feel like I’ve spent every day since then trying to find my way back to that place where you see me as a good mother again.”
Claire had been either seeking or avoiding this conversation with Helen for the last twenty years, but she knew if they had it now, she would fall apart.
So she asked, “What did you think of Paul?”
Helen twisted the ring on her finger. Paul had been wrong. Claire twisted her own ring because she had seen her mother do it so many times.
She said, “You won’t hurt my feelings. I want to know the truth.”
Helen didn’t hold back. “I told your father that Paul was like a hermit crab. They’re scavengers. They don’t have the ability to make their own shells, so they cast around until they find abandoned shells, and then they move in.”
Claire knew better than anyone that her mother was right. Paul had moved into her shell, the one that had been abandoned by her grief-stricken family.
She told Helen, “I’m supposed to drive to Hapeville in half an hour. To a bank up from the Dwarf House. It needs to seem like I’m there, but I have to be somewhere else.”
“What bank?”
“Wells Fargo.” Claire took another bite of biscuit. She could tell her mother was desperate for more information. “They’re tracking me. I can’t go to Hapeville, and I can’t let them know where I’m really going.”
“Then give me your phone and I’ll drive to Hapeville. I should probably take the Tesla. They might be tracking that, too.”
The phone. How could Claire have been so stupid? Paul had known she was in the FBI building. He had known her exact location on the street. He had told her to take a left toward the hotel. He was using the Find My iPhone app because he knew that Claire would not go anywhere without her only connection to Lydia.
She told her mother, “I need to be able to answer the phone if it rings. It has to be my voice.”
“Can’t you use call forwarding?” Helen jabbed her thumb toward the hotel gift shop. “They have a display for pre-paid phones. We can buy you one of those, or I can give you my phone.”
Claire was dumbfounded. In less than a minute, Helen had solved one of her biggest problems.
“Here.” Helen pulled her car keys out of her purse along with a light blue parking ticket. “You hold on to this. I’ll go check on a phone.”
Claire took the keys. Ever the cataloger, her mother had written down the floor level and parking space number on the back of the ticket.
She watched Helen talking to the clerk in the store. The man was showing her various models of phones. Claire started to ask herself who this confident and efficient person was, but she knew this person. This was the Helen Carroll she had known before Julia was taken.
Or maybe it was the Helen Carroll who’d come back to Claire after mourning the loss of Julia, because Helen had called Wynn Wallace the second she got off the phone with Claire. She had been searching for Claire all night. She had rescued her from Fred Nolan. She had distracted Harvey Falke so that Claire could get away. And now she was sitting in the lobby of a hotel doing everything possible to offer her aid.
Claire longed to enlist her mother’s help in solving her other problems, but she was incapable of coming up with a believable story that didn’t reveal the truth, and she knew there was a limit to Helen’s restrained curiosity. She couldn’t believe how resourceful her mother had already been. She had even looked for ammunition for the gun. Paul would be shocked.
Claire caught herself a moment too late. She wasn’t going to tell Paul this story when he got home from work tonight. They would never share a moment like that ever again.
“That was easy.” Helen had already taken the phone out of the box. “The battery has a half-charge, but I got a car charger and the nice man behind the counter had a coupon, so you got an extra thirty minutes for free. Inasmuch as paying for something to get something is free.” Helen sat back down beside Claire. She was obviously nervous because she was babbling the same way Claire babbled when she was nervous. “I used cash. I’m probably being paranoid, but if the FBI is tracking you, then they might be tracking me. Oh.” She reached into