“There were so many people on the scene, so many people searching the woods. I’m afraid there’s no clear evidence to say precisely what happened. We have to try to reconstruct the time after she left her friends, and you, Kimber. We need to find out what she was doing and who she was with, if anyone.”
“I guess you don’t really know anything, then.” Kimber was afraid of the police but couldn’t stop herself from challenging them. Michelle was dead, and she had killed her. She had nothing left to lose.
“We’ll need to look at her belongings. Search her room for any photographs or notes. Did she keep a diary?”
“She did keep a diary,” her mother said, suddenly standing up. “Sometimes I read it, but I didn’t mean to. She didn’t always tell me things. But you have to know what your children are doing.” She was trying so hard to make sense of everything that Kimber almost wanted to confess to make her feel better. Michelle had been her mother’s favorite, but Kimber still loved her.
“Sometimes she took it to school with her.”
The policewoman turned to Kimber. “Why would she do that?”
“She thought someone was reading it.” She looked at her mother, who quickly guessed what she was implying.
Her mother’s face turned a deeper red. “Oh God. She knew I’d seen it. Maybe I could’ve stopped this.”
“Odds are that this was just a terrible, freak accident, Mrs. Hannon. We’ll be thorough, but sometimes there just aren’t any answers. You all should be prepared for that. Why don’t you sit down while my partner and I take a look at your daughter’s room?” As the policewoman stood, Kimber rose too.
“I know where everything is in her room. I can help you find stuff. Things my parents might not know about.” She looked sympathetically at her father. “Sorry, Daddy. Girl stuff. It’s nothing bad.”
He nodded and looked away.
Why won’t he look at me? Kimber’s heart sank. He hates me now. What if Michelle was right? What if he loved her just as much as he loved me?
As the officers followed Kimber up the stairs, she glanced out the window overlooking the backyard and the big walnut tree. In the fading light of the previous evening, before Michelle’s body had been found, she’d slipped out to the tree with the diary to bury it in the wooden box containing her long-dead parakeet, Captain Jack. She’d been afraid the inside of the box would reek of death, but when she removed the lid, there was only the smell of damp wood and dirt. Worried that the diary might somehow get covered with dead bird, she quickly took off the light sweater she’d put on over her T-shirt and wrapped it around the diary before closing the lid. She used her hands to quickly scrape the dirt back into the hole. No one would find it there. No one would find out about the notes or the trip to Union. Or about her father’s cheating.
Michelle’s room was as she had left it: bed made, sandals and tennis shoes lined up neatly underneath, winter shoes in a similar line in the closet. Her necklaces and earrings hung from three jewelry trees on her dresser. They were actually thick wire bent into tree shapes whose branches spelled “Faith,” “Hope,” “Charity.” It was very Michelle.
She watched as they searched every pocket and piece of furniture as well as the narrow cabinet above the closet, where Kimber had discovered the diary the previous week.
“Nothing here,” the male officer said, rearranging the purses on the shelf. He looked serious in his dark blue uniform and his buzz cut. A pair of aviator sunglasses with black lenses hung from his chest pocket. Kimber wished the woman would go away and leave her with him. He seemed nice, like he didn’t want to give her a hard time.
“Do you think she might have hidden the diary somewhere else? Maybe in your room?” he asked.
“My room?” Kimber sounded genuinely perplexed. But she had guessed that they might look through the whole house if they found out about the diary, which is why she had buried it the night before. “You can look, but we don’t exactly keep things in each other’s rooms.” She flustered. “Didn’t, I mean.”
It hit her in that moment that Michelle really was gone. Michelle wouldn’t be yelling at her to get out of the bathroom or telling her not to worry about the vocabulary tests in freshman English because they were ridiculously easy. They wouldn’t be trading jelly beans from their Easter baskets: Kimber hated licorice but liked the orange ones, and Michelle disliked the orange but loved licorice.
