Page 99 of Husband Missing

She could tell Heather hadn’t known this. The reading glasses went back on. She scribbled on her notepad as Erica continued.

“I tricked Holden into dating me so that I could get access to Mace. It took a few months, but I finally got him to invite me to one of the parties.”

Heather looked up. “For what purpose?”

“You really can’t tell where this is going?” Erica said dryly.

Now Heather gave her a real-deal smile. “It’s better if you tell it.”

“Right. I went to the party to blackmail Mace. The same exact way my mom tried to do it. Pay me three hundred thousand dollars or I’ll tell the whole world that I’m your niece and that your dad knocked up my grandmom six times while she was living out in the woods like she was raised by wolves or some shit. Oh, and I’ll also tell the whole world how she hated having his babies so much that she killed them all—except for my mom.”

“I don’t want to encourage you to follow in Lila Jensen’s footsteps,” said Heather. “But you’re an impressive young woman.”

Erica’s posture straightened. She couldn’t remember the last time anyone besides her dad gave her a compliment. Especially a badass female detective with a big gun. “Um, thanks.”

“You should use your powers for good.”

Wait. Did telling the truth unlock some kind of alternate dimension?

“That’s the plan,” she said, infusing her voice with as much confidence as she could muster.

“Mace didn’t take your ultimatum very well, did he?” asked Heather.

Erica scoffed. “That’s an understatement. I knew he was violent but I just thought…I don’t know what I thought. That somehow it would be different when I did it than when my mom tried, but he was going to kill me right in the basement of his house. Well, not him. One of his meathead minions.”

“You talked him out of it?”

“I told him to forget about the blackmail thing. I’d keep the secret and in exchange for him not killing me, I’d give him something in return. Then I told him that my mom had this box of stuff she kept from people she screwed over and that she had something incriminating inside. Something that would be very bad for his dad and if he wanted it, I could get it for him.”

Heather made another note on her pad. “What was in the box?”

Erica smiled. “Nothing. I made that part up. I was trying to get the hell out of that house.”

“Lila never had anything incriminating on Clint Phelan?”

“No. I mean, the worst thing she had on him was his DNA but that’s not illegal.”

Heather tapped the end of her pen against her lip, staring at her for a moment that stretched out a little too long. Erica got the feeling that Heather knew something she didn’t.

“Mace Phelan believed you though.”

“Yeah. I had to make something up so I said that my mom had tracked down a hunter who’d witnessed Clint Phelan raping my grandmom and gotten a written statement from him. I told him that it was hidden in that box and if anyone ever found it, they would know the truth. It was pretty weak but Mace is pretty dumb, so he believed me.”

Erica could see Heather trying hard not to smile again.

“Anyway,” she continued. “He wanted the guy’s name, tried to choke it out of me, but I told him I didn’t remember it. Said it was some old dude my mom found in a nursing home and if he wanted the name, he’d have to let me go and I’d bring him the signed statement.”

“He didn’t let you go,” Heather said.

Erica sighed. “Guess he isn’t a complete dumbass. No, he wouldn’t let me retrieve it. Instead, he made me tell Holden where to look for the box. I had no idea what happened to it but I had to send him somewhere. I could only remember two names of the people my mom used to talk about a lot: Dexter McMann and Josie Quinn. I told Holden that one of them probably had it. I was just trying to stall—to stay alive. I told him what to say—the sob story about being one of Lila Jensen’s victims looking for his grandmother’s jewelry.”

Heather wrote something on her pad. “Holden and his associates took photos from the box. They also took the jewelry. Do you know why?”

“There was a photo of Clint Phelan in the box. Mace, too, I think. That’s probably why they took those.” Erica used a thumbnail to scrape off the last of the purple nail polish on her pinky. It had taken tons of hand-washing to get the blood out of her cuticles. “I’m sure they took the jewelry because they thought they could sell it. They would steal anything if they thought they could make money from it. I had no idea what was happening. A week passed and it became pretty clear that regardless of whether Holden found the box, Mace was going to have me killed. I figured that out when they brought me to the construction site. All hell broke loose from there.”

Heather nodded. “Gina Phelan?”

Tears pricked Erica’s eyes. Gina’s death was her biggest regret in all this, and she would carry the guilt of it for the rest of her life. “I told her the truth. Everything. She wanted to hide me until she could figure out how to handle everything without Mace finding out right away. She told me he got away with a lot of stuff and she was tired of cleaning up his messes.”

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