Tara left her chair and went to the kitchen window to look out. At what, Lauren didn’t know. The only thing visible was Tara’s own reflection, a near white, almost featureless oval, floating in a rectangle of glass as gleaming and black as oil.
“I was too late,” she said. “Bo was down there dying even before I got the tray out the door. Jeff and Greg might not have even known he was there if I hadn’t joined them. I’m the one who heard him. A whimpering sound. I thought it was an injured animal.”
“But how, TeeRee? How did they not see?”
“You don’t remember how thick the brush is along there? Even in daylight, it’s almost impossible to see the road. And it was getting dark. The light was almost gone.”
They shared a silence.
Lauren broke it. “Which one of them—?”
“I don’t know. They were both firing the gun.”
“Bo was whimpering, you said, so he was alive when you got to him?”
“I almost didn’t pay attention. For a moment, I thought it was only the wind, but then I heard him say please help me, please help me. It was awful.” Tara turned from the window. Tears welled in her eyes again; she brushed them away. “I went down the slope as fast as I could and found him. There was already blood under him, so much blood. I never saw—”
“Did anyone call 911? Did you go for help?” Lauren asked, even though she knew that if they had, she wouldn’t be sitting here listening to a horror story.
“We couldn’t get a signal, and then—then Jeff and Greg—they both—” Tara sat down and closing her eyes, rocked herself.
She needed a tissue, but Lauren couldn’t move.
“I don’t want to tell you the rest,” Tara said. “I don’t know how.”
“You left him there. Is that it? The three of you left Bo there to die?”
“No! I tried CPR, but Jeff said I was making him bleed worse. We kept trying to get a signal, Greg and I did. I told Bo to hang on, but he couldn’t—” Tara’s voice broke on a little sob. Her throat worked when she swallowed.
“How have you kept this to yourself?” Lauren asked softly.
“It was Jeff, and I’m not just saying that. I know I’m not his biggest fan, but the way he acted—he was just manic and crazy, shouting at us that we weren’t going to involve the police, and if I chose to, I’d be sorry.”
“He threatened you?”
“More like guilted me. He said I should consider you and the kids, how if what happened got out and he went to jail, it would destroy your lives, and did I want that on my conscience.”
“That doesn’t sound like him, Tee.”
“I know. He can be an asshole—sorry.” Tara made a face. “He thinks you’re still so fragile. He was in superprotective mode, I guess. It was weird and horrible, the whole thing—”
“It was an accident, though!” Lauren bent forward, disbelieving, adamant. “Hiding it only made it worse. Jeff—all of you—should have known better!”
“I did everything I could, Lauren.”
Tara’s voice, her wild-eyed gaze, were feverish, hectic, but Lauren was in no frame of mind to soothe her.
“What about Greg?” she said. “Did he go along with covering it up, too?”
“Yes, but at least he had a—an excuse, I guess you could call it.”
“Because he killed another man.” Lauren didn’t think twice about giving away Greg’s secret, the one she’d harbored since hearing him confess it during the 12-step meeting last summer. Confidentiality no longer seemed an issue.
“You knew?”
“I’ve been worried about you ever since I found out, but everything we say in meetings is supposed to stay in meetings.”
“He said going to prison was his wake-up call, his come-to-Jesus, what made him get off heroin. He was in there five years for manslaughter.”
“Did he tell you how it happened, that he was high on heroin when this guy tried to rob him, and he shot him? He said he could have walked away, but he didn’t.”
“You can tell he feels sick about it, though. He told us prison was hell, that he’d rather blow out his brains than go back.” Tara locked Lauren’s gaze. “He put the gun to his head.”
“For all you know, he was high when he did that.”
“No, I don’t think—”
“He’s slipped up before, TeeRee. Twice in three years that I know of. He was partners with some guy—another dealer that Annie, Bo’s sister, dated. Leighton something. The police are looking for both of them.”
