by Lisa Jackson
“And your sister Amity was bitten by a snake the night she was killed. Correct?”
“You can’t blame that on my stepmother’s church.” He glared at her. “Do you know how many snakes there are in Georgia or the southeastern United States? They’re everywhere. In the wild and in homes as pets. Or used for research or whatever.” His lips pursed angrily. “All I’m getting at is that now I see things more clearly. Much more clearly. I see them for what they are. When I testified, I was a kid and I was scared. I just did what I thought I should . . .”
Morrisette waited. Here it comes.
He swallowed hard. “I was kind of talked into saying what I did.”
“That your mom shot you,” Morrisette reminded.
“Maybe bullied is the right word. That detective, Mr. Beauregard, he was nice to me and . . . and I wanted to please him.” A drip of sweat slid from his temple to his chin. Absently he swiped at it with the back of his hand.
“You’re saying Detective Beauregard asked you to compromise your testimony?” Reed put in. “To lie?”
“No! Not directly . . .” Niall blinked and shook his head. “He just kind of steered me into what he deemed was the ‘right’ direction. I couldn’t talk to my mom, and my dad was just angry all the time, furious at what had happened. Whenever her name came up, he went through the roof.
“But Detective Beauregard took time with me. Gave me soda and cookies out of the vending machines, that kind of thing. It meant a lot to me.” After another glance at his lawyer, he folded his hands on the scarred table. “In response to his kindness and because I wanted to please him, I was influenced by him and what he wanted from me.”
“Which was,” Morrisette encouraged.
“To testify against my mother.” He let out a long sigh. “So I did.”
“Are you now saying you didn’t see her shoot you or Amity?” Morrisette asked. She didn’t much care for Flint Beauregard or his uppity son, but this total turnaround smelled of something rotten.
“A faithful witness will not lie: but a false witness will utter lies. Proverbs 14:5.”
Morrisette caught Reed’s eyes and sent him a “Can you believe this?” look. To O’Henry, she said, “You’re quoting Bible verses now?”
“Yes!” Niall was emphatic, one hand slapping the table. “I’ve found the Lord, and I cannot shame Him. I’m a follower of Jesus Christ, our Savior, and I cannot bear false witness! That’s the ninth commandment.”
“I know it’s a commandment.” Morrisette let her annoyance slip into her voice.
David Blass held up a calming, diplomatic hand. “Mr. O’Henry is cooperating,” he reminded them. “Trying to help you with your investigation of his own volition.”
“You’re not just trying to spring your mother?” she asked Niall.
“I just want to tell the truth!” Niall was glaring at Morrisette now, his eyes narrowing in a newfound hatred.
Well, fine. Morrisette knew he’d found God, had taken his father’s and his stepmother’s extreme religious views to heart. She also knew this weakling facade was just that—window dressing—because she’d checked. Niall O’Henry now worked on his father’s farm, pitching in with the hard labor, so he was tougher than he looked. Also, he wasn’t just a devout Christian, he was a card-carrying member of the NRA and had joined a vigilante group that was considered extremist, like his father. Married, with a wife and two sons, he seemed intent on policing his own property and keeping others away as if it were Fort Knox.
“You and your father,” she said to him, “you’re tight, right? Good buds.”
“I like to think so,” Niall said cautiously.
“You work for him, on the family farm?” She already knew this much, but wanted to see his reaction.
Blass was obviously irritated. “Where’s this going, Detective?”
“Just checkin’ my facts.” Morrisette saw Niall’s clenched fists, the vein beginning to throb near his temple. He might be all dressed up and putting on the soft-spoken act, but Morrisette wasn’t buying it. She hadn’t from scene one in front of City Hall. The guy had been coached and prompted by David Blass as much as he had by Flint Beauregard twenty years ago. She couldn’t help but wonder what really made him tick, deep down in the darkest parts of him. She suspected he was a bomb about to explode. “What’s your father think of your change of heart?”
“What does Calvin O’Henry have to do with any of this?” Blass demanded.
