by Aimee Hix
It was kinder to get right to it. I didn’t imagine she was a sociopath, gleeful that she’d gotten away with it all these years. She had to have been terrified every time Jan visited.
“You killed Mandy.”
She smothered a gasp with her hand, tears in her eyes. I gave her a minute to gather her composure. She’d been keeping this secret for a long time. From her husband and mother-in-law. From herself, at times. She’d had to have if she was able to look them in the face at holidays. There was no other way she’d have been able to sit across the table from them at Thanksgiving knowing the anniversary of the day she’d murdered Mandy was the next day. There were some cold people in the world but I didn’t see her being one of them.
“Here’s what I think happened. You tell me if I’m right,” I said.
Courtney Veitch looked away and I saw her gaze had landed on a photo of her daughter.
“Mandy had never been happy with your interest in her brother.” I paused, memories of Michael’s protests about the growing bond he saw between me and Seth. I hoped he’d be happy now with the way things had turned out because he loved both of us but, like with Mandy, we’d never know.
“Your relationship was going through a natural cooling off period with her at college and you at home. Then when Kevin came home on break, he confessed to her that you two had been seeing each other behind her back for a while.” I nodded to the photo she’d been staring at. “You probably had wanted to tell her about the pregnancy with him but he either didn’t want to do it that way or in the heat of the fight—the fight your mother-in-law had hated to confirm to the police—he’d blurted it out.”
She took a deep shuddering breath and, not meeting my eyes, nodded. I couldn’t have known the details of any of the conversations, but it wasn’t hard to fill in the gaps. Only three reasons for murder: revenge, money, or love.
“She waited until the family was out of the house to confront me. She called me over and said horrible things to me like that she thought I was using her brother, that I’d gotten pregnant on purpose to escape my family,” Courtney said.
“She was angry. At you, at Kevin. Those kinds of conversations … they escalate so quickly. Words got more heated. Maybe some names were called. You grabbed her arm perhaps and she pulled away or she pushed you and you pushed back.”
“She tried to hit me. I put my hands out to block her and she slipped on the throw rug.”
I recalled the crime scenes photos that I’d studied until I had them memorized. There was a throw rug next to the bed. The scene in my head changed from a static black-and-white image to full color with Mandy and Courtney fighting. If it hadn’t happened like she said, it was easy enough to imagine it did. Her defense attorney would definitely paint that picture for a jury.
“It would have been an accident.”
She nodded vigorously. She wanted to believe it was an accident.
“She slipped on the rug and fell, hitting her head on the nightstand. It probably scared both of you.”
Her hands twisted in on themselves, her fingers worrying each other. “But she was fine. She didn’t have a mark on her.”
“And then she wasn’t fine. How long did it take, Courtney? A few minutes, thirty, an hour?”
She looked stricken, her eyes darting over again to her daughter’s picture. Her mother-in-law had talked about how devoted Courtney was to her own daughter. How Mandy would have loved being an aunt. Too bad she never got the chance. It was sad all around and now it was about to get immeasurably sadder.
“Maybe ten minutes. Mandy had calmed down. I think trying to hit me made her realize she’d gotten out of control. I had been trying to calm her down the whole time. It wasn’t a bad thing. She had just been too stubborn to see it. I was telling her it was all going to be fine. And then she just collapsed. I tried to wake her up. I checked her pulse and … and I couldn’t find one. I was in shock.”
And if it had ended there, everything would have been fine.
“But then you made a terrible situation that much worse.”
Courtney couldn’t raise her eyes from the floor. “Kevin would have been so upset. He might not have stayed with me. I couldn’t raise a baby on my own. My parents, they’d already kicked me out when I told them I was pregnant. I didn’t know what to do.”
For someone who hadn’t known what to do, she’d certainly thought quickly enough in spite of her professed fear and shock.
“You saw the bottle of nail polish remover with its warning label that it was flammable. You just didn’t know that acetone didn’t burn like other flammable liquids.”
“Mandy was better at chemistry. Mandy was better at everything.” A bitter edge had crept into her voice. No, Courtney wasn’t a cold sociopath. She was just a jealous girl who’d frozen the object of her envy into a perpetual icon of everything she wasn’t. And now she was a woman who was seeing everything she’d so carefully built on a quicksand foundation of lies and playacting, slipping away from her.
I handed her Jan’s card. “I’ll stay with you while you wait. Detective Boyd will read you the Miranda warning and you should call an attorney before you give your statement. If you do everything by the book, if you tell her everything, it’ll be better for you and your family.”
