Chapter 3 - The Child Who Knew Her Route
They reached the SUV with Miles twenty yards behind them.
Dean shoved Evelyn through the passenger door and dove behind the wheel.
The keys were still in the ignition.
Victor shouted something from the clearing.
Dean hit the accelerator.
Branches scraped both sides of the SUV as it bounced down the logging road.
Evelyn kept looking behind them until the trees swallowed the clearing.
Only then did she realize she was bleeding lightly from a scrape on her wrist.
Nothing serious.
She pressed her sleeve against it.
“Tell me the name.”
Dean stared through the windshield.
“Not yet.”
She turned toward him.
“One of my children tried to have me murdered.”
“I said one of your children hired the job.”
“What distinction are you trying to make?”
“A pretty important one.”
Dean’s hands tightened around the steering wheel.
“The original instruction was to intercept you, take your phone, and move you somewhere nobody would find you until after Monday.”
“Monday?”
Dean glanced at her.
“Your board meeting.”
“That was today.”
He looked confused.
“No. The other one.”
Then Evelyn understood.
Monday was not a board meeting.
Monday was the appointment she had made with a forensic accountant in Charlotte.
Nobody outside the family knew about it.
Evelyn had told Mara.
She had told Colin.
She had also put it on the paper calendar in her home office.
Dean continued.
“Victor decided keeping you alive was a liability.”
“And the person who paid you?”
Dean said nothing.
“Was murder part of the order?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only honest one I’ve got.”
They reached a paved county road.
Dean pulled into the parking lot of a closed feed store and called 911.
By sunrise, Evelyn was sitting in the back of an ambulance wrapped in a blanket while deputies searched the woods.
Victor and Miles were gone.
The pit remained.
So did two shovels.
Dean was handcuffed before he finished giving his first statement.
As a deputy led him toward a cruiser, Evelyn stepped forward.
“Dean.”
He looked at her.
“Which one?”
His jaw flexed.
“My lawyer gets here first.”
“You were willing to bury me.”
“No.”
“You brought me there.”
His eyes dropped.
That accusation landed.
Then he said quietly, “Start with the person who knew Monday mattered.”
Evelyn watched him disappear into the patrol car.
Her phone had been taken.
Her purse was gone.
But when a deputy finally lent her a phone, she knew both of her children’s numbers from memory.
May you like
She called neither of them.
Not yet.
