Without Sin (An Owen Day Thriller)

by Rachel Ford

  “Jon didn’t want to see him.”

  She snorted. “Jon was poisoned against him, by his mother.”

  “You didn’t know Andy back then. Jon did. Missy did.”

  She waved this away with a dismissive gesture. “Andy told me what happened.”

  “And they lived through it. It’s not the same thing.”

  She looked me over strangely. “You always did take her side, didn’t you? I remember that.”

  “I’m not taking her side.”

  “You know, I always wondered about that. Was there something going on between you two? Behind Andy’s back?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Ridiculous? I’m not the one being ridiculous. You’re the one taking your brother’s bitch of an ex’s side over his. Your dead brother.”

  “For the love of God, Megan, he drove them off the road at fifty miles an hour. He tried to kill them all.”

  “He was unwell.”

  “He put a gun in his mouth in front of his own kid. He threatened to blow his brains out. In front of a five-year old.”

  “He was unwell,” she said again, more vehemence in her tone.

  “Yeah, he was. Very unwell. And he got treatment, and I’m proud of him for it. But that’s a fucked up thing for a kid to see. It’s a fucked up thing for a kid to live through.”

  She waved an arm in the air angrily. Wine sloshed up the sides of her glass. “Stop it. Stop it, damn you. He’s dead. Dead, Owen.” Her voice broke and she started to cry again.

  I took a deep breath. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “You should be. He loved you. You know that? He loved you.”

  “I loved him too.”

  She half-snuffled and half-snorted, as if to say, Bullshit. If you loved him, you wouldn’t talk about him like that.

  Maybe she was right. Maybe it was too soon to speak the truth. Maybe it was impolite, or disrespectful. But I didn’t think so. I thought it would be disrespectful to sugarcoat the truth.

  Andy had made mistakes, and plenty of them. He could have ended up like our grandmother: an angry, abusive alcoholic for the rest of his life. He came close. But he chose a different road. He fought addiction. He fought anger.

  And he won.

  That was the real Andy Welch. An imperfect man. A broken man, who put himself back together. A good man.

  We sat there in silence for a long moment. Then she got up. “I should go to bed.”

  “Okay.” I stood too. She’d mentioned an extra bedroom, and I wasn’t keen on another night on the couch.

  She glanced at me and seemed to sense my thoughts. “I didn’t have time to get your room ready.”

  “Oh. Well, I can take care of it.”

  She shook her head. “No. Maybe – maybe it would be best if you stayed here. You know, so you can keep an eye on things.”

  I sat back down. “Sure.”

  “Your blankets are in the ottoman. Just pull back the lid. I’ll see you tomorrow, Owen.”

  I sent Detective Clark a text, asking her to give me a call to talk about a possible angle with the Martinez killing. Then I settled in to sleep.

  It didn’t happen for a long time, and I tossed and turned all night. I woke twice to find Jason drinking beer in the armchair in the early hours of the morning. But we didn’t speak.

  I woke up for good around five thirty. I put on a pot of coffee and sat down with my phone at the island. My back hurt, my legs felt stiff, and the past was replaying itself in my mind.

  I was an idiot, I told myself, for trying this family bullshit a second time. Hadn’t I learned my lesson the first time?

  People don’t change. There were exceptions, of course. Exceptions like Andy. But for the most part, people stayed exactly who they were.

  Megan showed me exactly who she was ten years ago, when I was at my lowest. Broken, struggling to put myself back together. Last night, I’d seen the same Megan.

  What the hell am I doing here?

  I poured myself a cup of coffee and put milk in it. Skim, since that was all they had, and no sugar. I stirred it and took a sip.

  I’d gotten the information I needed. I could leave. Not without saying goodbye to the kids. They deserved better than ghosting. But I could leave after that.

  Jason ambled in from the garage, yawning and stretching as he went. “Mind if I take a cup of that?” he asked with a gesture to my coffee.

  “Help yourself.”