“Calvin O’Henry’s gone on record for years about how he feels about his ex-wife. Now his son wants to get her out of prison?”
“Be that as it may, it’s Mr. Niall O’Henry’s testimony that concerns us here. This has nothing to do with Calvin.” Blass was riled now, two points of color showing on his face.
“Okay.” Reed, who’d stayed back and let her run with the interview, now gazed over Niall’s shoulder at her before turning on his “good cop” charm. “We’re here to listen, Mr. O’Henry,” he said equably. “Why don’t you tell us what you remember of that night? In your own words. No pressure. Okay?”
“Maybe this is a mistake,” Blythe said, second-guessing herself as she glanced at her watch. They were seated in her living room, she in her wheelchair, her back to the dining area, Nikki on a sleek modern couch in front of the window. Two other chairs, one black leather, the other a leopard print, faced a flat-screen TV that was flanked by four guitar stands, each displaying a different type of electric guitar.
“Do you play?” Nikki asked as the black and white cat strolled across the living room.
“They’re my boyfriend’s,” she said. “He moved in about four months ago.” Then, as if she realized she’d gotten off track and said too much, Blythe turned serious again. “You said you knew Amity. Before you start asking questions, why don’t you tell me about that?” Blythe acted as if she suddenly doubted Nikki’s claim. “Amity was a year older than you, and you didn’t come from the same neighborhood. Considering what I know about my sister, I doubt you were in the same Brownie troop together.”
“Amity and I both went to Robert E. Lee. We had a couple of classes together,” Nikki said. “P.E. was required for both freshmen and sophomores, a blended all-girls class. We saw each other there and in biology. We were lab partners.
“I tested high enough as an entering freshman to skip general science and was pushed into biology, which was a sophomore class,” Nikki explained when Blythe looked suspicious. “Your sister ended up being stuck with me as a lab partner.”
“Amity wasn’t into school all that much.” Blythe said it as if it were a documented fact.
“That was probably true.”
“You carried her, didn’t you?”
“Sometimes.” Nikki remembered a time when she’d actually helped Amity cheat on a biology exam.
“You did her homework?”
“Once in a while. Yes.”
“You weren’t helping her, you know. That was part of Amity’s problem, getting others do her work for her, or so my father used to say. Then again, Dad and June were strict. Unbending. Even with Emma-Kate, and she was their darling, of course.”
Nikki nodded, remembering Calvin and June’s daughter, born just after Blondell’s trial.
“Dad told me that Amity had nearly been flunking out and didn’t seem to care.”
“That was the next year.”
“I guess you weren’t there to bail her out.”
“No.”
“How about Hollis McBaine?”
“How do you know Hollis?” Nikki asked.
“I don’t. But I’ve learned a lot in the past few years. I had a lot of questions about what happened and not many answers. I knew that Dad and June saw things one way, in black and white, as they do with everything, so when I could, I read all there was to read about my mother. I was, like, obsessed with what had happened. My shrink says I’m looking for answers I can’t find, but I think that’s crap. The answers are out there. Someone knows the truth
.”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out. I’m hoping to talk to your mother.”
“Good luck with that.” Behind her shaggy bangs, Blythe rolled her eyes. “For a few years I visited her in prison, with a social worker. My dad and stepmother wouldn’t be caught dead near the prison, and then, when I was older, I went by myself. I’m not completely bound to this chair, y’know. I can drive and walk with a walker, but it’s hard. Anyway, like I said, obsessed.”
“What about your mother? Was she anxious to see you?”
“Never,” she said, then amended that statement. “That’s not really true. I think she was glad for a break from the boredom and routine, but I don’t kid myself into thinking it had anything to do with motherly love. To me, she’s always been indifferent. Maybe even cold, and certainly narcissistic.” She glanced at the recorder, its red ON light glowing. “Anyway, I just pieced as much information together as I could. I knew my mother’s lawyer had a couple of kids who had died, so I googled them and read all the articles and realized that Hollis was the same age as Amity, and she had died just a couple of months before my sister. How weird is that?” Blythe lifted her shoulders in the tiniest of shrugs. “But, then, what isn’t weird about all of this?”
