by Lyla Payne
“Will. I’m okay,” I say softly.
After another minute, he straightens up and drags me into a rough, quick hug before turning me loose and putting his game face on. He pales slightly as he surveys the scene, which is pretty horrible. “What in tarnation happened?”
“That woman”—I point without looking, not wanting to take any chances with my sensitive gag reflex—“is related to Travis and me. We went looking for her a few days ago, but she was gone, and then she called me today saying she wanted to meet at the park.”
“And you said you’d go,” he guesses wryly. At least he seems too happy to find me alive to be angry. For now, anyway.
“But when I left, someone knocked me over the head in my garage and then turned on the car. Luckily, the carbon monoxide detector alerted Amelia and she saved me.”
“I can’t believe you two had batteries in your carbon monoxide detector, to be honest.”
“Brick installed a new one before Jack was born,” my cousin chimes in, looking exhausted and slightly dumbfounded now that the excitement has wound down.
Dammit. Now I’m going to have to be extra nice to Brick.
“There are cameras, too,” I remember. “Maybe they caught something.”
“We’ll check. But what brought you here?” Will prods, shifting his weight between his feet. Clearly impatient with our dawdling storytelling.
“I was worried,” I say. “This woman…Travis and I found some weird shit in her house, like she was looking for us, maybe stalking us. So after she came for me, I got scared that he might be in trouble.” I shrug. “I don’t know. I just had a feeling I should come here.”
Now that my brain has started working again, a deluge of questions covers me like slime. They stick to my skin, cold and uncomfortable and slightly smelly, but my head still aches and I’m starting to crash from my adrenaline high. I don’t have any time to wash them off; I don’t have any desire to sort through them. Not yet.
“We got here, and we heard two gunshots,” I continue, ready to be done with the story. “I heard noises, like someone moving around, so I broke the window. Gillian was dead when I got out here, and Travis was bleeding.”
Will looks like he wants to say something about me running around here unarmed after hearing gunshots, but manages to stay on track. “Did he say anything?”
“Just that she shot him.” I stop, remembering the other part. Somehow I’d managed to forget in the hubbub. “And he said she killed Frank.”
“What?” Amelia and Will say it together, as if they’d rehearsed it.
“I know.” I shake my head. “I don’t know if she just told him or whatever, but that’s what he said.”
“That’s it?”
“Yeah, that’s it. He was pretty woozy.”
Will nods and calls the Ryan twins over, speaking with them quietly. None of them have gone near the body since checking her for a pulse when they first got here. I watch as he and the Ryans put little booties over their shoes and gloves over their hands. Once they’re suited up, they approach the body.
Normally, they call in someone from a bigger town to do forensics.
“Aren’t you going to source that out?” I ask.
“We’ll call them after we bag up all of the physical evidence and take the photographs of everything,” Will says. “I don’t want anyone screwing this up if it could potentially exonerate you, Gracie.”
“Oh.” The trial hasn’t crossed my mind since I woke up in the garage, but now that Will brought it up, I can hear Brick’s voice in the back of my mind, telling me that we need proof of what Gillian told Travis. “Okay. Well…are you going to the hospital to talk to Travis after this?”
He nods, still going about his business with a frown on his face. “Yes. After we bag up the physical evidence, I’ll head to the hospital and the Ryans will wait on the coroner. Could be a while.”
“Can I ride with you?” The look on his face says he’s going to argue with me, so I rush ahead and say, “He’s my brother. I want to see if he’s okay.”
“Fine.”
I turn to my cousin, whose face is white and slack after dealing with all of the excitement. It crosses my mind that the gunshots might have dumped her back into a memory she’s tried hard to distance herself from, and feel the familiar slick of guilt slide through my guts.
I reach out and take her hand, forcing her to look at me. “You take Jack home, but call Brick first and don’t go inside unless he says it’s safe.”
“Since when did you become the mothering type?” she murmurs with a sleepy smile. Her adrenaline has clearly bottomed out too.
“Since you have someone to actually mother,” I tell her, pulling her into a hug. “Thanks for always being there for me.”
“I only do what you would do for me, Grace. I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
She turns, lugging the carseat back around the side of the house. I’m filled with gratitude that she’s found someone we both trust with her life, with Jack’s. Brick’s a good guy, despite his faults. Despite his past.
Over the next thirty minutes, Will and the Ryan brothers photograph all of the blood stains and smears, the gun and its position, and the body. Then Will bags the weapon and some tissue samples and stows them in plastic, airtight containers in his car.
At least, that’s what I assume is going on based on the conversations that filter around the side of the house. The last thing I want to do is watch, so the front porch seems like the best place to wait for my ride to the hospital.
It’s a relief when we finally leave. I never want to go back, and I can only hope Travis will feel the same way and move. Immediately.
Once we get to the hospital, it’s something of a whirlwind. Travis is fine, sitting up and looking much more colorful after receiving a blood transfusion. I listen, rapt, as he tells Will what happened.
Gillian showed up while he was raking up some leaves in the backyard, gun drawn and ranting like a lunatic about our family and needing to purge the bad blood once and for all. He tried to keep her talking, but when she said she’d left me for dead, just like my father, he rushed her. They struggled for the gun, and it went off, getting him in the arm before he managed to turn it around on her.
