“That’s not why I’m here. Can you tell me where your husband is?”
“James? He’s in Findlay, at work. If you wanted to talk to him you should have called first.”
“I did call,” I said, “several times.”
Maggie shook her head and pulled her phone out of her pocket; the lock screen showed no missed calls. “What do you need to talk to him about?”
“I don’t. Maggie, I know you said that you didn’t know Joel Creedle.”
“No.”
“But your husband does.”
“No.”
“Is James monitoring your phone calls?”
“No.”
“You don’t use UnityView?”
“Well, we—it’s just so we always know we can trust each other. It strengthens our bond.”
“Except when your husband is using it to screen your phone calls for you.” I showed her my five call attempts in the last hour.
Maggie tapped at her phone. “Sometimes in the house … I don’t have a good signal. James would never do that to me. Keep people from getting in touch with me.”
“Tell me this, Maggie. Did you get a bunch of calls and voice mails from me last week?”
“Just—no, just one.”
“You told me you didn’t want your husband to know you had hired me.”
“Yes, but just because—he didn’t want me worrying.”
“Maggie.”
“That man on the news is sick. Something went wrong in his brain, in his heart. That is not what Keystone is. His sickness has nothing to do with me or my husband—”
I showed her the printout from the Hilton’s security camera, and her mouth formed a perfect O as she stared at her husband’s face. Then her eyes drifted to the time stamp. “This can’t be. James has been in Findlay since Sunday for work.”
“Findlay,” I said. “That’s where he said he was on the day of your mother’s accident.”
“Yes, he goes up there two days a week. The big refinery there.”
“It never occurred to me at the time, but he made it to St. Ann’s awfully quick, for being all the way up in Findlay.”
“What—he was worried, about me. He was driving fast.”
“Tell me this—did he get new glasses recently?”
“Glasses?”
Her face answered the question—yes. But her mouth said, “He would never hurt anyone.”
“How sure of that are you?”
“Sure.” She was shaking her head. “I’m sure. He’s my husband.”
“How’d your mother get along with him?”
Maggie’s eyes had widened. “Poison ivy,” she whispered.
“What?”
“The poison ivy. What you said the first time I came to the office, about poison ivy.”
“Yes.”
“You had it, after you tried to help my mom.”
“Yes.”
“When you said that I had—it was just this fleeting thought. Like when you think you see a mouse, just in the corner of your eye. You just hope you were wrong.”
“Maggie, what about the poison ivy?”
“James had it, when the baby was born.” She bent forward at the waist and let out a sob. “He said from working in the yard. It’s in all the pictures from the hospital, on his hands, and his arms—”
That was when the front door opened.
* * *
“What’s going on?” James Holmer said, glancing from his wife’s face to mine. He wore the tan coat, which must have blended into the trees that day in the park. He was flushed, a slick of sweat on his upper lip. “Maggie, is she bothering you?”
“No.”
“Where’s the baby?”
“The neighbor has her,” Maggie said quickly.
“Why?”
“I needed a break.”
“A break from our child?”
“What are you doing home? You said you weren’t coming home until tomorrow.”
“I wasn’t—but you sounded upset last night—”
Maggie held up the security camera image.
“Is that what this is about?” James licked his lips. “Pastor Joel?”
“You said you never met him. You said the Fellowship was more than just him.”
“I just didn’t want you to worry.”
“So how long have you been helping him with this?”
“I wasn’t.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“I’m not.”
“If you lie to me, you will never see Beatrix again.”
Anger flared up in James Holmer’s face. “You don’t get to decide that.”
“How did you get to the hospital so fast that day?”
“I wanted to get to you. You sounded so—so weak and scared on the phone.”
It was impossible to say what Maggie’s mental state had been like that day, but she was no longer either weak or scared. Her face was pink and she grasped her phone so tightly her knuckles popped out in bright white ovals. “When did you start controlling my phone with that app?”
Now James looked at me. “Why are you filling my wife’s head with this nonsense?”
“I don’t need anybody to fill my head with anything,” Maggie snapped. She whipped her arm back so fast I didn’t have time to react before the phone left her hand and bounced off James’s cheekbone. “What did you do to my mother?”
“You’re being hysterical, Mags, I know the last month has been hard for you. Remember what we talked about in lifegroup?”
“You argued with her that morning. I heard you. I thought—I thought it was about the Fellowship. That she was trying to start that same old fight again. But that’s not what it was.”
A red welt was forming on James’s cheek from the phone. “We both just wanted what was best for you, sweetheart.”
“What happened,” I said, “did Joel Creedle tell you that she’d found out about the plan?”
James shook his head, touching a hand to his cheekbone like the pain was just registering. “I never wanted anything to do with his plan.” He spat out the last word.
“What, then?”
“He wanted my help. I kept saying no. But then Rebecca had to stick her nose into his business—your mother went behind Joel’s back and helped his wife run away from him. I just wanted her to tell me where Joel’s wife was hiding.”