“Greg took off as soon as he and Jeff—once they took away the body. I don’t know where he went.”
“That’s the part I can’t believe!” Lauren got up and, needing distance, went to stand behind her chair. “How could you roll Bo’s body up in our grandma’s beautiful rug?”
“It wasn’t me!”
“But you let them.” Lauren’s voice was shrill. Rounding her chair, she sat down again.
“I couldn’t stop them. If you’d been there—”
“You have to go to the police.”
“No!” Tara’s head popped up from her hands. “You can’t, either. I wouldn’t have told you if I’d thought—”
“Tara! For God’s sake, a man—Bo Laughlin—is dead; his family is sick with worry. You can’t let this go on. I can’t believe you agreed to cover it up in the first place.”
“I told you I didn’t agree, and anyway, how can you of all people preach to me?”
“Really? That’s how you want to play it?” Lauren took her cup to the sink, rinsed it, and shut off the tap, hard; then picking up a hand towel, she turned to Tara. “Fine. We’ll do it your way. So you can consider this your intervention, all right? The one where I say you either go to the police or I will. Hmm? The way you said to me at my intervention that I could either get help or you—you and Jeff—would see to it for me. Remember? You threatened to take my children if I didn’t do as I was told.”
Tara didn’t answer, but Lauren didn’t really give her the chance. Things, details were coming together in her mind. She was angry now. It was difficult to be articulate, yet she tried to put words to what was only half-formed sense. “This whole entire week—” she began, stopped and started again. “The things I’ve been thinking, blaming myself for—scaring myself over—my God, I even thought I might have done something to Bo myself.”
“I’m not following.”
“Jeff went along when I thought I had brought the notepad into the house. How could he do that?” Lauren folded the towel in half, running her fingers along the crease. She ought to feel relieved, she guessed, to know beyond doubt that she’d had no part in Bo’s death, but she didn’t.
“What notepad?”
Lauren looked at Tara. “You lied to me last night. You weren’t hiding Greg, but you knew. You knew what happened, that Bo was dead and how.”
“I didn’t want you involved. You’ve been through so much.”
“You didn’t want me involved? Are you kidding? We’re family, Tara—you, me, Jeff, the children—” Lauren’s voice, her mind faltered at the thought of them, Drew and Kenzie: What would she tell them?
“I’m sorry. I just—I don’t know what I—”
“How am I supposed to trust you now?”
“I guess the same way I trust you even though you lied and lied to me when you were drugging yourself.”
Lauren tossed aside the towel. “I thought Greg was back on heroin and that’s why you were acting so weird. I thought he killed Bo in some drug deal and you were hiding him, and I was scared to death for you and for Drew when he was here. Then I thought maybe you had cancer or something. You knew I was worried sick about you, and all the time, you were covering up this—this terrible—”
Was it real? Did it happen the way Tara said? Did Greg and Jeff really—dear God, ho
w would she tell Annie?
“Do you think I’ve slept since then? Or eaten or been able to work this entire week?”
“Do you think Annie or Bo’s dad has slept or eaten?”
The silence banged down hard, a judge’s gavel, an indictment. Then, abruptly, Lauren laughed, and the sound was ugly, truncated. “I planned to ask you to help me do a fund-raiser for Bo. Can you imagine? The only reason I didn’t mention it is because you were sick.”
Tara turned her mug in circles.
Lauren leaned, stiff-armed, on the counter. “No wonder Jeff didn’t want me volunteering. God, what a fool I’ve been.” She was remembering yesterday, at the hospital, when he’d blamed her involvement with Annie’s family for the neglect of Lauren’s own.
Some fucking stranger.
That was how he’d referred to Bo. And he’d known Bo was dead and where Bo’s body was, the body he’d dumped on that no-name ranch road. It was monstrous, despicable. And then his act, that holier-than-thou performance at Kenzie’s bedside—his perfect-father routine—
I’m working my ass off . . . trying to keep us together . . .
