No Exit
Page 25
And it’s all over now—
“Please,” Jay whispered, far away. “Please, come with me—”
Inhale. Count to five. Exhale.
Okay.
Just like that. Keep doing that.
In her darkening thoughts, she remembered Ashley’s final words to her, and she pulled up her right sleeve, uncapped that pen, and wrote left-handed on her wrist. Scratchy, half-inked, all caps on her own bare skin:
KENNY GARVER.
RATHDRUM IDAHO.
912 BLACK LAKE ROAD.
KIDNAPPER.
Now it was all really, truly done. Now Jay was saved, and every last angle of Ashley’s disgusting plan had been expunged, dragged into the daylight for judgment. She let the pen slide between her fingers, finally satisfied. When the cops discovered her body frozen here in the snow, they’d read her final message. They’d know they had one last door to kick down, all the way up in Idaho.
I’ve got you, Darby.
Okay.
Don’t be afraid. The long-legged ghost wasn’t real. Now her mother squeezed her tighter, impossibly tight, binding her in this perfect moment, and the terror was finally over. It was just a nightmare, and it’s all finished now. You’re going to be okay. And . . . and Darby?
Yeah?
I’m so proud of you.
* * *
DRAFT EMAIL (UNSENT)
12/24/17 5:31 p.m.
To: amagicman13@gmail.com
From: Fat_Kenny1964@outlook.com
Hey Ash . . . checking in. Everything go OK on your end?
All set up over here. I’ve got the bunker ready and two interested fellas already one from Milwaukee, one Portland coming in on the 30th. They haven’t even seen a picture of her yet if you can believe it.
Also need to know: those meds your getting will make her better right, at least for awhile? Sick is OK, barfing is not OK.
Hope you did a clean job tying your loose ends up. You should be in Casper by now, so get here the day after Xmas then? Stay safe, keep Lars’s nose clean and keep off the big roads.
Talk soon, I’ve got someone knocking at the front doo_
Epilogue
February 8
Provo, Utah
Jay didn’t realize Darby’s last name was spelled with a silent e until she saw it milled into a cement gravestone. Below it, the date of death: December 24.
One day before Christmas.
Seven days before New Year’s.
Forty-six days ago.
She was here with her parents in Darby’s hometown, on a cemetery hillside still scaled with thawing snow, because her father had insisted on making the trip. Originally, he’d wanted to fly here much earlier in January, but Jay’s adrenal condition had flared up with two seizures that left her bedridden and under watch. Finally, she’d been deemed healthy enough for travel last week. All the while, her father had insisted: We have to see Darby Thorne again. We owe her something that can’t be written on a check.
“That’s the one?” he asked now. A few steps downhill, catching up.
“Yeah.”
The hours and days after the incident on the Colorado highway were a sickly blur, but little moments snagged in Jay’s memory. The ache of the IV needle. The roar of the rotor blades. The way the medics had circled and applauded when they carried her onto the helipad of Saint Joseph. The strange blur of the drugs. The way her mother and father came racing down that corridor in dreamy slow motion, their fingers interlocked, holding hands in a way she’d never seen them do before. Speaking in choked voices she’d never heard. The three-way hug atop her creaking bed. The taste of salty tears.
The cameras too. The fuzzy microphones. The investigators, clutching their notepads and tablets, trading gentle questions and sideways glances. The phone interviews with journalists whose accents she could barely understand. The news truck parked outside with an antenna that looked like a ship’s mast. The reverent, almost fearful way people hushed their voices when speaking about the dead, like poor Edward Schaeffer. And Corporal Ron Hill, the highway patrolman who made a tragic, split-second error that cost him his life.
And Darby Thorne.
The one who started it all. The restless, bleary-eyed art student from a state college in Boulder, racing a beater Honda Civic across the Rockies, who’d first stumbled across a child locked in a stranger’s van and taken heroic action to save her.
And, against all odds, succeeded.
Darby came to that rest stop for a reason, Jay’s mother had said back at Saint Joseph. Sometimes God puts people exactly where they need to be.
Even when they don’t know it.
A gust slipped through the cemetery, breathing among the taller gravestones, making Jay shiver, and now her mother caught up to the group, flipping up her sunglasses to read the letters as they coalesced on paper, clearer with every stroke of black crayon. “She . . . she had a pretty name.”
“Yeah. She did.”
Sunlight pierced the clouds and for a few seconds, Jay felt warmth on her skin. A curtain of light swept over the graves, shimmering over granite and frozen grass blades. Then it was gone, snuffed by a biting cold, and Jay’s father slipped his hands into his coat pockets. For a long moment the three of them were silent, listening to the last scratchy rubs of crayon as the headstone transferred to paper.
“Take as long as you need,” he said.
But the etching was finished already. The Scotch tape peeled off the stone, one corner at a time. Then the paper moved away, exposing the engraved letters: maya belleange thorne.
“What did you mean?” Jay asked. “When I asked you if you loved each other, and you just said, ‘It’s complicated’?”
Darby rolled the rice paper into a cardboard tube and stood up from her mother’s grave, squeezing Jay’s shoulder.
“It’s all right,” she said. “I was wrong.”
Acknowledgments
Thank you, first and foremost, to my family, who made this book possible.
To my better half, Jaclyn, who put up with me while I sank many months into this project: thank you for your honesty, your keen critical eye, and your enthusiasm—but most of all, your patience. And thank you to my parents, who always encouraged me to keep writing from the youngest age, back when I first commandeered a sluggish Windows 95 PC and typed away at my masterpiece: an epic tale of Mount Rainier erupting. I couldn’t have written this novel (which luckily turned out better than the Mount Rainier one) without your support and faith over many, many years.
A tremendous thank-you across the Atlantic to Jasper Joffe of the dynamic London publisher Joffe Books for guiding this story to completion and presenting it to readers. Thank you to editor Jennifer Brehl for your expertise and sharp eyes, and to the entire team at Harper and Morrow for working their magic on this book’s U.S. release.
Another thank-you to agent Lorella Belli for being my relentless and tenacious advocate across the world, and to agent Steve Fisher for guiding the film deal.
And, once more, because it bears repeating: Thanks to my mother, for recommending that I commit to writing this story after I’d described an alternative idea I was considering writing instead.
That’s one more reason this book wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for you.
About the Author
TAYLOR ADAMS graduated from Eastern Washington University with the prestigious Edmund G. Yarwood Award. His directorial work has screened at the Seattle True Independent Film Festival, and he is an avid fan of suspenseful fiction and film. He lives in Washington state.
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Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is
entirely coincidental.
no exit. Copyright © 2019 by Taylor Adams. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Originally published in the United Kingdom in 2017 by Joffe Books.
first u.s. edition
Cover design by Elsie Lyons
Cover photographs © Dmytro Tsykhmystro/iStock/Getty Images; © sbayram/iStock/Getty Images (snow); © Lyu Hu/Shutterstock (lines on road); © Miloje/Shutterstock (texture)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Adams, Taylor, author.
Title: No exit : a novel / Taylor Adams.
Description: First edition. | New York, NY : William Morrow, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018018489| ISBN 9780062875655 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780062875662 (trade pbk.)
Subjects: | GSAFD: Suspense fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3601.D3973 N6 2019 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018018489
Digital Edition JANUARY 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-287567-9
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-287565-5
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