by Nic Joseph
“Not ye—” He stopped as they all heard a noise on the other side of the storeroom door.
Suddenly, it flew open, and Brat stood there, her clothes wrinkled and dirty, her hair tumbling out of her braid, but her face covered in a proud smile.
“Come on in,” she said.
They walked through the storeroom toward a door that led into the back of the small auditorium.
“You ready?” Lill asked the group, but she was mostly talking to Jack.
“Yeah,” he said, and for the first time, he wasn’t the cool, confident Jack they all knew. His hand was shaking as he reached up to open the door. “I’m ready.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
The Last Day of Emily Lindsey
Sunday—twelve hours left
She woke up feeling tired, her eyes heavy and head thick, as if she’d had too much to drink the night before. Her newly dyed hair was matted around her face, sticking out in every direction, and she finger combed it down as she sat up in her hotel bed.
The White Swan Inn was an inappropriately named motel about ten minutes from the church she’d visited last night.
She glanced at the clock.
Time to get up.
She’d shown up at the church the previous evening after the meeting had already started, and Amanda had been at the front of the room. When she’d spotted Emily hovering in the back, she’d smiled and reached out a hand, beckoning her.
“Come join us,” she’d said softly. “Everyone is welcome.”
Emily had walked forward and sat down. There was no need to tell her who she was just yet. She’d get Amanda to talk to her after everyone had left.
As the meeting ended, Emily lingered near the back of the room.
“Amanda Pearson,” the woman said, reaching her hand out to shake Emily’s. There was only a handful of people left in the room.
“I’m Emily of Carmen Street Confessions,” she said softly, not letting go of the woman’s hand. “I’m sorry for surprising you like this.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Amanda said, her face falling. “What are you doing here?”
“You stopped returning my calls. I really need your help. I’m trying to learn more about Friends of Frank.”
“I told you, I don’t have anything else to tell you.”
“You’re the one who contacted me,” Emily said, finally stepping back. “Don’t you forget that.”
“I didn’t forget it,” Amanda said. “But when I read the draft of the article you sent me, it’s not what I wanted at all…” She shook her head. “If I’d known what you were going to do, I never would have reached out to you. I never would have told you about Friends of Frank in the first place!”
“Look,” Emily said. “I just came by to let you know that I’m moving forward with my story no matter what. And I’d really like you to be a part of it.”
“You must be nuts,” Amanda said, looking around her. She raised a hand as the final couple left the room and headed back upstairs. Amanda shook her head and pushed past Emily, walking toward the door. “Leave me alone, okay? I wanted your help, but I should’ve known your own self-interest was more important.”
“Fine,” Emily said. “It took a lot of searching and a lot of questions, but I finally got the names of two other people who can help me, two other people who can shed some light on what Friends of Frank really is.” She reached into her pocket and let her fingers graze the Post-it Note where she’d scribbled down two names.
“Well then, I guess you’d better go get them to help you,” Amanda said firmly. “Now please, just let me be.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Now
It took some convincing, but Gayla was able to convince Brick to let me sit in on the interview with Ryan and Eleanor Griggs.
“He’s the one who found out they were lying,” I heard her say as I stood outside Brick’s office while she plead my case.
“He shouldn’t have been talking to them in the first place,” Brick said loudly, turning to look at me through the open door. “But it’s fine. I’ll allow it, just this once.”
The five-hour interview with the Griggs was tedious, exhausting, and embarrassing for everyone involved.
It also confirmed a few things.
One, they were liars, and not in the harmless, little-white-lie sort of way. They were willing to go to any and all lengths to protect themselves and their business, even if that meant making up the most outlandish story I’d ever heard.
Two, they were certifiable. Nuts. Both of them. As they held hands and explained what happened with tears in their eyes, I had to wonder if everything was all there upstairs.
Three, and most important of all—
They were probably not murderers.
Ryan Griggs had joined us at the station just two hours after his wife called him from her foyer. He’d walked in, his long, shaggy hair hanging down around his shoulders, a thick beard covering half his face, his eyes alert. As he turned to one side, his hair moved to reveal a large bandage on the side of his head.
“You have got to be kidding me,” Gayla said.
Ryan and his wife embraced, and then the protests were falling out of his mouth before either Gayla or I had a chance to say anything.
“Look, I know what we did was a bit unorthodox, but we didn’t have anything to do with that woman’s death,” he said. “Nothing. I had no idea until my wife called me. I swear.”
He looked about fifteen pounds lighter than the picture I’d seen of him, and he was jittery, tapping his fingers quickly against the table in front of him while he held on to his wife’s hand with the other. He seemed scared, nervous, and not 100 percent sober.
But he was very much alive.
“All right, well, why don’t you take a stab at telling us what’s going on?” I said. “You know, give the truth a chance?”
He nodded and looked over at his wife, who sat there with a steely expression on her face. She seemed angry, but Ryan Griggs looked relieved to be telling us the truth.
