Surviving the Truth

by Tyler Anne Snell

  Bless his heart, Dave had always been a somewhat simple man. He talked straight, was respectful, and became flustered fast.

  Willa was more than happy to help ease his embarrassment, even if that meant talking about work at a party.

  Being polite was in her DNA, after all.

  “Don’t worry about it. What do you want to talk about?”

  A new song from the DJ in the main room kicked up. It wasn’t as loud here as on the rest of the first floor, but it was annoying. Dave glanced at the door along the wall she presumed led out to the back.

  “We can go outside, if that’ll be easier for you?”

  Dave nodded.

  Missy huffed.

  “I’m off the clock, so I’m staying inside,” she announced. “Y’all just come back in when you’re done. I’ll tell Kenneth where you are if he comes back before you.”

  Willa thanked her and followed Dave outside into the night air. The lights hung out around the front of the house were sparse in the back. Though a path that led down a ways to what must have been the dock was faintly visible with lights in the distance.

  If Ebony had been there she would have said, “You can’t hide money.”

  But her friend wasn’t there.

  No one was really outside where she and Dave were.

  It was good and private.

  “So, what’s up, Dave?” she asked, readying to try to help with whatever might be bothering him.

  Dave set his drink down on the ground and looked back at the closed door. When his gaze went to hers, it had doubled down on apologetic.

  So much so, she started forward, hand out as if she could help him with whatever it was that was weighing him down.

  But then he spoke and Willa stayed right where she was.

  “Missy shouldn’t have called you that night. You shouldn’t have gone out to the lot to look for me.” He took a step forward. Willa had never noticed how big of a man he was until then. “And you should’ve never taken the box.”

  Before she could utter a word, move an inch or even scream, something hit her hard from behind.

  Just as the world around her went dark, Willa had one last thought.

  One day I’ve got to learn how to be a bitch.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “One of our witnesses called in and said they lied about the man they saw at the hospital.” Detective Lovett’s voice was clipped and undoubtedly angry.

  Kenneth made sure no one was in the room with him. It looked like a small office but without all the trappings of work. Just a desk, some nice chairs and a few wayward books. When he was certain no one would overhear him, he spoke.

  “They what?”

  Lovett talked fast. He was clearly on the move.

  “The witness was one of the two people attacked on the second floor of the hospital to, as we assume, draw you and security away from Leonard Bartow’s room. But before anyone could help, the attacker was able to say enough to scare both of them into giving a false description. Since they were the only people who got the best look at the guy, it was enough to tank our entire image of him.”

  “Did the witness decide to help us with a more accurate one?”

  They’d been looking for the wrong man for days. Kenneth swore beneath his breath in the space between his question and Lovett’s answer.

  “I did us one better. I sent him a photo lineup of sorts using several different people. He picked one picture out immediately as the man who was at the hospital. I just met with the second witness. I did some fast talking, and he agreed to cooperate. It was instant recognition with him, too. They both went for one man.”

  “Terry Page?” Kenneth felt like he was vibrating out of his skin in anticipation.

  Lovett didn’t make him wait a second longer.

  “Terry Page,” he confirmed. “That means we have enough to get him now and we’re on the way. I’m ten minutes out. Deputy Park should be there before me. Play it safe and smart until we arrive.”

  Kenneth snorted. “Safe and smart can kiss my ass. I’m going to go find Terry Page and arrest him.”

  He ended the call, whirled around on his heel with all of the righteous vengeance in his chest, but came up short.

  He hadn’t heard the man enter the office, but he couldn’t ignore the timing.

  Or the strappy shoe that was in his hand.

  It belonged to Willa.

  Dave Frye looked sincerely regretful to be exactly where he was, but that didn’t stop him from using a voice that was nothing but commanding.

  “Throw your phone on the desk—and your gun, too,” he said. He shook the shoe. “Or else this will be all that’s left of Willa.”

  Kenneth’s blood was boiling. “If you’ve hurt her—”

  “Just put the gun and phone down, and we can talk.”

  Kenneth weighed his options. It was smart to keep his gun when Dave didn’t appear to have any weapons on him. Yet, Willa’s shoe brought him up short. He should have never left her. Even when he’d thought she was with friends.

  He put the phone on the desk but hesitated with his gun in his hand. Instead of dropping it, too, he took the clip out and slid it into his jacket pocket. Dave watched with a raised eyebrow.

  “So neither one of us can use it,” Kenneth said.

  It surprisingly didn’t offend the bigger man.

  Instead, his brow scrunched. When he started to speak again, it sounded like he was saying something he’d been forced to rehearse.

  And Kenneth imagined he had been.

  “You have two choices now. You can either die here alone or you can die outside with Willa.”

  Kenneth couldn’t describe the anger that rushed through him. But he decided to bury it to keep the situation calm.

  “Why are you doing this?” he asked, genuinely curious. If Terry had been the man who’d killed LeAnne and Billings, and Leonard had been the man who he’d fought at Willa’s apartment, then how did Dave fit into any of this? “I thought Willa was your friend?”

