“Don’t remember it well, huh?” Sympathy rather than anxiety coated his words. “You were out of it.”
That’s what Mama had said as well. Drugs. She was leaning more and more toward that option. The therapist at the institution had told her she couldn’t remember the night because she’d repressed the memories. It had been too much shock for her brain to deal with, so her body had protected her.
But drugs made sense, too. Which means the deaths had been premeditated. Mia still wasn’t sure what she thought had happened, but drugging the victims didn’t exactly scream fit of rage.
It also meant that the killer had wanted Mia there, too. It would have been so much easier to turn Asher and Monroe into Romeo and Juliet. Mia ruined that pretty little story, casting doubt on the whole setup. So why risk it? And why just the three of them? If someone wanted to go after their little gang, why not wait until Cash was there, too?
There were too many questions left. Usually by this point in a case she could see parts of the image, what she thought it was going to be, at least. Right now, though, all she had were dots, and a lot of people trying to tell her what picture they should form.
However, she did notice that Jimmy hadn’t actually answered. “Who called you out there? Earl?”
“Yup.” Jimmy nodded, still tugging at his beard. “Woke me up. Time I got there, it was swarming.”
“With who? Who beat you there?” She would have guessed he would have been one of the first ones called.
That’s when she noticed the tapping again. It was fast, too fast. “The Bells were there, weren’t they,” he said, but it wasn’t a question.
The Bells. Of course, they’d been there first. But why did Jimmy care? Why had he and Cash been talking about them recently?
“The doc,” he continued, and his foot had slowed again. Which meant he had been flustered by the mention of the Bells. Charles and Bix. Why?
“Henry Jackson?” Izzy clarified. “The doc. That was Henry Jackson, right?”
“Ayup,” Jimmy said in a clipped affirmative, looking at Izzy for the first time since they’d started talking.
“He’d have access to drugs, though, wouldn’t he?” Izzy asked, overly casual.
“Course.”
“Is he still on the island?” Izzy asked, glancing between them.
“Moved to Florida, lucky bastard.” Jimmy chuckled, the tightness almost completely gone from his shoulders. This was not how Mia had thought the interrogation would go. It was throwing her.
“Have you heard from the Bells since they left the island?” Mia asked, going for surprise.
His fingers dropped out of his beard and curled around his mug, bringing it up to his mouth, which did wonders to help cover most of his face.
Thwap, thwap, thwap. Too fast, too agitated. What the hell had happened with the Bells?
“Nope.”
That was it, a quiet, definitive denial.
“Heard you might have been trying to find them,” she tried. “That Cash was asking you about them.”
“Who said that?”
“Does it matter?”
He’d leaned forward until his forearms were braced on the table, and for a second Mia thought he was going to argue the point. But then he glanced away, toward the window overlooking the backyard. His house was on the opposite side of town from Mama’s but was up against the woods, just like Edie’s. The snow in his was untouched.
Except for a single track of boot prints leading into the trees.
She thought about the trek out to the reporter’s cabin, thought about the feeling of eyes on their back.
Jimmy had sunk deeper into the darkness that crawled ever closer with each passing minute.
But when he turned back to Mia, it was fear she read on his face.
“Were you sleeping with Monroe, Jimmy?” Mia asked, as tempered as possible.
He flinched with his whole body, a visible, shocked recoil. “What.”
It wasn’t even a question, the way he said it, just an emotion wrenched from his belly.
Mia didn’t move, didn’t react. Just waited.
“Jesus, no.” Jimmy rolled his shoulders like he was trying to shake off the suggestion. “No, never. I’m not . . .”
He trailed off, still looking down, his head twitching sporadically like he had no control over it.
“I don’t even know what to say,” he mumbled, the words slurring behind thick lips only to get caught in his beard. “Why would you think that?”
The fear was gone when he looked up, and again Mia struggled to adjust to the patterns of the interview. She’d thought he’d been afraid of what they were about to accuse him of. But clearly she’d missed something.