The policewoman cleared her throat. She was inexplicably holding a pillow whose cover Kimber had cross-stitched for Michelle two Christmases ago. The picture was of two pink-cheeked Hummel girls, each one holding one side of the handle of a basketful of flowers. Kimber had carefully stitched the word “sisters” below the picture with the extra blue thread in the kit. “You obviously don’t have more than one sister, Officer Brown.” She smiled at Kimber, her face full of sympathy.
Kimber felt her stomach churn suddenly, and she ran past the surprised officers into the bathroom and retched into the toilet until her stomach was empty. She slumped against the wall, sobbing. She couldn’t stop, not even when her father came to sit beside her on the floor and pulled her onto his lap so she could hide her face against his neck.
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Gabriel’s private room has a hospital bed, but the rest of it is furnished like an expensive apartment, with low bookshelves packed with current hardcovers and classics, and an electric fireplace with a pair of leather chairs in front of it. The rug in the sitting area is wool, with a pattern of ornate flowers and leaves in green and beige and peach. The curtained windows overlooking the tree- and flower-filled courtyard aren’t barred, but they look thick, almost industrial, and have six-inch screened sections at the bottom that can be opened. No one would be leaving the room that way.
His bruises are faded, but there’s a bright red, sickle-shaped scar about two inches long above his left eyebrow. He wears a pale blue cotton pullover that makes his gray eyes even grayer and banded off-white sweatpants with thick white socks. He looks rested but as anxious as Kimber feels.
There’s a moment—maybe half of a second—when it seems they will embrace. Her arms respond automatically, but she stops herself. Gabriel stops too.
“Let’s sit down?” He indicates the chairs in front of the cold fireplace.
They sit, silent, for thirty seconds that feel like thirty years. Finally she can’t bear it any longer. “Just don’t tell me you’re sorry. Anything but that.”
He gives her a wry smile. “That’s the one thing I promised Isobel I wouldn’t do. You know how lawyers are. Saying you’re sorry is too close to an admission of guilt. She’s worried you might be wearing a wire.”
“I’m not the vengeful type anymore. It’s too damned exhausting.”
“Tell me about it,” he says without humor. “The doctors here think I have”—he pauses—“obsession issues. Some other stuff. It’s complicated.”
“Gabriel, didn’t they treat you after—you know? With the car? What happened?”
He stands, walks to the window. “I was doing great. I thought I was doing great. But Kevin showed up at my office back in March, about a month after the accident, and started telling me about the house and your father, his father—he just wouldn’t shut up. Like no one had listened to him in his whole life, and everything had to come out right then. I know I should’ve shut him down, told him I didn’t know you very well.”
“But you didn’t tell him that.”
Gabriel shakes his head. “I didn’t. And then Helena’s play finished in New York. She came to visit for a couple of weeks, and Kevin came by the office when I wasn’t there, and Helena—you didn’t know her. Well, then you didn’t know her. She reminds me a lot of you, actually.” Seeing the skepticism on her face, he says, “No. Really. She is—was—impulsive. But when she loves…Helena loved fiercely. After the accident, it was all I could do to stop her from finding you right then and confronting you.”
“Oh, really?” Kimber’s unimpressed with hi
s admiration of Helena’s endless love for him. “I guess it was my good luck she figured out how to wait. Decided to make my life hell first. Was she going to kill me all along?”
“She wasn’t, I swear. No one wanted you dead, Kimber. Please, God, believe me. I never wanted that. Never.”
“Kevin said she wanted me dead.” She feels her anger rising.
He sighs. “It was like the two of them egged each other on. It got away from me. They got away from me. All I wanted was to make you hurt a little. You were so proud of your job. Proud of that house. Kevin would find his money and leave you freaked out. You would get another job. But they started taking it way too seriously. I didn’t know how serious they were—how crazy they both were—until it was too late.”
“Dammit, they almost killed Hadley, Gabriel. Kyle and Hadley were completely innocent. Helena did kill Jenny, and we’ll never know why.”
“They knew she was spying on him for you. I know it sounds lame, but I don’t think it was planned. Helena and Kevin had been drinking, and Helena stupidly pulled up one of the blinds. She thought the old woman saw her. Like I said, she was impulsive.”
