“I don’t know what to say,” Spencer said haltingly. Once again his features had morphed, this time into avuncular concern. “You’re a very intelligent woman, Gin, and I almost feel that might be working against you here. Fueling your desire to force this fiction to be true.”
“I have to say, I’m not as impressed with the rest of it,” Gin pressed on. “It’s all very Murder She Wrote, wouldn’t you agree? I mean, faking his suicide, the gun in his hand . . . and don’t you ever watch Dexter? Those things are a lot harder to pull off than most people realize. You know, we have our own blood spatter expert in Cook County—that stuff really happens.”
Spencer set down his glass. “I think this has gone far enough.”
Gin stayed quiet. It wasn’t as if she’d expected him to confess, to offer to go right over to the police station and turn himself in. Right now they were in a stalemate: she had proof of paternity, and he knew she lacked proof that he was the one who’d broken into the hospital. The security tape and handwriting analysis might be enough to make the case against him, but a smart man would engage a lawyer and deny, deny, deny—and Spencer was nothing if not smart.
For Jake’s sake, and out of genuine affection for Lawrence, Gin wanted justice for the man’s death. But there was something she wanted even more.
“So . . . was Lawrence right about Tom? Was he the one who killed my sister?”
“Absolutely not!”
“Really? Because, the way I see this, even if you’re able to dodge arrest for Lawrence’s murder, the fact that he had Tom in his sights when he died is going to make an awfully compelling case for the county police to go after Tom now. And Tom’s going to have a hard time defending himself. His hospitalization could easily be viewed as an attempt to take his own life.”
“He was in withdrawal!” Spencer protested, loud enough to get the attention of both the bartender and the woman at the table. Only the man at the end of the bar didn’t look up from his cards. “It’s a chemical response to abruptly quitting the benzodiazepines,” Spencer said in a quieter voice. “Any expert would testify to that.”
“Or,” Gin said calmly, “as I myself have testified in court in a wrongful-death suit, it might just be the last event in a calculated act of self-destruction. Even if it can’t be proved, it will plant the seed of doubt in the detective’s minds. You know that there is tremendous pressure on them to come up with a suspect, now that two people are dead and the media is connecting the cases. Tom is going to make an easy target for them. How do you think he’ll hold up in jail, by the way? Under interrogation? Seems like these days, at least in Cook County, they’re really pushing the envelope when it comes to leaning on suspects in some of these cases. The most ambitious investigators skirt that gray area of what might be considered ethical.”
She had his attention; Spencer was gripping the bar hard enough to break it, and perspiration had broken out on his forehead. How far could she push him? What would it take for him to crack?
She pressed on, deviating only a little from events she’d witnessed herself. “Personally, I think it’s terrible when they extract a forced confession. Once in a while, a decent attorney can get one overturned, but that doesn’t happen nearly as often as you might think from the news. Most of the time? Those poor guys rot away in jail while the world has no idea that they were left in an interrogation room for thirty hours at a time. Or denied bathroom breaks. Or humiliated, or manipulated . . . the training some of these guys get? It’s on a level with what the ISIS operatives receive. Not really appropriate for domestic police work but . . .” She shrugged and turned up her hands. “Nothing you or I can do about it, unfortunately.”
“Tom didn’t kill Lily,” Spencer said, almost pleadingly. Gin could see how close to cracking he was. “He had no reason to.”
“Other than all the time my sister was spending with Jake,” Gin said quietly. “I understand why he was frustrated. Honestly, when I saw her with my boyfriend, sometimes I wanted to kill her myself.”
“You’re not—you can’t—”
“Which is what I’ll have to say,” Gin concluded. “When they come to talk to me. And when I start talking, I have a feeling I’m going to have a hard time stopping. Seeing as my father had to endure the humiliation of being hauled off to jail in front of the entire town. And as we both know . . . my father is an innocent man.”
