by C. J. Zahner
Giff’s stare fell to the side. He suspected Matt sent that letter for him. He just wasn’t sure whether it was to dissuade or warn him. He tucked his chin and shook his head but didn’t respond.
“I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anyone. Not even Emma,” she said as she stood. “He used to stare at her. I caught him many times. In school, church, at the mall, the grocery store. When we were young, I thought they were related. There was that whole McKinney adoption rumor. But after college, Emma came into her own. She didn’t look like the McKinneys as much. And she was born in between Matt and Melanie. No one gives a middle child up for adoption.”
She picked up her purse and placed its strap on her shoulder. “Do you think we need to be worried?”
He shrugged and spoke in a low voice. “Maybe just me.”
Chapter 43
Wednesday, July 29, 2015
Mastermind.
Her eyes skimmed the summary sheet of the McKinney appointments. Four lists divided the paper into four sections. Each contained the name of a McKinney sibling with a column of numeric dates below. Those dates represented days she counseled them. She stared at the numbers, knowing they represented so much more than time. On those days, she had heard about heartaches, rivalries, obsessions, and possible murders. So much information and, yet, she was missing something.
She stretched her arm out and held the paper to see it in its entirety. Her eyes took the page in—one stark white sheet quartered into dates.
Could she have saved Mary? She knew the answer hid within those dates, and to her it wouldn’t matter what the legal system concluded. She had to know herself. Last night Giff had dropped by her house and announced the first expert witness had sided with Emma, and now, with the suicide note, the plaintiff’s case was falling apart. But how the lawsuit ended didn’t matter if she herself believed she was at fault.
She gazed at the paper again. And again. From Melanie’s list, over to Matt’s, down to Mary’s, left to Minnie’s, and back up to Melanie’s. Her eyes worked in a square, tracing the lists repeatedly.
She tilted her head back and closed her eyes. She and Giff had concentrated so much on the lawsuit that they hadn’t talked much about the possible murders. Last night they agreed each of them should go their separate ways and reread, on their own, any portion of the transcripts they felt could substantiate the murders of either Melissa. Could they in some way be related to Mary’s suicide? Why had she killed herself?
Her mind sifted through conversation after conversation stored in her brain, but the one she kept coming back to was Mary asking if she was the good twin or the bad twin. Hadn’t Mel admitted being afraid of Minnie, not Mary? My grandmother was a murderess…Minnie defended her…Mary won’t let Minnie babysit…Minnie scares me…you were wrong, Emma, Minnie and I were talking about the baby…
Mel said most people liked Minnie when they first met her. Had she subconsciously meant they didn’t later? Emma thought about Minnie self-proclaiming herself her grandmother’s favorite, and about the babysitting story, and how angry Minnie became when Emma attempted to refer her to another psychiatrist, the hatred in her voice.
Minnie is like Sara. Sara who killed her sister—Melissa.
Her eyes shot open just as the chimes on the front door rang and Giff arrived.
She moved her gaze outside her office door to where Sharon stood talking, greeting Giff, but she couldn’t hear her words. Her hands jolted to her head, fingers wide and fingertips sifting through hair. Her palms worked like a drill press, squeezing her skull. “Sweet Jesus!” she howled, her words so loud they grabbed both Giff and Sharon’s attention.
“Emma?” Sharon rushed through the doorway with Giff on her heels. “Is something wrong?”
“I know what happened.” Emma pressed her hands harder.
Sharon walked around her desk and leaned over her shoulder to see the slip of paper.
“It was post-traumatic stress.” Emma released her hands and spoke slowly, pensively. “I was right about that, but it wasn’t over their mother’s suicide. It was over the baby’s death.”
“Melissa?” Sharon narrowed her eyes.
“They were all there.” Emma still pondered. She revealed her words at the same time she thought them. “They watched that baby take her last breath.”
“What are you saying?” Sharon asked.
Giff approached coolly.