“That’s sick.”
“They’re both dead. It doesn’t matter anymore.”
“It damn well matters to Jenny’s daughter. What about Diana, Hadley, and Kyle?”
“You don’t really want to go there, do you?” He gives her the same judgmental stare he gives her every time her involvement with Kyle comes up.
“Except that I didn’t try to kill any of them.”
“It wouldn’t hold up in court, but I’d say your involvement with them was an attractive nuisance for Helena. Like a swimming pool without a fence around it. You left yourself open, Kimber. You made them vulnerable.”
Now he’s sounding like the clever lawyer he is, and it pisses her off. She stands. “Screw you. Just screw you.” Her voice rises to a shout. “I don’t know why I came. Isobel told me I shouldn’t, and she was right.”
Before she can move to the door, he’s there, gripping her arm hard enough to make her cry out.
“If you don’t sit down, we have about another twenty seconds before the orderlies show up. They’re watching. Please hear me out. I’m sorry I brought up the thing with Kyle.”
Kimber glances around, notices the smoky, bulbous eye mounted on the ceiling. Fine. She jerks her arm away.
“Listen,” he says when they’re both seated. “When we were talking in the driveway after dinner at Diana’s, I wanted to confess everything to you. I remembered why I loved you. Why I still love you. But they wouldn’t let me quit. They wanted to go on, and I couldn’t stop them.”
“Oh, please. Of course you could have stopped them. You could’ve turned Kevin in to the Florida cops. You could’ve made Helena go back to New York. You’re not helpless, Gabriel. Why are you acting so helpless? Is it part of your defense strategy?” Her voice is cold. She leans forward. “You hid all this shit from me. You lied and lied and lied, knowing my father spent his whole life lying to me. Don’t try to tell me how much you love me. You don’t do something like that to someone you love.”
His face is blank, as though he doesn’t understand what she’s just said. She waits. He starts to speak, blinks a few times as though reconsidering, then starts again. “You hurt me. I thought you loved me, and then you were just gone. No real explanation. I didn’t know what I did wrong. You just stopped.”
“Relationships end,” she says. “It was too intense. I couldn’t do it anymore. But that’s no reason to drive yourself into a concrete wall and then try to ruin my life!”
“But you can’t just walk out of someone’s life that way. It’s cruel. It’s juvenile.”
Kimber puts her face in her hands. Maybe she could’ve handled it better. Hell, she sucked at relationships, period. Looking up again, she says, “We didn’t belong together. I’m sorry I left that way. But listen to me. What you did caused people to die. Your own sister.”
Her words hang in the air.
I really said that.
“I know all about the photographs of your sister. And of you,” Gabriel says. “If he couldn’t find the money in your house—in addition to getting back the twenty thousand he’d brought with him—he was going to blackmail you.”
“What do you want me to say? I guess we do have something in common. Although, you weren’t actually the one who pulled the trigger on Helena.”
“I get to live with that.”
“You do. I do.” Suddenly the room feels too warm and Kimber wants to get out. She changes the subject. “All of the money belongs to the Threllkill family. Do you know where the rest of it is?”
“No,” he says.
“Gabriel, listen. It might just have been Kevin’s fantasy that the money’s here somewhere. He didn’t know anything for sure.” She almost tells him that Kevin’s story probably appealed to him because it fit with his own desire for revenge on her. But she doesn’t. “And if he was also going to blackmail me for my savings or salary or whatever, then it wasn’t too smart of him and your sister to try to get me fired from my job.”
“No one said he was smart, and Helena was using him. I think he imagined you’d sell the house. Or you’d get money from your mother. He even talked about blackmailing Don.”
“First, he was already blackmailing Don. Second, he obviously didn’t know my mother at all. She would’ve told him to go ahead and turn me in for Michelle’s murder.” It’s probably not true, but it sounds good.