Gin saw the way Spencer’s skin had gone gray—the tic had developed into a full-blown tremor—and decided she’d pushed him as far as she could for one day.
“Oops, look at the time,” she said. “Tell you what, I’ve got to go. But there’s probably enough left on the tab for you to get yourself another Coke. It’s on me. Go ahead and enjoy it and . . . think about what we talked about.”
“No, wait.” Spencer looked desperate, perspiration dotting his brow, his hand trembling slightly around his glass. “I swear to you my son didn’t kill Lily. I know because . . . I did it. It was me, Virginia. It was an accident.”
Gin stared at him blankly, her mind refusing to accept what he’d just said. “What are you talking about?” she whispered faintly.
“I went there that night. I told the cops I was teaching Tom to drive a stick, but that was only because he was getting high with some kids from school and he begged me not to get them in trouble. I had been out walking the dog, when I saw Lily over near the water tower, where you kids used to go. I was angry, you see, because I thought Tom and she were secretly planning to meet up, and I felt they’d been spending way too much time together already. Their grades were atrocious, you’ll probably remember.”
Gin said nothing, barely able to force herself to continue breathing. Was Spencer really confessing to the murder of her sister?
“I confronted her. Not a good idea, with someone as temperamental as Lily. She got so upset with me—when I put my hand on her arm, just trying to get her to calm down, she started screaming at me and trying to run away. I was just trying to get her to listen to me. I—I don’t know exactly how it happened, but I was holding onto her arm and she was flailing around and hitting me when she got her arm free and stumbled backward. She fell, and her head hit a rock. There was nothing—” He swallowed and dropped his gaze to the sticky bar. “There was nothing I could do. I tried to resuscitate her, but I could tell the damage to her skull—she was gone. Just gone.”
Gin felt numb, her mind racing to catch up with what he was saying. Lily’s death had been an accident. Spencer had been with her when she died.
“But . . . why didn’t you call for help?”
“I panicked. I’m not proud of that. I would like to believe that if I’d taken the time to really think about it, I would have done the right thing. But—all I could think about was how it would look, and, worse, what it would do to my family. If I were to go to jail, who would have looked out for my kids? How would they have gone on with their lives? The cooler was right there, down by the creek, and it seemed, I don’t know, almost like a sign. A way to make the whole thing disappear. So—that’s what I did.”
“But that cooler was huge. It took two of us to move it when we filled it with drinks.”
Spencer was shaking his head. “I moved it empty. I went home and got a shovel and a pick, and I came back—the kids were already asleep, they didn’t see me. It took me forever to dig out the hole, and then I—I tried to move the cooler with her in it, I’m so sorry, Gin.”
His voice had gone hoarse, and he brushed at his eyes with his knuckles. “I had to take her out to get the cooler into the hole. Then I, I put her in it and closed it and covered it up. I pulled branches and weeds over it, tried to make it blend in, but I still thought it would get discovered within a matter of weeks, if not days. I’m not proud of this, but I thought—I thought that if she was found in Jake’s cooler, that, well . . .”
“That Jake would take the fall.” Gin’s stupor gave way to outrage. “You would have let him go to jail for something that you did?”
“No, no, it never would have gotten that far. They couldn’t have convicted him, not without more evidence. I just wanted to deflect suspicion, that’s all. And then, when time went by and everyone was saying she’d run away, I just—I just prayed that no one would ever know.”
“Not everyone thought she ran away,” Gin said coldly. “A lot of people accused Jake. They tried to ruin his life.”
“Yes, well.” Spencer starred miserably at his drink. “I could tell you I’m sorry. I could tell him I’m sorry. It still wouldn’t change anything that happened.”
“It would have, if you’d told the truth,” Gin countered. “You might not have been able to bring Lily back, but you would have saved everyone—Jake, my parents, me—all these years of agony.”
Spencer only shrugged, refusing to look at her.
Gin gathered her purse and stood. “You know I’m going to tell the police everything you just told me.”
