Page 81 of Guess Again
“There’s an old man sitting next to me . . .” Callie crinkled her nose. “No?”
“We’re playing next.”
“I can’t, Linds. My mom’s all over me about something.”
“Why is your mom such a buzz kill?”
“You think anything my mom does makes sense? She’s probably having a breakdown about something. I’m going to take the boat home. Be back in an hour. Then we’ll play those guys. Kick their butts.”
Lindsay was amazed at how easily her friend was able to lie. She saw a tear run down Callie’s cheek.
“You sure you’re okay?”
Callie quickly wiped it away. “Yeah. All good. I’ll see you later.”
Lindsay watched her hurry off. She stood on the sidelines of the sand volleyball court and watched Callie climb onto her boat and pull away from the dock. She turned and walked quickly toward the back of the restaurant. She knew from her guy friends on the football team who worked on The Crest that there was a fleet of five Polaris Ranger 4x4s they used to haul supplies along the small, unpaved access road that ran out to The Crest from the mainland.
Once she was beyond the crowd, she took off in a sprint. She hopped into one of the 4x4s. The key was in the ignition, and she cranked the engine to life. The Ranger took off, bouncing along the narrow road as she raced to beat Callie to North Point Pier.
Lindsay killed the Ranger’s headlights as she pulled into the parking lot at North Point Pier. The pier was where those who did not own homes on Lake Okoboji launched their boats for a day on the water. On any given morning, the lot was crowded with pickup trucks and trailers. But they typically pulled their boats from the lake before dark. Tonight, the place was empty.
Lindsay pulled the Ranger into the shadows on the side of the parking lot and climbed out. In the storage unit on the back of the 4x4 was a Callaway 9-iron golf club. Lindsay had seen the football players driving golf balls off The Crest, attempting to hit a wooden raft that floated a hundred yards off the dock. With little thought, she grabbed the club and hurried along the side of the parking lot to the boat launch area and the dock that ran out into the water. Far out in the middle of the lake she saw The Crest and the lights of the volleyball courts. The occasional lyric bounced across the lake, and she could hear an old Tom Petty song playing from where she hid in the darkness. She waited only five minutes before she saw a boat approaching. It had to be Callie. Lindsay had beaten her here.
She stepped deeper into the woods near the end of the dock and watched as Callie approached in her parents’ boat. Cloaked by darkness, Lindsay stood in the shadows as Callie tied off the boat and stepped onto the pier. Callie looked toward the parking lot, surely anticipating Blake’s car being there, and slowly walked down the dock. Once she stepped onto the gravel at the end of the pier, Lindsay emerged from the shadows. A twig snapped under her foot, but before Callie could spin around, Lindsay lifted the 9-iron and, in one swift motion, brought it down on the back of Callie’s head.
The thud was sickening as she felt the club insert itself into her friend’s skull. She pulled it out, expecting Callie to fall to the ground. Instead, Callie turned around and locked eyes with her. Lindsay lifted the golf club again and struck Callie in the crown of the head. The blow seemed to turn Callie into a statue, until she reached up and touched the blood that poured like lava down her face. Lindsay lifted the club and struck her a third time. This time, her lifelong friend and teammate—and the girl who had stolen Blake from her—collapsed in a heap.
CHAPTER 81
Milwaukee, Wisconsin Monday, August 4, 2025
THE MEMORY OF THAT NIGHT WAS STILL HEAVY ON HER MIND ASLINDSAYpulled up to her house. Her training had taught her coping mechanisms and ways to compartmentalize her feelings about that time of her life. In the immediate aftermath, Lindsay had distracted herself by working hard to win Blake back. She gave him a month to grieve and get over the confusion that came with losing the mother of his child. Lindsay waited for the investigation to die down, too. Then, she tried to rekindle what had once been between her and Blake. When Blake rebuffed her efforts, she decided to give him more time.
She visited his apartment late at night during her junior year of college, only to find that he was wholly uninterested in her. She tried again after she graduated and started her business, stupidly believing that Blake would be impressed with her success. Eventually, though, over the years Lindsay understood that no matter how badly she wanted to recapture the magic they had once shared, Blake did not. So, after years of rejection, Lindsay’s impetus morphed from lust to revenge.
