Brett drove through an empty intersection. “I never asked you to.”
* * *
Brett dropped June off first, then drove to Elizabeth’s house. As soon as she pulled the car into the driveway, the front door opened and Marshall rushed out. Elizabeth got out of the car and slouched up the walkway. Marshall hugged her, then pulled away. There was anger in his voice when he said, “I thought you were spending the night at June’s.”
He looked over Elizabeth’s shoulder to where Brett was getting out of the car. “Is everything okay?” Then he turned to his daughter. “What did you do? Are you in trouble?”
“Everything’s fine,” Brett said. “I found her and June hanging out downtown and offered them a ride home.”
“Thank you.” Marshall hugged Elizabeth again and pushed her toward the house. “Go to your room.”
When Elizabeth was inside, Marshall turned back to Brett. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with her.” He exhaled loudly and rubbed his temples. The words were obviously difficult for him to say, like he was trying to figure out how everything had come apart for his family like this, so quickly, without warning. “Ever since that boy, she’s changed, you know? This whole thing has changed her, and I don’t know how to fix it. How to fix her.”
“I’m not sure you can.”
He squinted at the sky. The rain had stopped, but the clouds were still layered thick. No stars were visible beyond the darkness churning.
“All you can do is be there for her,” Brett said. “Make sure she has someone in her life she can trust. Someone she can count on. She’ll find her way through.”
He nodded and offered her a faint smile. “Thanks for bringing her home.”
He turned to go back inside, but she stopped him. “Marshall? Can I ask you something?”
“About the cannery sale? Sorry, things have been so hectic.” He laughed nervously. “Well, you know how it is. I’ll have a listing ready for you to look over next week, I hope. I mean, that’s if you still want me to handle the sale?”
“Oh, no.” Brett had forgotten about the cannery. “I mean, yes, that’s fine, you can still handle the sale, but no, what I wanted to ask you isn’t about the cannery. It’s about Margot.”
His expression tightened. He twisted his wedding band around his finger. “Margot?”
“Yes. I was digging around in Amma’s attic tonight, and I uncovered some new information. About what time she went missing.”
He flicked his eyes toward the house, then back at her. “Okay.”
He kept twisting his wedding band.
“It seems she went missing later than we thought, sometime in the early evening rather than in the morning. Do you remember where you were that afternoon? What you were doing?”
He swallowed hard and squinted at his feet. His toe scraped against the asphalt as he thought for a second, then he lifted his face again and frowned. “The afternoon, huh? I guess, I mean, it was so long ago, but that summer I worked a lot. I was a lifeguard and swim instructor at the country club in the mornings. Then most afternoons, I worked with Eli as a caddy on the golf course, or we went and grabbed burgers and hung out on the beach or at the batting cages, or we’d go out to the drive-in theater. I guess that’s probably where I was that day, too. On the golf course.” He swept his hand through his hair and shook his head. “But like I said, it was a long time ago.”
Brett glanced at the house. “Is Clara home?”
“She’s asleep.” His words were clipped short, and he took a step back toward the house, moving away from her, drawing their conversation to a close. “Look, I should go back inside. Check to make sure Elizabeth’s okay. But, um, but thanks again for bringing her home. I’m sorry if she was any trouble.”
“No trouble at all.”
Marshall disappeared inside the house. In the front window, a curtain twitched, and a shadow fluttered as someone moved away from the glass.
Chapter 34
“Clara.” Marshall’s hushed voice reached for her in the dark. “What are we going to do? We can’t leave him out there.”
She rolled toward him and settled her hand on his chest. His heart was beating as fast as if he’d just come back from a run.
She had been expecting this conversation. Waiting for it ever since Brett dropped Elizabeth off at the house, ever since Marshall stood on the porch talking to her, pretending everything was fine when nothing was.
When the car first pulled into the driveway, Marshall nearly had a heart attack. Wide-eyed with panic, he’d turned to Clara, and she’d done her best to reassure him. Stay calm. Act normal. Everything will be fine. He shook his head because he didn’t know what normal was anymore, not after what they’d done. What she’d made him do. They don’t know, she’d told him. If they knew, it would be more than Brett pulling up in her ruby red Beetle. It would be squads of lights and sirens and men in black boots with guns. If they knew, their daughter wouldn’t be climbing out of the back of the car, acting like nothing was wrong.
Clara had almost gone outside to deal with Elizabeth herself, couldn’t believe that, once again, her daughter had broken the rules and found herself in trouble. But she’d stopped herself at the door and turned to Marshall instead. She wiped the sweat from his brow, straightened his shirt, and sent him out to talk to Brett because, for them to survive this, she needed him to see how easy it was to lie.
In the dark, his hand found hers, clutching tight, as if she was the buoy that could save him from drowning.
“We have to let him go,” he said. “We have to go to the police and apologize and say we made a mistake. They’ll go easy on us. We haven’t done anything, we haven’t—” He choked on the rest of it, his failed attempts to rationalize.
