The One I Trust (28 page)

“Where?” I whispered. I could barely speak.

“Hang up.”

I swallowed hard.

“Sir? Sir, are you there?”

“Um, yes. Sorry. It was a false alarm. It was just my wife.”

“Sir, are you certain there’s not an intruder in your home?”

“Yes. Sorry. My wife was out of town and I wasn’t expecting her back until tomorrow, but it’s just her.”

“Can you see her, sir?”

“Yes.”

“May I speak to her?”

“Yes.”

I handed the phone to Emily.

“I thought you were an intruder,” I told Emily for the operator’s sake. “I called 911 and now they just want to talk to you to make sure everything’s really okay.”

I nodded at Emily, encouraging her to take the phone and go along with my story. Tori, tape still over her eyes, listened silently with a smug smirk on her face. Emily took the phone from me with a displeased look on her face.

“Hello?” Emily asked.

I could hear the operator ask Emily if everything was okay.

“Yes,” Emily said. “I came home early to surprise him . . . I guess I’d better not do that anymore.”

She let out a short, convincing laugh.

The operator said something else that I couldn’t make out and Emily responded, “Oh, no ma’am. Everything’s fine. We’re the only ones here.”

The operator said something more and Emily thanked her before hanging up. She looked at me unhappily before handing me back my phone.

“Nice job,” Tori said with mock admiration. “If I could, I’d clap.”

“Where is he?” I demanded, standing over her.

“Take the tape off my eyes.”

I ripped it off gladly, hoping to hurt her as much as she’d hurt me.

She looked at me and smiled.

“Undo me,” she said.

“No.”

“Undo me,” Tori said again. “Or I’m not going to tell you.”

“No!” I shouted. “Tell me where he is!”

“He’s all alone,” Tori said in a sing-song voice, looking up at me as her mouth stretched wide in a grin. “Someone needs to get to him soon.”

I glanced at Emily, searching for direction.

“No food,” Tori continued sadly, shaking her head. “No water . . .”

“Where is he?”

“It’s very simple, Reid,” Tori said, her voice suddenly cold and severe. She looked me right in the eye. “You have two choices. You either undo me right now, or he’s going to die.”

“Is he really alive?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, and I believed her.

I REACHED TO free Tori.

“Don’t,” I heard Emily say. I stopped and looked at her.

“She’s lying,” Emily said. “Don’t let her go.”

This brought forth a second round of expletives, which Emily quickly silenced with a fresh piece of duct tape.

“You can’t trust her,” Emily said. She tore off a longer piece of tape and secured Tori’s arms to her body so that she wouldn’t be able to reach her face again. Tori struggled and made muffled sounds against the tape.

“What if she’s telling the truth?” I asked, choking down a sob. “What if my only hope of getting him back is to let her go?”

“She’s lying,” Emily said again.

“But what if she’s not?”

Emily paused and looked at me for what seemed like minutes as Tori continued thrashing.

“It’s your decision,” she finally said. “Do whatever you want to do, but I’m telling you that she’s lying.”

Tori flailed even harder against her restraints.

I looked back and forth between the two of them for what seemed like an eternity, trying to decide what to do before finally picking up my phone again and hitting redial.

“I’M GOING TO turn the porch light on and wait outside until they get here,” Emily said after I hung up.

“Okay,” I agreed, nodding.

I sat in the bedroom for ten minutes guarding Tori, watching her as she continued to struggle and make all sorts of noises, trying to communicate with me. It took everything I had within me not to rip the tape from her mouth and let her tell me again that Noah was alive and that I could see him once again if I would just set her free.

After Tori had been taken away, a sheriff’s deputy asked us if we would go down to the sheriff’s department to give statements. Noticing that there weren’t any personal vehicles in our driveway, he asked, “Do you need a ride?”

“Where is your car, anyway?” I asked, turning to Emily.

“I parked in the neighborhood back there,” she said, pointing toward our backyard.

