The Little Grave

by Carolyn Arnold

  “He’d have a motive,” Trent said softly.

  She couldn’t get herself to speak. Her father did have a motive, and he’d been quick to call to tell her it was over and that she could come back home. Had he killed Palmer to get her to return to her family? As a way of getting closure for Kevin and Lindsey too? Or had the injustice of Palmer’s measly prison sentence preyed on her father? She’d heard the rumors coming up through the department about him and how he’d toed the line. Some said he crossed it, but she’d always shut those people down. But what if they had been right all along? What if her father was the type of man who made his own justice?

  “You have to let me talk to him,” she blurted out.

  “I can’t… You’re not supposed to—”

  “I know, and I’ll take complete responsibility if it all turns to shit, but this is something I need to do.” When she’d promised Jensen she’d find justice for his cousin, she’d never have dreamed that might mean taking down her own father.

  “I need to do this,” she stressed. “You can be on standby, and, if need be, there to make the arrest. But let me talk to him. He’s my father.” She met his gaze and eventually he nodded.

  “When do you want to—”

  “Right now. Let’s clear this up right now.”

  “You sure?”

  “Nope,” she admitted and faced out the windshield.

  A few seconds later the car was moving in the direction of her parents’ house.

  Forty-Six

  Amanda’s mother was all smiles and hugs when Amanda showed up at the door.

  “I hope you have time for a real visit this time,” her mother said. “But it would have been nice if you’d called ahead.”

  “Is Dad home?”

  “Yeah, he’s—”

  Amanda went into the living room and found her father with his feet up, a rocks glass in his hand, watching TV.

  “Mandy, what’s going on?” Her mother had trailed into the room behind her.

  “Nothing, Mom; why don’t you go put on the kettle?” Amanda tried to calm the surge of emotions rolling through her. She had no intention of having a tea, but it would let her speak to her father alone while her mother was busy in the kitchen.

  Her father kicked the leg rest down on his chair and muted the television program he’d been watching. “Twice in one week? Guess you’re back, Mandy Monkey. I love it.”

  “Thanks, Dad.” She sat on the couch close to him. “It’s hard for me to ask this…” Emotional torment had physical pain spiking through her abdomen. “When did you start drinking again?” She’d build up to her reason for being there. She just couldn’t bring herself to attack the situation, even though it might be nice to get it over with.

  He cleared his throat and glanced away.

  “I’m going to guess,” she started. “Not long after the accident?”

  He chewed on his bottom lip, his eyes welling up with tears.

  A wave of guilt threatened to engulf Amanda. “I know you loved Lindsey so much, and Kevin.”

  “It wasn’t then,” he said, his voice husky.

  “When?”

  “When we realized that we’d lost you too.” Her father hiccupped a sob and it tore right through her.

  “I’m so… sorry.” She sniffled as her heart broke, something she never thought it would be able to do again. She took a deep breath. “Before that though, you hadn’t had a drink in a long time, had you, Dad? What, twenty years or so?”

  He scowled. “I don’t want a lecture.”

  “No, Dad, no lecture. I was just so proud of you.”

  The sunlight streaming through the front window caused her father’s watery eyes to sparkle. He had his hands balled into fists on the arms of his chair.

  “That’s amazing. And all one day at a time.” She was stalling, but this would be one of the toughest things she’d ever have to do in her life. “You called me after Chad Palmer’s murder.”

  “So? I figured maybe you’d finally be able to put the past behind you and return to your family. Your mother encouraged me, but I’m wondering if I did the right thing given the way you’re looking at me all disappointed.” His gaze cut to the window.

  She followed the direction he was looking and watched a cardinal perched on the porch railing.

  Her mother came into the room holding a plastic, lime-green tray with three mugs. “I hope you still like it the way you used to? Two sugars and milk?”

  “Yes,” Amanda told her. Tea was exempt from the “drink it black” philosophy.

