“You and Asher? Got in a fight?” Mia clarified.
“Yeah.”
“It was physical?” It was hard to believe she’d missed something so big. But she hadn’t realized Asher was planning on killing himself, either.
Cash was considering lying even when asked point-blank; it was so easy to read him.
“Don’t,” Mia said. She didn’t need to elaborate. Don’t lie.
He glanced up, his eyes sliding over her face. “Yes. I punched him.”
The room was still, and Mia almost forgot Sammy and Izzy were there, listening.
Mia licked her lips, and she thought back to that picture in the hallway. The three of them, their bodies like puzzle pieces, so at home with each other. Mia staring up at him like he was the stars and the sun and every happy and sad thought in the universe, a constellation of perfection. But it was the girls beyond the edges of the frame that had held both Cash’s and Asher’s attention. She’d thought Cash was looking at the camera.
“Monroe?” she finally asked, because, of course, why else?
Cash’s nostrils flared, and he wouldn’t look at her. He didn’t answer, because silence was part of their pattern of lies, and it was enough.
“Shit,” Izzy said on an exhale from across the room.
That summer. What did she really remember? She’d thought they’d been tangled together, she and Cash. Blind to anyone else. Hot, slick skin and swollen lips and hungry fingertips. Sugarcoated tongues from the syrupy Coke they’d drunk by the case during the day and alcohol-saturated laughter that spilled too easily from their mouths at night.
The memories felt like a film now, a pretty one, cut with rose and gold and sunburst filters. A melodic soundtrack played in the background as shots of her long blonde hair swirled around bare, tan shoulders and spaghetti straps.
How had it really been? Could she strip away the nostalgia to find the raw footage? There had to be things she wouldn’t want to see, bruises and hurt feelings. They’d been teenagers after all.
That first day when Monroe sat on Asher’s lap during their stupid game of truth or dare.
When Mia had thought about it earlier, she’d still been able to feel Cash’s hand on her back. But what about his face? Had he been watching them? Envious already? Of fresh possibilities, skin that hadn’t already been explored millions of times over the years, a body that didn’t reek of familiarity.
Why did they see things through prisms rather than as they were? Why couldn’t she see his eyes when Monroe straddled Asher? Why couldn’t she remember the punch or the blooming green and purple on Asher’s face?
“When?” she asked, because anything else was too much, too loaded and fragile and important. When did you punch him? That was easy at least.
“That day,” Cash said, and there was almost relief in his voice. Like the secret had been eating him from the inside out for more than a decade.
“You were grounded for it,” Mia said, her brain slow, so slow.
“Dad was furious that I punched someone.”
“Hey, I have a question,” Izzy called from her corner of the room. Mia flinched at the interruption. “As, you know, someone who doesn’t speak your supersecret language.”
Cash just shoved his hands in his pockets, but Mia met Izzy’s eyes, a silent go-ahead.
“Why were you the one swinging at Asher? If Monroe cheated on him with you, wouldn’t it have been the other way around?”
Cash’s eyes flicked to the side to catch Mia’s face in his peripheral, and something slid into place. Why hadn’t she asked that question? Blind spots. She had so many on this case.
Mia swallowed the saliva that had gathered against the pockets of her cheeks, flushing hot, then cold again.
The spaces between the truths always hid the lies. Cash had punched Asher. Cash had punched Asher over Monroe. Cash had punched Asher over Monroe and been grounded for it.
But none of that meant Cash had been in the wrong. He’d just been acting like that kid she’d known back then, trying to right the world’s injustices.
“No,” she said quietly, because she was a person sometimes just as much as she was a cop, and she didn’t want to let go of her best friend, the one who’d died fifteen years ago. Whatever Cash was about to say, though, she knew just from the way he hesitated that it would be bad, knew it would be a shadow that slid over the Asher she remembered.
Izzy’s eyes snapped between them when Cash didn’t say anything, but his fingers clenched and unclenched against the sides of his legs.