“It was in the reporter’s notes,” she answered, going with honesty. “What did you say to him?”
Jimmy blinked, slow and confused, his gaze unfocused. “Nothing. I said nothing.”
“You must have said something,” Mia pressed. She thought back to Theo’s message.
Ar w mb (v1). Affair with Monroe Bell (victim one). The message had been underlined and starred in the reporter’s journal.
“I barely knew the girl,” Jimmy said now, back to tugging at his beard. The tapping had resumed, but it was steady, more a thoughtful beat than anything else. “Talked to her once or twice in town, maybe.”
He could be lying. It was in his blood to do so. But he was also easy to read. Too easy, one part of her whispered, while the other thought about all she knew of Jimmy. He wasn’t particularly clever or manipulative. His tics were numerous and varied—the tapping being the most obvious, but his fingers betrayed his thoughts as well as they pulled at his beard. If it had just been one thing, she might have thought he was doing it to throw her off. But his movements were natural and reactive.
Probably he was hiding something. But just not what they had thought when coming in. So why had the reporter walked away with the impression that Jimmy was sleeping with Monroe?
Then something slid into place. “What about Bix?”
And there. There was his sore spot. He didn’t blanch, not like before when she’d asked about Monroe. This was more subtle. A hitched breath. White knuckles on a clenched fist. A tongue darting out to the corner of his mouth.
“She was married,” Jimmy said.
“She was,” Mia agreed easily.
The silence that followed was weighed down with everything he wasn’t saying. It was almost fully dark now, the light from outside all but gone. The echo of cigar smoke lingered stale in the air, along with the secrets, and both stuck to Mia’s throat, her lungs, as she breathed them in. They burned away, black dust, with each inhale, each exhale.
“I loved her.”
The confession was broken, ugly, almost a sob rather than words.
“Jimmy.”
It was all Mia could say. Just his name. Just a plea. Tell me. Let me help you.
“It wasn’t like that, all right?” Jimmy said, sniffing. “I loved her. But she didn’t . . . it wasn’t like that.”
“What was it like?” she asked.
“She loved him.”
“Charles?” Mia wasn’t surprised. That’s how it had always seemed to her, no matter what anyone now was saying.
Jimmy nodded and wiped his nose against the arm of his shirt, leaving behind a damp, greasy stain. “Don’t know why.”
“What was he like? Charles.” All she remembered was a buttoned-up man. He’d never looked at her like Earl Bishop had, like she wasn’t good enough. But neither had he paid any of them much attention. She knew he was a psychiatrist on the mainland, but everyone made it seem more a hobby than anything else. The Bells had no need to work, not with the money that lined their bank accounts.
“Those girls were all scared,” Jimmy said, a quiet hiccup cutting off the last of his words. “You saw them.”
She had. But she wouldn’t have described any of the Bell women as frightened. Brash, bold, witty, and fun, maybe. But not
scared.
So was she wrong or was everyone else? Why couldn’t she trust her perception any longer? Why did it feel like everything she remembered from those days had been skewed? As if she had been living in a slightly different reality from the rest of them.
Now she knew there was a fingerprint bruise on Lacey Bell’s arm and ghosts in her eyes. And she was living here despite everything that had happened on the island. Was she running away? Was it desperation that had sent her back to St. Lucy’s? Where was Charles now?
“Did you tell any of this to the reporter?” Mia asked, though she knew he must not have.
“No.”
She thumbed at her bottom lip. How had the reporter gotten the impression that Jimmy had been sleeping with Monroe? There hadn’t been many notes from the interview itself. But she had assumed Jimmy had said something off the record, maybe. Or offhand that the reporter had interpreted.
“Jimmy, I’m going to ask you something, and I need you to be honest with me,” Mia said.
He looked up finally, his eyes wide and red rimmed but dry.
“Was there a chance Henry or Earl was having an affair with Monroe?”
“No,” Jimmy said, executing a quick sign of the cross. “No, absolutely not.”
Mia nodded like she believed him. But she doubted he’d tell her anyway.