At the mention of her family, Courtney broke down crying. She sobbed so hard she began to choke on her breaths and even though it took everything in me to do it, I got up and placed my hand on her back. I forced away the knowledge that she had murdered her best friend and remembered that she was a woman who was about to lose the daughter she’d done it all for. Even if they stood by her, the relationship would never be the same. Her world, as she knew it, was over.
I could understand that pain.
“Jiu-jitsu, bitch?” Seth smirked. Open comms could be entertaining.
I shrugged. “He’d made shitty comments about my training regimen the first time I met him. I wanted him to know what took him down.”
I stared at him across the diner’s table. By mutual agreement we’d decided on a neutral location for our discussion in the hopes it would force us to remain civil, and clothed, so we could actually resolve an issue for a change.
“Speaking of take-downs, nice work on the Veitch case.”
“You and Jan texting behind my back?” I’d tried to sound light-hearted but the prospect horrified me. I was not up for my BF and my, and she’d die if she heard me call her this, BFF being Fs. Acquaintances worked just fine for all of us.
“Your dad mentioned it when he called for round two of kicking my ass for upsetting you and running off and not stopping you from being you. He kind of lost the bubble on that one when I pointed out that no one stopped you from doing what you were going to do. Like solving a seventeen-year-old cold case.”
“I’d like to be able to say it was my crime solving super skills but it came to me while I was throwing up.”
He laughed then stopped when he realized I was serious.
“I’m … are you … how, just how?”
“Mandy was allergic to artificial sweeteners too. Her mother mentioned it when I met her for the first time. So why, if she was allergic to it and they didn’t even keep it in the house, would Mandy have a can of diet soda on her desk?”
He made a go on motion with his hand.
“It was in the crime scene photos. I saw it but I didn’t see it, you know?”
“Then when you threw up … ?”
“It just clicked. The stuff makes me violently sick because I’m allergic to it. Mandy was allergic to it. No one on the original case thought twice about a can of diet soda on the teenage girl murder victim’s desk. Why would they? So it wasn’t treated as part of the crime scene. The mother never saw the room. Courtney cleaned up for them. Helping. Nice of her, huh?”
I took a sip of my coffee. Sweetened with regular sugar b
ecause I wasn’t throwing up for a good long while if I had anything to do about it. I’d have to find new ways to solve crimes. Getting the crap beaten out of me was getting old too.
He cleared his throat. “I need to explain to you what’s been going on.”
I pulled a folder out of my bag and slid it slowly across the table toward him. “I know. Here’s everything my dad pulled together about the adoption and your biological parents.”
Not everything though. I’d kept back the details about the murders, the prison sentence, the stuff that he didn’t need to know right away.
He picked the folder up and then put it down again, sliding it back toward me.
“Hold onto this for me. For later, when I’m ready.”
I nodded and put it back in my bag. It didn’t feel like I was having coffee with my boyfriend. There were plenty of couples in the restaurant. Some looked happy, joking around. Some looked annoyed, hurried. I felt like we looked like we were having a business meeting.
“When did you find out?” he asked.
“The day you left. Your dad came to pick up the boxes and I got it out of him.”
He laughed. It was an angry, gruff noise. It held disdain, anger, disbelief. “He had twenty-five years he could have told me. Or Michael. Michael died not knowing and he just blurts it out to you.”
I touched his fisted hand. He finally met my eyes.
“I had to wheedle it out of him. I begged him to tell me what was going on with you.”
“You don’t beg for anything. You wouldn’t beg for your own life.” His mouth a hard line, his eyes cold.
I snatched my hand back and leaned forward. “I’d beg for your life, you jackass.”
He opened his hands and laid them on the table, palms up, letting out a deep sigh. “I keep fucking up. I’m sorry.”
I put my hand into his. “I get that it’s hard. I’m not dealing well with the information and it’s not even about me, but can you for one second look at it from a different perspective?”
He looked away but he still held my hand. I took that as a sign to go on.
“People do things they’re not proud of because they’re scared. They kept the secret because they were scared, Seth. They didn’t want to lose you.”
“That’s stupid. It wouldn’t have changed anything, not how I felt about them.”
My heart cracked a little. “Oh, babe. The adoption wasn’t legal. They were scared someone would come and take you away from them.”
He dropped his head. I put my other hand over the top of our joined hands.
“It doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have told me … us.”
“Do you know for a fact that they never told Michael?”
He looked up at me, accusingly, like I’d just become a party to the deception.