“Nothing,” Nikki admitted.
CHAPTER 12
Niall O’Henry squeezed his eyes shut for a second. “I heard something. Loud voices, I believe. My mother. Angry. No, no, furious was more like it,” he said, looking from Reed to Morrisette in the interrogation room. “I’ve always thought she was yelling at Amity, but now . . . now I believe she was yelling at the intruder. Anyway, I shot out of the bed. I was in the top bunk, and I hurried to the stairs when I heard a shot. I couldn’t see much. I’ve worn glasses since I was three or four and hadn’t put them on, just ran to the stairs and started going down. The only light was from the fire, but I saw Amity on the bed and then a blast, a bright light, and I was hit. I thought my mother was the only person in the room, so I assumed she’d shot at me, but now, thinking back, I think there might have been someone else downstairs. Someone threatening us. Attacking us.”
He appeared earnest and sounded a little desperate, his wheezy breath more apparent as he became more agitated. “Look, I really don’t know what I saw. I was just a kid, a myopic kid in the semidark with bullets flying. I heard screaming, yeah, and then Blythe was behind me. I remember that. As I fell down the rest of the stairs, I saw her near the top and there was another shot and she . . . somehow slipped through the rails.” He closed his eyes tightly, almost cringing, his face seeming to fold in on itself. “And then . . . I kind of blacked out, I guess. I remember Mom carrying me to the car. Amity and Blythe were already inside, and Mom was bleeding.”
“You didn’t see anyone shoot her?” Reed asked.
Niall was shaking his head. “I don’t know how it happened.”
“You testified that she shot herself.”
“I know!” He held up both his hands. “That’s what Detective Beauregard wanted. He suggested it, I think. Because my mother was shot in her right arm and she was left-handed, but I’m telling you I didn’t see it.”
“Did you see anyone else in the cabin?” Morrisette said.
He looked weary, as if he’d been battling demons for years. “I just don’t know. But the point is I cannot, in good conscience, allow my mother to spend one more night in jail because of what I said. All because I wanted to please a man who gave me Snickers bars.”
“She won’t get out today.”
“I know, but I’ve done my part.” His spine seemed to stiffen a bit as he slid a glance at his lawyer, then stared Reed straight in the eyes. “I’d like to make a signed statement. Immediately.”
If Nikki had expected a big breakthrough from Blythe, so far she’d been disappointed. Blythe’s information on her family wasn’t much more in-depth than what Nikki had already read. Though pressed, she swore she had no idea who the father of Amity’s baby was. She’d been too young to know.
“I only heard things after the fact,” Blythe said, one hand resting on the arm of her chair, the other stroking her cat. “And usually it was something I just happened to overhear when June and my dad didn’t think I was around. All I know is that they were death on some older guy she’d been seeing, but I don’t know who, and there were a couple of boys from high school whose names came up.” Her eyebrows drew together as she concentrated. “Steve Something-or-other, a baseball player, I think.”
“Steve Manning, but he didn’t play ball,” Nikki said. “Brad Holbrook was an All-State pitcher. They both dated Amity for a little while.”
“And Holt Beauregard,” Blythe said.
“Flint’s son?”
“I’m sure I heard his name.”
“His father—”
“I know. Was the lead detective on the case.”
“That never came out in court,” Nikki said, certain she would have remembered if Beauregard’s youngest son’s name had been connected with Amity O’Henry.
“I only heard about it years later, when my dad and June thought they were alone. Dad and June were in the kitchen in the farmhouse; she was cooking breakfast and Dad was at the table, drinking coffee after the morning chores. I was just coming down the stairs and they were discussing Amity and the boys she’d dated. They didn’t see me. The stove was on the far wall, and Dad was facing it, away from the hall and the stairs, so I ducked back into the hallway and listened. It was hard to hear over the frying bacon, and they were talking kind of low. But I know I heard four names. There could have been others. But the ones I definitely heard were Steve, Brad, Holt, and Elton.”
