TEN MINUTES LATER, BRENNAN WALKED THROUGH THE DOOR as Hunter brewed a pot of coffee in the same French press they had used that morning.
“Jesus, it’s boiling in here.” She shed her coat and was already pulling off her sweater.
“Do you remember how to turn the heat down out here?”
“Yeah.”
“Then turn it down. I’m going to look in on her.”
Hunter turned down the thermostat and cracked a window. Brennan came out of the bedroom, closing the door behind her. They poured cups of coffee and leaned against the kitchen counter.
“What did you guys talk about?” Brennan asked.
“Some stuff.”
“Want to be more specific?”
“She doesn’t…I didn’t understand what she was saying. She was rambling about how she didn’t know.”
“Didn’t know what?”
“I don’t know exactly. It was hot in the room and she was all over the place and, Jesus, how long has she been like that?”
Brennan’s grip on her coffee mug tightened. “Come on, Hunter. She was sick when you saw her…what? Last year?”
“She wasn’t like this.”
“You knew this is where she was going to end up. You left anyway.”
“I had a job to do.”
“So did I. And a marriage I was trying to save.” The lie slid easily off her tongue because she wanted it to be true.
“For Christ’s sake, don’t fucking put that on me.”
“You put her on me, Hunter. Do you have any idea what my life has been like?”
“Are we going to do this, Bren? Now?”
Brennan forced herself to relax her grip and to take a breath. She had to treat her brother like a difficult witness. “Let’s try again. What didn’t she know?”
“Whether he did it.”
Brennan turned to directly face her brother. “Wait. She thinks he did it now?”
“No. I think she thinks he didn’t do it now.”
“She always thought that he didn’t do it.”
They stared at each other.
“Did she ever say that to you?” Hunter asked.
“Yes. No. She didn’t have to say it. I just knew…She ever tell you that he did it?”
“In those words?”
“Any words.”
Hunter tried to hold her gaze, to say she absolutely told him that his father had done it, but he couldn’t think of when she did.
“I need to sit down,” Brennan said. Hunter followed her to the kitchen table. For a moment, they both enjoyed the frigid air pouring in from the open window.
“When she’s gone, it’s just us,” Brennan said.
Hunter sipped his coffee, looking over the lip of the cup at his sister. He never thought that they looked alike. Hunter resembled his father like one street in Midtown might look like any other, although each had completely different buildings. He could never identify a specific feature that matched the pictures of their dad. Brennan resembled their mother overall, yet certain of her features were strikingly reminiscent of their father: the color and texture of her hair, the set of her eyes, her smile. Sitting at the table, though, they mirrored each other, in the way they held their cups, brought them to their lips, and sipped, and the way they each retreated into their thoughts until the two feet between them may as well have been the distance between Battery Park and the Spuyten Duyvil.
“We both drink coffee like him,” Brennan said. She remembered her dad, when they were kids, sitting at a table like they were, lost somewhere inside himself.
“I need something harder than coffee.”
Hunter disappeared into the living room. A minute later, he returned with a bottle of Oban and two rocks glasses. He placed one in front of Brennan. They drank the first glass of scotch in silence.
“So,” Brennan said, after the first sip of her second glass, “is the conclusion that she led us each to believe that she agreed with us?”
Hunter nodded. “Whenever we fought about it, she refused to take sides. I thought she just couldn’t say it because of you.”
“Me, too.” Brennan swirled her scotch. “Why would she do that?”
“And was she saying tonight that she didn’t remember what she actually believed anymore? Is that even possible? About something like that?”
“People can fool themselves into believing some crazy things. I prosecuted guys who came to believe their own lies. At least the foundational ones—like they were good guys or that they had no other options. I suppose that the opposite could be true, right? Convince yourself that you’re uncertain about something.”
Hunter took a substantial swig of the remaining scotch in his glass. “You still believe that he didn’t do it?”
“Absolutely.”
Hunter rolled his eyes. Brennan shook her head. “No. No, you don’t get to do that to me.”
“The only reason you believed that is because she told you he didn’t do it.”
“We just established that she never told either of us anything, so don’t start this fight again. It drove us apart. It’s kept us apart.”
“That’s your fault. You hated the fact that I didn’t believe in the fairy tale you held on to.”
“No. This is on you. You couldn’t get past your anger and resented the fact that I could see the best in him.”
“This was a mistake,” he said, standing up.
“That’s right. Run away. It’s like we’re kids again. You can’t win a fight, so you run.”
Hunter stared down at his sister, cheeks flushed from the heat or the scotch or his anger. Or all of them. He always hated how smug she was. And she could be really fucking smug. She had him trapped. If he stormed off, she’d know she was right. That he was a runner. And even though he was, and he knew he was, he was not going to give her the satisfaction.
“Fuck you. You’re not any better than me.”
Brennan raised her eyebrows. She fully expected him to storm off in a huff like the overgrown brat he had always been, yet he was sitting back down. But it was the last sentence that struck her.
“I never thought I was better than you.”
Hunter shook his head but poured a splash more into their glasses.