I took off my bloody sweatpants, put three Band-Aids on the wound left by my broadhead, and gingerly pulled on a clean pair of blue jeans before the deputy drove us to Emily’s car.

“We’ll see you in a few minutes,” I said to the deputy, holding the door open for Emily.

“You go ahead,” Emily said, not getting out of the car.

“What?”

“I’m going to ride with him.” She nodded toward the deputy.

“Why?”

“I’m going to ride with him,” she said again, and she reached for the door and closed it between the two of us.

I stared at her for a moment and then turned around and unlocked Emily’s car.

Is she mad at me?

I thought about that possibility for a minute as I turned the key in the ignition and started following them to the sheriff’s department in Raleigh.

She hadn’t hugged me sobbing in relief after overpowering Tori. She hadn’t seemed particularly concerned about the cuts on my neck and chest. She hadn’t gushed apologies for accidentally shooting me with an arrow . . .

But why would she be mad at me?

Because I’d been ready to have her committed? Because I’d actually believed that she was capable of setting Hale’s beach house on fire and killing our dog?

I thought about all this as I drove. Surely Emily could see that both of us had been victims of Tori’s twisted mind. None of this was my fault.

I called Hale but he didn’t answer, and I remembered that he was mad at me, too.

Dear God, please help me,
I prayed as I passed the convention center.
I wasn’t any better at praying than I’d been a week ago, but at least I was doing it.

I pulled into the nearly empty parking lot of the sheriff’s department and walked briskly to a side door, where the deputy was waiting to let me in. Emily had walked even more briskly and was already standing inside the lobby, refusing to look at me.

The deputy asked both of us to have a seat and then he disappeared. There were plenty of chairs, but Emily didn’t sit down, so neither did I.

“Emily,” I said, stepping toward her. “I am so sorry, I—”

“I can’t talk to you right now,” she interrupted.

That was exactly what Hale had said only a few hours earlier.

“Emily,” I pleaded. “Come on. I didn’t have any idea that—”

“You said you believed me,” she cried, her voice breaking. I looked at her and her eyes, filled with tears, met mine. I realized that she wasn’t just mad . . . she was hurt.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“You said you believed me,” she repeated. “I thought I could
trust
you.”

“You
can
trust me, Emily,” I promised. “But I thought she was dead! You’ve got to admit that she did a pretty good job of—”

“Let me ask you something,” she interrupted again.

“Okay.”

“Why did you call the sheriff?”

“What?”

“Tori said something about how after your little call to the sheriff that it wouldn’t make any sense for me to have a gun . . .”

I looked at her for a moment and then glanced away guiltily. Finally I looked back at her reluctantly and confessed, “I called him on Monday and told him to lose the paperwork for your pistol permit.”

She stared at me. “And you hid the keys to the safe,” she said. It was a statement, not a question.

I nodded.

She turned away again and stared off into the distance.

“I looked for them when I got back to the house but I couldn’t find them anywhere,” she said softly, more to herself than to me.

“I’m sorry,” I said for a third time, shaking my head.

“Tori had a gun,” Emily said with a humorless laugh, turning her gaze toward me once more. “I had six arrows and a bow that I could hardly even pull back, but
she
had a gun.”

Emily looked at me accusingly with bitterness on her face.

I wondered if I should say that I was sorry again.

“We almost got killed,” she said, her eyes filling with tears again.

“I know.”

She shook her head and looked away, wiping her eyes with her hand.

“Emily?” I said after a long silence.

“What?”

“How did you figure it out?” I asked. Telling her I was sorry again wasn’t going to do any good and I had so many questions that I had to have answered.

She turned to look back at me just as we heard footsteps coming down the hall toward the lobby.

She studied me for a moment before saying, “You know how you’re always telling me how smart Tori was?” Her eyes flashed angrily.

I nodded as the deputy opened the door and motioned for her to follow him back.

“Well I’m smarter,” she said, and then she was gone.

I stood there for a moment watching after her before burying my face in my hands.

Dear God,
I prayed again
. Please help me.

This time I added a few specifics.

