Bitter. Bob’s wife had been bitter. No amount of love and tolerance had ever altered her inbuilt ability to judge others and find them wanting.
Panic started to nibble at his guts as Bob realized that his breath still wasn’t coming any easier. He leaned his head forward, resting it on the top of his cane, and closed his eyes to concentrate.
If he drew the air into the base of his lungs first, slowly inflating them like a balloon, then he could get the oxygen his blood was craving. Not enough, it was never enough anymore, but getting halfway to satisfaction would stop the frantic pounding of his heart.
As he fed the breath into his abdomen, feeling it swell out like a pregnant woman’s belly, Bob focused on Shannon. It would be the height of uselessness for him to collapse in the waiting room before he could give her the gift that he owed.
Ann called him lazy, but Bob knew that wasn’t his true flaw. The deepest sorrow of his personality was that he was a coward.
Once, he let his lack of bravery steal a life away from his daughter. No matter how he’d dressed it up as a needed sacrifice to help out his wife, Bob knew the truth. It throbbed like it was a fish hook, tearing strips of flesh out from his heart.
Chapter Seventeen
“I understand why you think I killed him,” Shannon said. “It’s easy to point the finger with my history. I know you won’t just take my word, but I didn’t. I loved Sam deeply. We weren’t just boyfriend and girlfriend. Our lives had so many similarities that for a lot of the time we were together, it felt like we were the same person.”
Ngaire shifted in her seat, embarrassed to ask but needing to. “Was your relationship with Sam . . . sexual?”
Shannon looked at her with sunken eyes and opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out. While Ngaire stared, her eyes filled with tears and she looked down, reaching into her pocket for a pack of tissues.
When she’d wiped her face and blown her nose, Shannon cleared her throat and closed her eyes. “It wasn’t quite like that. We hadn’t had intercourse, but yes, we were very affectionate. The reasons we didn’t—” she broke off for a second, searching for the right word “—connect in that way were more to do with our individual hang-ups than because of any lack of affection.”
“You’ve said that Sam originally wanted to seek surgery to change. Was that something on your radar?” Ngaire asked.
It was as though Shannon didn’t hear her. Ms. Rickards’ eyes were fixed on a small abrasion on the table. Her head was tilted to one side, as though listening to something that Ngaire couldn’t hear.
Shannon reached out a finger and traced the scarred pattern on the tabletop. In a figure eight, repeating over and over, her eyes remaining focused on the same spot.
“When Sam and I got together, it all seemed far too comfortable,” Shannon said. There was a winsome sing-song quality in her voice that made her sound lyrical. “Neither of us had ever fitted anywhere and then suddenly there we were. The same but opposite. Perfect matches for each other.”
She stopped talking, all her attention still focused on her forefinger, tracing the infinity symbol. The silence lasted for so long that Deb had turned to Ngaire with a shrug and then Shannon began to talk in a halting style again.
“I think that we let the whole thing go on too long because it was all so easy. Have you ever disappointed everyone in your life?” She whipped her hand back close to her body and turned piercing eyes on Ngaire instead. “I disappointed my mother because I wasn’t a girl and my father because I wasn’t a boy. I was a disappointment to every boy who ever asked me out on a date or leaned in for a kiss.
“My teachers thought I should do better in school and my peer group thought I should do worse. I’d never fit in anywhere, not even my own skin, and Sam was exactly the same.”
Her eyes glazed over again, and she moved so her head rested on one hand, propped up on the table. “It was so easy to be with someone who’d experienced everything I had but backward. For every time I lay in bed awake at night wishing I were a boy, Sam had done the same, wishing he was a girl. He knew the puzzlement, the hatred that you engender just by being and wanting to be something else.”
“Did you love him?” Ngaire asked.
“So much.” Shannon’s eyes filled with tears and this time she didn’t wipe them away. They fell in streams down her face, glistening in the overhead light. A trail of sadness and regret.