  “Good, good. Take that one there.” She indicated with a jab of her chin for Amanda to take the mug closest to her. “Nathan,” she prompted when she moved in front of him. Her mother set the tray on the long rectangular coffee table and sat on a reclining chair. She lifted her mug in a toast, blew it, and took a cautious sip. “That horrible man finally got his due, wouldn’t you say, Nathan?”

  Her father was back looking out the window again. Amanda’s heart nearly stopped in her chest just thinking about the question she had to ask him.

  Her mother rubbed her knee and continued. “He was a drunk and took out two of the sweetest people that had ever walked the planet, and you—he ended up taking you away from us too. I might never understand why you pulled away, but I respected you enough to let you have your space.” She looked at Amanda as if seeking an explanation now.

  “It’s just… It hurt too much to be around you.” She pointed to her mother’s massaging hand. “What’s wrong with your knee?”

  “Oh, it’s nothing. Just my arthritis acting up these days.” Her mother tossed that out like it was nothing of consequence, but it had Amanda’s mind whirling.

  The perp who had attacked Palmer in the Happy Time parking lot had favored their left knee. Surely her mother’s ailment had to be a coincidence. That along with the fact her mother was the right height to be the person in the hoodie. Maybe they’d been wrong to assume it had been a man. And her father would have seen the accident report and known that Palmer’s drink of choice had been vodka—unless it slipped his mind like it had hers temporarily. But Amanda didn’t think that was the case. Her throat stitched together when she asked, “Mom, is there something you should be telling us?”

  Her mother bit her bottom lip and shook her head, her gaze drifting about as if she were lost in her thoughts. “Just such a horrible man. He certainly got what he deserved.”

  “And that was?” Amanda squeaked out.

  “Well, the papers are saying he was murdered. Hogwash, and to slap a defamatory spotlight on you, the Steele family. Disgusting. That man likely drank himself to death, choked on his own vomit.”

  Every bit of Amanda’s body sparked. It had never been made public how Palmer had died. “How do you know he drank himself to death?”

  Out of her peripheral vision, she caught her father turn toward her mother.

  “Mom,” she prompted.

  “Well, it makes sense to me. He was a drunk.” Her mother’s face knotted up and turned a bright red. “Probably drowned himself with whiskey.”

  “Palmer’s preferred drink was vodka, but Dad’s is whiskey.” She looked at her father.

  “Don’t go accusing your father of anything,” her mother hissed.

  “I’m not, Mom.” Amanda’s heart pounded in her chest as she leveled her gaze at her mother. “Did you kill Chad Palmer?”

  “Why I— I can’t believe—” She rubbed at the back of her neck.

  “Julie,” her father moaned with heartbreak.

  “He took everything from me,” she spat. “And I’m not sorry he’s dead!”

  “What did you do?” Nathan cried out. “Is that where you were last weekend? You didn’t spend it at Fee’s?”

  Her mother’s older sister, Fee, lived in Charlotte, North Carolina, over five hours away.

  Her mother twisted the hem of her shirt and wouldn’t look her husband in the eye.

  “Mom.” That’s all that wo
uld come out of Amanda’s mouth.

  “I’d been following him since his release from prison last Friday afternoon. I knew he was going to drink and drive again—and sure enough I was right. The night I killed him, I stopped him. He wasn’t going to hurt anyone again.” She tilted her chin up.

  “You wanted some time with your sister,” her father mumbled, chewing on his wife’s betrayal, seemingly wanting to avoid her confession.

  “I only lied because it was necessary.”

  “It was—” Her father clenched his teeth.

  “Where did you go, Mom?” She didn’t want to hear any more; every word from her mother’s mouth was another stab to her heart. And the way she had so callously tossed out “killed him” stole her breath.

  “I stayed at a hotel in Dumfries last weekend, starting Friday night, and had it booked through until Monday morning. I figured it wouldn’t take longer than that.” Her mother drank some of her tea. “It wasn’t as difficult as I thought it might be.”

  Amanda swallowed roughly. Killing a man hadn’t been difficult…

  Her mom continued. “I planned out what I was going to do and just waited for the right moment.”