  The big man nodded.

  “She is but friendship doesn’t get you out of gambling debt.”

  “But murder does?”

  Dave didn’t seem to like that question. He made a disgusted face.

  “I don’t murder anyone. I only find things and then return them.”

  Kenneth wanted to point out that he’d just given one hell of an ultimatum for someone who didn’t plan on killing anyone but realized then just how Dave fit into everything.

  “You’re the one who stole the piece of fabric from her apartment.”

  Dave didn’t deny the accusation.

  “It wasn’t Willa’s. It didn’t belong to her.”

  It didn’t make sense why Dave hadn’t grabbed the box when he’d taken the bloody fabric yet, his ultimatum was still ringing clearly in Kenneth’s head.

  There wasn’t time for any more questions.

  The feeling must have been mutual. Dave’s face hardened.

  Apparently, Kenneth had been too swift to discount Dave. The bigger man reached into the back of his slacks and pulled a gun from its waistband.

  “You die either alone or together,” he reiterated. “Those are your only options.”

  * * *

  WILLA WAS SICK right into the water. It was a miracle she’d even made it to the side in the first place—or maybe just instinct. Once she’d become conscious again, she’d heard the water, blinked against the dim lights strewed along wooden pillars, and had known if she got sick right where she was then her night would only head that much more downhill.

  When she was done, the pounding pain in her head had only lessened slightly.

  And the man who had dealt the blow seemed more annoyed than he would have been otherwise by the act.

  “I didn’t hit yo
u that hard,” he sneered. “You don’t have to be that dramatic about it.”

  Willa wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. There was blood on it but she realized she must have grabbed at the spot on top of her head before passing out.

  “You hit me hard enough to lose consciousness,” she said with some added spice she hadn’t realized would be there. “I’d say that counts as just painful enough.”

  Willa stood slowly and took a few steps back, trying to orient herself. She saw the path that led to the dock from the house again but, this time, from the other side. Somehow the house seemed farther than the dock had. She could hear the faint thump of music. She could also feel the wooden planks beneath her bare feet.

  Her shoes were gone.

  She took a shaky breath and finally met the eye of the man who had done this to her.

  Terry Page looked as average as his name sounded. Apparently, his Red Tree bio picture had in fact done him justice. Short brown hair, brown eyes, clean-shaved. A man who looked as though he said things like “accounts receivable” and “return on investment” several times during his workweek.

  Not a man who had become the center of a web of death and loss.

  “We don’t have much time,” he said, smiling like it was a business transaction.

  “Before what?”

  He shook his head. “I’m not going to tell you that. Though, if you scream, I will kill you, hand to God.” He moved his blazer and pulled out a gun, true to his word.

  Willa wondered where Kenneth was and then hoped to high heaven that Dave, nowhere to be seen, wasn’t with him. She didn’t want to ask about the former in case there was any chance that Terry didn’t know Kenneth was there with her. Instead, she did what they’d come here to do in the first place, even if it was under much different circumstances.

  “What do you want with me?”

  Terry sighed. Again, so average-looking of him.

  “Well, to be honest, I really want to say I’m impressed with how you handled my initial mistake. When I first buried that damn box, I knew it was a bad idea. But I was in a hurry and Lot 427 wasn’t even for sale, so I let that decision ride for too long. Then, when it finally went up, and I decided to try to retrieve the box, I realized I’d forgotten where I’d buried it.” He snorted. “To be fair, it was a while ago and things were a bit hectic.”

  “So you convinced Red Tree to buy the lot for development. Why?”

  He rolled his eyes. “It seemed like a good idea at the time. I’d rather keep my eye on the place than have someone else find it and take it.”

  Willa shook her head. It hurt.

  She thought of Dave. Her heart squeezed a little. He’d always been so nice to her. Yet, he’d taken her outside so Terry could attack her.

  So Terry could kill her.

  The only connection that she could come up with through her pounding head and fear was Clanton Construction.

  “Is that why Dave is here?” she asked. “He was trying to find the box for you?”

  Terry’s nostrils flared. She could see it clear as day from the distance between them.

  “Trying is the operative word,” he growled out. “I had him looking for weeks and then you just stumble across it because his wife has control issues and needed to know where he was every second of every day. Ridiculous. Then again, I’m betting the rain helped you with that. There’s just something about this town and flooding that uncovers things it shouldn’t.”

  He took the smallest of steps forward. Willa wanted him to keep talking.

  She also wanted answers.

  “Is that why you sent Leonard to my apartment instead? Because Dave failed to find the box the first time?”

  A look she couldn’t gauge crossed over his face.

  “Dave failed his first job, not his most important one.” That confused Willa but he kept on before she could ask anything else. “But I did have the hope that hiring Leonard to get the box would work out but I guess strike two and three for outsourcing. I hired him to find the box, which he didn’t, and then he went and got caught. So, I decided it was time to do things myself. Though, I admit things got a little sloppy.”