“Once upon a time, I thought that we’d be a couple forever.” Shannon sucked her lower lip in, chewing it for a moment before releasing it back into place. “After that ambition fell by the wayside, it didn’t mean I loved him any less. I thought he’d be a friend, the other half of myself, for the rest of my life. Someone I would always be there for and who would always be willing to listen to my troubles.”
Ngaire looked down at her hands. She had a pen and paper in front of her, even though the entire conversation was being recorded. Habit. She thought of Findlay who she’d always thought would be there for her, and then one day was suddenly gone.
“What did you think had happened to Sam?”
Shannon sighed and shook her head. “The last I saw of him, he was standing near the exit with blood running down his face. The police had their batons out by then and weren’t scared of using them. I don’t know.” She shrugged. “He looked okay, but maybe he bled into his brain.”
“You think that the blow to his head killed him?” Ngaire tried to force astonishment into her voice but the statement fitted with so much of the evidence that it was a struggle.
“Yeah, maybe. That or Sam fell in with the wrong crowd when he left the game.” Shannon looked up at the camera blinking in the corner. “That was always a danger. One caress up the inner thigh from the wrong man on the wrong day and bam.”
Deb leaned forward, peering at Shannon. “Had that type of incident happened before?”
“It had happened to Sam. The opposite occurred to me.” Shannon snorted. “The difference is that when a girl gets pissed off, she slinks off home to sulk. A guy takes his anger out on you.”
“For the record, you’re saying that Sam had been assaulted before?” Deb asked.
Shannon looked up, her eyes wary at the urgency in Deb’s voice. She opened her mouth to speak and then closed it again, staring down at the table instead. When Deb tapped her finger on the table, Shannon looked back at her with a worried frown.
“That’s not unusual, is it? Given the circumstances.”
“Do you know the names of anybody who’d attacked him in the past?”
This time, Shannon shifted on her seat, looking toward the door as though help would walk through at any moment and extricate her from the situation. “It was just boys. No, I never stopped to get their names, and neither did Sam. There were kids at school who’d done it and then boys at the club.”
“What club?” Ngaire asked. When Shannon didn’t answer immediately, she snapped her fingers to draw the woman’s attention. “What club?”
“I didn’t mean any club in particular,” Shannon answered. “Just a club. We used to go along to quite a few, none of them are in operation anymore.”
“The same place that you kicked those boys to death?” Ngaire asked. “Is that what you meant?”
Shannon’s mouth twisted and her nostrils flared. She pulled her hands off the table and stared at them, out of sight of Ngaire and Deb. “I didn’t mean any club in particular,” she repeated. “Is this going to take much longer? I don’t have anything much to add. I don’t know what happened to Sam and I was in police custody when whatever happened, happened.”
“We don’t have a record of your arrest that day,” Deb said. “Can you account for that?”
At the statement, Shannon’s eyes widened, and a frown turned her expression into one of fear. Ngaire felt it like a gut punch. Up until now, Shannon thought they were interviewing her for information. From this second on, she realized that they looked at her as a suspect. Her lips thinned into a hard, clenched line.
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br /> “I’d like to contact my lawyer,” Shannon said.
“If you’re talking about Stan Robinson, I’m afraid he’s now retired,” Ngaire said, and Deb turned to her with a puzzled frown. Ngaire mouthed, I worked with him. The puzzlement cleared up, but the deep frown stayed in place.
“Then get me another lawyer, any lawyer. I’m not saying another word until I have someone in this room looking after my interests.” Shannon folded her arms across her chest and sat back in the chair. She looked straight up at the camera in the corner and repeated herself slowly. “I. Want. A. Lawyer.”
Bob felt his labored breathing gradually ease. Slowly, slowly, his lungs started to fill with air more easily. To be on the safe side, he sucked another puff of medicine out of his blue inhaler, then sat while his heart beat a quick tattoo in response.
