Page 104 of The Inmate
His eyes linger on mine, and I wonder if it would be inappropriate to ask if he would come home with me tonight. It’s not just that I don’t want to be alone. I want to be withhim.
“Oh, hey,” he says. “Guess what? I was listening to the radio on the way over, and apparently they identified the dead body of that woman in Cohasset.”
I nod. “That’s good for her family.”
“Yeah, and I bet Santoro is going to get a lot of shit for arresting you for the murder of somebody who turned out to still be alive. They should’ve waited for the DNA to come back—they really jumped the gun.”
Yes, Santoro should have waited. But he was just too eager to nail me. All because he got bullied as a kid.
Caleb and Dawn have finally disentangled themselves. He’s got his arm around her shoulders, keeping her warm with his body heat.
“So who was the woman in Cohasset?” I ask Seth.
He lifts a shoulder. “Some woman… uh, Kara something?” He cocks his head thoughtfully. “No… Tara, I think? Nobody we know, anyway.”
Tara?
No… it couldn’t be…
My hands are shaking slightly as I reach into my purse and pull out my phone. I bring up a search engine and look up news stories about the identity of the body found in Cohasset. It’s breaking news, and the name comes up instantly.
“Tara Wilkes,” I choke out.
Tara Wilkes. My old best friend from high school. The one who sat with me writing fake valentines to Amelia Hodge all those years ago.
Seth snaps his fingers. “Right, Tara Wilkes. That was it.”
My eyes dart over to Caleb’s face. He heard me say the name Tara Wilkes just now, but he didn’t react. There’s not even a flicker of recognition. The name means nothing to him.
But when my eyes reach Dawn’s, I see something completely different.
The girl found in the woods was not a coincidence. All those years, Dawn hated me for being the mastermind, but she hated Tara too for the part she played in Amelia’s suicide. Death was too good for me, but it wasn’t too good for Tara.
Oh God.
“That poor woman,” Seth is saying. “They were saying on the radio that the reason they thought it was Dawn was that her hair was all hacked off, and her face was so badly beaten, she was unrecognizable.”
“Oh geez,” Caleb says, squeezing Dawn tighter in his arms. “That’s awful.”
Dawn’s eyes stay on mine. “Yes,” she says. “Awful.”
A chill goes down my spine that has nothing to do with the sub-freezing temperature. Dawn wanted more than anything to get revenge on the people she felt were responsible for Amelia’s death. She was willing to do anything. She was willing to take her own life. She was willing to kill.
She’s a very dangerous woman.
And nobody knows but me.
Epilogue
ONE YEAR LATER
DAWN
Turtles havea reputation for being slow, although it’s not entirely fair. Most walk at a speed of about two miles per hour, approximately half of the normal human walking speed of three to four miles per hour. But they can swim at a speed of ten miles per hour. And the fastest turtle in the world can reach speeds of over twenty miles per hour. That means the fastest turtle in the world could finish a 5K in about ten minutes.
It took me half an hour.
I spent the last two months training. Caleb and I did it together. We ran around the neighborhood together, side-by-side, working on my endurance and speed. The first day, I could barely run a mile. By the last quarter of a mile, I was huffing and puffing, my lungs on fire. But today, I burst through the finish line of the 5K, sweaty and achy, but filled with adrenaline.
