by Audrey Keown
My attention was caught by Autumn’s voice raised at Tom. “But why would Renee steal from me?”
“Because he was threatening her!” Clyde pointed a finger at Tom.
Tom sighed heavily, which was all the admission I needed.
I thought back to our conversation at the convention center. “It wasn’t that Selena was threatening to turn Autumn’s company in for hiring those workers. It was you, wasn’t it, Tom? You found out what Renee was doing, and you threatened to tell Autumn if she didn’t give you the money you needed for the drugs.”
Tom glanced at me, then Autumn, and nodded once.
Clyde looked like he was going to hit Tom again. “And then you used the money to buy pills for Selena!”
“No, she made me give her those,” Tom said. “I swear.”
Tom had been alone in the conservatory the night of the murder, and then Selena had pocketed the stash two nights later. That was where the exchange had happened, but why had it happened?
“How could she force you to do anything?” I asked Tom.
He turned to Clyde. “It’s your wife’s fault—”
“Ex-wife,” Clyde said. “And how?”
“I said Selena was blackmailing the company. Really, she was blackmailing me. When Linda got mad about being fired and about Renee stealing her husband, she told her daughter that Renee was hiring illegals.” Tom was angry, as if he had a right to be. “And that’s how the little brat figured out I was getting the money from Renee, from the company.”
He looked at Autumn now. “Selena was going to tell you the whole thing if I didn’t give her the pills she wanted. But, I swear, I didn’t know Renee was getting the money to pay me out of your books … not until last week.”
“So you decided to take your revenge on Selena by nearly killing her?” Clyde said.
“No.” Tom said. “I gave her perfectly good stuff … if she took too many—”
“They were blood pressure pills!” Clyde pulled a small bag out of his pocket and thrust it at Tom. “She thought you were giving her something for anxiety.”
Tom glanced at the bag. “No, I didn’t give her those. Those aren’t from me.”
Deena looked horrified.
Blood pressure pills … like the ones Deena had lost.
Velvet was still talking to an officer a few yards away.
“Hey! Did you have something to do with this?” I yelled. “Did you steal Deena’s pills?”
Velvet glanced at Deena and back at me but didn’t deny it. She couldn’t justify hurting Deena, even to herself.
If she hadn’t been, or at least seemed like, an unassuming old white lady, she would already have been handcuffed and put in the back of a patrol car.
Maybe the officers were waiting on someone familiar with the case.
Speaking of the devil, Bennett pulled up behind the ambulance in an unmarked black car with flashing lights. George exploded out of the passenger side, and I sprinted to meet him.
We talked at the same time.
“Are you al—”
“I’m al—”
“Thank God.”
“Yeah, everything’s okay … except your car,” I said.
He looked over my shoulder at his poor Highlander, which had broken through the guardrail and lay on its side in the median. He shook his head. “I really wasn’t that attached to it yet.”
Bennett left the driver’s side of the car with less urgency. He began a conversation with one of the officers, and I enjoyed the look of embarrassment hidden in his face as he pieced things together.
Before I knew it, a uniformed officer had handcuffed Tom.
Bennett must have had time to look into Tom’s little habit.
Tom called out to Autumn as they walked him to a patrol car, but she stood silently, watching him.
In a matter of days she had lost her sister and now, at least for a little while, her husband. I wondered if she’d be able to hold on to her company. I thought of my grandmother Mary trying to keep the Morrow holdings intact after my grandfather’s breakdown.
Autumn approached George and me where we leaned against the guardrail. Her face was controlled as usual, but her arms trembled at her sides. She looked at me intently. “How sure are you that that woman—Velvet, Naomi, whatever the heck her name really is—killed my sister?”
I screwed up my mouth. “Um, like a hundred percent. She confessed to me in the car.”
Autumn bobbed her head seriously.
Bennett interrupted. “Miss Nichols.”
“Detective.” I nodded with a victor’s smug politeness.
“I understand you stated there was a gun in the vehicle with you.”
“Yes, I was taken hostage,” I said. “Any of these people can tell you.”
“And where is the weapon now?”
“They didn’t find it in the car?” I said.
He shook his head.
The truth struck me all at once. I turned to where Autumn was standing, now six feet away.
One hand in her purse, she watched Velvet with the focus of a cat stalking her prey.
Several things happened in quick succession.
I yelled, “She’s going to shoot!”
Bennett dove for Autumn.
The gun went off. Together Autumn and Bennett crashed to the ground.
My eyes snapped to Velvet.
It seemed an impossible chance, but Velvet was lying on the asphalt, holding her stomach. Two paramedics rushed to kneel beside her.
Autumn had gotten off her shot before Bennett crashed into her.
He rolled her onto her stomach now, and a uniformed officer put her in cuffs. Somehow she was still so calm.
“Why would you do that?” I said to Autumn. “We caught her.”
Standing up again and adjusting his suit, Bennett gestured that he would allow it.
Autumn looked up. “But who knows what they could prove in court.” She struggled for enough breath to speak. “I loved my sister. If I had just gotten her away from Clyde …”
“She made her own choices,” I said.
