GREG SETTLED BESIDE JANELLE on the sand after driving Ann and Paul back to the airfield. “A tough day.”
“Another one of them,” she agreed, using a piece of driftwood to drag over more sand for the sandcastle she was building. It now had walls and towers and a bridge. He nudged one tower into a more uniform shape, and Janelle stuck a twig atop it. She gave him a brief glance. “Has anyone ever considered that it might have been Andrew who took my pocketknife out of my purse?”
Greg studied her face. “Go on.”
“He would use that pocketknife, since it was handy for all kinds of guy things—cutting cord, tightening screws, stripping twigs—it’s why I carried something that bulky around in my purse. It wasn’t for Tanya. I think Andrew took it out of my purse for something he was doing and then put it in his pocket. Then we have a fight, he’s pacing the beach, and like any guy he shoves his hands in his pockets, realizes he’s got the pocketknife, pulls it out, opens the blade, and starts flipping it into the sand, at pieces of driftwood—just to have something tangible in his hand as he paces. He still has the knife in his hand when he starts up those stairs.
“It’s late. He’s distracted. The stairs are damp, and he’s in a hurry. He’s moving too fast and catches his foot on a tread, trips and tumbles all the way down. With the knife in his hand, somehow he stabs himself by accident. The knife ends up buried under brush as it flips away.
“Tanya finds it, and it’s like the video. She doesn’t think I had anything to do with Andrew’s death, so the only thing she can really do to help me is to not give the cops evidence that makes me look guilty. So she doesn’t say there’s video of the fight. She doesn’t say she found my pocketknife and there’s dried blood on it. She’s a friend. Tanya tosses the knife in a drawer, the camera with its tape in a cabinet. She gives me a chance at the trial, and a chance to win an appeal. Her testimony hurt me, but she was trying her best to answer the questions without a lie and couldn’t avoid some of what she said when she got asked a direct question. She told what she understood to be the truth of the matter, what Andrew or I had said to her.”
Greg had been a doctor too many years to get surprised at what had now surfaced in Janelle’s thoughts. “You think it was an accident?”
“You get stabbed with a pink pocketknife, a wimpy blade—no self-respecting robber carries that knife. So I accept Ann’s conclusion it’s not a robbery. I know it wasn’t me. That video—Tanya was horrified with the way he broke up with me, was reaming him out, and that was authentic outrage in my friend’s voice. Tanya didn’t do this. It wasn’t me, a robber, or Tanya. So who’s left? Andrew. He had an accident. He fell, stabbed himself, and he died.”
Greg considered that statement. “You could probably convince me. I’ve flipped a knife more than a few times myself at driftwood. But what’s left is someone took his wallet and phone.”
“A passerby finds a dead man on a beach, takes his wallet and phone, and leaves it to someone else to report the body.” She said it as a casual, verbal shrug, yet he knew how deep those words went because it was Andrew.
“You should have mentioned this possibility during the trial.”
“It never dawned on me before today.” Janelle sighed and dug in to strengthen her sandcastle’s bridge. “The thing is, we’re never going to know the truth.”
He let the silence linger for a long time. “You okay?”
“I will be. After I sit here for about a zillion nights watching the stars come out as the sunset fades.”
He smiled at her word choice. “My beach is your beach.”
“Thanks. I’m going to stick around for a few months, if it’s all right with you. I’m going to need to talk with you.”
He was glad to hear she would stay and let him help. “You spent six years in prison because either your best friend framed you or Andrew had an accident, which the cops misread as murder. We’ll be unpacking this one for a while,” he agreed.
She nodded.
He was relieved the day was ending with such a matter-of-fact tone. “You’ll get through this, Janelle. And while we do that work, you can keep me well supplied in pies—cherry, apple, and that coconut one was particularly good. Whatever suits your baking mood.”
“I’m thinking something dark suits this day, like a good chocolate pie with whipped-cream clouds.”
“In that case I should mention I brought ‘good chocolate’ back with me from New York.”
“You did?”
“I figured there would be a day it was desperately needed.”
Greg reached for a conclusion for both of them. “Tanya is going to show her true colors with time. A dozen years or so from now, you and Ann will probably know which one of you was right. I predict you two will be friends at least that long.”
Janelle smiled. “I hope so. I owe her, Greg. I didn’t kill Andrew, but the only person who believed that until Ann came along was God.”
“God tends to be enough,” he replied, thinking back to his time in Pakistan. “You okay?”
“Exhausted, but okay. I’ll sleep better tonight than I have, as the past is no longer a mystery. It’s one of two things, and I can live with that. I’m ready to close this chapter and move on.”
“It gets smoother from here. There’s a grief wave still to come, but it will pass.”
“A grief wave—you’ve got a weeping woman ahead of you. That must be very unappealing.”
“A good doctor doesn’t mind tears,” he reassured. “Some people grieve by crying, while others experience a period of melancholy when life loses its color. Sometimes the grief turns into creative expression, like making art that memorializes the people of the past. Yours will find its own rhythm, I’m sure.”
“In all of this I’ve been avoiding saying I truly loved Andrew, and he’s gone.”
“I’ve noticed.”
“The wrong way to handle it?”
He shook his head. “The deepest loss needs its own space, and for you, Andrew is probably the last and deepest grief you will carry. He was the future you wanted, and instead he’s lost forever. You can’t recover him. Keeping a mental distance has been a way to talk about him with Ann without shattering. That will shift now, and you’ll start to let him go.”
“Like your wedding picture on the wall. What you miss from your past. But you’ve moved on.”
“Like that,” Greg agreed. He had learned this island gave people time to find their balance, space to move on. It had offered him that too, and it would do the same for Janelle.
Marco joined them, feet wet from dancing in the waves, threatening the sand creation she’d built. She hugged him with a laugh. “I’d like to watch the last movie on my top-ten list, then call it a night. Tomorrow the sun comes up on another day of freedom. For everything else this has been, nothing takes the pleasure away from the moment when the early-morning sun touches my pillow.”
Greg obligingly rose and offered his hand. “Let’s go do exactly that.”