“But it’s not your fault.” Morgan lowered his defenses and walked toward him, stopping only a few feet away. He could feel this man’s pain, understood what it’d taken to confess such a story. He only felt sympathy. “Things happen. It sucks, but that’s the truth of it all. My cousin died, and I hate that, but at some point I have to move on. You can do that too. It’s not exclusive to me.”
Arthur wept. “That’s not even the worst part.”
“Then tell me.”
“That weekend away… it was to the same place I’d been trying to book for us.”
Morgan nodded slowly, adopting his most sympathetic tone. He’d caught his breath again now, and that was just as well—he needed to maintain as much control over his body as possible, because if this man jumped, he had to be ready to pounce. To try to catch him. “So your last memory of Clara was that she did a nice thing for you?”
“What?”
“I mean, you made it through all the fighting and came out the other side. All those times she told you not to book it—all those times she said she didn’t want to go—she was just postponing until she could take you there for your birthday. That doesn’t sound like a bad marriage to me. That sounds like a wife who loved you, and she wanted to prove she’d do anything to make it work. If I were you, I’d cherish that memory of her, not the daunting one that detailed her final moments.”
While neither said a word, the police caught up to a far side of the rocky gap. They must have recognized Morgan’s hard glare, as they stopped where they were and watched. Morgan was about ready to burst with anger at whichever one had shot at Arthur, but he could address that later. Right now, he had to talk a man down from a ledge.
“I loved her,” Arthur said.
“Yeah, I bet.” Morgan took one small step closer, reaching out his hand. “You don’t have to be alone in all this. I’m here for you. If you need a friend, I’ll be right there beside you helping you work through it all.”
Arthur looked at him skeptically. “Why are you helping me?”
“Because there’s light at the end of the tunnel. Your life isn’t over just yet.”
“But I’ve done some terrible things.”
Morgan shook his head. “That doesn’t matter right now. You just need to step this way a little bit, and we can figure everything out from there.”
He held his breath while anxiety clawed at his skin. He wondered if he would follow through on his promise to be there for the man who’d killed Dusty. Did he really have it in him to forgive and forget? It wasn’t likely, but he would probably try. In spite of everything he’d done, Arthur St. John was little more than a man in excruciating pain. It’d driven him to do things he clearly wasn’t proud of, but that didn’t mean he had to die. After all, he’d been a normal man once, just like Morgan. Just like Dusty.
Finally, Arthur shook his head.
“There’s no undoing this,” he said. “I just want to be with her.”
It happened in a flash. Before Morgan could react, Arthur spun on his heel and threw himself off the ledge. He vanished from sight at once, while Morgan stood frozen still. He heard a short scream. It ended with a cracking sound, and that was the end. It was as fast and as simple as that; one minute he was there, and the next he wasn’t.
Morgan looked out across the drop, staring at some boys shooting hoops in their backyard. He was glad those kids hadn’t heard the scream—they were too young to see what Morgan had just seen, and it’d be even harder for them to recover than it would be for him.
Speaking of which, he wasn’t even sure how to pick himself up from this. All he could do was let the shock wash over him while he continued to stare, an awful silence filling the hollow clearing of the woods, where Arthur St. John had killed himself, ending the grisly project that Morgan was never going to forget.