Page 78 of Husband Missing

He squeezed her shoulder. “In a minute.”

She was about to argue, but Gretchen spoke again, seizing on the same detail Josie had. The fact that Erica referred to herself and Gina Phelan as “we.”

“Had you ever met Gina Phelan before that day?”

“No.”

Finally, a truth. Now Josie knew what it looked like when she didn’t lie. No prepared answer delivered with a too-transparent attempt at charm. No tightening of the skin around her mouth, no pauses or hesitation before answering, no flitting back and forth of her eyes as she searched for an out. Yet, the “we” implied she and Gina Phelan had formed some type of bond which wouldnot have been possible in the seconds it took for their assailant to stab her.

Gretchen jotted something down in her notebook. “How did you pay for your motel room?”

“I, um, had some cash in my pocket.”

Another ready lie or maybe a half-truth. The uncertain pause—the “um”—gave her away. She had to have had cash to rent the room and to buy the burner phone she’d used to contact Alec, but Josie doubted she’d had it on her person. Hardly anyone carried cash anymore, particularly in Erica’s generation. Perhaps she’d convinced a stranger to lend it to her or she’d stolen it.

Gretchen used her feet to maneuver her chair closer to Erica. “What happened to the clothes you were wearing when you were attacked?”

“I threw them away in the dumpster behind the motel.” She touched the collar of her sweatshirt. “I bought these clothes from a lady a couple rooms down from mine.”

Turner kept his hand on Josie’s shoulder and used the other to take his cell phone from his pocket. His thumb tapped away at warp speed. Josie hoped he was sending the ERT over to the Patio Motel to see if the clothes were still there.

Gretchen moved even closer, subtly invading Erica’s space. “Why did you run?”

“I don’t know.” Erica’s eyelashes fluttered. Her thumb worked harder to dislodge more nail polish. “I was scared. Not thinking straight.”

Given her body language, this, too, was true, though Josie suspected there was more to it.

“You ran right into a crowd of twenty people,” Gretchen pointed out. “And kept going. Why didn’t you stop and ask one of them for help?”

More purple flecks snapped off Erica’s fingernails, landing on the table. “I don’t know, okay? It’s not like I almost get stabbed all the time, okay? I just ran.”

“You kept running,” Gretchen said, though her voice was still quiet and free of judgment. “Then you hid. You weren’t the aggressor in this situation. Why hide?”

Erica abandoned her nails and reached inside the front of the sweatshirt, coming up with a necklace. Josie hadn’t noticed it when she was face to face with the girl. Now her fingers caressed the charm, keeping it covered from Josie’s view.

“I don’t know, okay?”

“Look at me.” Gretchen put her pen down, pushed her reading glasses onto the top of her head and leaned her elbows onto the table.

Slowly, Erica lifted her chin, wincing as she met Gretchen’s eyes.

“Given the bruises on your throat and wrists, I’d guess that someone is hurting you.”

Erica closed her fist around the charm. “No one is hurting me.”

“Where did you get the bruises?”

No response.

Gretchen didn’t try to poke holes in Erica’s neatly wrapped story. Instead, she got right to the point. “The man who came after you on Monday—you know him, don’t you?”

“N-no. I told you, I never saw him before.”

“You can tell me the truth, Erica.”

“I am! I am telling the truth!”

Rage simmered under Josie’s skin with each lie that rolled off Erica’s lips. Turner’s head stayed bent toward his phone as he scrolled and typed with his thumb. All the while, his other hand rested on her shoulder, steady and—she couldn’t believe she was even thinking it—comforting.

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