  He did and sat across from me at the island. We drank in silence for a long moment. Then, he laughed. “So what’s up with the stirring?”

  “What?”

  He waved toward my hand. I was still holding a spoon, from mixing my coffee. “You keep stirring that thing.”

  “So?”

  He shrugged. “It’s like very ritualized. You stir it three times. You tap the spoon on the edge of your mug three times. You sip three times.”

  I frowned. “I do not.”

  “You do.”

  I didn’t argue with him. I was pretty sure I didn’t. Sure, I mixed the coffee every few sips, just to make sure everything was blended. I didn’t like my coffee too milky or too dark. But three sets of three? He was imagining things.

  I laid the spoon down, resisting the urge to tap it against the mug. I ignored the ugly puddle that formed on the saucer, and took a sip of coffee. I ignored Jason, too, and went back to my phone.

  A minute later, I’d had a few sips of coffee and was absently stirring the mug again. I could feel the other man’s eyes on me as I pulled the spoon out, and I glanced up. “What?”

  He grinned. “There you go again. Three sips. Three stirs. Now you’re going to tap it three times. Right?”

  I frowned at him. “It removes any remaining droplets. So I don’t make a mess.”

  “I’m not criticizing, man.”

  I went back to my phone. He got up for a refill, and I determined to ignore him.

  Which was easy enough until I heard a loud, ceramic ringing. I glanced up. He’d taken a spoon and saucer back with him, and was very deliberately tapping the spoon against the mug. Three times, loud. He set it down now and took a long, slurping sip. Then another. And another. He reached for the spoon again. He stirred, three precise rotations.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  He laughed. “Just giving you shit, man.”

  “Well don’t.”

  He glanced me over. “You okay?”

  “Of course.”

  He set the spoon aside and drank his coffee regularly.

  I went back to my phone. I was looking for some kind of link between Mason Anderson and his rhyme. I was coming up with nothing. Humpty Dumpty had way too many interpretations, and I didn’t know enough about Mason to pick up on any references, however vague.

  “So that cop you were talking to yesterday?”

  “Clark.”

  “Yeah. You helping her?”

  “No,” I lied.

  “Sounded like you were helping her.”

  “I just had a few ideas.”

  He nodded. “Because you’re big into the murder thing, right?”

  “No, Jason, I’m not big into murder.”

  “Solving them, I mean. Meg says you got some kind of theory that you can use math to predict who a killer is.”

  “That’s a gross oversimplification. But yes.”

  “So you going to do that here? Find Andy’s killer using math?”

  “It’s not that simple. You need data. A lot of data – data I don’t have.”

  “So what are you doing?”

  “Trying to gather data.”

  “Then what?”

  “You find patterns in the data. You find enough of them, you can predict future behavior.”

  “Really?”

  “With the right data? Yeah.”

  “How do you know you have the right data?”

  “Your predictions are accurate.”

  He frowned at that.

&n
bsp; “I know. It sounds a bit circular: the data validates the prediction which validates the data. So you set up metrics beforehand. What data do you think you’re going to need? What level of accuracy is acceptable? As you expand your required data set, you validate each prior prediction against it. If they get worse, you messed up. If they get better, you’re probably onto something. You cross reference, you check and recheck.”

  “I wasn’t thinking that. I was just thinking it sounds hard.”

  “Oh.”

  “This is like what you did in the military, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You going to do that to find Andy’s killer?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because this works when you have a lot of data. Right now? The data is dead people. Dead people, and their lives, and how they were killed.”

  “So you’d need a lot of people to die for it to be accurate.”

  “Right now? Yeah. In theory, it could be expanded to predict killings maybe even before they happened. But I’m nowhere near there yet.”

  “And you work on this for what? Fun?”

  “It’s a hobby.”

  He shook his head. “So if you can’t wait for data, what are you going to do about Andy’s killer?”

