Exhaustion washed over me as I stood in the garage thirty minutes later, staring at the space where we’d wrapped Harris Mickler’s body just yesterday. The concrete floor was wet and smelled faintly of bleach, the bay door left open to the afternoon sunshine to dry it. Vero must have hosed it out while I was gone. The little pink trowel had been washed and dried, returned to its usual place on the pegboard. Harris Mickler’s personal possessions had been wiped clean and locked in his car at The Lush. Steven’s shovel was back in his shed. And I’d just burned through twenty dollars in quarters vacuuming every trace of Harris Mickler from my minivan. I’d done everything I could think of to cover our tracks, but I couldn’t shake the feeling I was missing something.
Guilt. This gnawing, nagging feeling that kept pulling me back to the garage had to be guilt. And it would probably follow me around for the rest of my life.
A flutter caught my attention across the street, the subtle shift of Mrs. Haggerty’s kitchen curtain falling shut. I strode to the garage door, stretching up on my tiptoes to drag it down with both hands. It slammed closed, rattling the garage.
Stupid. I’d been so stupid. I sank down on the short wooden step to the kitchen as my eyes adjusted to the dark, all the what-ifs of last night crashing down around me, as heavy and jarring as that damn garage door.
What if I had never called Patricia Mickler?… What if I’d never borrowed Theresa’s dress and gone to that stupid bar?… What if I’d never stuffed Harris in my van?… What if I’d never driven him here, to my own freaking home?… What if I hadn’t left the engine running after I closed my gara—
My back stiffened, one chilled muscle at a time. As I lifted my head, my focus jumped from the van to the garage door. The details of the night before were still fuzzy in my mind, blurred by champagne and panic, as if someone had taken an eraser to the edges, but I remembered … I remembered pulling into the driveway. Remembered clicking the remote on the visor and waiting for the door to grind open. The bright cone of the van’s headlights had illuminated the pegboard and that little pink trowel, and I distinctly remembered getting out of the van and squeezing between the workbench and the bumper, eyes narrowed against the glare as I’d raced into the house. The kitchen had been dark. Quiet except for the hum of the engine through the wall as I’d slid down it and made that call to my sister … Those details in my memory were all vivid and clear.
It’s what I didn’t remember that stuck in my throat now.
I didn’t remember tapping the button on the wall as I entered the kitchen. Or the mechanical grinding sound of the garage door lowering to the floor …
I hadn’t shut the garage.
I had left the van running. But I hadn’t shut the garage.
I stood up fast, flipping the light switch on the wall. The single bulb in the center of the ceiling washed the concrete floor in dim yellow light. I stood under it, staring up at the motor that mechanized the door. My eyes climbed the dangling red emergency cord, pausing on the pulley that raised and lowered the door. The pulley was disengaged from the belt. That explained why the motor had run when Vero pushed the button on the wall, but the door wouldn’t budge—the door wasn’t connected to it.
But that didn’t make sense.
The opener had been working when I got home from the bar. I’d pressed the remote on my visor, the door had opened itself, and I’d pulled into the garage. Yet, just twenty minutes later, when I’d come out of the house, Harris was dead and the garage door was disengaged from the motor. It was shut—though I was certain I hadn’t shut it.
But how?
I stared up at the red cord dangling above my head.
Pulling the emergency release cord was the only way to disengage the belt and free the door from the motor—the only way to manually open or close the door. Which meant someone must have pulled the cord and shut the door while I was inside the house. While the van was running. Which meant …
I didn’t do it.
I wasn’t the one who’d killed Harris Mickler.
Vero leaned back, one leg propped against the wall of the garage, watching me out of the corner of her eye as if I’d lost my mind.
“You actually think someone pulled that red cord and closed the garage door while you were inside the house.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
There was only one possible explanation for it. “Someone else must have wanted Harris Mickler dead. Whoever it was must have seen us leave the bar and followed me home. When I went inside and left the van running, I left a perfect window of opportunity to kill him.” It was the kind of crime I might have written about. The kind no one would buy because it was so … neat.
Vero plucked Patricia’s envelope from my hand. I’d been squeezing it so tightly, I’d forgotten it was there. “Are you sure this isn’t just your guilt talking?”
“I may be guilty of a lot of things, Vero, but I did not close that garage door.”
She withdrew a stack of cash and held it to her face, her eyes closing as she fanned the edges and inhaled deeply. “Do we still get to keep the money?”
I reached behind me for the roll of duct tape on the workbench and threw it at her.
“Okay, fine,” she said, using Patricia Mickler’s envelope as a shield in case I decided to throw anything else. “Let’s assume for a minute you didn’t close the garage door and someone else did. Why pull the cord? Why not just push the button on the wall and run?”
I gnawed my thumbnail, sifting back through the events of the night. It would have taken awhile for the carbon monoxide to fill the garage. Which meant the killer must have closed the door right after I went inside. I’d been sitting on the floor of the kitchen, my back against the wall directly beside the garage as I’d talked to Georgia. We’d talked so long, I’d forgotten I’d left the van running. Then I’d gone upstairs to wash up and change. My bedroom was right above the garage. “No.” I shook my head. “No, they couldn’t have used the wall button, or even a remote. The motor’s too loud. I would have heard it. Whoever pulled that cord wanted to be silent.”