What is going on with you? He had asked her at the hospital. Asked her in a way that made her feel she was the ruination of him.
When he had killed Bo and covered it up. He had let her be targeted by the police.
Tara stepped toward her.
Lauren thrust up her hand, palm out. “You have to make this right,” she said. “You and Jeff and Greg have to go to the police.”
“Well, last I looked, I’m the only one still here.”
Lauren sat at the table and put her head in her hands, fighting for composure, for clear-mindedness. It did no good to wonder how her sister and her husband and a man she thought of as her friend could, in so short a time, have become criminals who were wanted by the law. She looked at Tara. “Even if we can’t find them, you still have to go to the police. Bo’s family needs to know what happened to him. You can understand that, can’t you? If you don’t, I mean it, Tara, I will.”
“You would turn me in, your own sister, but you wouldn’t tell me Greg was a murderer?”
“The two things are not the same. There’s no question now of violating anyone’s right to keep their past mistakes private. I think the police know already. Maybe not all of it but something. They have the photo of the rug. They went by the warehouse, looking for Jeff. It’s only a matter of time until they put it together.”
“I didn’t even hold the gun, much less shoot it. I don’t know where they tossed it or where they took the body.” Tara averted her face, jaw trembling. “I couldn’t stop them—couldn’t save him.” She looked back at Lauren, and her eyes were fierce. “I tried! I tried to make his heart beat, make him breathe, but he—he—” She clapped her hands over her mouth.
“I’ll go with you, TeeRee.”
She didn’t answer.
“Can’t you see that you will never have peace unless you make this right? It doesn’t matter what Jeff or Greg do. You can’t live with this. I know, because I know you and how you’re made. This will end up breaking you.”
“I’m afraid, Sissy.”
Sissy. When had Tara last called her that? After their parents died, Lauren thought, when she’d been so young and lost, and Lauren’s sense of Tara then, the memory of her grief, her vulnerability was so visceral and real that Lauren couldn’t stop herself from going to Tara and gathering her little sister in her arms. “We’ll get through this together,” she said. “I’ll be right here beside you every step of the way.” It was the same comfort she had offered Tara all those years ago, during the long and terrible nights when, except for Margaret, they had been so alone in the world.
They were in the Navigator, leaving Tara’s house for the sheriff’s office when the unmarked brown sedan pulled across the driveway, blocking their exit. Tara turned around, and Lauren watched in the rearview mirror as the detectives, Cosgrove and Willis, got out of opposite doors. Both men seemed to be waiting. Within a few moments, another car, a patrol car with its siren off and its lights flashing, came down the street, and in its wake, a second squad car appeared. Without the warning shriek of sirens, their approach seemed covert, even lethal.
Within moments, four uniformed deputies had joined the detectives. A low sound of voices ensued, accompanied by a minimum of hand gestures. Sidelong glances were directed toward the Navigator. One deputy had braced his hand on the butt of his gun.
Panic sat in Lauren’s gut, as hard and cold as stone.
“Oh, God.” Tara let her head fall against the seatback.
Lauren took her hand. She couldn’t bring herself to say it would be all right. That was Jeff’s line, and it had turned out to be a lie.
28
Two officers approached Lauren’s SUV, one coming to the passenger side and the other rounding the tailgate to the driver’s side.
“I need y’all to step out of the vehicle,” he said when Lauren lowered her window.
“Are we under arrest?” Tara asked as she slid from the passenger seat, and the quaver in her voice made Lauren’s heart falter.
“Are we?” Lauren got out of the car.
The deputy cupped her elbow. “The detectives just want to ask you some questions.”
“About Bo Laughlin?” Lauren pressed.
“Yeah, that, and there are some other related matters.”
What other related matters? Lauren would have asked, but the officer was walking her toward the street, where the squad cars waited, and she was frightened now, enough that she balked, causing the deputy to tighten his grip.
