After the walk in the sunshine, Mr. Tuttle is happy. She settles him back in Gabriel’s apartment with a beef jerky treat.
“I’ll be back to get you as soon as I can. Be good.” She feels badly about leaving him alone, but she has a lot to do. Gabriel, whatever he’s up to, will definitely take care of him.
In the car, she calls Shaun, talking the moment he answers. “I know who he is. I’m coming over.”
“What do you mean?”
“His name is—”
Now Shaun interrupts her. “Merrill. His name is Kevin Merrill. I’ve been trying to get ahold of you, Kimber.”
“It’s been a fucking nightmare. But I have more news.”
She pours it all out to him: about the photo album, that Kevin Merrill is undoubtedly her father’s son and her half brother. “My father, Shaun. My father lied to me. Lied to us all. And then he left us. For them.” She can’t keep the venom out of her voice.
“Whoa. That’s really heavy. Are you okay?”
“There’s more.” Kimber gets on the highway, headed west. “Kyle and Hadley were in an accident, and I think Lance or Kevin or whatever his name is had something to do with it.” She doesn’t tell him about Diana throwing her out of the hospital. She’s never wanted Shaun to know about her affair with Kyle. He would be disappointed in her if he knew she’d been sleeping with a married man. And the idea that she befriended Diana afterward makes it sound even worse. Now Shaun and Troy may be the only people she can trust. She doesn’t want to lose them too.
“Have you been at the hospital? What about Hadley? Is she going to be okay?”
“I think so. I don’t want to stress Diana out by hanging around there too much.” The lie comes easily. “Her mother and sister are there by now too.”
“That’s tough for a little kid.”
“I have one stop to make. I need to check on my mom and Don. I’ll be there in an hour.” Seconds after she hangs up, another call rings. Gabriel. She ignores it. His hiding the photo album is too confusing. Was he trying to protect her by hiding the truth about her father? He’d met with her father more than once before he died, so he must have recognized him in the photos. But had he realized the teenage boy in the later photos was the man they knew as Lance Wilson? The answer had to be no unless he was hiding something else.
Now she needs to know why Kevin Merrill is really here. She has almost everything: the money, the revolver, the bible, and the photo album. It’s like she’s the props mistress in a real-life game of Clue. If she can figure out what he’s after, then maybe she can get rid of him permanently.
Chapter Forty
How’s Don?” Kimber follows her mother down the long hallway of the Webster Groves Victorian to the kitchen in the back of the house. Every other floorboard creaks because her mother refuses to take them up and install a new subfloor as the contractor suggested. It’s the house in which her mother grew up, not too far from the comfortable Kirkwood Cape Cod they’d lived in before her father left. Kimber remembers her father describing Mimi and Granddad as “filthy rich.” But while they were financially generous with their daughter and their granddaughters, they never truly warmed to him.
“I have to keep telling him to get up and walk around, like the surgeon said, but you know, I think that operation took more out of him than he wants to admit. He’s a very proud man. He doesn’t want me to think for a moment that he can’t take care of me.” She lifts one shoulder in a delicate shrug as she fills the teakettle. “Of course we both know I can take care of myself, but men like to feel they’re good providers for their women. Protectors. Some men do, anyway.”
Kimber reads that as a slight against her father, or maybe even Shaun, but it’s such an old, tiresome slight that she doesn’t bother to respond. Her mother indicates that she should sit in the sunny breakfast nook overlooking the herb garden, but Kimber tells her that she doesn’t want to sit.
“So it’s that kind of visit.” Her mother sighs. “What now? What did I do wrong?” She nervously fingers the small diamond pendant on her necklace.
“Tell me about John Merrill.”
Her mother’s brow knits thoughtfully. “John Merrill? I feel like I should know who that is. I’m sure I’ve heard the name before. But it seems like it was a long time ago. Why?”
Kimber had expected shock or at least stunned silence. Not a flat-out lie.
“Because I found an old picture of Daddy, and the name John Merrill is written on the back of it.”
“Where? In your house? I thought you couldn’t get into your house. Did that man go away?”
“Not in my house, Mom. In someone else’s photo album. Daddy was with another woman.”
“Well, I don’t know about that. Is this why you’re all exercised? You look like you want to snap my head off. I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Kimber takes the photograph from her purse and holds it out.
“All right. Let me get my eyeglasses.”
How is this patrician woman, with such a tiny waist and slight frame, her mother? Except for her hair, Michelle had been the one to take after their mother most. When Kimber was with the two of them, even as a little girl, she felt ungainly and freckled and not pretty, like some adopted charity child. Only her father had made her feel pretty. Special.
“How odd. It does look like him.”
“Mom, it’s him.”
Her mother shakes her head. “I don’t know, Kimber.”
Kimber pushes the photograph closer to her mother’s face. “Look! It’s him. Look at the way he’s standing, with his right foot turned out like he’s some kind of ballet dancer. Remember how you used to tease him? He stood like that every day of his life. You know you see it. Look at their clothes. His hair. This wasn’t taken before he married you or after he left.” She stabs at the smiling face of the woman. “He had a son with this person while he was married to you!”