  “Shit, Jules, that’s premeditated.” Her father’s face contorted in anguish.

  Her mother continued as if she hadn’t heard him. “I bought the whiskey and kept it in the trunk of my car. I also had one of your dad’s guns with me, along with his sobriety coin.”

  “Why?” her father asked.

  “To remind me of what else I’d lost all those years ago. I lost my husband.” Tears fell, but she didn’t stop to weep. “You’re not the same person when you drink. You’ve got a short temper; you’re distant.”

  Her father’s gaze hardened and blanked over.

  Amanda’s chest was in a knot. She’d made everything worse by taking off at a time when family should come together.

  “And I lost the coin.” Her mother met her gaze. “Guessing maybe you found it and that’s what led you here?”

  Amanda briefly pinched her eyes shut. “Just tell me what happened.”

  “He came out of that bar and I confronted him. The fast and dirty version is I thwacked him on the head with the butt of the pistol, drove him to the crap motel he was holed up in, and forced whiskey down his throat. I wasn’t going to shoot him; your father’s gun would probably be in the system. But it worked to coerce that sack of shit into doing what I told him to.”

  Maybe to get him back to the motel… “How did you force Palmer to drink?” Amanda went numb. Her mother had been the up-until-then faceless psychopath hanging around waiting for a man to die.

  “At gunpoint. I had him zip-tie his ankles and one wrist to a chair in the room. I tied his last one, while keeping my eye—and the gun—on him.” Her mother paused and inserted a tiny smile. “It was a good use for some zip-ties that were just sitting around here.”

  “How did you get him to drink?” Amanda repeated, feeling like she was watching this all unfold from outside herself. Her mother had fully planned and executed everything.

  “I stuck a funnel in his mouth, something I’d grabbed from here too, and taped it in place. I squeezed his neck, held his head back and just kept pouring. He bucked a bit at first, but his fight died really fast. He probably believed he deserved to go out that way. When he passed out, I dragged him onto the bed—that part wasn’t easy. Dead weight is no joke.” She met Amanda’s eyes—searching for empathy or understanding?

  She went on. “I staged the room and hoped it would just look like he’d drank himself to death. Maybe I should have just waited it out, let him do it to himself, but he was going to drive drunk again! Just seeing him, knowing what he intended to do…” Her mother paused and clenched her jaw. “Set me off.”

  “You stayed by his side for hours waiting for him to die, watching him… choke… and…” As Amanda spoke, she felt for what Palmer would have suffered. “I don’t know what you expect me to do here, Mom.”

  Her mother shook her head and fired a glare at her husband. “You just taught her too well, Nathan. She saw through the scene, knew he was murdered.”

  She couldn’t take all the credit as Trent had obtained the AA records that had brought her to her parents’ door, but she had been the one with the idea to get the records in the first place—little had she known…

  There was one other piece from that night that needed clarity though. “Mom, his car, your car, the logistics. How did you—”

  “I assume you found it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I took my car to the park and took a driving service from there to a couple of blocks away from the Happy Time bar. Walked the rest of the way. See, I’d already followed him to the bar just before doing that, so I knew where to catch up with him. And, sure enough, he was still there warming a stool.”

  “Driving service? You mean a Lyft or an Uber?” Amanda asked.

  Her mother snapped her fingers. “A Lyft, yes.”

  That would explain why Trent hadn’t got anywhere with the taxi companies.

  “Then after you killed him, you took his car to the park and drove off in your own?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What are you going to do?” Her father’s voice was gruff, and he looked at Amanda.

  Both of her parents were watching her, and it would have been easy in a lot of ways to turn her back on this, but it really was out of her hands. And to see her mother so full of rage was unsettling—she’d always been a rock and one of the kindest, most gentle people she knew. But her grief and her hatred, her inability to forgive, had murdered her soul, her moral compass, her morality. And reflected in her mother’s eyes, Amanda saw herself. She’d been heading down the same path, but the victim would have been herself.

