Never Look Away

She was pulled out of school.

Her parents moved away.

Her father began his never-ending resentment of her.

The day she took that necklace was the day it was determined she would leave home at seventeen and never get in touch with her parents again. She wondered, sometimes, whatever had happened to them. And then she realized she didn’t much care.

She hung on to the necklace for what it represented. A defining moment in her life. Even though it was a bad one.

One day, Ethan would see it in her jewelry box and ask if he could have it-cupcakes were his favorite snack in the whole wide world-and his mother would say no, it really wasn’t something a boy would wear, so he begged her to wear it when they went on a trip to Chicago.

She agreed to wear it for a day, and then never wore it again.

She thought about all these things, about her life, about Ethan, about David, as she sat in that truck. She thought about the life she’d had with them and-

Focus.

The woman known as Jan gave her head a small shake. There’d be plenty of time later to wallow in self-pity, immerse herself in it like a hot bath.

Something more urgent was nagging at her.

There was every reason to believe Oscar Fine knew that she had been living the last few years as Jan Harwood. He could have learned this from Dwayne, or he could have figured it out from the news reports of her disappearance.

If he knew about Jan Harwood, it wasn’t going to take him any time at all to figure out where she was from.

If she were Oscar Fine, she told herself, wouldn’t Promise Falls be her next stop?

She reached down next to her, looking for the photograph of Ethan she had taken from her purse only an hour or so earlier.

It wasn’t there.

Jan put the key into the ignition and started the engine. Without even realizing it, she’d already been driving in the direction of the place she’d called home the last five years.

She had to go back.

And she had to get there before Oscar Fine did.

She made no further pit stops on the way to Promise Falls, even when she was rounding Albany and saw that she had less than a quarter of a tank left. She felt she could make it.

She wondered where Ethan would be. It made sense that, considering the predicament she’d left David in, their son would not be at their house. David, if he hadn’t already been arrested, would probably be at the police station, or meeting with a lawyer, or driving all over hell’s half acre trying to figure out what had happened to her.

Jan almost laughed when it hit her: I wish I could talk to David about this.

She knew that wasn’t possible. There would be no room for forgiveness there, even though all she had to do was walk into a police station to put him in the clear. The things she’d done-you didn’t put that kind of stuff behind you and start over. Maybe, someday, some evidence might come along that would clear him. So be it.

By then she and Ethan would be long gone.

Ethan was her son. She was going to come out of all this with something that was hers.

It was most likely he was with Nana and Poppa. She’d take a drive by there first.

FORTY-EIGHT

Barry Duckworth was driving back from Albany in the late afternoon, approaching the Promise Falls city limits, when his cell rang.

His last stop had been north of the city at the Exxon station where whoever had been using Lyall Kowalski’s Ford Explorer-and Duckworth couldn’t begin to guess whether it had been his wife, Lea

When he got to the station, he showed a picture of Lea

For good measure, he showed them pictures of Jan Harwood and David Harwood. No joy there, either.

So he got back into his cruiser and began the trek back home. It gave him some time to think.

Just about from the begi

It looked very much like Harwood took his wife to Lake George and killed her. After all, no one had seen her since, so long as you didn’t count the boy, Ethan. But Duckworth had been having doubts about his initial theory ever since the discovery of Lea

Duckworth had not anticipated what he saw.

Genuine surprise.

If David Harwood had killed that woman and put her into the ground, he might have been able to feign shock. He could have put on an act and looked shattered. And faking tears, lots of people could pull that off. All of those things the seasoned detective would have expected.

But why had Harwood looked so surprised?

It had flashed across the man’s face for a good second. The eyes went wide. There was a kind of double take. There was no mistaking it. Lea

That told Barry Duckworth a couple of things. Harwood was not Kowalski’s killer. And it wasn’t very likely that he’d killed his wife, either.

If Harwood had killed Jan Harwood, and disposed of her elsewhere, he wouldn’t have looked so taken aback. He’d have known he was going to be looking down at someone other than his spouse. Even if he had killed Kowalski, and knew she was going to be there, he might have acted surprised, but that’s what it would have been: an act. What Duckworth saw was the real deal.

And then there was the business of the Explorer.

Harwood might have had time to kill Lea

Duckworth wasn’t liking Harwood for this nearly as much as he once had. Maybe there was something to the reporter’s claims that his wife had taken on a new name, changed her identity, after all. It had seemed pretty outrageous to him at first, but now he was feeling obliged to give it a look-see. He could find out again the names of those people Harwood had been to see in Rochester. See what they had to say.

He was starting to get a new feeling in that gut of his that Natalie Bondurant had so maligned.

And that was when his cell rang.

“Duckworth.”

“Yeah, Barry, it’s Glen.”

Glen Dougherty. Barry’s boss. The Promise Falls police chief.

“Chief,” he said.

“It wouldn’t normally be me calling you with this, but some lab results just got copied to me and I wondered if you had them yet.”