The officer near Autumn let her roll onto her side but kept a hand on the cuffs. “I explained everything to Clyde in the car, but he was just going to let the police take care of her. As if that would work.”
“Yeah, but … now you’ll go to prison,” I said.
She closed her eyes and opened them. “What’s left for me here anyway? A bankrupt company and a husband who used my sister to steal from me?”
“Tom loves you,” I said.
Resentment and hurt flitted across her features. “Then he should have done better.”
The officer made her stand and led her to the same patrol car as Tom.
I wasn’t the only one around here who had trouble trusting other people. Autumn couldn’t trust Renee to take the reins of her own life, and she couldn’t believe the justice system would convict Velvet.
I heard the squeak of wheels behind me.
A few yards away, handcuffed to a stretcher, Velvet was being loaded gingerly into the ambulance.
“She’s not as old as she looks,” I said to the paramedic.
The ambulance had driven away, and so had the patrol car and Deena’s Porsche with everyone who had come in it.
I had explained to George how I’d figured out Velvet was the killer.
He stood there rubbing the back of his neck and staring at the ground. “So many lies. I wonder what might have happened if Clyde hadn’t had a chance to take the wig before the police got to see Renee.”
“It’s a good question. He might have been arrested instead of Mr. Fig.”
“And Velvet never would have been found out. But it’s no use asking questions like that, I guess,” he said. “Especially when you’ve brought the truth out, like you do.”
I shrugged.
“But Clyde was right to be paranoid,” George said.
“Yeah. It’s no wonder he suspected his ex-wife of vandalizing h
is house. He wouldn’t have thought of Naomi returning after all these years, but I think the guilt of what he’d done had its effect on him. He was afraid of karma.”
“And he was hassling Autumn about the money she owed him because he’d lost a lot in alimony?”
Exhaustion and injury were catching up with me, and I had to sit down, there on the gravelly side of the road. George did the same.
“Seems that way,” I said. “Tom was blackmailing Renee about her hiring of undocumented workers so he could fund his drug problem. And Renee was keeping him at bay with money from Autumn’s company.”
“Ah, which is why Autumn couldn’t pay Clyde.”
I reached up, prodded the back of my head gingerly, and winced. There was a huge knot from the gun. “Yes, somehow—and my money’s on her mother—Selena found out about Tom strong-arming Renee, and he paid Selena off in pills. Velvet simply capitalized on all that was rotten between them, knowing Clyde’s desperation and paranoia, not to mention a bit of a fascination with death and Victorian poetry, made him a believable suspect in Renee’s death.”
“Wild.” George ran one thumbnail against the cuticle of the other, then looked up as a tow truck passed us at a crawl and stopped in front of the overturned Highlander across the road. “You know, I used to think it was a bad habit of yours that you kept … putting yourself in places where you don’t belong.”
That sounded like a nice spin on nosy. I leaned away enough to turn and frown at him, but I kept silent, knowing there was a compliment on the tail end of his statement.
“Remember that petition you started in eighth grade?” He threw his head back a little as he laughed once. “To turn one of the boys’ bathrooms into an extra one for the girls?”
My eyes widened. “Not extra. We needed it more than you did.”
“Anyway.” He shoved me with his elbow. “I figure Mr. Fig and I are really lucky that you are the way you are.”
Was he encouraging me the way he always did—or was this something more? I looked down at his lean denim-covered legs stretching out into the road past mine, his white tennis shoes glowing in the angled rays of the sun. And I held my breath, trying to keep the lid on that feeling about him, whatever it was, that I’d had right before the crash.
Seconds ago, with Velvet taken away and the expectation of Mr. Fig’s freedom, my world had been a still summer lake, warm and calm.
But now my breathing had gone all shallow and quick. George was the best and oldest friend I had. If I could just bury that instant when I’d seen his face during the crash, I could keep everything the same.
Couldn’t I?
His little gestures toward me had either become more ardent over the last week, which meant his feelings about me were changing, or I had simply noticed them more, meaning my feelings …
“You okay?” he said, watching my face.
“Um.” No. Why was I so tense?
There was only one explanation. But I couldn’t stand to think it.
I felt nauseous and petrified. I always got bored of the people I dated. If this thing George and I had, this easy thing, shifted into … it couldn’t last.
I turned back to his face, his raven hair framed by a clear blue sky.
The problem was that if I had woken up in the hereafter instead of that ambulance, I knew my biggest regret would be not having told him that I …
And here he was beside me, and not a thing in the world, save my own fear, could stop me.
His eyes scanned my face, and I could tell from the set of his wide mouth that he was going to say something important.
Should I launch into my thing or let him go ahead?
While I deliberated, his mouth opened. “Do you …”
“Yes?”
“Do you still have that newspaper?” he asked.
“What?” That wasn’t what I’d expected.
“The picture of Clyde at your grandparents’ party?”
“Um, yeah, it’s in my bag.” The police had retrieved it from the Highlander after the crash. “Why?’
“It’s just that … Clyde said something that made me wonder. Can I take a look?”
I fished it from my purse and passed it over.