  “Same thing Detective Clark is trying to do: figure it out based on what we have. It’s still working with data. Just, a smaller data set. Which makes patterns harder to establish. But they’re there. You just have to find them.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I did a lot of that in the military too.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Maisie came down around six-thirty. I asked her what she wanted for breakfast, and she said French toast. So I made French toast.

  She ate first, then Jason, and then me.

  “Did you help the police find daddy’s killer, Uncle Owen?” she asked as I sat down.

  “He’s working on it,” Jason said. “He’s got a whole theory about how to find him using data and math.”

  She laughed. Then, she seemed to realize he hadn’t been joking. “Math? Really?”

  “It’s more complicated than that,” I said.

  I repeated what I’d told Jason, and she seemed to grasp about as much as he had. Maybe a little more. She nodded and considered for a long moment. Then she decided, “I think you’ll catch him.”

  “Me too,” Jason said. “The smartest ideas usually are the most boring. And catching a murderer with math is definitely boring. So it’s got to work.”

  I ignored the fallacious logic. “Math isn’t boring.”

  Jason snickered.

  Maisie nodded. “It’s not, Uncle Jason.”

  He rolled his eyes, but said, “I know, sweetie. I’m giving Owen a hard time.”

  Daniel came down while we were still eating, and I left my toast to make him food. He was quiet and sad. Maybe the reality of Andy’s death was fully kicking in for him, too.

  Maisie talked about school. Jason pretended to be interested. Daniel brightened up a little when I put his breakfast out for him, but he didn’t say much.

  Ben and Megan came down next. She looked bleary-eyed and headed straight to the coffee. He scampered around like he’d already downed a few shots of espresso. He raced through the kitchen on his way to the living room. The TV sounded a moment later.

  “Morning Meg. We made French toast,” Jason said.

  She took a seat with everyone else.

  “Owen and I are going to take a look at my truck later,” he went on. “He thinks it might be spark plugs.”

  Ben raced back into the room. “What’s for breakfast, mommy?”

  “French toast,” I said.

  He considered for a moment, then made a face. “I don’t like it.”

  “Yes you do,” Maisie said.

  “I don’t.”

  “You liked it last time Mom made it,” Jason offered, the forced cheeriness in his tone almost masking the hint of annoyance.

  “I only like Mommy’s,” he said, his pitch rising.

  “Well, there’s probably cereal,” I offered.

  His pitch went on rising. “I don’t want cereal.”

  Megan glanced up at me, and I managed a smile. “Well, I can make eggs.”

  “I don’t want eggs.”

  I shrugged and went back to cooking. “Well, if you change your mind, let me know.”

  “I want pancakes.”

  “We don’t have pancakes today,” I said.

  Jason resumed his prior thread of conversation. “Then we’re going to –”

  “I want pancakes,” Ben said again, his voice somewhere between a sob and a scream.

  “Oh shut up,” Daniel said. “You heard Uncle Owen: no pancakes.”

  “Language, Daniel,” Megan said.

  Ben repeated his request for pancakes, adding that he hated eggs and cereal and French toast. He only wanted pancakes. Maisie rolled her eyes, and Daniel gritted his teeth.

  “Okay,” Megan said, “Uncle Owen will make you pancakes.”

  Ben seemed satisfied with his victory, because he returned to the television. I finished Megan’s food, and put in seconds for Maisie and Daniel. While they cooked, I mixed pancakes.

  Megan glanced up as I put another piece of toast on Maisie’s plate, but she said nothing. I pretended not to notice.

  I cleaned up the French toast bowl and made Ben’s pancakes. Then I went back to my own breakfast.

  Ben didn’t like the pancakes. He decided he wanted French toast after all. He started kicking the island when I told him it was all gone.

  Daniel had been watching all of this with growing rage. Rage that probably had a lot less to do with his brother’s tantrum than his father’s death.

  But the tantrum was the thing right here, right now. The thing he could control. “Shut the fuck up,” he burst out.

  Megan gasped. “Daniel!”