Emma’s ability to retrieve long-term memories was stellar. Like Minnie’s. She sorted through her mind’s complex web, sparked her hippocampus, and as always, her spongy memory squeezed out more words, important words. You can talk those twins into anything…I couldn’t tell them apart…hated us since the baby died.
“She really was murdered.” Emma’s gaze rose to Giff. She expected surprise from him, dispute. Instead, the look in his eyes relayed concordance.
He nodded, acquiesced. “After our discussion last night, I reread the transcripts. I agree. I believe Mary told the truth.”
“Murdered? Are you talking about the baby?” Sharon’s voice rose, a twang of doubt vibrated in her words.
“I’m talking about more than the baby,” Emma said, nodding. Gradually her nods flowed into the shaking of her head back and forth and she continued, “I think their grandmother killed her own sister, and when that baby was named for her sister, she couldn’t stand it.”
“You think she killed her sister—and the baby?”
“No, not the baby.” Emma’s head bounced back and forth quickly.
Responsibility is relative…I did not say my grandmother murdered the baby.
“But you think the baby was murdered, too?” Incomprehension bled from Sharon’s inflection.
“Yes, I do.”
“By who?”
“One of the twins,” Giff said.
“Impossible!” Sharon stood back to get a full view of both Emma and Giff. “They were babies themselves. You can’t seriously believe that?”
“That’s why Matt hated them both,” Emma said. “He couldn’t tell them apart when he was little.”
“One twin put a pillow over Melissa’s head and smothered her. He didn’t know which one,” Giff said, and Sharon stepped back, placing a hand on her heart.
“All night, dates and transcripts played in my head,” he continued but then hesitated, appeared to withhold something. Emma thought he chose his words gingerly. “The twins were easily controlled. I’m fairly sure the grandmother stood behind one twin, telling her what to do.”
She waited for him to say more, when he didn’t, she agreed, “I believe that. And Matt didn’t know which one it was.”
“And Mary was right.” Giff nodded, folded his hands in front of him over his files.
“Yes, there was a good twin and a bad twin.”
“Mary was—” Giff began, but Emma finished for him.
“The good twin,” she whispered, and her fingers released the paper in her hand.
“What are you two talking about?”
Giff turned toward Sharon. “The baby, Melissa, didn’t die of SIDS, and Mary didn’t commit suicide. Minnie killed them. Murdered them both.”
Giff restrained himself from saying more, held back what he was so eager to say: that Matt had a hand in the second murder, that when the family agreed to go to Emma for counseling, Matt turned twin against twin to find out which one’s hands held that pillow in place. Giff was certain Matt had misled each twin into believing the other was exposing the truth to Emma during counseling, and so Minnie, evil as she was, murdered her own twin sister to save herself.
But he knew Emma couldn’t hear about Matt’s part in it from him. Her allegiance to Matt grew stronger daily. So that part—Matt’s manipulation—she had to realize for herself. He stood back and waited.
“There’s something I missed,” she said. Giff remained silent.
Emma wiped her face hard with the palms of both hands, sat back, and then picked up the paper and traced the four lists with her eyes ag
ain.
“Like a missing puzzle piece. Come on, Emma,” she said out loud. “You’re almost as smart as them.”
Her own words surprised her. She brusquely unlocked her desk drawer and lugged out the McKinney file with the IQ Post-it. She glanced at the numbers and then back at the list of dates. The clue jumped at her. Something so utterly impossible that she closed her eyes and broke into a laugh.
Dates and details are everything to Matt…Matt is the master game player.
Like a gazelle waiting for a cheetah to close in on her, the incredibility of what Mathew McKinney had done consumed her. She let go of the paper and laughed harder.
She put her palms on her temples, stood from her seat, and turned toward Giff. He looked like he knew. She glanced back down at the dates. With the exception of Mel, she thought, who had transferred to Doctor Christy without Matt’s knowledge, he had set up every single appointment without a glitch.