“That’s bullshit. You were in on it from the beginning. The flash drive with the phone numbers. The little chemistry experiment you detonated at my office. How you almost beat Aiden Brant to death. You’re in this up to your eyeballs. And what about Keir Metcalf?”
Maggie flinched as I said the name. James didn’t respond to what I said, instead murmuring, “It wasn’t right, what Rebecca did. Interfering like that. Maggie, you know how she could be.”
“You were going to help that horrible man kill those people!”
“He has a vision—”
“What did you do to my mother, James. Tell me right now.”
“I just wanted to convince her to tell me where Nadine was. That’s all. That’s where it started.”
“So you followed her to the park that day,” I said.
He nodded. Now he was the one who seemed weak and scared. “I needed to talk to her.”
“You didn’t just talk.”
“It was an accident—”
I cut him off. “She fell backwards. That wasn’t an accident.”
James didn’t bother to deny it.
“And everything that happened after wasn’t an accident. What about Keir?”
Maggie was crying hard, gasping for air. She grabbed my arm and held on tight.
James said, “Pastor Joel asked me to talk to him.”
It was important to his particular brand of denial that he could claim he hadn’t meant for things to escalate, that he’d simply wanted to have a conversation. If it had been one conversation, I might’ve believed him. But two conversations, two bodies? “You didn’t just tal
k to him. Like you didn’t just talk to Rebecca either.”
“You killed him? You killed him too?” Maggie was squeezing my arm so hard it hurt.
“You hated him, Maggie, don’t pretend that you didn’t—”
“You let me walk around here thinking I was crazy.”
“I was doing what it took to protect my family. My child. Just look at you.” James sneered. “You aren’t fit to care for her. No one will ever believe you. Either of you.” He straightened his jacket and smoothed down his hair. “I can’t believe you just left her with a neighbor. After everything I just did for this family.”
He turned and opened the front door to a handful of Delaware County uniformed deputies and Sheriff’s Deputy Carter Montoya, who nodded at me, and I nodded back.
CHAPTER 40
Conventional wisdom says that people don’t change, especially not overnight. But conventional wisdom also says that every day is a new chance to do better, and this was the conventional wisdom I wanted to follow. To that end I dressed nicely in the clothes I’d bought in Detroit and attempted to camouflage the worst of my bruises with makeup in the hope that if I looked like less of a train wreck, maybe I’d act like less of one too.
Let’s not forget the conventional wisdom about faking it until you make it.
I got my Uber driver to take me to Bethel Road first, so I could pick up New India and good beer from the carryout across the street. Then we headed to Tom’s place.
“Wish me luck,” I said as I got out of the car, carefully balancing the full paper sack of food and the six-pack in its cardboard carrier. “I need it.”
“Good luck. Don’t forget to rate me five stars,” the driver said without looking up from his phone.
I set the beer on the doorstep and knocked.
Tom came to the door and looked out at me through the pane of glass next to it. “I was thinking about going to the gym.”
“I know,” I said, “seven thirty is the time you think about going to the gym.”
Despite his best efforts not to smile, he did, a little, and opened the door. “You said you needed time. I figured that would be more than one day.”
I put the food on the counter and the beer in the fridge. “They don’t make a card that says sorry for how I acted when I was concussed, so I brought dinner.”
“I see.”
“Talk first, then eat. Can I sit down?”
He gestured at the sofa, and we sat.
“I’m sorry. I know I’m not an easy person to be with. It’s not by choice, not really. I’ve spent my entire life trying to knuckle under and just get through things. It makes it hard for me to realize when things are good. I’m always waiting for the other shoe to drop. In my experience, there’s usually a shoe. So I’m always on the lookout for one. For what might be the shoe. As a result I’ve picked a lot of dumbass fights with you.”
Tom nodded but stayed quiet.
“And we have this pattern where I get mad, then you come through for me, and then we both just pretend it never happened. Or, rather, I pretend it never happened, and you go along with that because you don’t like confrontation, at least not with me. How am I doing so far?”
“An accurate assessment. Is there more?”
“Yes. I get freaked out when you’re up front about feelings. Because, well, because I’m messed up inside and actually hearing that you care about me makes me less likely to believe it.”
“Roxane, I don’t know how you could not believe—”
“Let me finish.”
“You have the floor.”
“All of these things are my own bullshit that I need to work through and have nothing to do with you. Which is really unfair, I know, because you’re the one on the receiving end. But you’re amazing, Tom, and I guess I don’t feel like I deserve you—I know I don’t deserve you—and the only way I know how to protect my dumbass heart is to act like the stakes are low. But they aren’t. Not at all. I want to do better by you. If you’ll allow me.” I stood up, my face hot. “Whew, okay, that’s it. That’s the spiel. I’m getting a beer. Want one?”
“Yes, please. Or there’s whiskey.”