“What am I missing?”
Cash licked his lips, looked once at Mia, and then turned back to Izzy.
“Monroe was pregnant.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
IZZY
Mia and Izzy didn’t return to Edie’s house until midafternoon. They’d helped Sammy deal with the body, then walked through all the rooms, checking each as thoroughly as possible without a tech team.
“So that’s convenient,” Izzy said, settling into what she was beginning to think of as her chair. “Wraps everything up nicely.”
While filling the kettle, Mia glanced back at her over her shoulder. “What do you mean?”
“Monroe was having an affair with an older guy on the island.” Izzy pushed her chair onto two legs. She held on to the counter behind her with her uninjured arm. “He finds out about the pregnancy, kills her, makes it look like suicide so there’s no autopsy. No one knows about the baby. Boom, problem solved.”
“Cash knew,” Mia said, leaning against the counter, her arms crossed, not giving anything away about how she felt about that particular revelation.
Cash had sworn that he hadn’t been sleeping with Monroe, had said he’d simply been trying to get Asher to step up and do the right thing. The fight had just been a man-up talk that had escalated because teenage boys were teenage boys.
Izzy doubted it had really been that simple, but, for now, she was going to let it go.
“Right.”
Mia rolled her shoulders. “And that scenario doesn’t account for why they’d be okay with Asher and me as collateral damage.”
Izzy deflated further but tipped her head in agreement.
“Actually,” Mia continued, the word drawn out, thoughtful, “I was thinking about it a different way. Still convenient.”
Izzy waved her free hand. “Do tell.”
“The case looks like it’s wrapped up,” Mia said.
“Isn’t that what I just said?”
“No. I mean this case. The reporter’s death. With Earl . . .”
“We see Earl’s suicide,” Izzy jumped in, “and assume he was the older guy involved with Monroe.”
“We conclude that he thought Twist was onto him,” Mia continued. “Logically, then, it would follow that Earl killed Twist, and both deaths, Twist’s and Monroe’s, weighed on him so much he swallowed a bottle of painkillers. That gives us a killer for both possible homicides, and a dead one to boot. Our jobs are done.”
“Case closed,” Izzy said softly. It was a tasty, easily digestible morsel all wrapped up in pretty paper.
“But what if . . . ?” Mia dragged her fingers through her hair, pushing it back into a low ponytail as she stared off at a point way beyond Izzy. “What if . . . ? What if it just looks that way.”
A setup. That’s what had struck Izzy as off about Twist’s murder as well. When you were a cop long enough, you learned how to smell a setup. And Mia was right. This whole case reeked.
I’m sorry. Forgive me.
The note, the pills, they told a clear story. But what if it just had the outer appearances of a suicide? “Just like with Twist.”
Mia nodded. “Earl did leave a note, though. Twist didn’t.”
“That’s easy enough to forge,” Izzy countered. What if they were both staged? And the person was getting smarter with each kill. Adding in a note this time to make sure it was clear. “It was typed.”
“All Earl’s notes to himself
were handwritten,” Mia said, and, God, she was a genius sometimes.
“So someone is screwing with us.”
Mia held out her hand. “Hold up. We’re running too quickly with this theory. It’s just a thought.”
“But think about it. His death could be a cover for the real killer.” Izzy let the legs of the chair drop. “Loose ends all tied up.”
Their eyes met across the small room. Cases like this were always tough, but this one seemed particularly hard to wrap their arms around. Add in someone planting a narrative in their heads, and it would become nearly impossible to untangle.
They needed a place to start.
“What about Cash?” Izzy couldn’t shake the image of him, face reddened, veins popped, teeth bared, holding Mia up on her toes. “He seems like he has anger issues.”
“You’re not seeing him like most people do,” Mia said.
“I think I’m seeing him a bit more clearly than most people do,” Izzy countered. “He was about two seconds from taking your head off this morning. And not for nothing, but we both saw Lacey’s bruises.”