Please let her forgive me. Please let Hale talk to me again. Please let Noah be alive . . .

That last one was such a long shot that I barely dared to pray for it, but out of the three things I’d just asked for, it was the one I wanted most of all.

After I was questioned and had given my statement, I made a point of mentioning to Sheriff Stuart multiple times that if anyone was capable of escaping from custody, it would be Tori.

“We’ll keep an eye on her.”

“I mean, I’m telling you that she will spend every waking moment of the rest of her life looking for ways to escape.”

“We understand.” That was an agent from the SBI who had joined Stu for the questioning.

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “I don’t think you do. She’s smart. She’s very smart. If there is ever a way to escape, she will figure it out.”

He nodded at me.

“Don’t ever let there be a way,” I said.

He nodded again.

“And if she ever does escape,” I said, looking back at the sheriff. “I need to be notified right away. I need you to take care of this for me, Stu. Whoever’s got custody—they need to understand that if she ever escapes, I need to be informed right away.”

He nodded at me too and he acted like he meant it, but I had a feeling that neither one of them really believe I had anything to worry about.

As long as it took for me to answer all the questions they had for me and to give a written statement, it took Emily even longer. I had to wait in the lobby for at least thirty minutes after I was finished before she finally appeared. It was almost three in the morning by this point and she’d been up for nearly twenty-four hours. She looked terrible.

“Are you ready?” I asked, not even sure if she was speaking to me. She nodded without meeting my eyes, and after a deputy unlocked the door to let us out, I held it open for her and we headed to her car.

I held that door open for her too and then went around to the driver’s side and climbed in. Before I could start the car, I heard her say softly, “You didn’t leave me.”

I looked at her in surprise.

“What?”

She looked at me for a long moment, her eyes filled with tears again.

“You thought I was crazy,” she finally said. “You thought I’d killed Gracie and you thought I set Hale’s house on fire and everything else, but . . .”

She blinked and a tear streamed down her face.

“You didn’t leave me,” she finished.

Still looking at her, I shook my head.

“No,” I said. “You’re my wife. I won’t ever leave you.”

She reached for me and I wrapped my arms around her. She buried her head into my shoulder.

“I love you,” I heard her say.

“I love you, too,” I said out loud, and then silently I said,
Thank you, God.

We held each other for a long time. Eventually, I sat back and called Hale. This time he answered and he listened and he told us that we should come to their house since there was blood all over our living room and our bedroom. I told him that we’d see him soon and I hung up.

Thank you, God,
I said again.

There was still one thing that I wanted to be able to thank Him for—one thing I’d begged Him for a million times even when I was sure it would never happen.

I turned in my seat and looked at Emily. Studying her face in the dim light, I realized that I hardly knew her at all. We’d known each other for less than a year and been married for barely five months. I had absolutely no idea how she was going to react to what I was about to ask.

“Emily?”

She looked at me. “What?”

“Will you pray with me?”

Her eyes filled with tears again as she gently put her hand up to my face.

“Of course I will,” she said, and I felt my own eyes fill with tears as well.

She took my hand, and then—for the first time in my life—I prayed with my wife.

AS WE DROVE to Hale and Anneka’s, I started working on getting some of my many questions answered.

“When exactly did you figure out that she was still alive?” I asked Emily.

“After you called me and left that voice mail saying that they had a suspect.”

“How?”

“Well, when I got out of Hale and Anneka’s house,” she began, “I just started driving. I realized that all three of you thought I was crazy and I was so scared that you were going to have me involuntarily committed or something. All I could picture was myself in a straitjacket in some padded room somewhere saying over and over again that I didn’t do anything.

“I knew the only way I was going to be able to prove that I wasn’t crazy was to figure out who really
had
been doing all that stuff, and I knew I had to do it before you found me. So I drove around for a while trying to figure out what to do or how to get someone to help me. I thought about calling my mom and dad or maybe Charlotte, but then I was worried that maybe you’d called them and convinced them I was crazy too, so I didn’t.