“Can’t we ride together?” Lauren heard Tara ask, and looking around, she realized they were being led to separate patrol cars. She glanced over at the detectives, Cosgrove and Willis, who hadn’t left the vicinity of their vehicle. They didn’t meet her eye, and it seemed deliberate. She wanted to shout at them, to demand they tell her what was happening. But panic made it impossible to speak. Her ears rang with it. Her stomach was knotted in its huge fist. The officer who was escorting her opened the back door of his car and gestured her inside. She sat gingerly, wiping her sweaty palms down her thighs. Once he closed the door, the smell of something rancid in the air—body odor and a fainter stench of vomit mixed with something harsher, like fear—her own and that of countless others—almost gagged her. She took air in shallow dips and prayed not to faint.
She didn’t speak on the ride into town and neither did the deputy, and when they arrived at the sheriff’s headquarters, and he let her out of the car, she gulped air like a person saved from drowning. Inside the squat two-story building, she caught sight of Tara for a moment, long enough to see she’d been crying and needed a tissue. Lauren thought of her purse, left behind in the Navigator. She always carried a tissue. Mothers did that.
Her uniformed escort ushered her to the end of a short corridor lined with doors, stopping at the last one—the sign beside it identified it as “Interview Rm. A”—and opening the door, he said, “Have a seat, okay? Detective Cosgrove will be here shortly.”
The room was small, not much larger than a good-sized, walk-in closet, and furnished with a metal table and four chairs. Lauren went to the opposite side of the table, facing the doorway.
“Can I get you anything?” the deputy asked. “Water, Coke, coffee?”
She shook her head, struck by his politeness. He was young and clean-cut. His mother would think he was handsome in his uniform. She would be proud. The thought made Lauren’s throat tighten. She didn’t know why. The door was nearly closed when she said, “Wait.”
He popped his head into view, brows raised.
“My purse and my sister’s—do you know where they are?”
“Here. At the duty desk. You can pick them up there when you’re done.”
“Thank you,” she said.
The door closed. Lauren propped her elbows on the table. The top half of the wall to her right was mirrored. She’d seen enough television crime shows to know it was two-way, that she was likely being observed. She hugged herself, feeling self-conscious, and jumped when the door opened.
“Sorry to keep you waiting.” Detective Cosgrove pulled out a chair opposite Lauren and sat down. He arranged the things he’d brought into the room on the table, a cup of coffee, a manila folder—it might have been the same one she’d seen earlier—a pen, and a notebook. She’d seen him write in that, too, when he’d come to her house.
She met his gaze.
“Thank you for coming,” he said, taking a hasty sip of coffee.
“Did I have a choice?” Her anger now made it possible to breathe, to speak without stammering, something she tended to do when she was scared. Which she was. Plenty scared.
“Well—”
“Tara and I were coming here on our own. If you’d waited, we would have saved you and your department the trouble.”
“That’s me, always jumping the gun.” He made a wry face.
“Where’s your partner?”
“Willis? I don’t think we need him in here. He just pisses people off.”
“What is this about, Detective?” Lauren wasn’t in the mood for humor.
“Why were you and your sister coming here?”
Lauren shifted her glance, but what was the point of being coy for either of them? Bringing her gaze around, Lauren said, “I think you know.”
“Here’s what I know, Mrs. Wilder—”
“Lauren, please call me Lauren.” She didn’t know why she asked for that. Maybe because the use of first names felt less intimidating.
“Lauren, then,” he repeated. “If you call me Jim,” he added, and he smiled as if he meant it.
Lauren felt her heart ease a bit. “You were going to tell me what you know, Jim. I interrupted.”
“Yes, well, shortly after we left your house, you left and drove by Wilder and Tate, then drove to your sister’s house. You were there for a little over an hour. In the course of your visit, you related to her that we’d been to your house and showed you a photograph of the area rug belonging to your grandparents—I’m assuming here, okay? Am I correct, so far?”
Crooked Little Lies Page 30