“Does this have something to do with that man living in your house? Why is this so important to you?”
Even in her anger, Kimber recognizes the pain creeping into her mother’s eyes.
“Because he’s with this woman. He was with some other woman. Some other family. Don’t you understand?”
“I don’t want to talk about this. I think you’re wrong, and I think you’re doing this deliberately to hurt me. Haven’t you done enough?”
The accusation stings, and Kimber takes a step back. Her mother’s sunny kitchen suddenly feels like a prison cell, her mother her accuser.
“That’s a really shitty thing to say.”
Now her mother’s jaw hardens, and the hurt look in her eyes turns into something sharp and aggressive. Kimber can read it too well: Why didn’t you die instead of Michelle? Michelle would never treat me like this.
“You blame me for your father’s leaving. You blame me for falling in love with Don, even though he was nothing but good to you. You blame me for being the kind of woman who wants a man in her life, a man she can trust and depend on.” She grabs the photo from Kimber and pushes it within a few inches of Kimber’s face so that she has to back away.
“I don’t know who in the hell this woman is, but if this is your father—and I say that it just might be though I’m not a hundred percent certain—then you now know what kind of man he really was. You thought he walked on water. He was a pathetic liar, and God knows I loved him, but I hate myself for it now. I hate how he treated me and how he left when your sister died.” Her eyes soften with sadness, the way they always do when she talks about Michelle, and Kimber—stunned—hopes that maybe now she will stop speaking so cruelly. But she goes on.
“If this Merrill person is your father, then it proves what a liar he really was. You didn’t know him, Kimber. All his lectures about being noble and how art feeds the soul and how he really wanted to be a college professor or a museum curator? It was lies. All lies. Do you know how much time he spent in college? One semester in community college. One. I c
alled the University of the South to get a copy of his diploma to frame it for him as a surprise, and they didn’t have a single record of him being there. He begged me not to tell you and Michelle. He fooled me and my parents. Fooled us all, and then I was pregnant with Michelle, and I had no choice but to stay with him. My parents wouldn’t let me leave, and I had to play the dutiful wife so they would help support us. Do you want to hear more? Is that what you want? Because there is more, my dear. Plenty more.” She’s breathing hard, the diamond pendant winking on its chain as her chest rises and falls.
The fury on her mother’s face is so clear and cruel that Kimber feels like she’s looking at a stranger. She has to lean against the counter to stay upright.
After an eternal moment, her mother turns slowly toward the doorway, where Don stands, watching them. Her face softens.
“I’m sorry,” she says quietly. Not to Kimber, but to Don. “I’m sorry if I woke you. Do you need anything?” Then her voice breaks with an anguished cry, the same cry she made when the police came to tell her they found Michelle’s body. Her shoulders drop, and Don takes three long strides to where she stands and takes her into his arms. He makes comforting sounds over her, stroking her hair.
They are a pair, united. He holds her so closely that there’s barely room for a breath between them, and her mother sobs and sobs. Kimber never suspected that she contained such pain.
Now Kimber knows the truth, and it sickens her. What would happen if her mother knew the whole of it, what her only surviving daughter did?
Don watches her over her mother’s head. He doesn’t look angry. Kimber isn’t sure what he is, besides hopelessly in love with her mother.
“I have to go.” Her voice is a whisper, drowned out by her mother’s crying.
The photograph lies on the floor next to her mother’s buff Ferragamo moccasin. Kimber considers picking it up to take with her. She could, easily. But there are other photographs in the album, which now sits in the backseat of her car, covered by the expensive wool travel blanket that was—ironically enough—a gift from her mother and Don.
Careful not to get too close, she edges around the two of them. Not angrily. Not dramatically. She just wants out of the house. Her every nerve is numb. With every step, she pushes her mother’s words further and further down to a place where they can’t touch her anymore.
She sits for a few suffocating minutes in the airless car until her lungs feel as though they will burst, and she realizes she’s been holding her breath. Gasping, she puts down the windows in time to see Don come out onto the porch. He tries to wave her back into the house, but she drives away.
As she pulls up in front of Shaun and Troy’s house, her phone rings. She’s tired and irritated and doesn’t want to answer, but it might be Diana, or the police. On the fourth ring, she pulls the phone from her purse to see Don’s name. She doesn’t want to talk to him, but thinking of the way he came out of the house after her, summoning her back, she answers.
“What is it? I don’t want to talk to either of you right now.”
“Kimber, there’s a lot you should know. I think you should understand that you’ve got some things wrong.”
She laughs. “That’s a lot of shoulds. Didn’t your therapist ever tell you that you can’t build a life on the word ‘should’? Go ahead. Tell me all this stuff I should know. I can’t wait. I’m sitting down.”
“Not over the phone. Let me come over.”
“Yeah, well, there’s nowhere for you to come over to right now, Don. And I’m busy.”
“Your mother should have told you a long time ago what your father was really like. It’s my fault she didn’t. I didn’t want to see you hurt.”
“Again with the shoulds, Don. You have to stop that. I’m not interested in anything you have to say. However you comfort yourselves for being his victims is your problem.” Now she’s giddy with anger, and her voice gets higher. “Let me guess. You were screwing her before my father left. Is that the big secret?”