“Hey,” Izzy said, a little too loud, a little too abrupt. “Did you ever talk to that Peter guy? The artist who lived at the Bell mansion in the fall?”
“The artist?”
Izzy nodded. “He was in residence during the fall,” she said again.
“Never did like that punk,” Jimmy said, barrel arms crossed over his chest.
The response didn’t feel connected to their question: not quite a non sequitur but also not really an answer.
“Why’s that?”
He shrugged. “Caught him sneaking into the old house near the Bell’s mansion.” He swung his arm toward the window and presumably the north end of the island. “Where the workers used to stay. And the artists, when there are more of them.”
Martha Lowe’s voice echoed in Mia’s head. You know that old house on the Bell land . . . ? It’s just sitting there. Abandoned. Makes you wonder why.
A tightness gathered at the base of her skull.
That house was right up against the cliffs. If the reporter had been there on the night he’d died, it would have been easy to maneuver his body into the ocean.
“What were you doing up there, Jimmy?” Mia asked, her voice a low rasp.
He was shaking his head before she even finished, a jerky, frantic denial of any implications layered beneath her question. “I go up once a month. Tend to the yard. That’s all, that’s it. Don’t even go in the house.”
Mia exhaled, the curve of her spine pressing against the back of her chair as she let the breath out. “Did you tell Lacey he’d been there recently?”
“Didn’t want to bother her,” Jimmy mumbled. “But I tore into him good. Just like that reporter who was snooping around the lighthouse. No one ever taught them what private property was.”
“Was he apologetic?” Izzy asked. “Peter, not the reporter.”
Jimmy’s lips twisted before going flat again. “Nervous and sweaty, more. Doped out, coked out, something like that.”
Or he’d found something, something he wasn’t supposed to find, something that was supposed to have been kept hidden. The house was fairly isolated, separated from the Bell mansion by a good deal of land. It was the perfect place to bury a secret.
“When was this?” Mia asked. “When you caught him.”
“Think it was about October, maybe, a few weeks before Halloween.” Jimmy’s voice grew more confident as he spoke, as if the retelling helped confirm it to himself. “Wanted to do one last rake on the leaves before the winter.”
October. A figure under a busted streetlight. An upturned collar of a jacket, hunched shoulders. Watching her.
It could be nothing. Or it could mean that whatever the artist had found in that old house had led Robert Twist to Mia Hart.
“I wonder why the reporter thought that Jimmy was sleeping with Monroe,” Izzy said as they trekked back to Edie’s house. It was well into the evening, well into the single digits. Mia was taking them on a shortcut through the woods, rather than having them wind their way back through town, and she almost regretted it.
There was a hush to the forest that she didn’t like, an eerie expectation, a threat of violence beneath the quiet.
She picked up her pace, forcing Izzy into a longer stride.
“I’m getting that feeling a lot. People getting the wrong idea about things,” Mia finally said. She didn’t want to think about it now, didn’t want to be distracted. She listened too hard, desperate for anything—a branch breaking, a creature fleeing from their heavy footfalls. There was nothing. Mia concentrated on the weight of her gun against her side, underneath her armpit, and fell back so that Izzy was a step ahead of her with Mia protecting her back.
Was it Jimmy following them? Had he been spooked by the questions?
Asher, something in her whispered. Like that first night. It was a sign of her sleep deprivation that she couldn’t immediately shake the thought.
“What do you mean?” Izzy asked. Mia swallowed the urge to tell her to shut up.
“I don’t know,” Mia said, keeping her voice pitched deliberately low. “It seems like there are a lot of wrong conclusions being made in this case.”
Izzy glanced over her shoulder, finally catching on. Her gaze flicked to the shadows trailing behind them, and then back to Mia’s face. She wanted to ask what Mia meant; Mia could all but see the question forming behind her lips. But she didn’t say anything further, just unzipped her coat enough that her weapon would be easily reached.
They walked the rest of the way in silence.
“Shit,” Izzy whispered once they’d stepped into Edie’s house. “Shit.”