Because up to this point, what had they really done wrong? Besides attacking a man, kidnapping him, keeping him locked in an abandoned hunting cabin in the middle of the forest—the sarcastic voice in her head wouldn’t shut up. On the other hand, they’d left him with water and a baloney sandwich and a blanket and a bucket to shit in, and up to this point, they could still take it all back. Couldn’t they? They could explain away their actions as panic, as fear, as temporary insanity. Marshall thought they could.
He didn’t know the rest of the story, the house of lies Clara had built, how quickly it could all come crashing down around them. She didn’t know how much Jimmy knew, only that it was enough to be dangerous. He was the crack in the foundation that could ruin everything.
She should have taken care of him already. The longer they waited, the more likely someone would find him. But she didn’t want to do it in front of Marshall. Killing would break him, she knew, in a way it wouldn’t—hadn’t—broken her. She had needed Marshall’s help to carry Jimmy out of the house, though, and stuff him in the trunk of his own car. Marshall had driven the family sedan, and she’d driven Jimmy’s car, ten miles through town, to an old hunting cabin near Lake Chastain that Clara knew hadn’t been used in years. That damn dog howled in her ear the whole way. When they got there, they dragged the still unconscious man inside the cabin and dumped him on the floor, padlocking the door behind them. The dog escaped from the car during the shuffle. She’d tried to grab it, but the dog had wriggled free of its collar and disappeared into the trees in a white flash of fur. Let her go, Marshall had said. They dumped Jimmy’s car on an overgrown fire road and drove back to the house together.
She had planned to come back later without Marshall to do what needed to be done to keep them safe. Except Marshall hadn’t left her side in the past twenty-four hours, since they got back from the hunting cabin. He clung to her, worrying and fretting. She tried to get him to go into the office, to act normal, but he gestured to his sweat-drenched shirt—Does this look normal to you?
In front of Elizabeth, he plastered on a fake smile and did his best to act like nothing was wrong. As soon as Elizabeth left for school, he started panicking again, desperate for som
e solution other than the most obvious one.
She had hoped he would make peace with the situation on his own, come to accept the reality of what must be done, and allow her to do it. Instead, he kept circling around the idea that if they just let Jimmy go, everything could go back to the way it was before. But that wasn’t how things like this worked, and they were running out of time.
“We have to kill him,” she whispered the words, testing them, testing her husband, saying out loud what she had been hinting at, holding her breath to see how they landed.
Marshall stiffened and tried to pull his hand away from hers, but she grabbed hold, refusing to let go. He always had such a tender heart, so soft and kind.
A few months before they started dating, she and Marshall were paired up in anatomy class to dissect a rabbit. Marshall had picked up the scalpel first, thinking because he was the man, he should make the first cut, but he couldn’t do it. So Clara had taken the knife from him, quietly, without anyone noticing. It was an easy thing. The scalpel felt good in her hand, natural. It was—if she could admit this—exciting to slit the rabbit from chin to groin, revealing the inner workings, the tissue, bones, and organs. He’d stared at her with a mix of admiration and gratitude and maybe a bit of fear. What she remembered most about that day, though, was thinking how easily she could fall in love with a boy like Marshall, a boy so gentle he couldn’t even skin an already dead thing. She believed that a boy like that would keep her safe from hurt, too. How young she’d been, how naïve. The world was pain, she’d learned. So you do whatever it takes to survive. You make your skin tougher, you become the one doing the hurting, rather than being hurt, and you find your power in that.
Just as he’d needed her all those years ago, he needed her now, and she would be there for him, the way she’d always been there for him. She would do the hard things that needed doing so he didn’t have to. Because she loved him, she would hold the knife.
“You don’t have to do anything.” She squeezed his hand. “I’ll take care of it.”
“You can’t be serious.” He rolled to face her.
“I’ll handle everything. You don’t have to worry or think about it. You just have to…you have to say nothing. That’s it, that’s all I’m asking. Keep quiet, pretend none of this ever happened. You never saw him. You never spoke to him. You don’t know anything about it. Okay? That’s all you have to do, say nothing, and we’ll be okay.”
He sat up, throwing the blankets off of them both. He curled over his knees and dug his hands into his hair. “I don’t understand. Why can’t we just go to the police?”
“We’ll go to jail.” She rubbed his back.
“If we tell them he attacked you, they’ll understand.”
“They won’t,” she said, adding quietly, “Marshall, please, think of Elizabeth.”
He groaned and buried his face in his hands.
“We have to do this for her,” she said. “Think of what will happen if she finds out. What will happen to her if we both go to jail. Think of how that will ruin her life. What she’ll think of us, of you. We can’t let that happen. We have to protect her. From all of this.”
He shook his head harder, refusing to hear her. She understood his denial, his desire to wake up from what surely must be a nightmare—she really did understand. That didn’t change the fact that they had only one option, a choice that had been made for them the second Jimmy stepped into their house.
He sucked in a deep breath and released it all at once. “We’re good people. They know us. Eli.” He twisted his head toward the phone. “Eli will know what to do.”
Clara scrambled, clamping her hand over his, jerking him away from the phone. “No.”
He looked at her, stunned. He got up from the bed and started to pace. “How can you be so nonchalant about this? You’re talking about killing a man. Killing a person, Clara. A person. A living, breathing—I don’t understand how you can sit there and be so calm about any of this.”
