by Quinn, Lucy
“I told Leo that so he wouldn’t come with me to talk to my mom. He thinks he’s some kind of big savior or something. I just want the truth.”
“And did you get it?”
“I sure hope so.” A muscle ticked in his jaw as he clenched it, and his hands fisted again. “If I didn’t, they’re all going to regret it.”
I swallowed, trying to figure out a kind, compassionate, non-judgmental-of-Claire’s-choices way to ask if he knew who his real parents were.
Because I did.
Chapter 22
When we pulled into the driveway of his house, Austin didn’t make a move to get out of the car. I threw the Tank into park and sat for a long moment, still not sure what to say.
“Have you talked to Leo or anyone about what’s going on with you right now?” I finally ventured.
His hands had relaxed, and he no longer looked coiled for an assault, but a bone-deep sadness hovered underneath his skin. Or maybe I was projecting, because I’d thought the same thing about his father. His real father.
“I can’t talk to Leo. He doesn’t understand.”
“Well, you can talk to me, if you need to. If you don’t have anyone else to talk to.”
A tired smile crossed his lips as he laid his head back against the seat. “Everyone keeps saying that to me. But what if I don’t want to talk to anyone?”
“Who’s trying to get you to talk to them?”
“Uncle Mike. My grandma. My mom.”
“Wait. Uncle Mike…the Van Andels are your relatives?”
“Not really. Jenna and my mom were best friends growing up. I guess I just call them that.”
“You don’t want to talk to Uncle Mike?” I asked, venturing out on the shaky bridge of not-my-business.
“He doesn’t really want to listen to me. He just wants to talk.”
I had to smile a little at his description of Mike. I could so easily imagine Leo’s dad being that guy. The one who said he wanted to help, when he really just wanted to fix things. It was such a dad thing. My own father was the same way.
“And my grandma did ask me to come over after school, but she’s worse. When she thinks something’s wrong, she makes a bunch of food and tries to stuff down whatever’s going on with me. I couldn’t take any more of that today.”
A car turned on to the street behind us and I found myself looking back and expecting it to be Mike Van Andel’s truck. Thankfully, it was just a little car. I really needed to settle down.
“Say, that reminds me,” I said, trying for nonchalance, just wanting to see how he would handle the request. “That knife your grandma told me about, the homemade one…do you happen to have that here? You said you’d show it to me sometime.”
He stiffened, his fingers going stock straight against his blue-jeaned legs. After a second, he relaxed and gestured toward the house. “Um…it might be in my room.”
I opened my door without asking for an invitation inside, and hopped out onto the driveway. Two can play at that game, bud. If he could pretend it was there, I could pretend to believe him.
By the time I got around the vehicle, he was halfway to the front door, walking fast. He wasn’t going to find the knife up there, but then I could ask him about giving it to Claire without seeming like I was trying to get anything out of him.
The interior of the Krantz house looked different in the daylight. Almost the whole back wall of the living room was a plate glass window, which made it extremely bright. The hallway from the front door led straight back into the living room, through the kitchen, and I remembered Nikki and Jenna and Mike standing at the center island on Tuesday night, shrouded in half-darkness, talking about Derek and Claire and who knows what else.
Austin led the way to the kitchen and grabbed a Gatorade from the fridge. He offered me one, too, and I declined, preferring not to drink my calories. Not everyone had the metabolism of a seventeen-year-old boy.
He suggested I wait in the living room while he retrieved the knife, and I took a seat on the big, white leather sectional that faced the backyard, planning what I would say when he came down without it. Could I just tell him that I knew he’d given it to Claire? Would that be safe?
A big deck was accessible by a door alongside the windows, tucked next to a set of white-painted bookshelves. The yard sloped out from under it, and I could see almost all the way down into the gully that appeared to separate the Krantz house from the back neighbors. At the bottom of the manicured slope was a strange little formation of stones with a big American flag sticking out of it.
I walked to the windows to get a better look, but the angle wasn’t quite right, so I unlocked and opened the deck door, and walked out into the cool afternoon air. At the edge of the deck, I could see more clearly. It was a white rectangle of stones with a big white hunk of marble at the end farthest from the house. There was a little white light at the base of the flag that probably lit it up at night.