“I know. But I heard recently that liquor doesn’t solve anybody’s problems. And yeah, yeah, neither does beer. But I’m trying, here.”
I grabbed two beers from the fridge and cracked the lids off with the bottle opener in his silverware drawer and drank some of mine.
Tom joined me in the kitchen and we stood there on opposite sides of the peninsula, in reverse of our positions from the other night after the explosion in my office. It had been so clear to me in that moment that we worked together, perhaps because I was too stunned by what had happened to bother with the walls that my mother called me out for keeping up all the time.
I said, “I want you to be happy. And what if I can’t make you happy?”
“What if you can?” He set a hand on top of mine. “I’ve been feeling like shit all week. I know why you were upset. I think that everything you just said? Completely true. But then I went and did something to hurt you anyway, even though that’s the last thing I want to do. And I’m sorry for that.”
“If there are any other secrets my father told you? Don’t tell me.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“Not really, but I sense that it would be good for my character, to not know.”
“There aren’t any.”
“You weren’t supposed to tell me that.”
He leaned across the counter and kissed me, one hand on my shoulder. I could feel the warmth of his palm through my shirt and down my arms and into my belly. I said, “Does this mean we’re okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Better than okay?”
“We will be.”
“I’ll take it.”
Tom said, “Me too.”
* * *
The next morning I met my brothers at the Starliner Diner in Hilliard. “I don’t like being seen with you two right now,” Andrew said, nodding at Matt’s cast and my black eyes. “People are going to think I’m responsible.”
“Either that, or they’ll think you’re next.” I put my sunglasses back on. “Does this make it better or worse?”
“Now it looks like you’re a rock star and we’re your groupies.” Matt stirred his iced tea with a straw using his good hand. “Or he’s the groupie, I’m the bodyguard. Injured in the line of duty.” Then he frowned. “Fuck, bad choice of words.”
I said, “So I found out something this week. Dad got some woman pregnant a long time ago. We have a half sister out there. This asshole has known about it since February, though.”
Matt nodded.
“What does that mean?”
“It means, yes, I already know about this.”
Andrew sat back in his seat. “You do? Since when?”
“Christ, I must have been seventeen or eighteen.”
Now it was my turn to slump backward. “Mom told you?”
“What? No, God, no,” Matt said, almost laughing. “Dad did.”
This fact came down hard on the table, muffling us into silence for at least a minute.
“Um,” I said finally, “why?”
Matt shook his head. “He was drunk, and I was there. I was also blasted, but this kind of thing has the power to stick with you.”
“Jesus. And you were mad at me, Rox, for not telling you for a couple months.”
I leaned my elbows onto the table and rested my chin in my hands. “Why didn’t you tell us before?”
“When? At the time? You two were kids.”
“So were you.”
“Yeah, well, that was on Dad—a fucked-up thing to do, to burden somebody with that information. I wasn’t about to turn around and do the same thing to you guys.”
Matt was six years older than I was, not so big a gap, but when we were growing up, it seemed insurmountable, like he was in another world. And as adults we were unable to bridge it, or maybe we’d never tried, no
t really. But Matt getting into the truck with me the other day had felt like a rope across the divide, one that we could both hang on to.
He added, “He said it so nonchalantly, too. Like an aside. Then he said, if anybody ever asks, it’s yours.”
I spread sour cream on my breakfast quesadilla and shoved a big piece in my mouth and chewed. “That has to be the most fucked-up thing he ever did,” I mumbled around it.
“It’s not a contest.” Matt drowned his Cuban French toast in extra syrup. “I know he pulled some dick moves with you too. With all of us.”
We ate in silence for a while. Then Andrew raised his chipped coffee mug. “To that cranky old drunk bastard who, despite his best efforts, managed to get three badass kids.”
“Cheers.”
“Cheers.”
And we drank.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The most important acknowledgment goes to the readers who are so enthusiastic about Roxane Weary as a character. Writing this series is the best thing ever. Thanks, especially, to my book club ladies, to amazing librarians like Erica O’Rourke in Cook County, Illinois, and to bookstore owners like Denise Phillips of Gathering Volumes in Toledo, Ohio (name checked in this very novel, because that’s how much I love her store). Shout-outs, also, to Glen Welch and the Book Loft for putting this series in the hands of even more Columbus readers.
Huge thanks to my agent extraordinaire, Jill Marsal, for always advocating on my behalf.
Thanks to my team at Minotaur, especially my editor, Daniela Rapp, and my publicist, Kayla Janas.
I also want to thank my Faber team of Angus Cargill and Lauren Nicholl. Angus always catches the throwaway lines at the ends of my chapters, where I go on just that much too long. He’s always right. I’m thrilled that I didn’t accidentally give any of my characters the name of a prominent UK car service this time.
I am a very lucky writer for many reasons, including the fact that my work has been recognized with some awards. Thanks to the Golden Crown Literary Society and the Private Eye Writers of America and the tireless volunteer staff who power those organizations.
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