It was the first time she realized how impossibly clever and wickedly controlling Mathew McKinney really was.
Chapter 44
Thursday, July 30, 2015
Intrusion.
At two o’clock in the morning, she jerked the covers over her head and pressed 911 into her phone.
“What is your emergency?”
“Help! Send police. My name is Doctor Emma Kerr. I live alone at 410 Colorado Drive. Someone just broke the glass of my kitchen window,” she whispered. “Hurry, please. I’m in my locked second-floor bedroom. I believe the person is now downstairs, inside my home.”
That last part wasn’t true. She didn’t think the burglar was inside yet, but a national news broadcast estimated the average response time for police to arrive at a true emergency was eleven minutes. She understood—from calling 911 at work—response times shortened according to incident priority.
“Stay on the line with me. I’m sending police,” the woman said.
She reached for her car keys on the nightstand and pushed the fob’s emergency button. A trick she also learned from that broadcast. She continued pushing the alarm, poking her head out from under the blanket, and listening for the car horn. She heard it and knew the car’s lights would be blinking. She hoped it scared the robber and woke Judy—and Moses. She held her breath and kept pushing.
When she at last heard him bark, Moses sounded far away but determined to wake the neighborhood. She listened to that lovely yelp and hoped for quiet on her back deck. Instead, the sound suddenly multiplied as if a scuffle had broken out—feet stomping, wood breaking. Moses’s moans weren’t scaring whomever it was away.
“There may be more than one person. I do not know if they have a weapon,” she whispered to the faceless woman on the phone.
“Do you have a closet you can go to in your room?” the woman asked, but Emma didn’t hear her. The noise outside became louder still.
She felt for Josh’s bat under the bed, grabbed it, and tiptoed toward the door. She turned an ear outward and slowly, quietly, unlocked and opened the door. Were the sounds coming from the back deck? She crept into the hallway. Yes, the noise was outside.
“Ma’am?” The voice on the phone was barely audible. Emma held the bat and keys in one hand, her other hand dangled at her side, cell in sweaty palm. As she listened to the noise on the deck, she thought she heard the woman say, “Police are on their way.”
Her neighborhood wasn’t as crime infested as the inner city. She prayed tonight was a mild night, so officers in her area could cut their eleven-minute response time in half.
“Ma’am, stay with me.”
She brought the phone up and whispered. “I’m out of my bedroom. Heading down the hall. I’m going downstairs.”
“Ma’am, do not go downstairs. Doctor Kerr! Stay on the second floor.”
She sidled down the stairs and, once at the bottom, peeked down the hallway toward the ceramic-tiled floor in the kitchen. Dark forms moved across the porcelain squares, indiscernible geometric figures, their silhouettes sent through the window by the grace of Judy’s backyard motion floodlight. As she tiptoed toward the kitchen, it became clear there were two large shadows. They moved across the tiles like bending black forms on a gray ceramic palette.
She stepped closer. Saw outside the broken window. The forms danced in a pulsating red light that blinked in perfect timing with a horn. Emma glanced toward the bat and keys, the fob still clutched in her hand, her finger moving up and down. She was still pushing the car panic button.
“Ma’am, go back to your bedroom and lock your door.”
“I’m on the first floor. They are on the back deck. There are two of them.”
“Find a safe place,” Emma thought she heard the woman say, but she was engrossed in the sounds outside.
The figures disappeared from sight. She heard a thud, body against deck, then muffled words and a clatter, and she moved into the kitchen while the woman on the phone continued pleading with her to find a safe haven.
She inched toward the shattered window, unaware she was cutting her feet on broken glass. From there, she could see them fighting. One man lay on the deck, his arms flailing, and a second man hovered over him. The man standing held the collar of the man lying on the ground, and he was throwing punches in rapid succession. Emma watched the arms of the man being punched fall to the side. He’d lost consciousness, but the man standing continued to hold him by his collar and bring his fist down on him.