  “I have no choice but to turn you over—”

  “No.” Her mother thrust out her chin. “If I’m being arrested, it’s by you. It will clear your name of that awful accusation made in the paper.” Her mother looked at her father, who raised his hands.

  “I’m off this case, Mom, but I will be by your side every step of the way. My partner is in the car and he’ll be the one to bring you in. As far as our conversation, your confession to me, none of it happened.”

  Amanda got up, her feet like lead as she headed to the front door.

  Epilogue

  A week later…

  Amanda reluctantly left a reunion at her parents’ house late afternoon. She hadn’t been able to get enough hugs from her brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews. Everyone was happy that Amanda was back but coming to grips with what Julie Steele had done, and there were moments when Amanda felt she may have imagined it all, but the horror of it was too much for her to have simply created. Like grief ebbed and flowed, so too did her mother’s actions play out in her mind as surreal, an alternate and imagined reality. If Amanda hadn’t heard her mother’s confession with her own ears, she never would have believed it, but the truth was there, not only in her words, but in her eyes. And the entire family would be the subject of county gossip for a long while to come—or at least until the next big thing. Right now, all anyone could talk about was the arrest of former police chief Nathan Steele’s wife in the murder of Chad Palmer. In the media, Detective Amanda Steele had been credited with the arrest, but officially it had been Trent.

  The toughest reunion had come with her sister Kristen and niece, Ava. Amanda hadn’t realized just how much it had hurt to distance herself from them until she was holding on to them again. When she’d made the choice to cut them out of her life, it had been too painful to look at them because all she saw was the accident, the funeral, the lowering of the coffins… that little one that had housed her baby girl. At the sight of Kristen and Ava today, her heart had opened up like it hadn’t in years, and she let them in and soaked up their love and poured hers on them.

  “I’m so sorry,” she’d whispered in Kristen’s ear when they hugged and wept.

  “Me too. I ne
ver should have stopped fighting for you.” Kristen sniffled and stepped out of the embrace. “I just…” She palmed her wet cheeks.

  “I know.” It hurt her and her sister and the rest of her family. But now they had a chance to at least inch toward healing old wounds, though it was shadowed by their mother facing prison time. Amanda had pulled her sister in for another hug and didn’t let her go until their baby sister, Sydney, who was twenty-five, nudged them apart.

  The entire day had been somewhat bittersweet, but Amanda was happy to be reunited with her family again. She only wished she’d done it sooner. If she had, maybe her mother wouldn’t have murdered Palmer.

  She pulled into the cemetery and walked across the lawn to the knoll and planted the bouquets she’d brought for Kevin and Lindsey in the holders in front of their stones. She crouched next to their graves and let the tears fall as she spoke to them from her heart and didn’t leave a detail out. It had been early evening when she’d arrived, and the sun had sunk in the sky by the time she was getting ready to leave.

  She pressed a kiss to her palm and passed it to the stones. “Thank you, to both of you, for having been a part of my life and helping me through this…” She hiccupped a sob. “The worst pain I’ve ever experienced. I will love you always and I will always, always do everything I can to make you proud of me. Thank you, Lindsey, for helping Mommy keep her word.”

  Amanda headed home, wanting nothing more than her bed and pillow, and she had some time to catch up on her sleep. Malone had granted her a week’s leave and Amanda was taking it. She’d use much of it visiting with her family, but she was also fulfilling her promise to be by her mother’s side through the judicial process. They’d hired Hannah Byrd out of Washington as her mother’s attorney and she’d got her mother out on bail. Hannah was optimistic she could get the sentencing down to fifteen years and, with good behavior, parole in seven and a half, but nothing was certain in the world of law. Nothing was for certain in the world period. Amanda didn’t miss the irony that her mother might not spend much more time than Palmer had behind bars, and how she’d always viewed the sentence as unjust and measly. And, sure, Palmer hadn’t deserved to go out the way he had, and her mother had to pay the price, but this was her mother. They’d fight for her.