Footsteps thumped on the deck behind me and I turned around to see Austin advancing, hands in his pockets. He came all the way to stand beside me, looking out over the yard, eyes fixed somewhere near the flag.
“That’s Auggie’s grave,” he said somberly.
“I thought soldiers killed in action were buried at Arlington,” I said.
His breath stopped and held for a minute, and I felt like an idiot. Of course, it was easy to talk about the theory of where someone should be buried when it wasn’t a member of your family. I looked for a way to apologize, but it seemed best to just let the awkwardness pass.
“He’s buried at Arlington, too. He was cremated, and they gave my mom part of his remains to bury here. She got an easement from the city and everything.” The hollowness of his voice sent a chill down my spine. It was the same kind of absence of emotion that Henry had shown on my last visit to the jail. Like he was numb from the weight of it.
Austin had to know the truth. He hadn’t shown this kind of oddness about Auggie when we’d spoken about him on Tuesday night. Still, I wasn’t sure how to politely ask him if his father wasn’t really his father. Maybe there was no polite way to say it.
“You seem different today,” I tried, going for the roundabout way. “Like something changed since I saw you last.”
He shrugged, leaning against the railing. “I do?”
“It feels like you’re…like you’re in pain.” I matched his stance, leaning forward so I could look down at the yard. “I know what that’s like.”
“You do?”
“Sure. Sometimes the unexpected happens, and you don’t know how to react, so you stuff it all down inside. It feels like it’ll just go away if you don’t talk about it, but it won’t.” The last words echoed deep into my own heart. A little too much truth for my own comfort.
“So, you know, too?” The edge in his voice told me I had to tread lightly.
“I don’t know anything, Austin.” I used his adult name, feeling like the Aussie nickname would be too diminutive right now.
“Well, you’ll know, soon enough.” He kicked at the wood railing and the whole deck shook. “I’m sure everyone will find out, since they’re looking into Claire’s murder.”
My breath went shallow, like when an animal hides from a predator and doesn’t want it to see any signs of life. I didn’t ask any more questions, hoping the truth would just spill out of him.
“Claire is my real mom.”
I pursed my lips, nodding slowly. “Okay.”
“Which means Nikki isn’t my real mom.” A sharp pain punctuated the words, like he was still in disbelief. “Not biologically.”
“How did you find that out?”
“Uncle Mike.” He looked down at his feet, leaning back and pulling against the railing. His face was hard and straight, not showing much emotion. It was hard to get a read on what was happening under the surface. “Y’know, when I saw her at the bank, she told me she was my aunt. She showed me the picture from the basement of my grandma’s house. She told me
where to look in her old room to find the stuff she’d hidden that they probably hadn’t found.”
“They?”
“Grandma and my m—” He stopped, his lips pressed together, shaking. “Grandma and Nikki.”
“Why did Mike tell you?”
“I was over at Leo’s last night, playing Halo, and they didn’t know I was there.” His voice took on that empty quality again. “I went upstairs to get a snack and the basement door was cracked a little. I heard him and Aunt Jenna talking about whether or not they’d have to prove I was Claire’s son in order to get the money.”
The words flapped out in the breeze like the lonely flag over Auggie’s grave. I tried to gauge his mood. Some people needed a lot of comfort when they were telling you something tragic, and they had this way of emotionally grasping for it, usually with little looks. Austin hadn’t looked at me. Not once.
“Then they talked about whether they’d need a DNA sample from my real father. Uncle Mike said Henry would pay either way.”
My stomach tightened at the mention of Henry’s name. The thing that connected me to this situation—my short-lived friendship with Henry—was the one thing that I couldn’t reveal to Austin.
So, I just kept standing there, hoping he would continue.
He pulled his phone out of his pocket and snorted. “Nikki is calling me.”
I almost said, your mom, and held it back. He seemed to have made the switch already. I didn’t want to get in his way.
“You should answer,” I said.
Austin shook his head, stuffing the phone back in his pocket. “She gets off work easy enough for her vet club meetings, like every time she turns around they’re doing something with her freakin’ vet club. If she wants to talk to me so bad, she can come find me.”
“Did you happen to find the knife?” I asked, feeling like the subject of Claire’s murder was about to pass, and trying to keep the momentum going.
“No.” He shoved his hands in his pockets. “I’m not sure where it is.”
I forced a slow breath between my lips, considering the ramifications of what I was about to do. It was either swim or drown at this point. I was already in the pool.
