Now
Lorelei said nothing when Emma appeared on her doorstep, only held the door open and gave Gabriel a look that could have been a whole conversation. Emma could only guess that Lorelei wasn’t thrilled to have her here, to have Gabriel involved in her drama, but she’d made up the guest room already, and while Emma sat in the back garden, the wind catching at her hair, she brought out a cup of coffee.
Emma sat with her hands wrapped around the mug, staring at the tumble of green and bright flowers.
Emma didn’t believe in luck or fate. But she understood, deep within her heart, that there were people who could be a curse on those around them. Their rot infected others and it spread and spread, it got into the blood, the marrow, the lungs.
Nathan was a good man, she told herself. His flaws were modest ones, suited to a modest life. He had grown up loved by two middle-class parents and gone to school and gotten good grades and a decent job, and if the last few years had been hard, had given those small flaws the chance to gain purchase, surely it was because of the dark seam at the center of her she had worked so hard to cover over. But it was like foul water seeping through layer after layer of wallpaper, revealing the shape of the damage.
If it weren’t for her, she was certain he would still be alive.
“Emma.” She didn’t startle at Gabriel’s voice as he stepped out onto the back porch. “Your coffee’s getting cold.”
She hadn’t had a single sip. She lifted it to her lips. It was lukewarm and bitter. “JJ is right, you know. Me being here—it’s going to cause you trouble.”
“I’m not worried,” Gabriel says. “I was at a jobsite most of the night. Cameras everywhere.”
“Jobsite?” Emma echoed. “You know, I don’t even know what it is you do.”
“Carpentry,” he told her, leaning against the doorframe. “I’m leading a renovation for this historic B and B. We had some delays with the supply chain issues, so I was up there with one of my guys trying to finish in time for their grand opening. The owner’s paranoid about theft, so she records everything.”
Gabriel was a carpenter. That felt right, somehow. She couldn’t imagine him cooped up in an office doing IT work.
“Emma. Why didn’t you want to go with Juliette? What’s going on between you?” Gabriel asked.
Emma took another sip. “I don’t know that woman. I don’t know if I even knew Juliette, but this is someone else entirely,” Emma said. Her words sounded pockmarked, pitted by the acid that seemed to always be burning away at her throat. “After my parents died, everyone I knew disappeared. They wouldn’t talk to me. Didn’t want anything to do with me, really. I figured if everyone hated me that much, they couldn’t all be wrong. I decided I had to start over. Take myself apart and build someone new. Someone who had nothing in common with the old Emma Palmer. I made myself into a stranger and I found someone who could love her, but I couldn’t ever let him find out who I was. And then he did, and he died.”
“I’m sorry. Emma. I should have talked to you,” Gabriel said.
“You had every reason to hate me,” she replied. The sun, angled low among the trees, burned her eyes, half blinding her. She didn’t look away. There was nothing she wanted to see.
“It wasn’t entirely your fault,” he said, and his voice cracked. “That night, when I left? I drove to your house.” Now she did startle, looking at him with wide eyes. He rocked his weight back on his heels.
“Why?” she asked, her voice a whisper.
“You showed up on my porch with a black eye. Didn’t take much to figure out who’d given it to you,” Gabriel said. “And I knew it wasn’t the first time. I was angry. I went there to—I don’t know. I parked across the street. Tried to talk myself into going up to the door, tried to talk myself out of it. In the end I guess I came to my senses. I left. Came out here to clear my head.”
“But you didn’t do anything,” she said.
He shook his head. “The thing is, someone saw me. They gave a description. A shitty one, but close enough. It wasn’t just the alibi that made them fixate on me. It wasn’t just your fault. It was my own terrible judgment.”
“Why would you do that?” Emma demanded.
“Because I cared about you. I was angry,” he said. “And I was young and hotheaded and I wanted to be a hero.”
“You cared about me,” she repeated.
“Of course I did,” he said.
She set her coffee cup down on the small metal table beside her, the movement slow to give her time to think. “You put up with me,” Emma said. “I followed you around like an annoying little sister and you were nice enough not to tell me to get lost.”