He felt useless, helpless. Shannon was somewhere in the rabbit’s warren of rooms behind the plexi-glassed front desk. Instead of being treated with kid gloves because her boyfriend was the one that had turned up dead, the police would be badgering her. Worse than when they’d visited her at home while he was there to intercede. Then, they’d been fishing for connections. Now, they must have found something bad to warrant them dragging her down here.
His fault. All of it.
A stronger man would have put his foot down when Ann started to kick off. With him united with Shannon, they could have talked her around, Bob felt sure of it. Ann wasn’t a monster, she was just a simple woman who had trouble accepting new ideas into her head. No wonder that she’d struggled with the revelation that Shannon wanted to be a boy. At the time of that news, Ann had still been struggling with the idea that Shannon’s favorite color was black, not pink.
Sometimes lately, Bob had chuckled when he saw an item on the telly where transsexuals were living large and being bold. If Ann had lived to see the world in this past decade, it would have made her eyes pop out of her head, and her eardrums burst in sympathy.
The woman behind the desk gave him another look, keeping tabs on him but not in a way that made Bob feel unsafe. Why would he? A white male still reigned supreme, no matter what the majority of the world wanted. He commanded instant respect whether he walked into a bank or a police station.
Bob had been weak when strength was called for and then strong after it no longer mattered. It hadn’t occurred to him in the maelstrom of confusion at the time, but Shannon turned out to be a thousand times stauncher than he could ever hope to be.
Robust and stupid. When Shannon should have stood up for herself, instead she’d slumped and accepted the punishment others draped across her shoulders.
The world had changed for the better and Bob should change with it. No matter what, he’d be drawing his last breath soon, and it would be better if the last of his life didn’t go to waste.
When the woman behind the desk next looked over, Bob struggled to his feet, leaning his weight heavily on the cane. Six months ago, the doctor ordered him to take one and Bob had done so, even though he’d scoffed at it. Now, he wouldn’t be able to walk down to the front gate without its reassuring stability.
He shuffled forward, as careful of his footing as he could be. The cane dug into the heavy-duty carpet with each step, laying a temporary divot on the floor. When Bob looked up to judge the distance left, he saw the officer behind the desk watching him, paralyzed. She couldn’t look away now that he was approaching her, but her fingers were fidgeting because Bob was still so far away.
With one yard still to go, she called out, “How can I help you?” in a cheery voice that seemed completely inappropriate to the station setting. Bob didn’t look up, still concentrating on his feet and his cane. A minute later he stopped in front of her and finally looked her in the eye.
“My daughter was called in here for questioning,” he said, then paused to take a long breath. “Her boyfriend went missing years ago, and the police keep haranguing her about it. Something about a body being found in the fire that matches with him.”
The officer’s eyes widened even as she kept her expression set to pleasantly neutral, and nodded for him to continue.
“I’d like to see her if I can,” Bob said. “They didn’t have any reason to bring her down here rather than questioning her at home. I’m not well. I can’t be trekking back and forth to the city on some policeman’s whim.”
“Just give me a moment,” the woman said. “I’ll find out what’s happening with your daughter. What was her name?”
“Shannon Rickards,” he said. “And I’m Bob Rickards, her dad. Shannon’s not involved in this case at all, I know. She was locked up by you lot when Sam went missing.”
He faltered to a stop, caught between wanting to tell the officer everything and the more pressing need to catch his breath.
“I can’t be dragging myself back and forth,” he repeated and then leaned heavily on the bench.
“Just wait there, Mr. Rickards, and I’ll check with the arresting officer,” the woman said.
“She wasn’t arrested,” Bob said, his eyes widening in alarm. “Shannon was just asked down here to answer the same questions she’s already answered. Nobody better have arrested my girl.”
His agitation began to increase and spread rather than settling. Bob’s heart started to pump in an irregular pattern. Skipping a beat and then making up for it with an extra large thump. He held a hand up to his chest, massaging the skin as though that would make a difference to the distressed organ inside.
