It’s amazing how quickly—and slowly—time goes by when you’ve been blindsided by a homicidal lunatic. It had been just over two weeks since Megan Johanning threatened to hurt the people closest to me if I didn’t thwart the investigation into Shannon Claremore, and I’d spent every moment since then trying to do just that. It hadn’t been easy.
I managed to convince everyone that while in line for the bathroom at Toad’s party, I’d found an old voicemail from Flick that I hadn’t previously known about. I told them hearing his voice, combined with the alcohol, had upset and confused me, and that was the reason for my odd behavior. Eventually, they all accepted the explanation; I had been so emotional right after his death that it wasn’t a far leap to think I might have had a grief-induced setback. Explaining why I wouldn’t let us ride home in Holman’s car had been more difficult, but I’d just kept repeating that I’d had a lot to drink and who knows exactly what was going on in my mind at the time. This had prompted frequent lectures about the perils of binge-drinking and several emails with the times and dates of AA meetings from Holman. Fine, I told myself. It was worth it if my plan worked.
Joe Tackett succumbed to his injuries and died on January 2nd. The secret of where he’d hidden the recording—which I knew now was almost certainly that of Megan Johanning—died with him. And so ended any hope of prosecuting her for her crimes. She was going to get away with it all. After all, as she pointed out, I was the only one left alive who knew, and I wasn’t going to tell. As much as it sickened me, I would not put anyone else in the path of this madwoman. I’d seen what she was capable of, what she was willing to do to protect this secret. I simply would not put the people I loved at risk. I’d already lost too much.
Over the course of the past couple of weeks, Megan was like an evil puppet master, feeding me the lies I was to use to persuade Holman, Kay, and Lindsey that I’d been wrong about Shannon Claremore’s involvement in Flick’s and Granddaddy’s deaths. It required me to push the limits of both my theatrical and ethical boundaries. In short, I had to do a lot of lying and faking of evidence.
My first task was to dispel our assumption that Bethany Miller had stolen her cousin’s identity after getting out of the juvenile detention center. Since I’d been the one who’d done most of the legwork thus far, no one questioned it when I managed to unearth a paper trail that showed Bethany Miller was very much alive and well, though estranged from her family and living under a different name. It was all fake, with evidence supplied to me by Megan or simply made up out of thin air. But I was careful to make it look like this information came out in drips and drops, planting the slightest seed of doubt about our identity-theft theory and slowly building the case against it. I was also careful to appear crushed when it became clear we were wrong. Whenever it seemed like the lies were too much, just when I’d think maybe I could take all of this to Carl or Sheriff Clark, Megan would call and remind me why I was doing it. It’d be a shame if anything were to happen to your parents, Riley. She haunted me like a ghost.
“Twins?” Holman asked, when I walked into his office holding the fake documents Megan had given me. “Charlie Miller didn’t say anything about having twin daughters?”
“I was shocked too,” I said. “But here, look.” I showed him the two birth certificates she’d sent me. One was for Shannon Miller and one for Bethany Miller, both with the same parents, same hospital, same 1954 birth date. I didn’t know how she did it—but they looked legitimate enough to convince Holman that it was true. The story was that Bethany and Shannon were Charlie’s girls, twins. Daniel Miller also had a baby girl named Shannon (named after the matriarch of the Miller family), but she died in the plane crash.
I told Holman that I’d tracked down an old friend of the Miller family who’d given me the whole painful history. Charlie Miller fell to pieces after his wife died (which was true) and Bethany had started to get into trouble (also true). Megan told me to say that Bethany’s twin, Shannon, was a good girl and tried to help her sister. But Bethany blamed her father for her problems, and after she was released from juvenile detention, she changed her name and moved out to California. I recounted the fake details Megan fed me and told Holman they were from an interview I did with Shannon Claremore in which she admitted the existence of Bethany, her twin. She explained that the reason she hadn’t mentioned it before was that it was particularly upsetting to her father, and that his memory of Bethany was starting to fade, which was a blessing.
It had been disturbingly simple to craft a believable story and falsify documents to support that story. After all, my co-workers trusted me. They never suspected for one minute that I was lying the whole damn time—and that kept me awake, wracked with guilt, nearly every night since New Year’s Eve.
Without any evidence of identity theft, Shannon Claremore was no longer a suspect, which meant that Megan Johanning wasn’t either. After building the case brick-by-brick over the course of three weeks, Holman and Kay were on board—and just as disappointed as I was in our failed conclusions.
Of course, there’d been some collateral damage to my personal life. I’d necessarily pulled away from Ash. I could not in good conscience start out a relationship among all these lies. And I knew the only way I could keep my distance from him was to literally keep my distance from him. It had been so hard to suddenly start treating him with indifference, refusing to explain why I didn’t want to hang out anymore. I’m too tired. I can’t tonight. I don’t think so. He stopped by my house one night, mid-January, and demanded to know what was going on with me.
“Just tell me what I did wrong?” When I refused to invite him in, he’d stood outside my front door.
“Nothing. I just need some time to myself.”
“But I don’t understand. Everything seemed to be going so well with us.” To his immense credit, he seemed more confused than angry.
“Don’t make this a bigger deal than it has to be, Ash,” I’d said, coldly.
I fought back tears after he left but reminded myself that the shame and regret I felt was a small price to pay for his safety. After weeks of unreturned calls and texts, he’d sent me a message that he was going back to Texas to get his stuff, and when he came back, he’d leave it up to me whether or not to get in touch.
It’s for the best, I told myself. That had been my constant mantra over the past couple of weeks—every time I thought I’d break, that I couldn’t tell Holman one more lie, or shut Ash out one more time. I knew that at least for right now, the fewer people I was close to, the better. I’d chosen to make a deal with the devil in order to protect the people I loved, and I would accept the consequences of that deal.
But on all those nights that I laid awake unable to sleep lest the nightmares set in, I began to look at things another way. Megan had robbed me of my sense of safety, control, honesty, and optimism. Because of her, I’d not only lost two of the most important men in my life, I’d lost so much of my sense of self. Night after night in the still of the early morning hours, I perseverated over everything that woman had taken from me. And I decided I wasn’t about to walk away from her empty-handed.