The rest I know; I’d arrived moments after it was all over.
Will steps out to call Brick and the FBI, since my case is still technically active. I stay by Travis’s bed—not holding his hand because that would be weird for us, but unwilling to step away from him either.
“I’m glad you’re okay,” I tell him.
“I’m glad you’re okay,” he says back, a smile crinkling the edges of his gray eyes. “But we missed our Skype dates.”
“I’ll email them tomorrow and try to reschedule.”
We sit in the quiet for a while, and then Travis’s lips pull down into a frown. “I wish I hadn’t killed her. I mean…I didn’t have a choice, but it would have been nice to be able to talk to her first. Get her to confess to Frank’s murder on tape, and all of that.”
“I know. But it’s okay. We’re alive, and that’s the most important thing.” I wish he hadn’t killed her too, for the same reasons.
I find myself biting my lower lip. It would be nice to believe this whole murder thing has been swept off my plate, but those questions I let myself ignore earlier have come seeping back.
As much as I want to blame everything on this one woman, it feels a little bit too neat. Why did Gillian wait all of this time to make her move? And why try to frame me for Frank’s murder, if that’s what she’d done, only to come back and try to kill me?
It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but I’m far too tired to try to make sense of it right now, and Travis is settling back into his pillows, too. Part of me wants to go home, but the rest of me isn’t ready to leave him. Brick will take care of Amelia; I know it.
That’s why, when Will comes in to tell me the FBI want to talk to me, he finds me fast asl
eep in a puddle of drool the size of Lake Erie.
That’s the small one, right?
“They’re here? Now?”
He nods, his eyes huge. “So is Brick. Just in case.”
I follow him dumbly into the same waiting room where Beau and I broke up a month or so ago. The room feels tight, full of memories that choke off my oxygen, but it isn’t as though our tiny Heron Creek Medical Center offers many options.
The agents are the same ones who worked my case before, the ones who decided I was guilty without listening to a word I had to say.
I shoot Brick a glare as I cross the room to stand next to him. “You’re supposed to be taking care of Amelia.”
“I did. And now I’m taking care of you. It’s a big job, you must realize.” He sighs when I don’t even crack a smile. “She’s at Mel’s. They’re both fine.”
“Humph.”
“Just listen.”
“Are you two finished?” the agent asks, one eyebrow arched impatiently. “Good,” he says when neither of us responds.
“Given today’s events, and the items that were found in Ms. Harvey’s possession at the time of her death, we wanted to inform you that we will be looking into the possibility that she’s connected to your father’s murder case,” his partner starts.
My heart jumps. “What items?”
“Photographs,” Brick explains. “Of you and your brother, but also of your father. Notes about needing to find you, to take care of her family obligations.”
“The shovel in your garage, the one used to knock you out earlier today, and the gun found at Mr. Travis’s will also be tested for prints, ballistics, and other forensic evidence,” the first agent says.
“Against the shovel that was used to kill Frank, as well as the other items found with him under your house.” It’s Brick again, translating. Telling me what I really need to know.
I nod like an idiot. Will gives me an encouraging smile from his place by the door, present but not involved, and I take heart. This is good news.
Nothing may come of it, but they’re looking at other possible scenarios, and if the notes they found on Gillian are anything like the ones she left in those books, Brick will have plenty of material for the hearing next week.
“We just wanted to give you and your attorney a heads-up, given that your trial date is coming up,” the second agent tells me. There’s a suspicious glint in his eye, but I’m starting to think nothing would dislodge it, not even a private meeting with the pope.
“Thanks,” I tell him, still feeling removed from the situation. It has been a long, ridiculous day. I don’t know what to make of any of it, but I know that I need some time alone. Some space. Some quiet.
I also know that I don’t want to go home. The feeling of displacement, of anxiety, produced by the thought of returning to my grandparents’ house—my former refuge—won’t last forever. There are too many good memories, too much love infused into those walls, for that to ever happen.
But for tonight, I want to be with my friends. Safe. Even if the entire idea is turning out to be something of an illusion.
Maybe if Leo were here, things would feel different. Safer, more finished.
“Can I go home with you?” I ask Will once the agents are gone.
“Do you know how many times fifteen-year-old me wanted to hear those words?”
I swat his arm, a little surprised by his teasing but grateful, too. “Perv. Amelia’s there with Mel. I just thought…we should all be together.”
Not all of us.
Strange, how it had always been Mel, Amelia, Will, and me, a night with friends in Heron Creek no longer felt complete without Leo there, too.
Might as well get used to it.
Will slings a brotherly arm around my shoulders, tugging me close. The familiar smell of him goes straight through me, an arrow tipped with friendship and loyalty and love and nostalgia—and maybe a dozen other emotions that weave together this relationship that has lasted over half of my life.
“Of course, Gracie. Together is how we’ve gotten through everything so far. I don’t see why tonight should be any different.”
It’s not until we get to his house, and the four of us are sitting around the living room with popcorn and wine, that I feel safe enough to completely lose my shit.
