Page 48 of Don't Leave Me
“Anyway, it’s like you said. I didn’t love finance, I just wanted money. I like the investigation stuff, but I don’t know if it’s enough.”
“Enough for what?”
“To support you and Danny,” I said, then quickly raised my hand to stop her from cutting me off. “Yes, I know you’re supporting yourself. Yes, I know you might not give me the privilege to do it in the future, but it’s important to me that I could. That if we do find our way back to us, that I can. Which reminds me, I need to sell my truck.”
“Why?”
“When Landen died, most of his assets went to pay off the clients he’d cheated, but what was left he’d bequeathed to George. George and I took the money and bought cars as a fuck-you to your father, but it’s your money. Your inheritance. You should have it.”
She shook her head. “Don’t want it. A car and a truck are the least of what you and George deserve. Arthur Landen cost you fifteen months of your life. I wouldn’t take that money for anything. Keep your truck. If you are worried about me financially, don’t be.”
“You earn that much money making cupcakes?”
She laughed. “Ah, no. I make a decent income, enough to pay Candy, too. No, my savings are everything I took when I left.”
“How much did you take? It wasn’t like you had that much time to plan everything.”
I knew from what she’d told me, that from the time she’d learned she was pregnant, to when she fell off the earth, had only been a week.
She winced. “That’s not exactly true. I told you about San Diego. How Arthur had me tracked down. Thinking back on it, that’s probably why I changed my plans at the last minute. I was trying to see how much of a leash I had. How far I could go before he pulled on it. That’s when I learned how little freedom I actually had.”
“Why didn’t you tell me all of this back then?”
She shrugged. “Because it seemed crazy. Like some other person’s life. Like I wasn’t just the daughter of a rich father, but there was something more sinister happening. So, I started to plan. Figure out what I could do, in case the worst happened. It wasn’t even like I thought I would ever need it, but having an escape route became critical to me. That meant money. In Switzerland, I bought everything for every one of those rich debutantes and made them reimburse me in cash. Shoes, clothes, jewelry. All of it.”
“Ash.” I didn’t know whether to laugh or shout at her again for hiding all of that from me. She’d been thinking about running away since Switzerland?
“I bought a fake passport—a good one. I set up a Swiss bank account under my new name. Another one in the States. Hocked any jewelry Arthur gave me and replaced a number of valuable works of art in the house with fakes. By the time I knew I had to leave, I had a nest egg of about half a million dollars.”
My jaw dropped. Half a million dollars?
“You clever little thief.”
She smiled mischievously. “I was pretty good at it. Even my engagement ring, hocked and replaced with a convincing fake. I took satisfaction in it every time I made another wire transfer into my secret account. I thought once you graduated Princeton, I would use it then. Set us up so we didn’t need Arthur’s help at all. I hadn’t accounted for Evan.”
“Tell me about it. That night you left,” I said, realizing I’d never asked. Maybe because I didn’t want to relive, what for her had been an escape, but for me, had been a living nightmare.
“I was scared. So scared because I had to rush through the last of the details in only a few days. My goal had been to rehearse it a few times, make sure there was no chance at failure. Then suddenly, I was out of time and I had to just do it. I drove the car out to a fairly untraveled road on the way to his house in the Hamptons. In the off season, it’s nearly empty. I parked the car, and ran it until the gas tank was empty. Someone actually pulled up behind me. An older gentleman who insisted on taking me to the nearest gas station. I had to be really convincing I’d already called for an Uber that was on its way.”
“He never came forward. There weren’t any witnesses who could pinpoint the time you broke down.”
“Maybe he didn’t put the pieces together that I was the missing woman. I don’t know. Once he left, I cut my thumb and smeared blood over the seats, the dashboard, the steering wheel. Anything to make it look like an assault, a struggle. I had a bike in the trunk. I rode it to the nearest convenience store, and dropped my credit cards near a homeless man sitting outside the door. Hoping he might use them.”
“That was the guy on camera,” I said, seeing it clearly. “It immediately made him a suspect, but the police could never find him.”
“That was a lucky break. I’d already purchased and registered a car with my new identity. It was waiting for me in a parking lot of a grocery store just down the road from the convenience store. I wiped down the bike for any traces of fingerprints, dumped it in the grocery store dumpster, and drove away.”
“How did you know my mother was dead?”
“When I got to Florida, I started searching for Marie Campbells, much like you probably did. I had this idea if you came looking for her, you might find me instead. But I thought I should know at least where she was. Eventually, I came across her death certificate.”
Which told me if I’d kept trying to identify dead Marie Campbells I would have found the certificate too. Thank God I focused my search on those who were still alive. If I’d stumbled upon my mother first, I would have moved on, and I never would have found Ash. The precariousness of it left me feeling shaky.
The sun had gone down, the night was dark, and I could hear cicadas in the distance.
“You’d been planning your escape since Switzerland, and you never told me,” I said, trying to deal with how crushing it felt to be excluded from something so vital. I’d always thought Ash was mine. All mine. I had to deal with it though, if I wanted to do the thing I said earlier. If I wanted to push myself back into her life, I had to let it all go.
“It wasn’t real in Switzerland. It was just a thought that if things ever did get serious, building a nest egg could help. That having an escape hatch would give me some piece of mind. It didn’t become real until I married Evan. By then, you were already in prison.”