“I drove out to see one of the patients who Emily interviewed for her blog,” he said. “Enid Greene.”
“Yes, I met Enid,” I said.
“You did?” he asked. “What did she tell you?”
“Why don’t you tell us what happened?” I said. “And again, you might want to err on the side of telling the truth here.”
“Okay,” he said. “It was horrible. A big mistake, really. I went out there just to talk to her…” He slowed his speech when he saw my face. “And yeah, maybe I wanted to see if there was anything I could do to change her mind about the lawsuit,” he said.
“You tried to bribe her.”
“No,” he said. “I tried to…give her something that she wouldn’t be able to have otherwise?” He shrugged his shoulders. “I just feel like bribe is a strong word. It was probably not the best idea, but it’s not like it worked anyway.”
“Yeah, given that she recorded you.”
“What?” Eleanor asked.
“Yeah, that’s when I realized it was getting out of control. I didn’t feel like coming home right away. I don’t know. I knew that Eleanor…” He looked at his wife. “I knew how much you wanted me to talk to them, to stop all of this, and I knew how disappointed you’d be,” he said. “I just wasn’t ready to come home yet, but I didn’t feel like going to any of the other meetings. So I missed my flight.”
“Wait, so you were never in Philadelphia?” I asked.
“No, I grabbed a hotel out near Enid’s, this absolute hole in the wall, but it was nice to be alone, nice to not have to deal with any of it or to explain why I didn’t want to try anymore.”
“But if you just talk to them—” Eleanor started.
“What? They’ll record me trying to bribe them and make it all lo
ok even worse?” he asked. “It’s not worth it.”
“So what was your plan?” Gayla asked. “Just hole up in your hotel room and hope it all went away?”
“You know, that was pretty much as far as I got,” he said. “I was just lying there in my hotel room, wondering if I should go get a bottle of whiskey. It seemed like too much effort. That was the only thing that stopped me. The worst part is that I really wanted to snatch that tape recorder when I saw it. I thought about it, for just a moment, and then ran out of there.” He shook his head and looked at his wife. “I’m a lot of things, but I’m not a violent person,” he said firmly.
I nodded for him to go on.
“So I’m lying there, having missed my flight. I’m thinking about getting drunk, and I can’t even think about calling Eleanor.”
“Ryan…” his wife said.
“I just stayed there for a few days, not doing anything. I knew that she thought I was traveling and that she’d be pissed at me for not calling, but she always got over things like that. But then I got her message.”
“Which one?” Gayla asked.
“She said that Emily from Carmen Street had been found in her home, covered in blood and holding a knife. And that there was no body, and nobody knew who she’d hurt. And that’s when I saw my opportunity.”
“How’s that for an opportunity?” Gayla muttered to me, her eyebrows raised.
“So you decided, what, to stay hidden?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “I know how crazy it sounds, but you have to understand the state I was in. I just couldn’t deal with all of the scrutiny and the questions. That woman was relentless. I figured, if people thought she was a crazy psychopath, I could stay hidden for a few years, and the company would rebound.”
“A few years?” I asked. “How would you do that?”
“It’s not that hard actually. My wife and I have three homes and a couple of properties across the globe. I knew people would figure it out soon enough, but maybe by then, they’d start to see that there was something wrong with Emily, you know, something not quite right.”
“There was no way your plan would have worked,” Gayla said.
“But it did,” Ryan said. “For a little while, right? I know it was ridiculous, but you have to understand—it came from a place of passion. That business was my life. Do you know how many people we help at Kelium? How many people’s lives we’ve saved or prolonged with our medications?”
He looked down at his hands and swung back and forth in the chair, his face twitching, the tears just starting to roll down his cheeks. His wife sat stonily beside him. “She wanted to ruin that because of one bad batch.”
“But you didn’t stop there,” I said, pointing at his ear. “What were you thinking?”
He looked at his wife and shrugged. “We weren’t,” he said. “We got desperate. When we heard about the search teams in Piper Woods, we figured…it was the most definitive way to prove that I’d been out there with her.” He shook his head. “Like I said, we weren’t thinking.”
“How did you do it?” I asked, and he looked at his wife again.
“I did it,” she said softly. “With a brand-new pair of garden shears.” She laughed humorlessly. “You know, infections and stuff.”
“My brother-in-law is a doctor,” Ryan said. “He gave me the numbing injection. He didn’t know why, though. I don’t want him getting mixed up in any of this.”
We wrapped up the interview with the couple a few hours later. Gayla and I walked back to our desks and dropped into our chairs.
“I’ve seen some crazy stuff,” she said, “but this takes the cake. Where the hell do we go from here?”
I closed my eyes and rubbed my temples. When I opened them, I straightened in my chair.
“We go to a church out in Ashland,” I said.
Gayla frowned. “What?” she asked.
“Come on,” I said, standing. “I’ll explain on the way there.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
We drove forty-five minutes up to Kendall Community Church. Gayla was quieter than usual, and I didn’t know if it was because of the whole Griggs fiasco or because of what happened with Mary earlier.