“I need to see my daughter,” he said. Although Bob wanted his voice to remain nice and steady, he could hear it increasing in pitch and volume. Panic flooded his system. It felt like there was a crushing weight settling onto his chest. He knew that feeling from descriptions from the circle of friends he’d once had who were no more.
An elephant, William had once told him. It feels like there’s an elephant camped out on my chest.
Bob struggled to draw in another breath, fighting against the muscles that were squeezing his rib cage. The room darkened and started to spin around him. Bright flashes of light pulsed in time with his irregular heart.
“Sir?” The woman behind the counter sounded alarmed but not as frantic as Bob felt. His chance was going. Shannon would be locked up again, and everything was his fault. He was such a coward. Why on earth had he been the one to give birth to such a strong-willed girl?
“I need…” he began and then trailed off as his breath was stolen from his lungs. Blackness encroached in a circle from the outside of his vision, quickly eroding his sight as it paced toward the center.
Hands pressed on him, turning him over to his side. Somebody with cool fingers let them gently rest against his neck as they felt for a pulse.
Now. If Bob wanted to confess and go to God with a clean slate, then he had to do it now.
Bob tried to scream out. He tried to call, but with no breath, it was impossible to make a sound. Concentrating every last remnant of physical strength on drawing in a lungful of air, he writhed beneath the touch of strangers.
Up from the bottom. Fill your lungs up from the bottom. Do it for Shannon who put up with every last piece of crap that you ever threw at her and then stuck around for more. Do it for every time you let Ann tear her down and never stepped in the middle of their fights to say she was wrong, even though you thought it. Do it because you owe her fifteen years at the very least. Do it for her.
Bob gasped, dragging in a small amount of revitalizing oxygen through the vise that pressed against his chest. It would have to be enough.
“I did it,” he said, his slowing heartbeat pounding in his ears so loudly that he couldn’t be sure his voice made any noise at all.
“I did it,” he repeated and felt the change in motion of the hands pressed against his body as they heard and waited for understanding.
“I killed George Kenton and Jessie Collingwood in an abandoned warehouse thirty-six years ago.”
Murmurs issued from the crowd around him. With the la
st flickers of light dancing out of his vision, Bob sipped in another sweet mouthful of air to say the words that he should have shouted out decades before, “I kicked those boys to death. Shannon is innocent.”
Chapter Eighteen
“They can do so much these days, it’s almost like a miracle,” the woman seated next to Shannon said.
She was seated in the waiting area of the surgical rooms at Christchurch Hospital. The woman next to her—Mrs. Wainwright or Wainbright, something like that—had been spontaneously breaking into short, encouraging sentences every few minutes. By now, Shannon had reconciled to the fact they seemed to be some type of nervous tic.
It would have been nice to be alone right now. Instead, Shannon had a magazine in her hand to ward off too much conversation, not that it did much good in the face of Mrs. Wainwright’s / Wainbright’s? nerves.
The different chairs in the room were assorted colors, irregular heights, and in a variety of discordant styles. While Shannon’s chatty companion perched anxiously on the edge of a low-level two-seater couch, she had opted for the overstuffed opulence of a single wide chair. A name plate on the wall behind informed her that Mr. and Mrs. Goodman had donated the chosen piece of furniture.
There was enough space to tuck her legs up beside her, but with another woman in the room to cast judgment, Shannon sat with her feet placed decorously side-by-side on the floor.
When a nurse entered the room, the two of them turned their heads in expectation. The blue-scrubbed man gave them both a strained smile and reached for a cup to make himself a coffee.
Shared facilities were a constant insult to tensed muscles. Even when Shannon tried to relax, immediate crisis averted, her stomach stayed knotted, and her shoulders ached so badly that she wanted to cry.
Upon her insistence that she wouldn’t answer any further questions without a lawyer present, the interviewing police had decided instead to let her go. Shannon had walked stiffly down the corridor in front of them, popping out through the door to reception just as her father’s confession fell on disbelieving ears.
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