She kneeled on the bed, watching him walk back and forth, his hands flinging the air.
“This isn’t supposed to be happening. How did this happen?” He stopped and turned toward her, his whole body rigid. “Outside, on the porch tonight, Brett told me, she asked about Margot. She asked me where I was the day she went missing.” He shook his head like he was trying to shake the words loose. “But it wasn’t the same time that they asked me about before. She asked me where I was in the afternoon. Not in the morning. She didn’t go missing in the morning.” He grew quiet.
A sliver of moonlight came through the curtains where they didn’t quite meet, and in his face, she saw the full gravity of the situation pressing on him. She watched as the pieces clicked together to form a new and terrible picture of his wife. The woman he’d trusted for his entire life, now someone he could barely stand to look at. She’d worked so hard to keep this monstrous part of herself hidden, and all for nothing. She was going to lose him anyway.
“What did you do?” He came toward her and grabbed her arms.
“You’re hurting me.”
“What did you do?” He shook her. “Tell me.”
“Keep your voice down. You’ll wake Elizabeth.”
“What happened to Margot? Did you hurt her? Did you…?” He choked on the words and flung her away, returned to the window, pushed aside the curtain, and stood with his head pressed to the glass.
She rose from the bed and crossed to where he was standing. She touched his arm. He flinched away from her.
“You came to me that afternoon.” His voice was a rasping whisper cutting the shadows. “You were covered in blood. You said it was yours. You said…” He took a slow breath. “You said you had tried to hurt yourself. That you were upset because I’d broken up with you. Because we’d… You couldn’t stand the thought of living without me.” He whirled and grabbed her wrist, lifting it to his face even though it was too dark to see much more than her pale skin. “You had cuts on your arms. I saw them. I cleaned them and taped you up. I wanted to take you to the hospital, but you wouldn’t let me. You said you were too embarrassed. That you didn’t want to get in trouble.” His thumb ran over the soft underside of her arm, and he drew her closer, lifting one hand to cup her face. “What really happened? Please, tell me the truth. I won’t be mad. I just want to know. I need to know.”
“I did what I had to do to protect you,” she said. “To protect us.”
“What do you mean? What did you need to protect me from?”
“From her.” Clara leaned into him, but even as she did, she felt him stiffen and pull away. “She didn’t love you. Not like I did. Like I do. She was using you to get back at Danny and make him jealous. She was going to dump you. She told me. She was going to break your heart. I couldn’t let her do that. You deserved better than her.”
“Clara…” He held her at arm’s length. “Please tell me you’re not saying what I think you’re saying.”
For so long, she had pushed it all down, buried deep the sins of her childhood. A single moment that changed everything. Like what happened downstairs with Jimmy. Her hand finding something heavy to grip and swing.
Clara hadn’t set out to kill Margot. She’d sent Margot a note, pretending to be Marshall, and lured her out to a secluded section of the forest. She hadn’t known exactly what she would do when Margot showed up, only that she wanted to humiliate her, hurt her the way Clara had been hurt, make her feel the same pain she’d felt when she saw Marshall and Margot in the car kissing. She’d wanted Margot to suffer, that was all. Maybe shove her to the ground, tear her favorite dress to pieces, push her into the river, but then the rock was in her hand, and Margot was dead, and after, it made a perfect sort of sense. Killing Margot, the thing she should have been most ashamed of, the thing that should have ruined her, was the very thing that saved her.
What would her life have been like without Marshall? Who would she have become? She didn’t like thinking a
bout it. Losing Marshall meant losing Elizabeth and the short time she had with Lily, meant losing this home, this beautiful life, the security and safety of love. Losing Marshall meant losing everything. So no, she had no regrets about what happened in the woods that summer. She would do it again in a heartbeat.
“Please, try and understand.”
He shook his head and backed away. “How could you do it? How could you?”
“It was an accident.” Which was the truth, despite everything else that came after.
“I’m calling the police.” He stepped toward the phone.
She blocked him. “Don’t. Please let me explain.”
He backed away again, his face etched in fear.
“I’m not going to hurt you. I would never…” Clara clutched her hands tight together, holding them against her stomach. “Everything I’ve done, I did for you. For Elizabeth. To keep you safe and make your life better.”
“How did killing Margot make my life better?” His voice trembled, rage and sorrow mixing together.
“You came back to me,” she said.
He made a sound like he was choking and reached his hand, grasping for something to hold on to. Clara tried to offer her support, but he pushed her away and fell onto the bed instead, bending double and clutching his stomach.
“This isn’t what I wanted. I don’t… I’m done, Clara. This is over. I’m calling the police, and we’re going to tell them everything.” He reached again for the phone.
“You’re a part of this now, too,” she said.
He held the receiver to his ear but didn’t dial.
“You helped me get Jimmy into that shed.”
“I did what you told me to.”
“You did what you needed to protect this family.”
“No.” His fingers tightened around the phone.
“I didn’t threaten you, did I? I didn’t force you to do anything. You helped me because you knew it was the only choice we had.”
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