Or both.
“You all right?” I asked, my gaze on the road. Gayla and silence simply didn’t go well together.
“Yeah,” she said quickly. “I’m okay. Are you?”
“Yeah,” I said. Then nothing again for another few minutes. “Look, about Brick and Mary—”
“It’s okay,” she said. “We have a deal. As long as you’re okay, I won’t say anything to them.”
I glanced over at her and nodded. “Thanks,” I said. “Any luck with Dan Lindsey?”
She shook her head. “Nothing. Nobody’s seen or heard from him. It’s not looking good.”
We pulled up outside the church a few minutes later. It didn’t look much like a church at all. Kendall Community Church was a small, one-story building with a fading facade and boarded-up windows. If it wasn’t for the sole light on in the building, I would have assumed that it was the wrong place.
Gayla must have shared my sentiments. “You think that’s it?” she asked.
“It’s gotta be,” I said. “Worth a look around at least?”
Gayla nodded, a frown on her face as she opened the door and stepped out. I did the same, and we walked together up to the door. It was only seven, but the street was eerily dark. There was just one other building on the block, and a huge vacant lot separated it from the church.
I pulled the door open, and we stepped inside. The small, warm foyer we stood in certainly smelled like a church. I hadn’t been to church in a very long time, but they always smelled the same. We stepped forward.
“Hello?” Gayla called, but there was no answer.
We reached the end of the hall and looked into a small room with hard-backed chairs facing a stage. The room was empty, and we both turned around and headed back toward the front of the building. A staircase led down into the basement, where there were more lights on.
Gayla turned and began to make her way down. “Hello?” she said again as we walked down the stairs.
We stepped into the basement, and the heat improved, if only slightly. The floor was filled on both sides with boxes, trinkets, tables, and chairs, pushed out of the way and forgotten. We walked to the end of the hall where a door was pushed partially closed, and as we got closer, I could hear light chatter on the other side.
I stepped up to the door and peered through the glass. Inside, I could see about half a dozen people milling about the room. A man and a woman were standing just a few feet away from us, talking. The other people in the room were arranging chairs and settling in.
Gayla opened the door, and we both walked in. Everyone looked up, and the couple that was talking stopped, leaving the room in complete silence.
“Hi,” I said. “We’re looking for someone named Amanda.”
A woman near the front of the room stepped forward. “I’m Amanda,” she said. “Are you here for the seminar?”
Immediately, I recognized her voice from our phone call. “No,” I said. “I’m Detective Steven Paul, and this is Detective Gayla Ocasio. I talked to you earlier today on the phone. I was wondering if you had a few moments.”
The already quiet room got impossibly quieter as everyone stopped moving and stared.
Amanda looked like she’d been hit by a truck. She frowned and bit her lip and then quickly crossed the room until we were standing face-to-face, her back to the rest of the room.
“I thought I asked you not to call me,” she said in a low hiss. “You can’t possibly think that showing up here is any better.”
“I just want to ask you a few questions,” I said. “Please, it’s extremely important.”
“You can’t just barge in here,�
�� she said. “I’m about to host a meeting.”
“Are we going to do this or what?” one of the women asked from behind her. “It’s seven o’clock, and I have places to be.”
“I’m sorry. I can’t do this right now,” Amanda said to me, turning briefly to the crowd behind her and raising up a finger. “We have to get started. I wish you hadn’t come.”
“Is this seminar open to the public?” I asked. “If so, you won’t mind if we join?”
She balled her fists at her side but didn’t respond. Finally, she turned and headed back to the front of the room.
She sat down in her chair and watched Gayla and I warily as we made our way farther into the room and sat down in two empty chairs. Some of the other participants watched us for a moment, but they turned back to the front of the room, seemingly ready to begin their session more than they were worried about us.
“Thank you all for coming,” Amanda said, still watching me, and I could see that our presence had rattled her. I didn’t feel good about making her uncomfortable, but that fact alone let me know that she knew something. She had to. She was the best lead we had on what exactly Emily had been looking for right before her death.
“I want to talk to you about grief and overcoming that emotion,” she said. “Grief is an important part of our lives, something we all experience at some point, in varying degrees of severity. It’s how we deal with it that really matters. Because like I said, it’s going to come. It’s how we find inner peace, where we turn for sanctuary, that can help us through it.”
Amanda wasn’t looking at me anymore, and she was engaging with her audience. She was a natural, and I could tell that she’d done this before. She opened the floor up, and then the room began to share stories about things that happened to them. The stories were all incredibly painful—a mother who’d just lost her daughter to stomach cancer, a man who’d lost his wife in a car accident. I realized very quickly that you didn’t show up for grief counseling on a Saturday night if you didn’t have a good reason for it.
“Now, under your seats,” Amanda said, pointing, “I’ve placed a pad of paper and a pencil. I want you to sketch something. Absolutely anything that makes you upset. And I’m not grading based on artistic talent here.”
