Page 1 of The Secrets We Hide
PROLOGUE
Allison Vickery threw clothes into the open suitcase on her bed: underwear, bras, shirts, jeans. She didn’t give herself time to think about what she was taking. She had to keep moving forward, ignore the voice in her head that said she could wait another minute, another hour, another day. They could buy whatever else they needed on the road. There were hundreds of shady motels between North Falls and Atlanta, but she had to get out of the state. Florida, maybe. Alabama or Mississippi, possibly. Skirt up to Arkansas, Oklahoma, maybe disappear into the vastness of Texas. She would keep under the radar. Pay cash. Use the fake IDs. Make sure she was constantly moving forward, never looking back. Every time they thought they’d caught up with her, she’d be on to the next place, then the next place, and then a month would’ve passed and she’d be home free.
Theywould be home free.
She checked her watch. No more delays. They had to leave now. She went into her bathroom. Tears filled her eyes. Her mind started to race—not with things she needed to pack, but all that she was leaving behind. Everyone she loved. The friends she could always count on. The neighbors who’d always checked to make sure she was okay. The other moms, the other cops, the countless people she cherished. Allison had given so much of herself to so many, but she’d always gotten more than she deserved in return.
Was she really going to leave them all behind?
She abandoned the bathroom. Walked down the hall to the guest room. Went to the window, looked out into the street thathad been her home for so many years. The gorgeous fall flowers in the yards. The neatly trimmed grass. The gentle sway of the trees that had stood through ice storms and flooding and once, a long time ago, a tornado that had levelled several houses and a farm.
Allison looked down at her own yard. Mandy had abandoned her bike on the front lawn. They would get her a new one in another town once they had settled. Once they were safe. That was the only thing that mattered right now. Keeping Mandy safe. Allison had to stop making stupid mistakes. Like leaving the damn trunk open and her other suitcase in the driveway. Anybody passing by would know they were going somewhere. She had to stop letting fear and anxiety overtake rational decisions.
Was it rational? Could she really leave?
She bit her lip hard enough to taste blood. She used the pain to focus her thinking. There was no more time for second-guessing. She let her instinct take over.
Check the perimeter. Secure the area.
She studied the neighboring houses. Johna Patel’s Subaru. Lynne Emory’s Honda. Darla Bell’s Camry. Window shades and curtains all open to the afternoon sun. No strangers lurking on the sidewalks. Nothing looked out of place, but that was hardly a comfort. Everything Allison knew as a cop, every corner she saw around, every move she anticipated, would be mirrored on the other side.
Loud music boomed out of a Hyundai as the young man from two streets over barreled past the house. Ginny Saddler’s grown son was just as reckless as his alcoholic mother. He was going to end up killing somebody one day.
Allison walked down the hallway, grabbed Mandy’s textbooks off her desk. There was no reason her daughter couldn’t study on the road. They would have to leave all their electronics here—phones, laptops, tablets. Mandy would be livid, but she wasn’t unreasonable. She knew that these things could be tracked. She would know that their lives would be in jeopardy if they were found.
Wouldn’t she?
Allison shook her head. No more letting herself get caughtup in questions she had already answered. She would deal with Mandy’s anger later. She grabbed a backpack, shoved in the textbooks and headed back into the hallway. Allison bypassed the back stairs that led to the den and took the curved grand staircase so she could make sure the deadbolt on the front door was locked. Her foot was coming off the last tread when she saw the gun.
Her gun.
Glock 19 with a fifteen-round magazine and one in the chamber. Allison had carried the backup weapon since before Mandy was born. She kept it tucked inside a Crown Royal bag in her purse, but the purple velvet bag was on the floor and the gun was aimed at her chest.
There was no time to talk, to plead, to reason, to de-escalate. She saw the tip of the muzzle flash. Heard the crack of the bullet splitting the air. Felt the shock of what was happening. A decade on patrol pulling over speeders with expired license plates. Another decade of clearing warehouses full of drug dealers. Searching stash houses. Raiding shooting galleries. Every single time she’d entered the unknown, she had expected to catch a bullet. But not now. Not in her own home.
Not from someone she loved.
FORTY-SIX MINUTES BEFORE THE SHOOTING
CHAPTER ONE
Emmy Clifton watched in silence as her mother’s casket was lowered into the ground. Her vision turned shaky. There was a sudden tightness in her chest. She couldn’t take a full, deep breath. The electronic motortick-tick-ticked like the second hand on a stopwatch counting down the passage of time. She struggled against the feeling of wrongness in her body. A current of low-level anxiety. A niggling fear that she had missed something important, said something wrong, done something stupid, and it was too late to fix any of it.
She tried to take another breath, but grief snatched the air from her lungs.
Her mother was finally gone. Myrna Joy Clifton had outlived her husband by exactly six weeks. Theirs had not been a great love story, but they had respected each other, supported each other, brought four children into the world, buried one of them before he reached the age of eighteen, denied the existence of another one for over forty years, and helped raise a beautiful grandson into an impressive young man.
Now their entire lives with all their contradictions and complications had been reduced to two caskets laid side by side in two separate holes carved into the side of a hill.
Gerald’s headstone had only been placed four days ago.
Husband. Father. Friend.
Emmy looked down at the memorial pamphlet that had been passed out at the church. Her hands were so sweaty that the ink had gone fuzzy, which was the type of metaphor her mother would’ve appreciated. Father Nate Trask had known Myrna forover half a century, but he had eulogized her in a way that Myrna herself would’ve called excessive and untruthful. She had not been a warm woman. She had not loved many people. She had been a steady presence. An unbending ally. The calm in a storm. A wife, mother, grandmother, teacher, intractable, irritating, funny, kind, surprisingly tolerant, often sympathetic, and never, ever without an opinion.
What Emmy wouldn’t do now to hear her mother declare that it was silly for hundreds of people to watch a dead body sink into the ground on an unseasonably scorching Saturday afternoon. Myrna had hated idleness almost as much as she’d hated public displays of affection. Even in the last moments of her life, she had been eager to get things over with. The way she’d gasped for breath hadn’t sounded strained so much as exasperated, as if to ask,Why on earth am I still here?
Not that she’d understood whereherewas. The death of Emmy’s father had been a sharp, sudden cleaving, but the passing of her mother had been one of slow deprivations. For seven excruciating years, Alzheimer’s had stolen the essence of Myrna Clifton like a sadistic thief, first snatching the location of petty trinkets—car keys, reading glasses, half-finished books—then grabbing larger, more precious items such as her sharp wit, her keen observations, her love of literature, her disgust with politics, and her phosphorescent rage over the decline of English grammar.
