Evidence of Life - By Barbara Taylor Sissel Page 0,95

her need for her mom to come home. He hadn’t commented when she’d mentioned Hank’s theory that Adam Sandoval might have been in the car, too, that he might also have died in the accident. That was a police matter; let them figure it out.

Abby bent her gaze to Jake’s. “Thanks for bringing me. Maybe you’ll come home for the weekend?”

“I’ll try.” He looked away and as quickly looked back. “I kept waiting to hear from him that he’d told you. He said he was going to. He promised me he would.”

“Is that why you didn’t go with them to the Hill Country? It wasn’t because you had to study, was it? You were angry at your dad.”

“I didn’t want to be around him.”

“Was Sondra invited?”

“No! I don’t know. That’s what I can’t figure out. If that was really her at the gas station, why was she with him? Dad wouldn’t have brought her along, not with Lindsey. Uncle George is right. He wouldn’t have done that, no way. He told me it was over, Mom. He swore it was.”

Abby shook her head. She was cold and too tired to think. She wanted to lie down.

“I wonder what happened to her. Seems like if she was in the car, she couldn’t have lived, could she?”

“I doubt it.”

Jake chewed his lip and contemplated the view through the windshield. Abby got out her car keys. Down the street, someone whistled. For their dog, she guessed.

“Dad didn’t take the settlement money, Mom. He wasn’t in on that; he wasn’t Adam’s partner. You know that, right? I mean, he was a bastard, but he wouldn’t steal from those kids.”

Abby thought about it. “I don’t want to believe it, Jake.” But she didn’t know. She wasn’t sure anymore who Nick had been, who they had been as a couple. She wondered if she even knew who she was, if she would ever trust herself again, and that was possibly the worst feeling in the world.

“Was Dad acting different? Were you guys, like, fighting?” Jake asked.

How did it happen? That’s what he wanted to know. How had his world, the one he believed in, with two parents who loved each other, come apart this way, seemingly without warning? “I think he was more troubled than we realized, in ways we didn’t understand,” Abby said. “He was unhappy, maybe. He didn’t talk to me, or I didn’t listen. I don’t know.” She smoothed the folds of Nick’s coat over her arm, absently, feeling sad and awkward, feeling tiny licks of anger heat her temples. Ask your father, she wanted to say. Ask that woman. Sondra. Abby didn’t want to think about it...the possibility that she had survived, while Abby’s own daughter had not. She did not want to live in a world where such a horrible injustice could be a reality.

“After the flood,” Jake said, “when I realized you didn’t know about her, I figured, why should you have to? Dad was dead. It was over.”

Abby didn’t respond.

“It is, Mom. It is over, right?”

Abby said, “I hope so,” but she wondered, if that was true, why did everything feel so unsettled?

* * *

She was turning into her driveway when her cell phone rang, and, thinking it was Jake or her mama checking to see if she’d made it home safely, Abby stopped to answer.

“Hey, I’m here,” she said, but instead of the warm affectionate response she’d anticipated, what greeted her was silence. Her heart froze. It’s not Lindsey, warned a voice in her head. It can’t be.

“Hello? Who’s there?” she demanded.

The silence was cut through by faint static, then a drift of words, something soft and singsong that sounded like, “Are you happy now?...Are you happy now?...Are you happy now?....”

“Who is this?” Abby demanded, but she realized the connection was severed, that she was talking to empty air. She brought the phone down, checked where the call was from, but the record gave her nothing. Out of Area, it read. She peered into the path of headlights. It wasn’t Lindsey. Of course it wasn’t. Common sense told her it wasn’t. Even if it had been Lindsey, she wouldn’t have asked such a question.

Abby’s impulse was to call Jake or her mother, but she didn’t act on it. She knew what they would tell her, that it was a prank, and in the end she would be sorry she had involved them.

The house was dark, and it filled her with foreboding to go inside, but she did. She