Chapter Twenty-One
It’s surprising how fast things like preliminary hearings and murder charges can disappear from a person’s calendar when the real culprit is apprehended. The evidence from Gillian’s car was enough to kick the FBI into gear, but it was the fact that Gillian’s prints showed up on the bags of drugs under my house that convinced them, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that she had done it.
Honestly, some of the stuff in her car read almost like a confession. It was eerie.
I’m having a hard time believing it’s over—that there’s no trial hanging over my head. That we found the person who killed Frank. That the threat from the Fournier family has been put to rest, quite literally.
I should feel free, but something’s standing in my way. The questions that don’t have answers, at least not satisfying ones.
Part of it, I’ve decided, is that Lavinia Fisher hasn’t been back to bother me. Which should make me happy.
But it doesn’t.
It feels unfinished, her leaving. It could be because of my gift or whatever—that I can’t forget about her because I didn’t help her the way I was supposed to. Even though I didn’t want to help her creepy, crazy butt to begin with.
It could be because I never got the chance to ask her whether she had been spying on me for Gillian.
Or someone else.
The fact that she hasn’t returned seems to indicate that Gillian is—was—a Fournier who shared Frank’s gift. If someone else had been controlling her, wouldn’t she still be around?
More questions.
It’s the reason I’m standing at the gates of the Unitarian church graveyard for the second time in as many weeks. They’re locked again, too, and I’m feeling particularly conspicuous standing here with a shovel.
Not the one that was used to kill Frank, or the one that knocked me in the head. The FBI has both of those. I had to buy a new one, and replacing the one my grandma and grandpa used to work in their garden for decades has left me strangely bereft.
Strangely, because who gets nostalgic about a murder weapon?
I toss the shovel over the wall before anyone can stumble along King Street asking uncomfortable questions. The wall isn’t too high, though it’s too tall for me to feasibly climb it without hand or footholds. But my lock-picking kit is in my back pocket, and the mechanism isn’t sophisticated. I probably could have popped it just as fast with a bobby pin.
Inside, the place feels as eerie as ever. People like me, those who attract the dead, shouldn’t spend too much time in graveyards. I decided that after picking up the ghost of Dr. Ladd on the last ghost tour I took, and yet…here I am.
I retrieve my shovel and try to ignore the creeping feeling of being watched as I make my way through to the older part of the graveyard, heading toward the wall where Lavinia sat the last time we were here. There’s honest to goodness fog drifting four or five inches off the ground, obscuring my feet and whatever dead, groping hands might lurch toward me from the graves.
The ground is soft, thanks to the misty evening, and my shovel has no trouble sliding into the soggy winter earth. Lavinia didn’t give me exact directions. I was hoping that she would show up when I arrived, but she hasn’t, leaving me to rely on my memory as far as where, exactly, she mimed me digging.
Moonlight flickers in and out underneath spotty clouds. A cold wind gusts through the trees, most of them varieties that keep their leaves through the winter in this climate. Despite the feeling of being watched, of not being alone in this place, the night feels peaceful. There’s something simple about the shovel in my hands, the cold air in my lungs, and the monotonous act of digging small, two-foot-deep holes
along the bottom of the wall.
I work like that for a couple of hours before quitting, satisfied there’s nothing buried there. Nothing that isn’t supposed to be, anyway.
Instead of hustling out of the cemetery, of heading back home where Brick promised a warm fire and steaks on the grill for an early celebration of my exoneration—my friends have a bigger one planned later this week—I hoist myself up onto the small wall. The stone under my thighs is cold, slippery, and slightly wet. I guess I’m hoping that I might get some answers by sitting where Lavinia did. That she might come back and tell me why she was here in the first place.
But she doesn’t. Nothing happens. No ghosts appear, and the longer I sit, the more it seems to me like the Unitarian graveyard is a place like any other. Like Odette said, it’s almost certainly haunted, but no more or less than any other holy ground in the Holy City.
In the end, I hop down and make my way back to my car. The streets are lonely but not deserted. The storefronts glow and their signs declare them open, although customers are relatively thin this time of year.
It occurs to me that I’m going to have to find a way to let this Lavinia Fisher thing go. I may never find out why she’d come to me. If she’d done it of her own accord, if she’d ever wanted anything. What the true version of her death really is.
If I’m being honest, it’s maybe the last part that bothers me the most.
When there’s a knock on our front door after dinner that night, Big Ern is about the last person in the world I expect to see. He’s wearing his usual getup—overalls, no shirt, straw hat—though he has added a pair of boots, presumably because he enjoys having ten toes.
Dinner was delicious, and it was actually enjoyable to spend time with Brick now that he’s no longer trying to lawyer me twenty-four-seven. He and Amelia seem comfortable in their relationship, however they’re defining it.
Now that all of this trial madness is over, Amelia and I are overdue for a talk about her love life. I want to hear everything—if he’s kissed her, whether they’ve had the talk, if the Drayton matriarch knows what’s going on—and she’ll totally tell me. It will be nice to go back to fussing over my cousin and Jack, not to mention moping over Beau, with nothing else in my mind.
