by L. C. Warman
Whitney colored. It was closer to the truth than she would have liked. “I wanted to leave almost right away, actually. But Daniel said we had to stay, so we stayed.” She drew in a long breath, as Rick and Daniel just watched her. Anytime now would be good, she thought, and shakily took another breath. Maybe this was as much of the truth as she wanted to tell.
“Gina,” Rick pressed. “What happened with Gina?”
“Oh, she’s a horrid woman. You heard that speech she gave in front of everyone. What did you think of that?”
“She sounded drunk.”
“Of course. She always was.” Whitney pursed her lips. “I didn’t realize something was off about her that night until she stood up on that stage and said those horrible things about me. About Evan. It upset Daniel, too, that was obvious—at least she could have thought of that. But no. She had gotten it into her head that she was doing something righteous.”
“Something righteous?”
It amazed Whitney how daft most men could be. “Yes. She decided that she didn’t like the arrangement that Evan and I had set up. And she was going to have a talk with Daniel about it. You see, she overheard Evan and me talking earlier in the evening, and from whatever she pieced together, she decided that she had to be some avenging angel.”
“How do you know that?”
“I’ll get there. So after the speech, Evan comes down and we talk for a bit. I go to find Daniel and Evan goes to find Gina, to talk some sense into her. She had gone into one of the upstairs bedrooms. She knew he would follow her. She had told him earlier in the night—before that awful interruption—that she wanted Evan to tell Daniel what she had overheard, or else she would.”
“So about the fact that you two planned to cut Daniel out of the company.”
Whitney hesitated. She spared a quick glance at Daniel, who looked confused and hurt. She shifted her gaze back to Rick. “Yes. In any event, Evan knew what she wanted. And he knew that it was only a matter of time before she said something awful like that to Daniel, when really—why did he have to know? What good would it do him? So he walked into the room, and…well, I suppose they quarreled, and Gina fell over. And that was that.”
“An accident?”
“How should I know?”
Rick frowned. “He confessed to you, obviously. If you’re telling me about it.”
She could see the fear slowly dawning on Rick’s face. Yes, you turtle-brain, she thought. I’m not telling you for my own conscience. Aloud she said, “Yes, he told me what he had done. He didn’t try to hide it. I assume it was some sort of awful accident—and there was no reason to ruin what was left of Daniel’s future because of it.”
“Or yours. Or Evan’s.”
Whitney shrugged.
“Did you go outside to check on Gina?”
“No, of course not. I didn’t know what happened, not exactly. Evan just said it was something awful that happened on the balcony, and he had to tell me—I told him to be quiet for now.”
“You’re a pretty loyal business partner.”
Whitney glared at Rick. Rat, she thought. “I’m a loyal person.”
“Were you planning to tell Daniel that you were having an affair?”
Silence filled the room. Whitney felt like she was drowning in it. She didn’t dare look at Daniel, though she could feel his eyes on her, could imagine the stiffened, shocked expression on his face, almost half-amused at the thought. She knew that if she looked at him, she might break down, might lose her resolve. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this, Whitney thought.
“You really want him to know everything, then,” Whitney said finally, lip curling in disgust. “You can’t keep that out of it.”
“He should know,” Rick said. “Why shouldn’t he?”
“Because he won’t know for long.”
Rick blanched. Whitney stared at him, hard. He really could have left that detail out, she thought, lips pursed together. He really didn’t need to say that.
“Why won’t he know long?” Rick said.
Whitney snorted.
“No, really. You’re talking about CTE?”
“I’m not discussing it with you.”
“Why not? If that’s the case, why can’t you say it?”
Whitney rolled her tongue behind her teeth. She had a number of choice words that she wanted to tell the journalist, but she bit her tongue. Some secrets were not meant to be told.
Rick whipped on Daniel. “You seemed to be a bit better, after the party. Fewer headaches. Wasn’t that the case?”
“Whitney?” Daniel said. “What’s going on? Are you—are you and Evan—?”