Her heart quickens as she imagines this new development. She waits for Don’s outraged response, but instead there’s a long silence before he speaks again.
“It wasn’t your mother who cheated. I think you know that. Your father did much worse. What your mother told you is only the beginning. He was a complicated man.”
“I have to go.” Kimber ends the call. The talk about her father is too distracting. She has to push it away if she’s going to deal with Kevin Merrill.
Kevin, my brother.
Chapter Forty-One
Kimber brings the mug of black coffee Troy has given her into the living room, where Shaun is on his laptop. He nods at her over his reading glasses. She’s never gotten used to seeing him in glasses. It’s a reminder of how much older they are now than when they were together.
“Get ready for news of the weird, Florida style,” Shaun says. “Sit. This isn’t going to be easy.”
Taking the chair opposite, Kimber mumbles under her breath. “Of course. It can’t ever be easy.”
Troy settles on the couch. “That’s some family you’ve got there. I had no idea. I want you to know we don’t imagine for a minute you’re anything like them.”
“Troy.” Shaun’s voice is low. “Please. Just let her hear this.”
“What is it? It’s about Kevin Merrill, right?”
Shaun checks the screen of the laptop, then hands it to her. “This page and the jump at the end.”
Kimber holds the laptop like it could easily shatter if she moves too quickly. She’s waited so damn long to have answers. She takes a deep breath and sits.
The first thing she sees is her father’s and Kevin Merrill’s photos. Mug shots. Her heart sinks. Her father looks so old. John Merrill’s skin is leathery from sun exposure, and the slight fold lines on either side of his mouth that she remembers from her childhood are dramatically deeper from age and gravity. But even in the flat light of the police camera, he’s still handsome. His eyes—a stark, icy blue in his tanned face—are familiar and look sincere. This is her father’s face. A beloved face. But it’s also the face of John Merrill. This man was in trouble with the law in Florida. She can’t think of her father that way.
Kevin Merrill looks much younger than the man she knows as Lance Wilson. Younger and sporting the cocky self-assurance of an attractive thirty-something man who doesn’t believe he could be found guilty of anything. He stares defiantly into the camera. There’s nothing wiry or hard about him. She can see the small resemblance to their father, here, while the man she knows is all hardness. Kevin Merrill looks like his mother, the pretty, shy-looking young woman who held him and touched him possessively in the family photos. Kevin Merrill was beloved and a little soft. Lance Wilson is granite.
“This is unbelievable.”
“That’s your father, right?” Shaun obviously knows the answer. “It looks like he got caught up in something Kevin was into. There’s a lot more, but they couldn’t make the charges stick against your father. He was arrested for driving a stolen car, but the judge didn’t find enough evidence in the preliminary hearing for it to go to trial. There was some question as to whether he knew the car was stolen.”
“Wait, I want to read this.”
“I’ll make more coffee.” Troy gets up. “I think a nip of the Irish is in order.”
“No complaints from me,” Shaun calls after him. “Kimber, when you’re done with the first one, you’ll see the others tabbed in the browser.”
Kevin Merrill had been a landscaper who took a job as a private driver, gardener, and companion to an elderly man named Louis Threllkill, whose family described him to the newspaper as “barely able to look after his own affairs.” They believed Kevin Merrill gained Mr. Threllkill’s confidence while working on an extended project to restore his historic St. Petersburg, Florida, garden. They also alleged that Mr. Threllkill gave him increasingly expensive gifts, including watches, electronics, and a restored 1972 Camaro.
; Two months before Mr. Threllkill’s presumed death, Kevin Merrill turned the old man’s niece and nephew away from the house, saying their uncle didn’t want to see them. After being turned away a second time, the pair asked the police to check on Mr. Threllkill’s well-being. Kevin Merrill allowed the police access to Mr. Threllkill, whom they found lucid and in reasonable health given his low body weight and emphysema. But three weeks after the police visit, the niece returned to the house unannounced. Finding a large number of advertising circulars on the porch and her uncle’s Cadillac gone, and getting no answer at the door, she broke into the house through a basement window. “It was horrifying,” she told the court, dissolving into tears. Her uncle lay naked and decomposing in a few scant inches of putrid bathwater in an upstairs bathroom.
Experts said Mr. Threllkill had been dead for at least two weeks, due to cardiac arrest.
Kevin Merrill was found living in a Tampa hotel and was taken into custody and charged with first-degree murder, car theft, and abuse of a corpse. His father, John Merrill, was arrested driving Mr. Threllkill’s Cadillac, saying his son had led him to believe that his employer was on an extended visit to relatives in Michigan and had told Kevin to make use of the car.
Mr. Threllkill’s relatives told police that their uncle was known to keep large amounts of cash—anywhere from three to six hundred thousand dollars—in a safe in his bedroom. But when it was opened, it contained only a thousand dollars and some jewelry belonging to his late wife.
Kevin might have received up to fifteen years in prison for Threllkill’s death alone, but he pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to ten years for the death and the theft of the car. No trace of Threllkill’s money was found in his possession.
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