He shakes his head. “On the day she died, Helena stole all the photographs and negatives of you and Michelle from Kevin and gave them to me. She thought I should be the one to use them. But I want you to know I destroyed them—pictures and negatives. After what she did to Hadley…” He pounds his fist on his thigh and turns his face away. “Dammit, it was never supposed to go anywhere near that far.”
Kimber whispers, “It went way, way too far.”
“Oh God.” Finally he looks back at her. “When Kevin told me about the pictures—what you’d done to your sister—I hated you more than ever. There were times when I really did think I wanted you dead. But I never would’ve acted on it. I’m not a murderer.”
“Not like me, you mean.” Kimber gives a harsh laugh. “Now I hope you’re not wearing a wire.”
He leans forward and reaches for her hand, making her flinch. His eyes are intent, and he lowers his voice to an anxious whisper.
“That’s just it. You’re not a murderer. Kevin got drunk one night at my place. He was drunk a lot. I told you how sometimes he started talking, like he couldn’t stop?” Gabriel loosens his grip on her but doesn’t let go. “I don’t know what kind of bullshit investigation the police did after they found your sister, but they should have figured out that she was injured twice. Kimber, you didn’t kill Michelle.”
Chapter Fifty-Eight
September 199_
Michelle opened her undamaged eye to a blurry view of dirt and rock. When she could focus, she noticed an ant struggling up the side of the rock with something red in its mouth. Despite the afternoon heat, cold radiated through her body as though her heart were pumping ice water. Desperate to be warm, she tried to wrap her arms around herself but found her right arm was trapped beneath her. She slowly lifted her left hand to her head, feeling warmth there. But when she brought her fingers in front of her face, she saw they were wet. Smeared with blood. For the second time that day she was certain she was going to die.
There was no pushing up from the ground because half her body was wedged beneath the rock, and even small movements made her want to scream with pain.
“Kimber?” She tried to shout but managed only a rough whisper. Her jaw was stiff, and her mouth was so dry she could barely push the dirt from her lips with her tongue. Where was Kimber? She imagined the sun setting around her, the woods turning dark. She couldn’t remember if there were coyotes out here or even bears. There were definitely snakes because the teachers had wa
rned the park was full of them. No, please. No.
The directions to the meeting place on the hillside had been so clear that she’d torn up the note. If she hadn’t, her mother might have found it and known where she’d gone.
What if no one finds me?
As though God were listening to her thoughts, someone called down to her from the path.
“Hey, are you okay?”
She couldn’t answer but lifted her arm to show that she’d heard.
The sound of shushing leaves told her that whoever the guy was, he was slowly getting closer and closer. It was an easy hill to get down only if you came down the way she had: falling and rolling unawares.
“God, Michelle. What happened? Can you move?”
She’d forgotten! Of course Kevin, the boy she was supposed to meet, was here. Kevin, her half brother.
Michelle tried again to turn, but every movement was agony. “I think my right arm is broken. Maybe my leg too.”
“You’re bleeding!”
“I…I don’t know if I can walk.” She shivered. Even the sweater that both Kimber and their mother had judged too heavy for the day wasn’t keeping her warm. “Wait. What was that?” Michelle turned her head back as far as she could. Her view was limited to the top of the rock and a bit of blue sky fringed with treetops, but she froze at the sound of two more shutter clicks. “Did you just take a picture?”
Kevin gave a nervous laugh. “Sorry. I was trying to take the camera off and I hit the button by accident. Here, let’s get you onto your back.” Placing one hand on her shoulder and one on the top of her head, he tried to help her turn. She cried out in agony when his thumb pressed against the bloody wound on her temple.
Hot tears escaped from the outer corner of her eye and mixed with the blood. It trickled into her hair. Damn you, Kimber. I hope you rot in hell.
“I think you’ve definitely broken something.”
Now that she was lying on her back, she could see her half brother with her undamaged eye. It was hard to focus, but she was sure he was also the boy who’d taken her sister’s picture. Without his sunglasses on, she saw the shape of his brow was a lot like her own. How strange.
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