“It wasn’t like that,” Gabriel replied. “You know it wasn’t. I liked having you around. I liked talking to you, hearing about your art. You were never imposing. And I never spent time with you because I felt sorry for you.”
She made a noise in the back of her throat. “I had such a crush on you.”
He laughed a little, softly, kindly. “I know.”
“It wasn’t exactly subtle. I hope it wasn’t too awkward,” she said.
“No. I mean, you were too young for me, obviously,” he said, and a half smile hooked the corner of his mouth. “But if you’d stuck around another few years? I don’t know. But I definitely never thought of you as a sister. I’m sorry I didn’t get in touch after, Emma. I’m sorry you were alone. But it wasn’t because no one cared about you.”
She’d wanted to hear those words for so long, but hearing them now, she struggled to feel anything at all.
A bird, small and brown, lit on the lawn in front of them, and both of them watched it, so they wouldn’t have to look at each other. Its head twitched, examining them with one eye and then the other. Apparently unimpressed, it flitted away again.
“I’m sorry. It’s a shitty time to be bringing this up,” Gabriel said. “I don’t mean anything by it. Your husband just died. I’m not trying to suggest anything, I’m just—”
“I know,” she said. “Please, God, don’t go away just because we liked each other over a decade ago. You’re the only friend I have out here. Or at all.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Gabriel said.
She wiped tears from her eyes with her thumb. “We weren’t happy, you know. I don’t think we had been for a long time. I tried to stay the person he married, but she was always a lie. And I think he could tell.”
Gabriel didn’t respond; she supposed there wasn’t a way to respond to that.
“Gabriel, I need to ask you something,” she said. She sat forward, elbows braced on her knees. She didn’t know what to do with the weight of loss inside her. But she could get answers. She could do something. “Maybe it’s nothing—maybe it’s irrelevant. But your dad, when he got fired. Can you remember anything else about what he thought was going on there?”
“I wouldn’t put much stock in anything he said,” Gabriel replied. He put his hands in his pockets, squinting off into the distance. “Dad was a useless drunk before he got fired. He’d been through a half-dozen jobs in half as many years. He’d always claim he was getting his act together and then fall apart again. When your dad fired him, he kept insisting he hadn’t stolen anything. That your dad was the one stealing. Nana believed him.”
“You don’t?”
“Addicts have been known to lie,” Gabriel said. His weight shifted like he wanted to pace. “He was borderline functional before that. After, he went off the deep end. Kept saying he was going to find a way to make your dad pay for humiliating him, but the only people he ever made suffer were his family.”
“And you don’t have any idea where he is now,” Emma said.
He was silent a moment. “Emma, Nana says that he came back right before … right when your parents died. Then he took off for good.”
“What are you saying?” Emma asked.
He rubbed his shoulder with his opposite hand. “He was never violent. But I’d never seen him as angry as he was at your dad. What if…” He didn’t finish the thought.
“What if he killed them,” Emma said. The thought hadn’t crossed her mind, but she couldn’t deny it fit. A grudge. A disappearance. If Kenneth Mahoney had come to the house demanding some kind of justice, and things got out of hand … But her father had been shot in the back of the head. No demands. Just an ambush.
“It would explain why he never came back,” Gabriel said, and she made a noise of consideration, noncommittal.
Her phone was ringing in her bag, and she pulled it out to check the ID. Chris. “It’s my lawyer,” she said. “I have to—”
“Yeah,” Gabriel said, bobbing his head. “I’ll be inside if you need anything.”
Gabriel ducked inside, and Emma caught the call right before it got kicked to voice mail.
“Chris,” she said.
“Emma. I’m in town,” Chris said. “Where are you?”
“Lorelei Mahoney’s place,” Emma said.
“You mean you’re with Gabriel,” Chris replied, and heaved a sigh. “I can be there in fifteen minutes. Try not to get into any more trouble before I get there, will you?”
“I’ll do my best,” Emma promised, but her voice sounded weak. “Chris, I’m really worried.” Tell me everything’s going to be okay, she thought.
“You should be,” he said instead, and hung up the phone.