  He smiled like the cat who ate the canary.

  “Like you killing LeAnne? Leonard and Billings too?”

  Willa knew that Terry had been the one to kill them. Still, she needed to hear it.

  He actually shrugged again.

  “Like I said, things got a little sloppy.”

  Willa hated him. Right then and there she hated everything about him and everything he’d done. From the top of her hair to the tips of her toes.

  “But why?” she asked, voice pitching higher. “Why go through any of the trouble? You didn’t have a target on your back until you created all of this madness trying to get the box. You made yourself all the more suspicious. Nothing in the box even linked to you. If you hadn’t tried to find it at all, we might not even have—”

  All at once, Average Terry became enraged. He took two giant strides forward, which only made Willa shrink back that same distance until she was closer to the edge of the dock.

  “Because I earned everything in that box. It’s mine, no one else’s.”

  Willa’s heartbeat was all-out racing.

  She hadn’t expected that.

  But she decided to use it.

  She kept her voice as low and nonthreatening as possible.

  There was something else that she knew in her heart but, again, she wanted him to say it. First, though, she made sure her words were clear to lead him there.

  “Because you killed Joshua Linderman and Ally Gray.”

  Terry’s nostrils flared. When he laughed, Willa knew that she was beyond “in trouble.” The man in front of her wasn’t stable.

  And had no intention of letting her go.

  “I didn’t kill them. I fixed his problems,” he said. “Even after he died.”

  Willa didn’t want to look toward the house but, at the same time, she was hoping to see Kenneth. Coming for her. Though she also didn’t want him here. Not with the man who clearly had no problem killing.

  “He?” she asked, hoping to keep him talking. The longer he did that, the longer she had hope of getting out of this.

  Terry snarled, leaving any trace of his laughter behind.

  “My father made a mistake over thirty years ago and here I am still correcting it,” he snarled. “That’s why the box isn’t for anyone but me. I deserve it.”

  Willa took the smallest of steps back. A splinter bit into her foot. She didn’t care.

  “Josiah Linderman,” she whispered.

  That seemed to trigger the man more.

  “My father thought he was untouchable. Getting drunk at home wasn’t enough for him. He had to take it on the road. But then, there was Josiah, out walking.” He clapped his hands together, the gun between them briefly pointed at her. Willa held in a flinch. “My father couldn’t even handle burying the body. So, there I was at fourteen burying my first. I barely could lift him.”

  So, Josiah Linderman hadn’t abandoned his family. He’d been killed by a drunk driver and then buried to hide the evidence.

  “Joshua didn’t believe his dad had left town,” she guessed.

  Terry snorted.

  “I thought he did until he showed up at my house, asking questions about a piece of a car he’d found. Because, of course, my father couldn’t be bothered to clean up his own mess.”

  “So you did.”

  He nodded.

  “All I had to do was wait for him to go walking and follow.”

  Willa didn’t say it but she believed Joshua had suspected the attack from Terry was coming. He must have thrown his theory, the cigarette case and the list, in the only place he’d time to—the tree in the small clearing in the woods next to the cr
eek and not too far away from the back road his father had been walking.

  Terry made another snarling sound.

  “I shot him, but wanted to talk. So I made sure the shot wouldn’t kill him fast, but we were interrupted.”

  Ally Gray.

  “Stupid runner. Shot her after she hit me good. It’s the only reason they got away.”

  That was news to Willa. Ally’s body had been found, Joshua’s hadn’t. Had Joshua gotten away?

  Her hope didn’t last long.

  And that had everything to do with Terry sensing he needed to crush it.

  “Don’t worry. They didn’t make it far. Though Joshua sure was a pain to track. I’ll give it to him, he made it a lot farther than I thought he would, but he made it easier, too. Buried him in the exact spot he asked me for mercy.”

  “But you didn’t get to Ally in time?”

  “No. She’d made it out to Becker’s field and was spotted before I could deal with her.”

  He sighed, as if now bored.

  “You shouldn’t have taken the box, Miss Tate. It wasn’t yours.” His body language started to change. He was becoming angry again.

  And it was all directed at her.

  “The sheriff’s department has it now and knows everything I do. Killing me, doesn’t do anything.”

  He shook his head.

  Willa’s veins turned to ice. This was it.

  Whatever he was planning to do, he was about to do it.

  “Not true.” His voice was like a knife dipped in venom. “It would make me feel better.”

  Everything happened in the space between heartbeats.

  Willa turned around and dove into the water with enough force to go as deep as possible. Had it not been raining as much as it had, she would have gotten to the creek bed a lot sooner. Thankfully, it wasn’t until she was completely submerged that a gunshot pierced the water behind her.

  Willa kept her eyes shut tight and changed course as best she could. She was a good swimmer but when it came to holding her breath under water, she would never win any medals.

  She struggled as another muffled shot sounded. She was going to have to surface soon.