“My cousin Elton?”
“You know another one?”
Nikki felt as if she’d been sucker-punched. In the past few days she’d read and reread articles about the trial and she’d known Amity. “She never mentioned Holt or Elton.”
“Maybe it was the secret she was going to tell you if you’d shown up at the cabin that night.”
“The lead detective’s son and the defense attorney’s son? Both linked with Amity?”
“And Steve and Brad.”
Nikki had just shaken her head and moved on, asking her instead about the night Amity died, but Blythe could tell her little more than what she already knew. She’d heard screams and gunfire. She didn’t remember sliding through the railing, hitting the floor or anything about the ride to the hospital. The next thing she recalled was being released to her father’s care.
“And that was a nightmare too,” she admitted. “Believe me, living with Calvin and June and Leah and Cain was about all Niall and I could take. Leah, she’s older, and she was like our nurse or something, or June, at least, gave her that responsibility. Really? A twelve-year-old? But Niall liked that. I think he kinda had a crush on her.” She pulled a disgusted face. “He and Leah . . .” She shuddered. “I don’t care if there’s blood involved or not, a stepsister is a sister, a relative in my book.”
“Niall and Leah were, what? Lovers?”
“I didn’t mean that, exactly, but . . .” She gazed off into the distance, lifted a shoulder. “They were tight, and she got kind of silly around him. Not at first, of course, we were both just kids, but as time went on, when Niall was in high school, it was pretty obvious that they were interested in each other. June did not like that at all. As crazy as her religion is, and it’s . . . nutty, the whole incest thing is frowned upon. I would have left if I could, but I didn’t have a choice. Things didn’t get any better when Emma-Kate was born. She was a crabby, colicky baby.”
Before she could expound, the roar of a motorcycle’s engine reverberated through the apartment, only to stop suddenly. Blythe looked up sharply. “That’s A.J.” Her shoulders sagged for the first time since Nikki had arrived. “He might not be thrilled about this.”
“Is it his business?”
“He thinks so,” she admitted at about the same time that her boyfriend swaggered inside.
“Hi, babe,” she replied. “This is Nikki Gillette. She was a friend of my sister’s and is a reporter for the Sentinel. She, uh, wants to write a story about my mother.”
“True crime,” Nikki said, extending her hand.
“More like true cash, don’t you mean?” He was a tall man, over six feet, with beard shadow covering his chin, his lean body draped in black leather, his hair pulled back into a scrawny black ponytail. He carried a helmet tucked under one hand and didn’t bother to remove his gloves or boots. “You wrote a couple of other books, right?” One eye was squinting as he considered her for the briefest of seconds, and Nikki thought she recognized him from somewhere, maybe.
“That’s right.”
“You payin’ her?” Hooking a finger at Blythe, he said to his girlfriend, “She payin’ you? Or givin’ you credits or royalties or whatever they’re called?”
“I’m here as a reporter for the Sentinel,” Nikki said, pocketing her recorder.
“I don’t care if you’re here for the fuckin’ New York Times, we deserve a cut. Look at her! Still in a fuckin’ wheelchair because of her fuckin’ lowlife mother. She’s got a disability, I mean, for the fuckin’ rest of her life!”
“I can speak for myself,” Blythe said, stiffening.
He dropped his helmet unceremoniously onto the couch. “Sorry, babe. That’s the way I see it.”
He didn’t sound sorry in the least.
“I can handle this.” Blythe’s lips were taut.
“Hey.” He cocked both wrists, palms out in gesture of surrender, as he took a step backward. “I’m just lookin’ out for us.” Then as if Nikki’s name and face had finally made an impression on what was outwardly a Neanderthal brain, he said, “Wait a sec. You were with Sean Hawke for a while, right?”
Nikki didn’t respond.
“He’s one badass dude,” A.J. added, nodding, as if agreeing with himself, a note of envy evident in his voice, “Can fuckin’ play a guitar, I mean fuckin’ play it.”