“They are,” Rick said. Whitney still refused to look at Daniel. “Becks, this is important. The days after Gina died, you were feeling better, weren’t you? When I came to visit, you seemed lucid. No headaches or anything, I think.”
“I don’t know. I felt a little better, I guess.”
“Did you eat anything differently those days? Drink something, stop drinking something?”
“What? I don’t know why you—I mean, nothing out of the ordinary. Except…” Daniel’s voice trailed off, and he grew quiet.
Whitney couldn’t bear it any longer. She looked up at him.
Daniel’s eyes were searching hers. They didn’t look angry, not yet, though that might come later—they looked incredibly sad. As though she had taken him and shattered him. As though he was still waiting for her to say the right words to explain it all away, to make everything better. That was Daniel’s problem…he kept hoping and hoping, long after the situation was hopeless. She stared at him with her expression hard, unyielding, and slowly Daniel seemed to understand: there was nothing she could tell him to take it all away. Even lies at this point would be a bandaid on the wound, useless and temporary.
Daniel jerked his head left to face Rick.
“I was sick that morning,” he said quietly. “The morning after. I threw up most of the day.”
“And you felt better after that? Better than before, I mean?”
“Yes. I mean, not right away…but in the next few days, yes. I started to feel a lot better. A lot more clear-headed.” His jaw worked. “I thought I was just getting more sleep, or something.”
“And then it got worse.”
Daniel pressed his palm to his forehead, as if acknowledging the source of the pain. “Yes.”
“Care to explain?” Rick said to Whitney.
No, in fact. No, she did not. But she was terrified now, terrified that Rick would walk out too soon and leave someone wandering the world who knew things that nobody except Evan and herself ever should. “Fine,” she said, discreetly checking her watch again. “We were dosing Daniel with medication.”
“Medication? What kind?”
Whitney blew air through her nose. “Well, a home remedy, anyway.”
“A poison.”
“You can call it what you wish,” Whitney spat. “It’s all about dosages, anyway.” At least, that was what she had told herself, when she first started giving Daniel the concoction—extract of Garcinia cambogia, high doses of Vitamin A, a rotating group of other herbs, and then (experimentally!) a little bit of arsenic. She herself had used an alternative medicine supplement back in the day that had trace levels of arsenic; the supplement had promised to help her sleep, and did. But Whitney had used a higher dosage for Becks. To make it more effective, she had told herself. To help his restless sleep, his headaches, his fatigue. She couldn’t remember the moment she had switched over from trying to help Daniel to trying to poison him. In some ways, she felt like she never had. But she had understood that there were risks of giving him higher and higher dosages, that symptoms might mimic CTE, but then, it was entirely possible Daniel did have CTE, and the concoction was just helping him…
“When did you start? While Becks was still playing?”
Whitney felt a rush of rage. “Of course not. I would never. Only after he was finished. When we were home alone and I—I was helpi
ng him. He was depressed, and his head hurt, sometimes…”
“I told you it never did,” Daniel said. Whitney kept her eyes on Rick. “I told you I would tell you if that started, and it didn’t, not for a while. But you kept asking me if I had a headache, like you expected it. You brought up CTE two weeks after I left the NFL.”
“Someone had to discuss the possibility.”
“You said that I wasn’t fit to work anymore. To go to business school. That I should let Evan start a company and be a figurehead, so that I could do something without exerting myself, you said. You told me there weren’t any other options.”
“I wasn’t lying,” Whitney said. “Why would you go to business school? It’s a waste of money, and you’d never make it in a traditional corporate job. You’ve been an athlete your entire life, for goodness sake. You never worked an office job in your life.”
“I had the money to waste if I wanted to.”
“Yes, well, it’s my money too. I gave up my career to support you, to keep our household together. I had a say in how we invested it.”
“So you invested it in Evan. And not in me.”