Mia shook her head but said, “I know.”
“So why would Monroe go to Cash about the baby? It wasn’t . . .” Izzy didn’t want to ask the question, but she had to. Mia saved her from having to put it into words.
“I don’t know if it was his, but I think he would have mentioned that,” Mia said, her arms wrapped around her stomach, her fingers pressed into the bottom of her rib cage. Izzy hated this. Hated it. “He told us about the fight. And back to your original question, why would he have punched Asher?”
That had struck Izzy as strange. Cash had tossed it out like it was a reasonable expectation—hit his best childhood friend over a girl he barely knew and had no personal attachment to. “Can you explain that?”
“He was kind of . . .” Mia trailed off, her eyes unfocused. “Idealistic, I guess, is the right word. When he was younger.”
“Saw himself as a white hat riding in to save the damsel in distress?”
“You have to understand the way he was raised here,” Mia said, nodding. “I told you Earl was the de facto leader of the island and that it means more here than other places. I wasn’t exaggerating. He was responsible for essentially maintaining civil order on St. Lucy’s.”
“Judge, jury, and . . . ,” Izzy summarized.
“Not quite executioner, but nearly.” Mia huffed out a little breath. “Most people took disputes to him rather than going through any formal methods—he broke up bar fights, got the instigator to pay for the damages, things like that.”
“Was the first responder to a suicide pact between three teenagers,” Izzy said.
“Exactly.” Mia touched her nose, then pointed at her. Izzy didn’t know if she should be worried or relieved that she’d begun to pick up the rhythms of this place. “Cash was groomed into that position. So something like this—if Monroe was upset when she went to Cash, it might have seemed like the right thing to do to go talk to Asher.”
“And then things get heated, maybe Asher says some not-so-flattering things about our damsel, and our white hat hero throws fists,” Izzy said.
“Earl sees or hears about it, grounds Cash, and he can’t go to the lighthouse that night,” Mia finished for her. “Which was probably a good decision all around, to be honest.”
Izzy studied the scenario they’d just drawn out, looking for cracks. Mia seemed to be doing the same.
“You didn’t remember the fight because you don’t remember that day,” Izzy finally continued.
“But why would I have gone with them, then?” Mia said, her thumb finding her wrist like it so often did these days, the pad of it stroking over the scar Izzy knew was there. “What the hell was I doing there?”
The door slammed open down the hallway, and Mia visibly tensed. “Mama.”
“Oh, maybe she knows more.” Izzy snapped her fingers. Why hadn’t they asked her anything yet? Perhaps it was the weird undercurrent between the two women, the way their bodies were like similar magnets, always pushing away from each other no matter how much you forced them in close.
A flicker of something passed across Mia’s face, but she nodded a quick affirmative before Edie walked into the room.
“Mama,” Mia said again, this time to the older woman. “Can you sit, please?”
Mia’s tone must have set Edie on alert. She stopped midstride, her body stiff and unnatural. “I’m getting out of your way.”
“No.” Mia shook her head. “We need to ask you some questions.”
It was then that Edie’s gaze swung to Izzy, obvious in the reminder to Mia that there was an outsider there. “Don’t think that’s a good idea.”
Izzy sank lower in her chair, trying to make herself less obvious. The piercings and pink hair probably didn’t help. She ran a hand over the spiky strands to try to get them to lie flat.
“Mama.”
The two women had a silent conversation in just that one word.
Finally, Edie sighed, poured a cup of tea from the kettle Mia had put on, and then sat in the empty chair, her body angled toward her daughter, away from Izzy.
“You heard about Earl Bishop?”
Edie crossed her heart. “Bless him.”
Mia nodded once. “Where did I say I was going that night?”
If Edie was surprised by the abrupt question, she didn’t show it. Izzy guessed the words “that night” had never and would never need to be qualified.
“Out,” Edie said simply. “You didn’t lie.”
“Who did I say I was meeting up with?”