“Yeah,” Mia agreed, and the shivers rippling beneath her skin, pulling her muscles tight, had nothing to do with the cold.
“That was creepy as hell,” Izzy said, shrugging out of her jacket. “Someone is definitely following us.”
Mia locked the door. The dead bolt was rusted and sluggish and protested being put to use after years, if not decades, of neglect. The thud it made when it sank home let Mia relax just a bit.
She hung up her outdoor gear but left her holster in place as she moved toward the kitchen.
“What were you saying about wrong conclusions?” Izzy asked, settling into the seat Mia had begun to think of as Izzy’s.
Moving to put a kettle on, Mia tried to attach coherency to the jumbled thoughts that she could barely get a hold of herself.
“Do you know what I told Cash that first night at the bar?”
“Hmm?”
“That these types of cases, the kinds we solve”—Mia gestured between them—“they come down to people.”
“Yeah,” Izzy agreed.
It was rare these days. With DNA testing and new technology, solving crimes more often than not had to do with waiting for labs to process samples rather than the old ideal of gumshoeing together clues and piecing together mysteries.
“Okay, so wrong conclusions,” Izzy prodded when Mia didn’t continue.
Mia blinked and swayed, unfocused for a minute, exhaustion seizing on her distraction. “Right.” She pressed the heel of her palm against her eye until lights popped behind the lid. “So with Charles, okay? I always thought of him as adoring of Bix. Seemed like a good guy when I was growing up.”
Izzy nodded but didn’t say anything.
“But Jimmy thinks he was abusive. Or near abusive? If the girls were scared of him, that implies something at least,” Mia said, not sure if she was even making sense. “And after you came back from the bar, you had mentioned you got that impression, too?”
“Just a feeling,” Izzy shrugged. “Nothing concrete.”
“Exact
ly,” Mia said. “And Cash, too. Never would I have said he’d be violent.”
“Right up until he hauled you off your feet and almost slammed you against the house,” Izzy said. “Don’t think that’s a wrong conclusion.”
“But Mama was shocked,” Mia continued. “About his behavior. Which means it probably was unusual.”
“And wouldn’t you have said Monroe and Asher were all puppy love all the time?” Izzy asked.
Mia snapped her fingers. “Yes. I would have thought they had been pretty serious. Not that she was sleeping with some older guy.”
The kettle screamed, and they both jumped, wound too tight from their walk home. Mia reached for the mugs. “It’s like an alternate universe. Sliding past this one. One tiny change and everything about reality has shifted,” Mia said, wondering if she was toeing the line to delirious.
“So which timeline is the true one?” Izzy asked.
“Hell if I know,” Mia said, making Izzy honk out a big, unattractive, yet genuine laugh.
Izzy took the tea Mia poured her, blowing the steam off the surface. “Okay, come on. Say you hadn’t talked to anyone on this fucking island.”
Mia rolled her eyes at the obscenity, but she saw Izzy’s point. They were getting bogged down in everyone else’s point of view. They needed to scrape that back, look at the facts.
Mia thought back to the ferry, back to when she’d been standing on the deck, the spray from the sea cutting across her face, her eyes trained on the lighthouse. Thought back to the Bell mansion coming into view through the mist. Thought about the way Jimmy had reacted to the idea of Charles and Bix at the lighthouse that night. Thought about that old abandoned house tucked away on the Bell property. “I think we need to find Charles and Bix Bell.”
“Any luck with the uniforms?” Izzy asked.
Mia tucked her fingers in her pocket to pull out her phone, the urge to slam it against the wall barely suppressed when she saw the “No Service” status. “Mama said a storm is coming in. Worst one yet.”
Izzy wasn’t thrown by the shift in topics but simply grabbed her own cell, holding it face out, like she always did, as if Mia were somehow at fault for the lack of bars at the top. “My brain is choosing not to acknowledge that there could be worse storms than what we’ve already had. I’m just going to go ahead and plunk my head in the sand and leave it there.”
Black Rock Bay Page 20