Whitney wheeled her gaze finally on her husband. “I was doing what I needed to do to keep things together,” she said. “I’m sorry if you don’t see it that way. After you were kicked out of the league…it was like the world was crumbling down on us. We have savings, Daniel, but I don’t think you understand how much money it takes each year to keep this house. Not to mention the investment properties in Florida…we needed to do something. I reached out to Evan for help.”
“Is that when it started?” Rick said. “Or…no, it was before, wasn’t it?”
“What does it matter?” Whitney said, flushing. It hadn’t been like that, not like Rick was implying. She and Evan had spent a night together once, years back…it had been silly then, just a simple transgression, one they agreed to never speak about so as to protect Daniel. And then when Daniel was fired, Evan was the only person that she could think to reach out to. The football players wanted to have nothing to do with him, of course. And Evan, Evan was Daniel’s good friend from high school. And he had a reason to want to keep Whitney happy, too…
She had reached out, and Evan had come over that one evening to support them. He had cheered Daniel considerably. Whitney had walked him out to his car to thank him, and he had reached for her arm, and—they had been embarrassed after they had kissed, but they both knew it would go further next time. Wasn’t it Evan, anyway, who had suggested increasing the dose of the herb? Whitney couldn’t remember…if it was her, well, then Evan certainly knew about it and encouraged it. It was Evan who had told Whitney to have Daniel throw up the next day, in case the police wanted to drug test him and found strange levels of it in his system. They had kept him off of the herb for days after, until it became clear that they needed to do something, to risk it again, lest Daniel become more clearheaded and remember that, in fact, he had had nothing to do with Gina’s death. That Evan and Whitney had been acting strangely…
They weren’t trying to frame him, of course. That wasn’t the intention, when Evan had killed Gina. It just so happened that afterwards, they saw it was a perfect solution. Daniel would be deemed crazy and would go to live in a mental ward. He would be safe there at least, drugged up and carefully monitored. Whitney knew something about such places. Even if you were sane, you wouldn’t get out of one. That wasn’t how they worked. Daniel would get the care he needed (after all, didn’t most football players get CTE, at least eventually?) and Whitney and Evan could look after the money. If, in a few years, they decided to marry, well, that would be that. Whitney didn’t care so much about the legal side of things.
“My sleepwalking,” Daniel said, breaking Whitney’s thoughts. “You said I had choked you.”
Whitney stole the briefest glance at him. “Well,” she said. “You do sleepwalk, of course.”
“Did I touch you?”
Whitney’s hand trailed across her neck. “No. You didn’t.”
“Who made the bruises?”
“Well, I did. But you have to understand, Daniel, I wanted you to take your health seriously.” She colored at the expression on Rick’s face. Who needed the beady-eyed little journalist there to judge her? He didn’t understand. “Maybe it wasn’t the best idea. But I wasn’t trying to—”
“You wanted to make him think he was going crazy,” Rick said incredulously. “You made him think that he tried to kill you?”
“Daniel, I knew that if you went to—to a facility—then you’d get all the care you needed.”
“The DNA,” Rick said. “You put Becks’ DNA under Gina’s fingernails.”
Whitney snorted. “That was Evan’s idea. He said juries love DNA evidence. It was just a piece of hair, anyway. He was going to do it in front of the security cameras, until I reminded him they were there.”
Rick was looking at her as though she were a monster. You don’t understand, she wanted to say. You’ve never been married to a footballer.
“You framed your husband for murder,” Rick said.
Well, of course it would sound bad when he said it like that…
“I didn’t kill anyone,” Whitney said.
“But you knew that Evan was going to. You could have stopped him.”
She was tired of this game. Of course she wasn’t going to be able to explain it all to Rick in the short time they had. Of course she couldn’t go into her deep history with Daniel, how she had stood by him when his family had not, how she had sacrificed, how she had done everything for him, how she had felt so betrayed the moment he had tossed it all away with that stupid tackle and then had come home and looked at her with tears in his eyes, as if he expected her to clean up the mess! After everything she had done for him, he still wanted more. Whitney was tired of it. And she had figured out a way to keep them both safe and happy, and shouldn’t that have been enough?