He arrived exactly fifteen minutes later. Christopher Best was Black, nearly six foot four, and broad in the shoulders, the hair at his temples graying and a pair of glasses giving him a professorial air. He had a predilection for fine suits and good brandy, and was the sort of man who read Ulysses for fun. What he called his “intellectual blossoming” had occurred after high school, which explained how he, Randolph Palmer, and Rick Hadley had ended up friends. Back then he’d been primarily concerned with football, beer, and girls—shared interests among the three. He’d left Arden Hills while the other two stayed, changed when they’d stagnated, but he’d maintained a friendly relationship with his high school buddies as an adult. Up until he became Emma’s lawyer.
Chris wasn’t a hugger. Or at least, not with her. She gave him a close-lipped smile as she opened the door, then stepped aside to let him pass. It might have come across as cold, given all that they had been through together, but Emma had come to appreciate the emotional distance. She had been so desperate for anyone to show her love back then that if he had offered her tenderness, she would have dissolved into it. She would have clung to him and never let go. But he was not her parent. Whatever warmth existed between them, there was also a careful remove.
They sat together in the kitchen, Lorelei and Gabriel having vacated to give them some privacy. Emma picked nervously at a loose thread on her jeans as Chris settled into his chair.
“What have you gotten yourself into?” he asked her.
“You tell me,” Emma replied. “You’ve talked to the police?”
“I’ve talked to a number of people,” Chris said. “First order of business, the Arden Hills Police are not investigating this case. The State Police will be stepping in.”
“How did you manage that?” Emma asked.
“I pointed out to them the personal history between you and the two senior officers, not to mention the ongoing harassment the department’s second-in-command has engaged in for years. The misconduct investigation a few years ago helped my case.”
“An investigation? Of Hadley?” Emma guessed.
“Ellis,” he corrected. “Abuse of civil asset forfeiture to fund the department. Mismanagement of city funds. Things missing from lockup that he claimed were a result of bad recordkeeping. The last decade hasn’t been kind to Ellis. Word is he’s holding on to his job here by a thread. Smart money would be on him retiring soon.”
“And then Hadley’s in charge? Not exactly an improvement,” Emma said.
Chris’s expression was regretful. She forgot sometimes that they’d been friends once. All the way up until Best became her lawyer. With that, he’d made himself Rick Hadley’s enemy.
“He was your friend, too,” she remembered Hadley shouting at him.
“That’s why I’m here. Looking after his family,” Best had answered.
“She’s a bad seed. He knew it. She’s the reason he’s dead.”
Of all the people who had asked her questions about that night, Best was the only one she had ever thought believed that she was innocent. And the strange thing was, he was the only one it didn’t matter to. He would have done everything the same either way. He would have done his job.
“The detectives are eager to get a statement from you,” Chris said in a tone that suggested this was entirely the detectives’ problem, not his.
“I was pretty out of it when I talked to Hadley before,” Emma acknowledged with a convulsive nod.
Chris raised an eyebrow. “You shouldn’t have talked to them at all. You know better.”
“I wasn’t thinking clearly.” She dropped her eyes to the floor.
“Good thing I’m here to do your thinking for you now,” Chris said, only a little bit joking. He reached into the briefcase on the floor beside him and took out a pen and a legal pad. “Now. You are going to tell me every goddamn thing that led up to your husband’s death. Not just the relevant things or the things you want me to hear, all of them. Understand?”
She nodded mutely. “Where do I start?”
“I think you have a better handle on that than I do,” he said. He clicked the end of the pen. She wetted her lips.
She began with the house, the lost job, the move. She told him about the flaming shit bag and the fireworks, the kids throwing rocks, the arguments and the almost-arguments. She found herself skipping forward and back, filling things in, but he never interrupted, just took quick little notes as she went along. Every once in a while he asked a clarifying question, and it always set her stammering. When she got to the carriage house—the body—she faltered.
“You pretty much know the rest,” she said.
He nodded slowly. “I believe so. Now, Emma—do you or Nathan own a gun?”
“Just Dad’s,” she said. “He got them out of storage. They were in the gun case.”