She had treated clients over the years who suffered from OLD—obsessive love disorder—and she was not so blind as to miss the telltale symptoms of the disorder in her own life. She knew she was in the throes of the affliction, and decided the only way past it was to find closure. And closure would come only after she delivered justice to Blake Cordis. She thought long and hard about how to do it, settling on the idea that the prepaid cell phone she had kept hidden for years would be the perfect tool.
Lindsay knew the phone was the perfect way to exact her revenge, but still she had never been able to go through with it. Despite her frustration, there was an ember of love for Blake Cordis that remained insufferably glowing. It represented a tiny morsel of hope that perhaps they would someday get back together. That tiny ember had prevented her from pulling the trigger on her plan over the years. But it had finally gone dark when Lindsay learned of Blake’s love affair with Portia Vail.
In one torrid night of alcohol and Valium, Lindsay formulated a plan to abduct Portia Vail and frame Blake for it. The scheme came fully together after Ethan Hall was tapped to reopen Callie’s case. Suddenly, Lindsay knew whom she would give the prepaid Samsung to. And when she started seeing Eugenia Morgan as a client, the pieces of her revenge began to align. The poor woman was suffering from hybristophilia and in love with a convicted cop killer named Francis Bernard. When Lindsay looked into Francis Bernard’s history, she learned that the man’s past was intimately connected to Ethan Hall. It was then that Lindsay’s plan took an unexpected, but utterly perfect, turn.
For years,The Anonymous Clienthad done pro bono work for prison systems around the country, offering psychological care to inmates. When she rooted through the requests waiting for her approval, Lindsay reviewed the list of inmates at the Wisconsin Secure Program Facility seeking mental health exams. On the list was none other than Francis Bernard. Lindsay took the pro bono case, and within a week was sitting face-to-face with the man who had killed Ethan Hall’s father.
Only attorneys and doctors were allowed personal interaction with inmates at the maximum security prison in Boscobel. Lindsay’s first session with Francis Bernard took place in a small conference room rather than at the visitation booth where a pane of glass would have separated them, and where their conversations might have been overheard through the prison’s phone system. In that quaint meeting room, Lindsay had laid out the details of her offer. She knew after a single session that Francis Bernard was desperate for a transfer to a more humane prison, and that he would do anything to be liberated from solitary confinement.
Lindsay informed Francis that for a chance at such a request, he’d need to pass a psychological evaluation, which Lindsay offered to facilitate if he gave her something in return. If Francis agreed to lead Ethan Hall to certain bits of evidence that Lindsay planted—specifically, the prepaid Samsung phone and Portia Vail’s whereabouts, which Francis could use as leverage—then Lindsay would repay Francis by signing off on a psychological evaluation that would spring him from the WSPF and put him on his way to Columbia Correctional Institute.
Lindsay’s plan was so meticulous that she never considered Francis had one of his own.
CHAPTER 82
Milwaukee, Wisconsin Monday, August 4, 2025
LINDSAY PULLED INTO THE GARAGE OF HER HOME LOCATED IN THELower East Side neighborhood. She had purchased the custom-built home the year before, after spending the last many years in the city. She let out a restrained laugh as she parked in the expansive garage that was larger than Blake Cordis’s entire cottage. A home he didn’t even own, but which had been bequeathed to him by the Prescott family in exchange for a lifetime of servitude looking after their stables. It was such a sad existence and was still more than he deserved.
She shut down the engine of her Mercedes and closed the garage door. Despite her excitement, she couldn’t get ahead of herself. There was still much to do, but if her plan had gone according to schedule today, then Ethan Hall should have already found Portia Vail hidden away in the abandoned cabin in Rome. A cursory search would have turned up Blake’s Saratoga 120s cigarettes, which Lindsay had planted when she was there over the weekend. She had taken the package of cigarettes the night she broke into his cottage to reroute the encryption software to the IP address of Blake’s computer. Together with the prepaid phone she had planted in the warehouse, and the photos she had snapped of Portia Vail chained to the bathroom door, it would be enough for the authorities to take Blake into custody.
The final nail, of course, would be leading Ethan Hall to Callie’s body. She had given the coordinates to Francis during their last session, and soon the authorities would find the location not far from North Point Pier. It was there, at an old, abandoned power plant that stood at the water’s edge, where Lindsay had stashed Callie’s body in a 55-gallon barrel before rolling it into the lagoon. An autopsy would reveal the cause of death to be trauma from a Callaway golf club. The same club Lindsay had hidden in the closet of Blake’s cottage.