“The usual.”
Mia leaned forward. “Did I say ‘the usual,’ or is that you paraphrasing?”
Edie sighed and rubbed her thumb along the space between her brows. “I don’t know, Mia. It was a long time ago.”
“Okay.” Mia relaxed into the counter again. “Did I seem . . . normal?”
Edie’s thick brows shot up. “Don’t actually know if I even saw you more than in passing. Was at work most of the day.”
So Mia could have been out of it already. Was she thinking drugs? That . . . that would explain a lot.
“When Earl Bishop dropped me off here, what did he say?”
“Just that there’d been an incident at the lighthouse,” Edie answered slowly, clearly weighing each word. “And that Doc was already there and had bandaged you best he could. That you’d need to be looked at in the morning when everything settled down.”
“Do you remember anything about Earl in that moment?”
Edie crossed herself again, and Izzy was reminded that not everyone was as good at compartmentalizing death as she and Mia were. “I’m not speaking ill of the dead, Mia Mackenzie. Take that thought right out of your mind this second.”
Izzy tensed and shifted so she was no longer slouching. Ill of the dead. That meant there was something to say. Mia flicked a quick glance toward Izzy. She’d picked up on it, too.
“Mama, it could help the case.”
“And that’s all that matters?” Edie asked, her tone harsh, slipping deeper into her clipped northern accent. “Some reporter no one knew or liked? He matters more than the man who helped keep this town together?”
It was an echo of what Cash had said earlier. An outsider’s life meant less to these people than protecting their own. It was a harsh reality but one Izzy couldn’t ignore.
Izzy followed Mia’s lead in not mentioning their theory that Earl’s suicide may have been staged. If she didn’t want to bring it up, Izzy wasn’t going to rock the boat.
Mia’s stance was braced, looking like she was ready for a fight. “What aren’t you telling me? What happened that night, Mama?”
“Earl Bishop was a good man,” Edie said.
“I know.” It was said on an exhale that wasn’t quite as impatient as Izzy would have been. Mia knew these people. Knew when to push, when to back off.
Time stretched, the hands on the clock’s slow t
ick forward the only thing marking the passing of the seconds. The sound wiggled and burrowed into the crevices of Izzy’s brain, and she wanted to scratch at the soft tissue until she could reach it.
I’m sorry. Forgive me.
What had Earl meant by that letter? And had he even written it?
Izzy’s legs ached, begging her to push to her feet, walk, stretch, let the pressure that had been tightening in her chest unfurl.
“He brought Lacey here, too,” Edie finally said. “Her parents were still at the lighthouse.”
Mia’s reaction was characteristically muted. “You’d never told me that.”
“Because we talk about it so often?”
There was a beat, a nod, a recognition of the point made. “What happened then?”
“He left.” Edie picked up her mug, her stubby fingers pale white against the turquoise.
“Then what aren’t you saying?”
Edie took a swallow of her tea. “You were a zombie, completely out of it. I would have said you were high, but it was different.”
This was what Mia had been getting at earlier. The lost day. Maybe it wasn’t just her brain protecting itself. Maybe it had been deliberate.
Izzy leaned forward. “Drugged?”
“Sedated, maybe. Figured Doc gave her something.”
“Who’s Doc?”
“Sammy B.’s predecessor,” Mia answered. “Henry Jackson.”
“More info please,” Izzy said. Another player, another player, another player. They kept adding up. So many on the island had been touched by that night.
“He grew up here, was friends with Earl and Jimmy.” Mia held a hand up before Izzy could say anything. “Everyone of that age was. It’s not unusual.”
But friends covered for each other, helped hide bodies. What if one of the three had been the father of Monroe’s baby and he had snapped? And then he’d called his buddies to come clean up the mess. It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility. “Was he handsome? Henry, that is.”
“Um.” Mia looked up like she was trying to pull up his picture in her mind. Edie huffed and shuffled in her seat. “I guess?”
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