“All of them?” he asked, glancing at her over his glasses as he scribbled notes.
“I think so.” She chewed her lip. “Do you … do you think that what happened back then is relevant?” she asked.
“Why would it be?” Chris asked.
“It just seems like a massive coincidence otherwise, doesn’t it? I come back here and start asking questions, and suddenly my husband is dead,” Emma said.
“I think that the more distant from your past this current murder is, the better for you,” Chris said.
“In other words, I shouldn’t talk to the cops about that idea,” Emma said.
“I wouldn’t advise it.”
Emma fidgeted, rubbing her thumb over the opposite palm in a repetitive gesture. “The thing is, I’ve been talking to some people. People that think Dad was involved in some dangerous things. Illegal things.”
“Your mother’s suspicions aside, I never saw any proof of wrongdoing,” Chris said. She was silent. For all that he’d helped her back then, she’d never felt like she could tell him how she’d really felt about her father. As far as he was concerned, the narrative the police painted about a girl who hated her parents was a total fiction. Randolph Palmer had been his friend. “Who have you been talking to, exactly?”
“Logan Ellis,” Emma said. “He told me that he used to sell prescription pills to Mom. And that Dad was using the company as a front for smuggling.”
“Logan Ellis is a waste of oxygen who sold pills to middle schoolers,” Chris said, his expression dark. “I wouldn’t believe a word he says.”
“But is there any chance it’s true?” Emma asked. “If it was, couldn’t that have something to do with why they died?”
Chris clicked the pen to retract the point and set it on the legal pad, then folded his hands. “We aren’t trying to solve your parents’ murders. We’re not trying to solve any murder. We are trying to insulate you from this investigation.” He let out a sigh. Rubbed the spot between his brows. “I’m sorry. After everything you’ve been through, you shouldn’t have to endure this. And it’s going to be hard. Very hard.”
“Does that mean you believe me, at least?” Emma asked, hating the tremor in her voice, the way she couldn’t quite look at him.
“I’ve always believed you,” he told her.
“I haven’t always told you the truth,” she said.
“You told me the important thing. That you didn’t do it,” Chris said. The chair creaked as he adjusted his weight. “And this time?”
“It wasn’t me,” Emma told him. There was no real inflection to her voice, no strength. Just the words offered plainly, without performance.
“I’m going to do everything I can,” he promised. She could see in his eyes that he didn’t think it would be enough. “But, Emma, to protect you, I need to know what I’m protecting you from. Are you sure that you’ve told me everything?”
“I loved my husband,” Emma said quietly. Her hands were limp on her lap.
“I don’t recall questioning that,” Chris replied.
“But people will. They’re going to look at me and try to judge my grief. Whether I’m acting like a widow should. But it doesn’t matter what you do. If you cry, they call them crocodile tears. If you ever laugh, you’re a psychopath; if you never laugh, you’re, wait for it, probably a psychopath. If you smile, you’re remorseless, and if you don’t, you’re cold and unlikable.”
“I wish I could tell you that you’re wrong. But then, you’ve been through this before.”
“Maybe I’m cursed,” she suggested.
“Entirely possible,” he told her, surprising her into a small, mirthless laugh. He settled back in his chair. “The police want to bring you in to ask you some questions. You do not have to go; you aren’t being arrested. At least, not yet.”
“I should seem like I’m cooperating, shouldn’t I?” Emma asked. This time, she didn’t need to lie or spin a story. She hadn’t done anything. She wasn’t trying to hide anything.
“It’s your choice, but I’d advise against it, at least until we know more about what we’re looking at here, and whether they’re looking at you,” Chris said.
“I’ll go. Then we’ll know what it is they want to ask, right?” Maybe they’d found some evidence, something they would share. Right now, there was nothing for her to hold on to, just endless whirling questions in her mind.
“It’s your choice,” he said again. “But I need to know that there isn’t anything they’re going to surprise me with in there. You’re sure you’ve told me everything?”
He could see it on her face, she thought. Yes, there was one last thing. Something that shouldn’t have ever mattered. That should have been allowed to fade, unremarked.
“There is one thing you should know.”