“I don’t know that they told him or that they didn’t, Seth. I’m just trying to help you work this out,” I said.
He pulled his hand back slowly, a mulish set to his jaw. “That shit’s not helpful, Willa.”
I bit the inside of my cheek, trying to come up with the right words. I wasn’t the person he should have been talking to about this. He should have been in his parents’ kitchen going over all this heart-rending, family-shifting stuff with them over coffee and family photo albums. That suggestion had not even been considered.
I wasn’t going to find the right words to comfort or console him. I wasn’t built like that and maybe those words didn’t even exist. Either he was going to get over it or he wasn’t.
“You know, you’ve expended a lot of energy being pissed off about this. You’ve pushed your parents away—”
“They’re not really my parents.”
I leaned forward again, dropping my voice. “The fuck they aren’t. Are you ten? They’ve nursed you through sickness, broken bones, they cheered at every stupid sports event, they paid for you to go to college, you selfish, ungrateful jackass.”
He opened his mouth to protest, anger flashing in his eyes.
“Shut it, Anderson. I’m not finished.” And he shut his mouth, which was a damn near miracle. “You have bossed me around since the moment we met. You’ve decided what was right for me and badgered, harangued, and outright ordered me to do what you wanted. Where do you think that comes from? That ‘not real’ father of yours. You’ve fussed over me and pushed me to take care of myself. You sent me to Adam, you drove me to therapy appointments and waited in the car for me at both places. Sound familiar? Maybe like that ‘not real’ mom of yours? You ever utter the words ‘not real parents’ ever again and I will personally beat the ever-living hell out of you. We clear?”
His lips were pressed in a tight line, as if to keep from telling me off. Sorry, babe, tough love time.
Then he smiled, a little. “Excellent points except I have never harangued you. I may have strongly pointed out the merits of my position but—”
“Merits, my ass. Harangued,” I said.
“I’m not saying you’re right but you did make a few good points to consider.”
“Consider them for as long as it takes to pay the check and drive to your parents’ house, Ace. I’m sick of being your emotional punching bag. I’ve got people who want to use me as a physical one.”
I gestured to the slight shiner I was sporting. People had been staring at us as the discussion had grown heated and I was sure they thought they were watching an abusive situation unroll itself. I found, unlike in the fall, I didn’t much care what other people thought of him, or me, or our relationship. It may not have been what other people thought it was supposed to look like, but it worked for us. Most of the time.
He laughed and tossed down some money to pay for the cold, untouched coffee. Then offered me his hand to help me out of my seat.
“Then you need to find a place for us to live that will take Fargo. If I’m moving in with you, she’s coming with me. No arguments.”
“No, ma’am. No arguments.”
He hadn’t needed to say the words; his smile had said it for him.
“And don’t ever call me ma’am again, Ace. It’s creepy.”
The End
Acknowledgments
Writing the acknowledgments is the hardest part of writing a book (aside from getting it published). No book comes together without a team of people. The image of the author in an attic garret scrawling prose next to a guttering candle is picturesque but wrong. Maybe if there were a dozen people in the room … It’s hard because you don’t want to forget anyone and hurt them. So much of what I do is only possible because of the people in my life who stand by me, support me, brainstorm with me, and talk it out with me. Forgetting to thank one of them would break my heart.
Many thanks to the usual suspects: Matthew Clemens, Dru Ann Love, Terri Bischoff, Jessie Lourey, Heather Webber, Sherry Harris, and Lyndee Walker Stephens.
Special thanks to the Midnight Ink and Dana Kaye Publicity teams; and John Talbot.
Deep gratitude and accolades to the Fairfax County Public Library system and their staff.
My husband and daughter deserve all the credit for making it possible for me to finish this book, written during an eleven-month bout of vertigo, doctor’s appointments, testing, and sinus surgery for me; vet visits for our sweet dog Karma, who was undergoing cancer treatment; and the general maintenance and upkeep of our lives. They held it together for me so I could hold it together for the book and Karma. You will find her immortalized in this book.
Finally, thanks to the readers who bought What Doesn’t Kill You, read it, loved it, checked it out from the library, wrote reviews, and championed it. I hope you enjoyed Dark Streets, Cold Suburbs.
About the Author
Aimee Hix is a former defense contractor turned mystery writer. She’s a member of Sisters in Crime, Mystery Writers of America, and International Thriller Writers.
Dark Streets, Cold Suburbs is her second book. Visit her at www.AimeeHix.com.