“Do what you have to do.”
Gin didn’t look back as she exited the bar, the noonday sun hitting her like a fist.
***
She was running across the bridge late that afternoon, breathing in the sultry, brackish breeze, when the phone call came. She’d waited at home for as long as she could stand it, but when no new news had come in by four thirty, she’d laced up her shoes and hit the street.
She stopped next to a support beam and dug for her phone.
“Mom?”
“Your father didn’t go to work. He’s sitting in the kitchen drinking whiskey from a juice glass,” Madeleine said, as incredulously as if she was announcing that Richard was dancing an arabesque. “Oh, honey, please come home. I just—this is all too much.”
“Are you . . . crying?”
“I just can’t believe I ever thought—your poor father—but I didn’t even tell you the worst part: Spencer has confessed.”
“To murdering Lawrence?”
“To both of them. Spencer killed Lawrence and Lily, too.”
Her mother’s voice did something Gin had never heard before. She kept the phone pressed to her ear, listening to her mother’s gasping sobs, while she ran as fast as she could back the way she’d come.
34
The county police held a press conference. Gin watched it on television with her parents, sitting in her mother’s favorite easy chair while they held hands on the couch.
The chief spoke for only a few moments while Detectives Witt and Stillman stood on either side of her, hands clasped behind their backs, looking grim. In July of 1998, Spencer Parker had confronted Lily Sullivan in a clearing in the woods above Trumbull where local teens were known to gather. He was angry that Lily, only sixteen, was dating his son who was to start college that fall. The discussion turned into an altercation in which Lily fell and struck her head on a rock, and died. He buried her in a cooler that was left at the location, believing that if she was found, suspicion would be cast on its owner, unaware that the owner was another local teen, Jake Crosby.
As soon as the chief concluded her remarks and stepped back from the podium, the questions swarmed.
“We will share further details when we have them,” the chief said, and then she and her detectives left the room.
Madeleine turned off the television.
“I’m just so glad all of this is finally going to be over,” she said. “Do you think they’ll release Lily’s body now?”
Gin had been only half-listening, going over the chief’s comments in her mind. Something wasn’t lining up for her, and it wasn’t just Spencer’s abrupt change of heart about confessing. That, she could chalk up to pure parental protectiveness, to his giving in to panic once he realized he’d been backed into a corner.
She was quite certain he’d killed Lawrence. But his claim that he’d “run into” Lily at the creek couldn’t be true, could it? Unlike Gin, Lily wasn’t the sort of girl who needed time to herself. She rarely went anywhere by herself if she could talk anyone into going with her. And most compelling of all, she didn’t even like the creek that much. She complained that it smelled of dead fish and rotting weeds, and she hated getting dirt on her clothes. She constantly tried to convince the others to drive to the mall or even to hang out at their house instead.
And there was something else. In the days following Lily’s disappearance, Gin and her mother had discovered that some of her things were missing—her backpack and some clothing. The county police had emphasized that finding when deeming the case a runaway situation.
Spencer hadn’t mentioned the backpack, and it hadn’t been found at the scene or in the cooler.
Obviously, Lily had gone to the creek that day. But Gin couldn’t believe she’d gone alone. Someone had talked her into it—and that someone wasn’t Spencer.
“Virginia? Did you hear your mother? Will they release Lily’s remains now that Spencer’s confessed?”
“Oh—sorry, Dad, I was distracted. Yes, I imagine it will happen in the next day or two. But I’d hold off on finalizing plans.”
As her parents discussed the interment, she returned to the puzzle of Spencer’s claim. If he was telling the truth, that meant that Lily really had gone there alone. It was true that she had been behaving oddly for most of the summer. It wasn’t just the increasing amount of time that she was spending with Tom—and with Jake, too, for that matter—but also with Christine, long girly chats about things that held little interest for Gin. They did each other’s nails and braided each other’s hair and swooned over Usher and NSYNC.
