A gunshot on the lake sounds like the sky is cracking open, shattering your eardrums and swallowing up every other sound, ripping through your bones like a bullet.
Only it wasn’t my bone the bullet ripped through. It was Micah’s, and by his own hand.
Paul was on me in a millisecond. “Don’t look,” he shouted, covering my eyes, but he was too late. I already saw the way Micah’s limbs were splayed every which direction on the dock, how his eyes were open but the top of his head was a mush of hair and meat and white bone. I saw how Paul sank to his knees and vomited onto the lawn, how Jax’s body seemed to sway with the patch of grass he stood before. I saw it all.
And then the hill came alive with light and sound, with men shouting and waving guns and handcuffs, and I saw the look on Paul’s face when Sam read him his rights. It was like the clouds cleared and God shone a spotlight on all those things I’d missed before. That my husband was old. That he was full of secrets. That I was better off before he stepped up to my counter at the gas station, when I was so eager to claw myself out of that muddy trailer park, I didn’t realize I was trading one set of problems for another. Pretty things for a man still in love with his first wife. No, Paul didn’t kill Katherine, but his secrets are the reason she’s dead, and in my heart that feels unforgivable. There was a hint of truth to all those whispers in town. I should have listened.
“Paul told me he met Sienna the day before she died,” Sam says, watching me from the other side of the kitchen counter. Behind him, on the other side of the glass, the lake is high wattage in the early-morning sunshine. A glorious morning, one that makes me long for sunglasses.
Chet steps up beside me, but neither of us say a word.
Sam’s gaze sits steady on mine. “I just think it’s weird, don’t you? That Paul forgot to mention it the first time I asked him, I mean. He claims you found him talking to her in town, but that there’s no way you would have recognized her. Something about the distance or the angle, I don’t know which, and before you say anything, don’t. This is where you’re supposed to nod your head and agree.”
I don’t disagree, but I don’t nod, either.
Sam sighs, pushing at his eyes with a thumb and forefinger. He’s still in the same clothes he was in last night, a flannel shirt and faded jeans as if he got the call as he was settling down to dinner. I’d say he slept in them, but the hollowed-out shadows under his eyes tell me he got about as much sleep as I did, which was none. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the dark stain on Micah’s dock. I smelled the blood and gunpowder and fear, the way bone and brain drizzled down like rain. It was so much easier to stay awake.
“Charlie, what do you say we cut the crap? I’ve got confessions on record from both Jax and Paul that make them accessories to manslaughter on top of a heaping pile of other charges. They’re going to prison, probably not as long as I’d like them to, but they’re going.”
“Is this the part where you say I told you so?”
“No. This is the part where I say if there’s anything you’re holding back on, then you should tell it to an attorney. As soon as we’re done searching Micah’s house, we’re coming here next.”
For some reason, his words rile me up, and my shoulders hike to my ears. “Why would I need an attorney when all of this is news to me? I don’t have anything to hide. I didn’t know about Bobby, about Katherine, about any of it. I learned all these things last night, like everybody else in this room. But if you’re looking for someone to blame, you may want to check with Chief Hunt and Diana, because from everything I heard, I’m guessing they knew all along.”
Sam runs it down for us, how Paul’s and Jax’s statements have opened the floodgates. How our old friends and neighbors from the trailer park are stepping forward one by one, claiming their eyewitness accounts were ignored or buried. How a power-hungry Chief Hunt actively participated in the cover-up, then twenty years later did it again, when Sienna’s investigation connected his son to Bobby’s death.
“We’re searching Chief’s house. Micah’s, too. If something’s there, we’ll find it.”
“No, you won’t. Micah told me Sienna’s things were somewhere no one will ever know to look. The bottom of the lake, probably.”
“Micah wasn’t the only one with motive and opportunity. So far, we haven’t found one person who can verify your husband’s alibi.”
Chet leans onto the countertop with both elbows. “Dude, you can’t be serious. Jax was wearing her scarf.”
Sam swipes a hand down his face, his fingers digging into his temples. “Jax was at his sister Pamela’s house the night Sienna was murdered. He tends to do that when the weather turns nasty, crashes at her place, then takes off as soon as the sun’s up. She’s already given a statement, and I believe her. The Pentecostals are pretty solid in their belief that lying is a sin.”
And Pamela lives all the way on the other side of the lake. A good twelve miles from the marina, maybe more. Too far for Jax to hike back and forth in one night.
Which brings us back to where we began: Micah or Paul. Both have motive. Both insist they didn’t touch Sienna, but an innocent man denying his guilt would use the same words as a guilty man. Their arguments would sound the same.
Exhaustion washes over me, dragging down on my skin and bones, turning my thoughts sluggish. How did they do it? How did they keep a secret that monumental for twenty long years, feeling it heavy over your head all day every single day? Knowing that all it would take was one tiny nudge for the whole thing to come tumbling down, cracking open for all to see.
“And Diana?” I say. “How much did she know?”
“Paul and Jax are pretty tight-lipped whenever her name comes up. They’re very protective of her.”
Chet and I share a look. Of course they are. She’s been guarding their secret like a pit bull all these years. I’m sure as far as they’re concerned, silence is her reward.
Sam gathers up his things, his keys and notebook and cell, and Chet walks him out.
I sink onto a stool and think about what I’m going to do, now that the bottom is blown out of this marriage, now that I don’t have a job, a place to live, a bank account overflowing with cash. Maybe Paul didn’t kill a person. He didn’t shoot a bullet through another man’s heart or hold a woman under water until her breath ran out, but he still kept quiet about something so important, so momentous that for me there’s no way back. There’s no reset button on this thing.
“So, I talked to Tim McAllister earlier,” Chet says, stepping back into the kitchen. “His grandma’s place at Shady Grove is up for rent now that she’s moved down to Florida, and he’s giving us the first look. Fully furnished, and the price is right.”
“That’s because it’s in Shady Grove.”
A pretty name for a hideous trailer park off Highway 73. Not so much a grove as it is a muddy clearing lined with a few dozen trailers, all of them run-down and propped up on grubby cinder blocks. They surround a cluster of cracked picnic tables and a rusty swing set, the seats and metal chains long gone. Any rental contract should come with a free tetanus shot.
“I’ll take the couch, and I promise not to hog the bathroom or leave my crap all over the place.”
Call me thickheaded, but that’s when the realization hits. This move is for me, too. I’m moving from this place to a trailer. I’m ending up right where I began with a baby in tow.
Chet reads the look on my face, and his voice softens. “It’s only for a little while. We’ll be out of there by the time the baby comes. I swear.”
“How?”
He shrugs. “We’ll figure out a way. We always do.”
He’s right, even though a real McCreedy would be packing up all the valuables right now. She’d swipe the silver, stuff the cash from the safe in a bag and take off into the wind. She’d put this ridiculous sham of a marriage in her past, bail on this accidental pregnancy. If I were anything like my mother, I’d be long gone by now.
But I’m not like her, which is why I’m leaving here with what I walked in with all those months ago. Two pairs of threadbare Levi’s, five polyester sweaters, some underwear and T-shirts and my most comfortable pajamas, stuffed into a Hefty bag by the front door. As far as I’m concerned, this part of my life is like Vegas: what happened here stays here, hanging from velvet hangers upstairs in the closet.
All but one tiny memento, a little seed sprouting in my belly.
I shimmy the diamond off my finger, place it on the counter next to the sink and turn to Chet. “Okay. I’m ready.”