  Ben went on kicking and crying.

  His older brother went on berating him. “You said you didn’t want it. It’s gone. Stop being a baby.”

  “Daniel Emerson Welch, you go to your room right now.”

  “Mom, I –”

  She slapped her palm hard against the island. “Now.”

  Daniel scowled at her and his still protesting brother. He threw his fork down with a clatter against his plate and slid out of the seat. He shoved it into place, hard, and stomped upstairs.

  Silence settled in the kitchen – silence, apart from Ben’s continued complaints. “I want French toast.”

  “You heard Uncle Owen. There is none left,” Maisie said.

  Megan glanced at her, anger in her eyes. “Maybe there would have been, if you hadn’t taken more than you need.”

  “She didn’t take anything,” I said. “I gave her a second piece. Her and Daniel.”

  “She doesn’t need it,” Megan shot back. “Look at her, for God’s sake.”

  A flash of pain crossed Maisie’s face. She put down her fork.

  “Meg,” Jason put in, “maybe we should all just take a breath.”

  “Maybe you should get a damned job,” she said, rounding on him. “So you’re out of my house.”

  I wanted to tell her she was a fucking asshole for talking to and about her kid like that. But right now, that would be the wrong approach. So I tried a placating tone. “Maybe I could take the kids to the park or something. Get them out of your hair for a while. Give you some time.”

  “Maybe you can mind your business. You can’t even make breakfast without starting a fight, Owen. I don’t need you to do anything.”

  We sat there in absolute silence for a long moment. Even Ben had given up wailing to take stock of his surroundings. Then he broke the silence. “I want French Toast, mommy.”

  She half laughed and shook her head. “Alright. Come on.” She stood and shot me a dirty look. “We’ll go get French toast, since it’s apparently such a big deal.”

  “I can make m
ore,” I said.

  “Don’t bother. We’ll go get it. But Owen?”

  “What?”

  “I want you gone by time I get back.”

  “Meg,” Jason said, “come on.”

  “Both of you.”

  “She doesn’t mean it,” Jason said. He was hunched over the counter while I cleaned up. “She’s just upset. I mean, I get it. Her husband died. She’s just having, you know, some kind of breakdown. She doesn’t mean it.”

  Whether she did or didn’t, I couldn’t say. I didn’t really care.

  “And Maisie, sweetie: you’re not fat,” he went on.

  “Mom thinks I’m fat.”

  “You’re not.”

  “Daddy was fat.”

  “He was,” I said. “A little. But you’re not, Mais.”

  “Your mom is projecting her own insecurities on you,” Jason said. “Adults do that sometimes. It’s a shitty thing to do, but it’s always about them. Not you.”

  “Projecting?”

  “Yeah. You know, where someone feels bad about something, so they say someone else is that thing?”

  She looked at him blankly.

  “You ever play a game,” I asked, “and you beat someone? And then they call you stupid? Or they say the game is stupid?”

  She nodded.

  “It’s like that. They don’t really think the game is stupid. They’re mad because they lost. They say that to make themselves feel better. They don’t think you’re stupid. They know you’re not: how could you be? You just beat them. They’re worried that losing makes them stupid.”

  “So they project those feelings on you,” Jason finished.

  “Oh.” Maisie considered this for a long moment. “So…mom thinks she’s fat?”

  Jason threw a glance around, as if making sure no one had appeared who might overhear him. “Your mom was fat as a kid. People were really mean to her. It hurt her feelings.

  “So when she says those mean things to you, it’s not because you’re fat. It’s because she remembers being your age, and people being mean to her.”

  Maisie glanced to me for confirmation, and I nodded. I hadn’t known her mom as a kid, but I had no reason to doubt Jason. And, whether it was true or not, if it helped Maisie, that was worth backing him up.

  “Poor mommy,” she said.

  “Yeah. But you remember, Mais: when she says those mean things to you, it’s not about you. It’s about your mom.”