Gin had forgotten how isolated she had felt from the whole group. By the time she left for college, she was blaming Jake for everything: for driving Lily away, for keeping her secrets, for betraying Gin’s trust. But that had been a convenient excuse, so that she didn’t have to blame the two friends she had left. Once Lily disappeared, Tom and Christine had pulled back from her, too, and that had hurt: Gin had gone from having two best friends, a boyfriend, and a beloved sister to having no one at all.
Lily could have gone to meet any of them that day. But Tom and Christine both had given statements to the detectives that they’d been elsewhere. Spencer and Tom were each other’s alibis, and Christine said she’d been scrapbooking at the house, something Spencer had confirmed.
Now, with Spencer’s confession, all those alibis were worthless.
Gin got up and grabbed her purse from the kitchen counter, digging for her keys and phone.
“I’ll be back soon,” she called, already halfway to the door.
“Where are you going?” Madeleine called. “I thought we should all have dinner together tonight—”
“Save me some,” Gin called guiltily, letting the door slam on her words. By the time she got in her car, she was already dialing Jake’s number.
***
Jake met her at the door wearing a much-laundered apron, an expensive-looking Microplane in his hand. Issuing from the house was an incredible smell, savory and rich and definitely better than anything Gin had consumed since coming to Trumbull.
He’d shaved, and there was a smudge of something along his jawline that Gin very much wanted to wipe away, possibly with her thumb, while her other hand . . . but no. What happened yesterday had been a one-time thing, the confluence of nostalgia and shock and the remnants of chemistry between them.
She pushed the whole subject from her mind in frustration and ducked awkwardly past him into the house.
“So you just whipped this up . . . ?” she asked, and was rewarded by a long, thoughtful stare. Evidently Jake decided to follow her lead, because he merely turned on his heel and walked over to the kitchen, where he got busy at the cutting board, on which he’d grated a small mound of Parmesan cheese.
“I would have cooked anyway,” he said, lifting slices of what looked like homemade pizza onto plates. “But I’m glad for the company. Help yourself to wine, it’s open.”
“Most guys would just stick a frozen Tombstone in the oven.”
“This was just wh
at happens when you give a man a grill and twenty years to get tired of fried chicken from the grocery store.”
“You’re too modest. Did you actually make that on the grill?”
“Yeah, it’s really not all that hard, I’ve found that if you just form the dough for the grill basket—”
“Wait, and you make the dough, too?”
A smile played around the corner of his lips. “Yeast, flour, a bit of honey—it’s really just a chemical reaction, Gin. I would have expected you of all people to get that. Although I suppose your job doesn’t leave you a whole lot of time for domestic pursuits.”
She didn’t answer; there wasn’t a lot she could say that wouldn’t reveal that the most time-consuming thing in her life was the treadmill of her own perpetual restlessness. She sat at the table and accepted the plate laden with pizza and salad, and a rough-weave ivory napkin. The pizza was topped with olives and shaved ham and the salad was studded with pistachios.
Her mind finally stopped spinning when he handed her a knife and fork: they were the monogrammed, beaded silver pattern that had belonged to the mother he’d never known, the service that Lawrence had only used on Sundays.
He noticed her looking, and his voice went gruff. “Ah, that. You know, somewhere along the way I decided life’s too short not to use the good stuff.”
There was a lot more to explore in that vein. For a moment, Gin was very sorry that she’d never be the woman who got to do so.
“So,” Gin said, setting her fork down after her first bite. The food was incredible, but she could barely taste it. “I assume you watched the news.”
“Yeah. Pretty damn shocking. I wasn’t sure if you wanted a break from it or . . .”
A break from it was exactly what she wanted, but that wasn’t going to happen.
“Look, Jake,” she said carefully. “The way things stand now, you’re completely in the clear. I don’t want to throw a wrench in that. And you know that my family is behind you now the, um, way we should have been all along.”
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