“Whitney,” Daniel said, voice pleading. “Why?”
“It was best for everyone, Daniel.”
“But—”
The door to the back of the house opened.
Chapter 43
Rick almost jumped out of his chair. Not yet, he thought. Just a few minutes longer…
But he froze as Evan Miller, in a button-down shirt and business pants, walked into the room as if he were strolling home after a day of meetings. He looked fresh-faced and young in the low lamps of the Becker house, his cheeks just a little flushed, his eyes bright and searching.
“Whitney?” Evan said. “What’s going on?”
Rick looked between the two co-conspirators, feeling tense. He worried about Becks, mostly, who had shifted in his seat to stare at his former best friend. What if the two men began fighting?
“Evan,” Whitney said coolly. She had not lost her composure this entire time, not shed a tear or even spared more than a few glances at her husband. Rick felt cold every time he looked at her. “We were just chatting. Care to sit down?”
“Is Becks okay?” Evan said, wheeling towards his friend. Becks looked white, almost frail.
“Whitney was just telling us about how you were framing Becks for Gina’s murder,” Rick said, taking a risk. Keep the conversation going, he thought to himself. At least until…
“We were what?” Evan said, his gaze darting to Whitney.
“Framing Becks for Gina’s murder,” Rick repeated calmly. Next to him, Becks stirred.
Evan spared one scathing look at Rick before turning back. “Whitney, what is going on?”
“I was just talking,” Whitney said calmly.
“You’re trying to say this was on me?” Evan said, taking a few steps towards them, looking almost pleading as he came parallel to where Rick was seated, shoulders squared towards Whitney. “That I killed Gina?”
Rick felt a whoosh of cold go through him. Next to him, Becks seemed disoriented and out of it, and Rick couldn’t tell if that was just the shock to his system, or if his sympto
ms were flaring up again. Had Whitney dosed him today?
“Evan,” Whitney said, voice still calm, though with an electric note through it. “Please. We were just talking about a few things. I didn’t see—”
Rick felt a tremendous pressure around his neck.
For a moment, nothing made sense. He flapped and flailed, and his first thought was my goodness, I’ve caught my sweater on something. But that thought was gone in a flash, replaced as soon as his mind processed that it was an arm around his throat, and that Rick had been so busy worrying about Becks that he hadn’t noticed Evan turning around and attacking him.
They were bluffing, he thought stupidly. They were pretending to argue so that they could take care of me.
And then it was hard to think, because his vision began to swim and stars dotted his eyes. He tried to fight, swinging his arms up and kicking his legs. But he had been taken by surprise; he had let his guard down among murderers, and was paying the price.
His last coherent thought was that he felt sorry for Becks—that no one deserved what had happened to him, and that now no one would be around to tell his side clearly. Who knew if the effects of the poison were permanent. Who knew what would become of him. Poor, poor Becks…
The world went black.
Rick crumpled to the floor. He inhaled deeply, gasping, his throat throbbing. He just had time to process Becks’ feet in front of him before he heard a tremendous crash and the sound of shattering glass.
Trembling, Rick pulled himself to a sitting position. I’m not dead, he thought dumbly, massaging his throat as he looked towards the sound of the crash. Evan lay slumped amidst broken glass, bleeding and groaning, but not severely hurt—at least, Rick didn’t think so. Becks stood facing him, hands balled into fists, face a mask of rage.
Whitney had risen, her face white, her eyes calculating. “Becks,” Rick tried to say, but his throat was hoarse. Watch her. She’ll try next.
“Police! Hands up!”
Rick almost crumpled with relief. What had taken them so long? He had texted them as soon as Whitney had come home and told them that Whitney was confessing her crime to him. She had, eventually—just as Rick had hoped. The detective Rick had contacted must have told everyone to hold off until the sound of the crash.