark blue vinyl, one long bench, no center console. The radio had thick white punch-buttons. There were big silver knobs and slider controls. The gearshift was on the steering wheel. The dash had stickers on the flat parts to simulate woodgrain. The odometer showed only 22,184 miles.

  Andy didn’t recognize the logo on the steering wheel, a pentagon with a star inside, but there were raised metal letters on the outside of the car that read RELIANT K FRONT WHEEL DRIVE.

  She went around to the other side and reached in to open the glove box. Andy reeled back. A gun had fallen out; a revolver, the same type that Jonah Helsinger had pointed at Laura’s chest. There were scratch marks on the side where the serial number had been shaved off. Andy stared at the nasty-looking weapon sitting on the floorboard, waiting, like it might suddenly twitch.

  It did not.

  She found the owner’s manual.

  1989 Plymouth Reliant SE Wagon.

  She flipped through the pages. The graphics were old, the illustrations clearly placed by hand. A twenty-nine-year-old car with barely any miles on it. Two years younger than Andy. Stored in a place that Andy did not know about in a town that she had never heard of before her mother told her to go there.

  So many questions.

  Andy started to walk around the back of the car, but stopped. She turned around an
d stood by the closed door. She listened to make sure a car hadn’t pulled up, or a man wasn’t standing on the other side. Just to be extra paranoid, she lay down on her stomach. She looked under the crack to the door.

  Nothing.

  Andy pushed herself up. She wiped her hands on her shorts. She continued her walk around the station wagon to check the license plate.

  Canada. The plate design was as boxy as the car; blue on white with a crown between the letters and numbers, the words Yours To Discover at the bottom. The emissions sticker read 18 DEC, which meant that the registration was current.

  Andy knew from her work at dispatch that the NCIC, the National Crime Information Center, shared information with Canada. The thing was, the system only checked for stolen vehicles. If a cop pulled over this car, all they’d be able to verify was that the registered owner’s name matched the driver’s license.

  Which meant that for the last twenty-nine years, her mother had kept a secret, untraceable car hidden from the world.

  From Andy.

  She opened the wagon’s hatch. The springs worked silently. She rolled back the vinyl cover obscuring the cargo area. Navy-blue sleeping bag, a pillow, an empty cooler, a box of Slim Jims, a case of water, a white beach tote filled with paperbacks, batteries, a flashlight, a first aid kit.

  Underneath it was a light blue Samsonite suitcase. Fake leather. Gold zippers. Carry-on size. Not the kind with wheels but the kind you had to carry. The bag had a top and a bottom clamshell design. Andy opened the top first. She found three of everything: jeans, white silk panties, matching white bras, socks, white button-up shirts with polo ponies on the front, and a tan Members Only jacket.

  None of the clothes looked like anything her mother would wear. Maybe that was the point. Andy slipped off her shorts and pulled on the underwear. She preferred cotton, but anything was better than the shorts. The jeans were loose at the waist, but again, she was in no position to complain. She removed the twenties from the make-up bag and shoved them into the back pocket. She changed out of her shirt but kept her bra because Laura was two cups bigger. At least she used to be.