The Stranger(55)

“Not even close,” she said. “I don’t know when or how the guy told Harold. But he did. He gave Harold some web link so he could see all the stuff I ordered from that pregnancy-faking website. Harold went ballistic. I thought it would open his eyes to my pain, but really, it did the opposite. It played into all his insecurities. All that stuff about not being a real man—it all came roaring to a head. It’s complicated, you know. A man is supposed to spread his seed and if the seed isn’t any good, well, it goes right to his core. Stupid.”

She took another sip and looked him straight in the eye.

“I’m surprised,” Suzanne said.

“Surprised about what?”

“That Corinne made the same choice. I would have figured that she’d pay the money.”

“What makes you say that?”

Suzanne shrugged. “Because she loved you. Because she had so much to lose.”





Chapter 25



Could it be that simple?

Could it all be a blackmail scam that went south? The stranger had gone to Suzanne Hope and asked for money in exchange for silence. She refused to pay. The stranger then told her husband about her faking the pregnancy.

Was that what happened with Corinne and Adam?

On the one hand, it made perfect sense. The Hopes had been blackmailed. Why couldn’t it have happened to Corinne and him? You ask for money, you don’t get it, you tell. That’s how blackmail works. But as Adam started on his way back home, as he let the reality of what he just heard roll around in his head, something about it all didn’t feel right. He couldn’t put his finger on it. For some reason, something about the obvious blackmail theory didn’t quite pass the smell test.

Corinne was driven and smart. She was a worrier and a planner. If the stranger had threatened her with blackmail and if she had made the decision not to pay up, Corinne, ever the perfect student, would have been prepared. Yet when Adam confronted her after the stranger’s visit, Corinne had been at a loss. She had no ready answer. She weakly tried to stall. There was no doubt in his mind that Corinne had been surprised.

Why? If she’d been blackmailed, wouldn’t she have at least suspected that the stranger would tell Adam?

She had also reacted by, what, running away? Did that make sense? She had run so quickly and haphazardly, barely contacting him and the school and, most surprising of all, just leaving the boys in the lurch.

That wasn’t Corinne.

Something else was going on here.

He did a mental rewind to the night at the American Legion Hall. He thought about the stranger. He thought about the young blond woman with him. He thought about how calm and concerned the stranger seemed. The stranger took no joy in telling Adam what Corinne had done—nothing about him indicated psycho or even socio—but then again, he hadn’t seemed businesslike, either.

For the hundredth time that day, Adam checked the phone-locator app, hoping that Corinne had charged her phone back up since her visit to Pittsburgh. He wondered again whether she had chosen to stay there or was just traveling through. He bet traveling through. He also bet that she had realized somewhere along the way that one of the boys would put together that they could find her on the phone locator, so she had simply turned off the power or maybe found a way to turn off the app.

Okay, so if Corinne were traveling from Cedarfield through Pittsburgh, where would she be going?

He didn’t have a clue. But something was really, really wrong. Duh, thank you, Captain Obvious. Still, Corinne had told him to stay away. Shouldn’t he listen to that? Should he sit back and see how it all played out? Or was the threat too real to be idle?

Should he get help? Should he contact the police or just let it be?

Adam couldn’t say which side of the fence he would have fallen on—both options were fraught with problems—but suddenly, as he made the turn onto his street, that didn’t seem like an issue anymore. As he pulled up to his house, Adam noticed three men standing on the curb in front of his lawn. One was his neighbor, Cal Gottesman, who was pushing those glasses up his nose. The other two were Tripp Evans and Bob “Gaston” Baime.

What the . . . ?

For a moment, just a split second, Adam expected the worst: Something horrible had happened to Corinne. But no, these guys wouldn’t be the ones to tell him. Len Gilman, the town cop who also had two kids in the lax program, would be the one.

As if someone had heard his thoughts, a squad car with the words CEDARFIELD POLICE DEPARTMENT emblazoned across the sides turned onto the road and slid into the spot where the three men were standing. Len Gilman was in the driver’s seat.

Adam felt his heart drop.

He quickly put the car in park and swung the car door open. Gilman was doing the same. When Adam stood, his knees almost gave way. On teetering legs, he sprinted toward where the four men had congregated, on the curb right in front of Adam’s house.