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“Come on, honey,” she whispered, lifting her sleeping baby from the car seat and carrying her boneless, sweet-smelling little girl into the farmhouse.
They’d turned the spare bedroom into a room for Bea, complete with a sun painted on the ceiling and a friendly, if lopsided, giraffe on the wall, like she was peeking over the edge of Bea’s crib.
Josie had painted it for her.
A sudden pang of missing Josie hit her square in her chest. She wasn’t entirely sure where Josie and Cameron were these days. It had been a while since she’d tuned in to their exceedingly popular Five Questions and a Cup of Coffee YouTube channel. It was just called Five Questions when Cameron was doing it by himself, when Josie joined him, she added the coffee part.
The pandemic had been weirdly good to them—everyone home and desperate to watch something to alleviate the boredom of isolation and the high-level anxiety from the news. And there had been Cameron, sitting at a fire, making coffee for extremely famous and interesting people, asking them five sometimes silly, sometimes important, questions.
To say it was going gangbusters was an understatement. During the lockdown he did the interviews over zoom and then socially distanced around fires.
And once they could travel again, they’d loaded up their camper van and headed south. Or north? They might be in Canada. She honestly couldn’t remember.
She stroked Bea’s sleep-sweaty head and then pulled her phone from her back pocket and took a picture of Ginny the Giraffe, as Josie had named her, and sent it off to her cousin/best friend.
Ginny says hi. I miss you. Where are you?
She hit Send and put the phone back in her pocket.
She tidied up a few of the toys and books that were scattered across the rug. Goodnight Goon and Chrysanthemum were current favorites. She was tempted to hide them, just to avoid reading them tomorrow for perhaps the millionth time. But she knew better. Bea would systematically take this room apart to find what she wanted.
Like Evan.
She shook off the memory and took a deep breath in the hushed and darkened room.
Where am I? she thought. I mean, really. Where am I?
Her parents’ house? Her childhood home? She was about to climb into her childhood bed. And it had been amazing, safe and easy for years. Only just now was it starting to feel like quicksand.
She blew out a breath, shook her head. There was something in the air with her.
“Weird night,” she whispered out loud. “It’s just a weird night.”
The insistent buzz of her phone pulled her out of a deep sleep and a pleasantly surreal dream of watching a monster truck rally with Josie. She opened one eye, saw that it was still dark. Middle-of-the-night dark. She sat bolt upright.
Only bad news came in the middle of the night.
Her brain went crystal clear. Absolutely focused, even as her body broke out in a frigid sweat.
“Hello?” she said into her phone.
“You have a collect call from Monroe County Jail.”
Angela Newman
But no. She was in Taconic and Monroe County was Rochester.
Who did she know in Rochester who would be getting arrested?
“Do you accept the charges?”
“Yes.”
There was a click and a buzz and then the ambient din of a busy hallway.
“Helen?” a voice said. And it took her a second to place the voice, because there was no scenario in the world she could possibly imagine in which this guy was calling her from jail.
“Micah?!”
Chapter Seven
Helen
“Yeah.”
She blinked. Speechless.
“What…what is happening?”
“Well, I’ve been arrested. The band is in White Plains and Jo…well, Jo seems to be a bit peeved at the moment.”
“So you called me?”
“Yeah.”
“Because that made sense to you?”
“I had your number.”
“Don’t you have like…a million numbers?”
“Actually, no.”
There was a click and someone in the background on his end yelled something.
“I’m running out of time, here. Is it possible you could come get me?”
“At the Monroe County Jail?”
“Yes.”
“In Rochester.”
“I think…I’m not sure about that. Hey man?” he asked someone on his end. “What town are we in…? Yes. Rochester.”
“That’s, like…hours away from me.”
“I understand that. You’ll also have to bail me out.”
“Bail you out?” She started laughing.
“Helen, we have a time issue at work here, so maybe save your questions for the end?”
“You want to scold the person you’re asking to pick you up from jail.”
“I’ll pay you back, obviously. And donate those items you mentioned in your email to your auction.”
She perked right up.
“All of them?”
“I think we can talk about it when you pick me up.”
“Am I being blackmailed?”
“Maybe? So far news outlets don’t have a hold of this and I’d like to keep it that way, so the sooner the better?”
“None of this explains why I’m the lucky person getting this call.” She stood up and started to pull off her pajama shorts.
“I don’t have a lot of people to call. People I trust.”