She tiptoed closer. Something seemed familiar—the way the man throwing the punches lifted the collar of the man on the ground upward before each punch. Flashes struck her. She remembered: her office, Matt McKinney, Josh being lifted off the ground by his collar.
She dropped the baseball bat and keys, clicked the phone off and tossed it on the counter, and ran for the back door. She threw it open.
“Matt,” she yelled, “stop. You’ll kill him.”
He looked up at her, his face enraged, but he stopped hitting the man. He let go of his collar with such force that the figure bounced once when hitting the deck.
A quiet moment passed between them. Then Emma looked to the ground, not sure if the man was alive. Confused, her eyes rose to survey Matt, his stance, dark clothes, gloved fist, and heart-shaped mole lit up by Judy’s motion light.
“You’ll find his fingerprints on every one of your first floor windows.” Matt brought one straddled leg over the man and stood tall. He jerked one slipping glove over his wrist and nodded toward the figure on the deck.
She squinted to glance through the night’s dimness and see the dark-clothed, masked man with the crowbar beside him.
“He’s been watching you.” Matt stepped gingerly backwards, down the steps, and off the deck. He moved toward the back yard. “As I have been.”
Out front she could hear a car coming down the street, high speed, and knew the police had arrived.
“His car is around the corner on Fifth Street, a blue Toyota. Give me ten minutes and then tell the police,” he said and took off running through her back yard. She watched him sail over her four-foot fence as easily as a seasoned hurdler.
With that leap he was gone, and she stood alone. Her back was pressed against brick and mortar, and her feet were just inches from the man and his mask and his crow bar. Her breath left her. She couldn’t move.
When the police officer rounded the corner, he flashed his light on her first and then the man on the ground. He spoke into his shoulder mic, and Emma heard a siren sound around the corner and then another farther away.
“Did he hurt you, Ma’am?” he said to her, bobbing his light toward the man on the ground.
Emma’s lips parted, but her voice failed her. His light inched from her head to her bloody bare feet then darted toward the still figure on her deck and the blood around the man. He bent down cautiously, put two fingers on the man’s neck, and then pushed down on his mic again.
“We need an ambulance,” the officer said.
Within seconds, Judy appeared and led her to
the opposite end of the deck, away from the limp body, and in the middle of the night Emma’s backyard lit up like a football field as officer after officer arrived with lights.
“Ma’am?” The officer who first arrived at the scene returned to her. “Was there someone else here?”
She nodded.
“Did you see who did this? He’s badly beaten.”
She shook her head, said nothing.
“Could a neighbor have done this? Helped you? Or is it possible this man had an accomplice that turned on him?”
She shook her head again, then finally found her voice.
“His fingerprints,” she said. “The man who hit him said you’d find them all over my windows.”
“His fingerprints?” The officer motioned toward the man.
“Yes, the man who—” She struggled for the right words. “The person who protected me said this man, lying there, has been watching me.”
“Did you recognize him? The man who helped you?”
“No.” She was careful not to respond too quickly nor too slowly. “I have never seen him before.”
Paramedics arrived, and officers gathered evidence. A lumbering, authoritative man with cigar breath and stars stretched across his collar came and hollered instructions. More neighbors showed up, huddling in Judy’s driveway, watching as paramedics carefully cut off the mask of the man on her deck.
“Geoff,” someone called to the policeman who still stood beside her. “Can you ask her if she can identify the suspect?”
“Ma’am, Emma?” he said, turning back toward her. “It’s Emma, right? Doctor Emma Kerr?”
She nodded and Judy, still holding her up, confirmed her name.
“Can you walk with me? See if you can identify this man?”
She nodded. Judy relinquished her arm to him, and he led her slowly toward the man on the ground. She shivered when she saw the amount of blood accumulating around him. Her eyes dropped to his face. She expected to see a teenage boy, an unfamiliar face, but, surprised, his face was familiar. Even with the gore and swelling, she knew who it was.
“Do you recognize him?”