She drank two beers and then fell asleep on Liz’s couch. They stood above her until they were sure she was asleep, like parents watching a child, and only then did they move to the kitchen.
“She can’t stay here,” Liz said.
“I know that. I’ll put her up in a hotel or something.”
“What are you doing, begging to be fired?”
“I don’t know what else to do with her. She won’t go home, and she won’t go back to…”
Liz arched her eyebrows. “Won’t go back to where?”
He blew out a long breath, glanced at the room where Kimberly was sleeping on the couch, and said, “She was staying on Little Spruce. In Howard’s cottage.”
“Kimmy Crepeaux is staying where Jackie Pelletier lived?”
“Shh!” He held up his hands against her rising voice, and she lifted her own in response against her rising temper, then she turned from him, pressed her fingers to her temples, and shook her head slowly.
“The studio is locked,” he told her.
“What difference does that make!”
“It makes one to Howard, I can assure you of that.”
He told her about the phone calls then, and his trip to see Howard in the middle of the night.
“Howard believes her?” she asked, staring at the diminutive form of Kimberly Crepeaux curled up on her couch. Kimberly was snoring softly.
“Yes,” Barrett said. “Howard believes her. And now you’ve heard her out in person. So tell me: What do you think?”
Liz leaned on the kitchen island, looked at him, and then away. “I don’t want to tell you what I think.”
If he hadn’t known her so well for so long, he might have misinterpreted this gesture, this statement. But he was remembering the way she’d responded when he’d told her about the lies his grandfather had offered. She had looked away from him that day because she hadn’t wanted to disagree with him. She was looking away from him today because she didn’t want to agree with him. In both circumstances, she saw risk for him on the horizon. There was no reason for him to have such certainty except for the familiarity of people who had long understood each other in the darkness.
“Liz?” he said. “I need to know.”
She turned to face him, her hair sweeping across her cheek.
“I understand now why you believed her.”
“But you still don’t?”
She bowed her head. He could see the top of the tattooed script that traced just below her collarbone. “Two hours ago, I’d have said no chance. When I got the first call saying you’d been seen with her down in Port Hope, I was devastated that you’d come back to listen to that, to her. But…”
She crossed the kitchen and stepped into the small sunroom that served as her dining room. She sat down and stared at the pines, looking exhausted.
“I certainly believe this much of what she said—the truck is the biggest problem. It’s one thing to say that her whole story rests on bodies in a pond that turned out not to be in that pond. It’s one thing to say that they were shot, not stabbed. We can believe that happened later, right? We can believe Girard helped Mathias move the bodies, maybe. But the truck is harder. You put out that bulletin for a white truck with a black cat painted on it, but the truck you found at Girard’s with their blood in it was completely different.”
“Yeah,” he said. “That is a problem.”
“There are plenty of people around here who still think she told part of the truth, actually,” Liz said.
“What part?”
“That she was an accomplice to murder, and that she was in the Dodge Dakota when it happened. The rest of it—who was with her, how Jackie and Ian were killed, and what was done to them—is still up for debate.”
He nodded. He’d had plenty of time to think of those options himself. To wonder whether he had gotten to the right woman but extracted the wrong story from her.
“She believes what she’s saying,” Liz said. “I never saw that before, I only heard it from you. But she believes her story.”
“Yes, she does.” He leaned against the kitchen island and they studied each other in the fading light. “So I’m back where I started.”
“Prove her story?”
“Right.” He glanced at the couch. “And figure out what to do with her.”
“One night,” Liz said. “She can stay for one night.”
“You don’t have to do that. I haven’t asked you for that, and I won’t.”
“If you’d asked, I would have said no,” she said, and she gave a familiar wry smile with only the corner of her mouth. “When was the last time you slept, Rob?”
“It’s been a few hours.”
“You look like shit. Go get some rest. I’ll stay down here and keep an eye on your girl. I probably should hide the knives.”
“Bad joke.”
“Who said it was one?”
He stepped down into the sunroom and knelt before her, put his hands on her thighs, and looked up at her. “You know why I’m doing this. I’ve got to put some certainty behind this one. For Howard, for Amy and George.”
She leaned down and touched his forehead softly with her lips, then rested her face against his.
“I know why you’re doing this,” she said. “And you can keep telling yourself those are the reasons. In the meantime, Rob, be careful listening to that girl’s story. Whether it is true or not, it can burn your life to the ground.”