“You had the luxury of faith,” he said. “When people threw Dad in
your face, you could just say, ‘He didn’t do it,’ and hold your head up because you knew that he didn’t do it. What could I do? I knew different. There’s no comeback for ‘Your dad’s a murderer’ when you think he did it. What can you say to that when he got away with it?”
“He didn’t get away with it, Hunter. He got charged with someone else’s crime.”
“He never denied it.”
“Are we really going to relitigate this now?”
“No,” Hunter said, holding up a hand to placate her. “But did you ever investigate it, Bren? Try to prove yourself right?”
“When I was a prosecutor? No. Setting aside all of the other issues, it would have been a conflict of interest.”
“Even on your own time? Like in law school or college?”
“No. Why would I? The jury acquitted him. Did you ever look to find evidence that would have convicted him?”
“He never denied it.”
“Except for his not-guilty plea.”
The minute hand moved a few ticks on the wall clock before Hunter broke the silence.
“He didn’t deserve your faith in him.”
“He did. And he deserved yours, too.”
“If you really think he was innocent, you should have done something. Doesn’t the victim—do you even remember her name?” He asked the question like a challenge. He remembered. Did she?
“Don’t be an asshole. Jessica DeSalvo.” She couldn’t remember the first time she’d heard it. When she was a kid, every other Jessica brought her to mind until, over time, the commonness of the name desensitized her to it except for odd moments, like the time two months ago when a barista called the name at a Starbucks and Brennan thought, Jessica was killed, and they blamed my father. “I think about her. She never got justice. Someone went free because they accused our father of that crime.”
“Then you should find the killer.” Hunter said it flippantly. It had once been a sure way to make her storm off when she was a teenager, to sulk in her room at her impotence. Life wasn’t a Nancy Drew book—teenage girls did not solve real-life murder mysteries. But Brennan wasn’t a kid anymore.
“You should help.”
They stared at each other across the table, waiting for the other to blink, to back down. Brennan broke the standoff by pouring more scotch—a conciliation, not a surrender.
“If you’re serious, Hunter, then so am I. Don’t we deserve to know the truth? Finally? Maybe it can give Mom some peace. More importantly, don’t we owe it to Jessica DeSalvo?”
Hunter knew that truth was a currency the dead couldn’t spend. People got killed. What did it matter to them if it was a lover or neighbor or the insurgents or the government or international forces? Hunter looked down at his glass, but there were no answers for his apostasy there.
“If I’m right,” he said, “it means you were wrong your whole life. You going to be able to deal with that?”
“I don’t know. But what about you?”
Hunter shrugged. Facing the thought that he may have been wrong about something so foundational was like trying to imagine being wrong about gravity.
“If I’m right,” Brennan continued, “someone got away with her murder. You said it yourself, we should try.”
Hunter shook his head. “This is a bad idea on so many levels. First, you and me do not work. We never worked. We work best when we’re on different continents. Second, you’ll have an agenda. You can’t go into something like this thinking you know the answer. You’ll bend the facts to fit your theory.”
“I won’t. But even if I did, you’ll be there keeping me honest, right? Bending the facts to fit the story you want to write?”
“I don’t bend facts.”
“Neither do I when I investigate things.” She was precise without thinking about it. A careful listener would have realized she was vulnerable to cross-examination on the specificity of her answer. Well, when do you bend the facts? Other than with your family? She thought of the last trial with Sean. She’d bent no facts; she’d made arguments. She hated that she made those distinctions.
“It wouldn’t be ethical—in either of our professions—to cover our own dad’s case. So what’s the point?”
“The truth is the point. Isn’t that why we both grew up to do what we did? Because we believed that the truth was something that deserved to be found?”
She spoke of truth like it was a religion, as if her faith in it excused her hypocrisy. Brennan was Catholic in that way—she believed in truth, but didn’t practice it very well personally.
“That belief drove us apart, too. You think it’s going to be different now?”
Brennan didn’t respond.
“And what if you’re right, Bren, and we find the murderer?”
“Turn ’em in? Who knows what we’ll find?”
“And if I’m right, then what?”
“For a start, I’ll go to Jessica’s grave to lay some flowers and apologize. Take time and figure out if there’s a way to make up for what he did.” He supposed she meant it, but it came off like she was telling him she’d pay him a trillion dollars if he flapped his arms and flew himself to Europe. She didn’t believe it was possible.
Hunter took a long sip from his glass. “Do you even have time for this?”
“I’ll find it,” she said. “And I know you have time.”
Hunter snapped his mouth shut. He’d been about to say “I’m busy” without thinking. He’d always taken the opposite position from his sister, because if she was wrong about this one thing, then she was wrong about everything. But that approach hadn’t left him anywhere that was ever the right place. “Fine. I just don’t see what there is for us to do. The police. The DA’s office. Everyone at the time thought it was him.”
Brennan almost said that their mother didn’t think that he did it, but she was no longer certain. She said, “People make mistakes.”
“If we’re going to do this, Bren, you have to promise me you’ll come to it with an open mind.”
“If you do, too.”
Hunter nodded.
“Great. Where do we start?”