My eyes lifted to the red handle. Something still didn’t add up. The emergency release cord was anything but quiet. I’d used it one winter during a power outage, when the garage door was stuck open and the snow was blowing in. As soon as I’d pulled the cord, the door came crashing down, bouncing against the concrete with a bone-jarring smash, just as it had when I’d dropped it a few minutes ago to startle Mrs. Haggerty. Steven had heard the noise from our bedroom and had come running to see what had happened. He’d lectured me for a week about how I could have destroyed the frame. How I could have hurt myself or one of the kids. How I should never pull the release cord when the garage door is open. Not unless …
“What’s that look? I know that look,” Vero said as I grabbed the rusted step stool from the corner. “That’s the same look you got before you stuffed the Play-Doh in Theresa’s tailpipe.”
“Open the door,” I said as I positioned the stool under the red emergency cord.
“It’s heavy! You open it.”
“I can’t. I’m getting on the stool.”
Vero uttered a few choice words about where I could stick said stool as she hauled the garage door open with both hands. She shivered as a cold autumn wind sliced under the opening and rustled her hair. Cursing me under her breath, she slung the garage door high above her head on its track until it was fully opened, resting parallel with the ceiling. I climbed up the rungs and reconnected the belt to the pulley, the way Steven had shown me. Then I pulled the cord.
Vero shrieked as the door slid freely down the tracks, picking up speed as it dropped. She lunged, catching it before it hit the ground. “Are you nuts?” she hissed. “The last thing we need is Mrs. Haggerty hearing all this and poking her nosy ass all up in our business!” Vero eased the door to the ground with a quiet thud, a sound so small I might not have heard it inside the house.
“There were two of them,” I said, climbing down from the stool. Vero wrinkled her nose at me. “It’s the only way someone could have shut this garage without making any noise. One person pulled the cord. Someone else caught the door and controlled the drop.”
“So let me get this straight,” Vero said. “You mean to tell me someone else … no, two someone elses … killed Harris while you were on the phone with your sister?”
“Making it look like an accident.”
“Or setting you up to take the fall.” Vero picked up the envelope and slid it into the waistband of her yoga pants—my yoga pants—as if she were afraid I might suddenly decide to give it back. She yelped as I yanked it free, but there was nothing to be done about it now. I had already claimed the money. Regardless of who’d shut Harris inside the garage, I was the one who’d accepted payment for the hit job. And if anyone ever found Harris’s body, we were the ones who’d go down for it.
When the kids went down for their afternoon naps, I retreated to my office and closed the door. Patricia’s envelope rested on top of my desk. It was noticeably lighter since Vero had counted out her forty percent of the cash, but that didn’t make it any easier to look at, and I tucked it inside my desk drawer.
The money from Patricia was no different from my book advance, just one more unearned payment for a job I hadn’t done. Just one more thing to feel guilty about. As many problems as Patricia’s money could solve, it had come tied to even bigger ones. Scarier ones. The kinds of problems that meant losing my kids. The kinds of problems that meant spending the rest of my life behind bars. And the only way I’d ever have a leg to stand on if Harris’s disappearance came back to bite me was to know for certain what had really happened in my garage. To be able to prove, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that I hadn’t been the one to murder him.
I flipped on the old PC, waiting as it coughed and sputtered to life. I opened a blank Word document and titled it, typing the first words that came to mind, the one thing Sylvia and my editor were expecting of me—THE HIT by Finlay Donovan. The screen was blindingly white. The cursor stared back at me with an indifferent, slow blink as my calloused fingers hovered over the keys. It had been months since I’d been able to climb out of my own mire of self-defeating thoughts. Since Steven left, I hadn’t been able to cobble more than a few words together on a page. Every plotline seemed hopeless, every romance fell flat, and every story I dreamed up felt like a complete waste of time.
When I’d missed my first deadline after Steven moved out, Sylvia had called to lecture me. I’d told her I had writer’s block, but she’d insisted I push through it. Sometimes, she’d said, you can’t see the whole story until it’s laid out on the page, and the only way to figure out what happens next is to write your way through it, one scene after the next, until it’s done. Sylvia was all about tough love and finding your own answers. Mostly, Sylvia was all about earning a paycheck. Maybe I should’ve been, too.
I touched the keyboard, trying to figure out exactly where to start my contracted novel, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Harris’s story. Probably because, through my own stupidity, I’d managed to put myself in the middle of it. If the police managed to trace Harris from The Lush to my garage, I’d become their prime suspect. And Vero and I would go to prison unless we could prove the murder had been committed by someone else.
I knew the opening scene. Harris Mickler had been murdered right under my nose. All I had to do was uncover the backstory to figure out the rest of the plot. I just had to put myself in the heads of the characters—to figure out who they were, what they wanted, and what they stood to lose. It all boiled down to means, motive, and opportunity. How hard could it be to solve my own crime?
I started typing, beginning with the note Patricia had slipped on my tray during lunch, recalling as many details as I could: the call I placed from my van, my trip to The Lush, sneaking Harris to the parking lot, then finding him dead in my garage. As I wrote, I lost myself in the story, letting my memory fill in the gaps. The names—Harris’s, Patricia’s, Julian’s, mine, even the name of the bar—I changed, letting the rest of the events of the night spill unfiltered onto the screen.
The keys clicked with increasing speed. Paragraphs became pages, and I typed until the sun pulled its tired pink fingers from the slats between the blinds. Until the clatter of dishes quieted in the kitchen, and the kids fussed in their beds before finally drifting off to sleep. I wrote through the long hours of silence that followed, until the light from my screen was the only light in the house.