He held the paper between two hands and peered into the faces in the photo. His eyes widened, and he unfolded the page from where it was creased under the caption. He looked at me and then away again, an expression of horror on his face.
“For God’s sake, what is it?” I said, grabbing his hand to see the photo.
“Before Clyde left a few minutes ago—you were talking to Deena, and he didn’t want to interrupt you—he said to thank you …” He brought a fist to his mouth.
My eyes were torn between searching for clues in the photograph and seeking them in George’s face. “Okay. And?”
“And he said you were the spitting image of your dad … when your dad was a teenager.”
He held the newspaper where I could see and pointed to a name below the fold. I hadn’t noticed before, but the caption continued there. My grandparents were listed, but then, above George’s thumbnail, was another name. A name that didn’t make sense at all.
Paul Morrow.
I could feel some part of my subconscious already putting things together, even as I struggled to understand. “Who—who’s that?”
George’s thumb moved under a face now, a boyish, teenage face, bright blue eyes and full, ruddy cheeks. I knew that face.
My dad.
“But …” I couldn’t form words. It was as if this new information shot into my brain, obscuring everything I knew about my life with misunderstanding. “My dad’s name is—isn’t Paul Morrow, George. My dad isn’t a Morrow. My …”
“I know. I know.” George held on to my arm. “But that’s him, isn’t it?”
I felt my stomach clench unwillingly. Whatever was in it rose up through my throat. I pulled away from George and wretched onto the road.
“Damn, Ivy.” George sighed. “I’m so sorry.”
He walked away and returned with napkins and a bottled water. “Here.”
I coughed, then took them and wiped my mouth with the rough paper. “I’m okay.”
“It’s a lot,” he said. “Of course it would make you sick.”
I swished and spit with the water a couple of times, trying to clear the acid from my mouth.
“I guess you two need a ride somewhere?” It was Bennett, who had walked up and nearly stepped in my vomit.
I wished I’d been able to save it for the inside of his car.
“Yeah,” George said, and gave Bennett the address to my apartment.
We climbed into the back seat of his unmarked black sedan. I was moving slowly with the weight of the news and the soreness from the crash.
I sat with the wad of damp napkins in my hand and shook my head. “Why did he lie? All this time, George?”
“There must be some explanation.”
The drive felt like an hour, during which I lost myself in anger. Everything I saw was filtered through the narrow tunnel of it. It had been just the two of us for so long. My dad was my roommate, my friend, my whole family. Nothing he could say could excuse his hiding this from me. But I had to confront him anyway.
Are you home? I texted him.
Yep. Need something?
Headed that way, I replied. Liar, I thought.
I looked down into the pit of my fears and realized some part of me was always waiting for the people I loved to leave me or let me down. I guessed that was the attachment disorder talking, but putting a name on it didn’t undo the damage.
It was why I had taken it so hard when friends stopped calling after I dropped out of college. Maybe it was the reason I had never dated anyone longer than a month. And it made sense of my extreme reaction to a small thing like my dad getting a girlfriend.
Even with George—I hadn’t been able to admit to myself that anything was going on there because I was afraid I would be disappointed. Or that h
e would—what? Leave?
Seeing my dad in that photo had interrupted my confession. Our moment, mine and George’s, had expired in the heat of my anger, and I didn’t know if I could revive my courage.
I held the photo in my sweaty fingers and stared at the faces in black-and-white print. I had only imagined that I could find my mother’s features in my grandparents’ faces. I’d seen what I wanted to.
Bennett stopped the car under the bare-limbed flame tree.
“I need to go in alone,” I told George. “It’s not that I mind you hearing anything I’m going to say.”
A thought broke in unasked for: because I love you. I set my mouth and continued. “Just that he needs to feel free to say whatever he needs to. The truth, I hope. Even if it hurts.”
“You’re right. It’s time for that. No more sidestepping.” He turned toward me. “By either of you.”
“Okay, I hear you.”
“Remember how he forgave you for lying about working at the hotel.”
“That was different! This is my whole life, George.”
“I get that, but sometimes loving someone means assuming they have the best intentions.”
I nodded and got out of the car. He was right.
“Call me and let me know you’re okay,” he said.
I dragged myself up to our door as if the weight of my dad’s lies was shackled to my feet.
Where was his family now? Surely there had to be someone left alive, nearby? Why had he lost touch with them?
I’d spent all these years denying my own curiosity in order to spare his feelings.
But he hadn’t spared mine.
I unlocked the apartment and took one last look down at Bennett’s car pulling away.
I threw the apartment door open, banging it into the wall of the tiny entryway as I stepped through, and then slammed it home again.
Dad appeared at the mouth of the hall. “What in the world is the matter?”
I threw my bag across the room.
It slid on the linoleum and came to a stop under the kitchen table. “Twenty-eight years of you lying to me. That’s what the matter.”
This was where it had to happen. In this apartment.
Here where we’d eaten hundreds of frozen dinners and drunk thousands of cups of tea. Where I’d grown plants in the pots he’d made—the pots, I realized, that Morrow artistic talent handed down! For the last five years, this place had been the closest thing we’d had to a family home, and it represented everything we meant to each other.