“I know you gave it to Claire,” I said quickly.
He froze, all his muscles going on alert. “How could you know that?” he choked out.
“Your uncle Derek told me. He said she showed it to him when she got back from seeing you on Monday.” The words just kept tumbling out. “Austin, I’m worried that was the knife that killed her.”
Austin finally turned to me, his eyes wide. “How do you know that?”
“Deductive reasoning.” I held up my fingers. “She had the knife on her when she last saw Derek”—I ticked off one finger—“but it wasn’t logged into evidence”—I ticked off another—“and I saw a crime scene photo of her. The entry wounds were jagged and wide, like the serrated bottom edge of that handmade blade…”—A third finger.
His face curled up. “Are you sure that’s the knife?”
“Well, not completely sure. Only the police would know for sure.”
He walked toward the door of the house and I followed him. When he passed the bookshelf, I noticed a similar display to the one at Frances Barnett’s house. Big, formal pictures of three military men—possibly even the same pictures—surrounded by boxes. Only none of the boxes on Nikki’s display were medals.
Austin opened one of them. Small and made out of thick wood, it had rounded corners, and its beveled cover bore the remnants of dust. “Could it have been this knife?”
He held it out to me and I found myself holding an exact replica of the knife from the bag that Derek had received. Almost exact. This one had initials engraved in the hilt. LRV.
I turned the box toward the light. There didn’t appear to be any dust on the knife itself, and I hadn’t seen the box before Austin touched it, so I didn’t know if the dusty smudges were new or not.
“I suppose so.”
“Then the murder weapon may not have been the one Claire had.” He took the box back, placing it on the shelf. “Because grandpa made one of these for each of his daughters, his wife and her sisters, and all of their daughters. Each is engraved with the initials of the person he gave it to.”
“Who is LRV, then?” I asked.
“My grandma. Before she was a Barnett, she was a Vincent.”
“Why does your mom have hers?”
“They trade the boxes back and forth, depending on who’s hosting the vet club. They like to keep most of them together, as a whole set. Sometimes my mom has all the medals. Sometimes grandma has them all. But then whoever doesn’t have the display still has a box of these knives.” He ran his finger along the dust on the outside of the wooden cover of the knife box. “It was the last set he ever made, and he never engraved the big one. But I think they might have been for Aunt Cl—”
He stopped again, concern creasing his brows. He didn’t correct himself to mom, but it seemed like he wanted to. I couldn’t even imagine trying to assimilate a bombshell of secrets and lies like that at the age of seventeen. My heart was breaking for him.
His phone started ringing in his pocket—there was no ringtone, but I saw the flashing light. Probably his mother again.
“Do you mind if I ask you something, Austin?” I said, moving to the couch and sitting down. When he nodded, I continued. “What were you and Nikki fighting about earlier?”
His brow furrowed. “How did you know that?”
“I was in the shop across the street, and I saw you come out of the bank.” I tented my fingers, leaning forward. “That’s why I drove down the street after you. I wanted to make sure everything was okay.”
“It’s all right, Miss Vee. You don’t have to worry about me.” There was so much concern in his tone, it took me back a little. He shook his head. “I’m not going to kill myself or anything. I’m just freaked about this.”
It seemed like an odd choice of words, especially considering what had supposedly happened to his biological father, and my skin chilled. “I’m not worried for your life, Aussie, but I’m definitely worried. This is a lot to take in.”
With a bit of a blank look, he walked over to the door and locked it. “Sure, it changes my whole life, but…” He rested his hand on the glass, looking out at the memorial for the man he’d spent his life thinking was his father. “I’m still going to the Naval Academy. I’ll still get out of this town in like six months. Nikki is still my family. She raised me, and she’s my aunt. It’s just. I would’ve liked to have known my real mom.”
“I can imagine.” I sat back, hoping the movement would make me seem more relaxed.
“I tried to tell Nikki that I knew about Claire being my mom. She was in her break room or whatever, so she was all by herself, but when I tried to say the words…” He broke off, leaning hard against the glass on the white-framed door. “There’s a reason why she never told me, and I’m trying to give her the benefit of the doubt, but it just makes me so angry when people lie to me like that.”
His fists closed, hard, and he pushed one of them against the door frame.
“She must know there’s something going on,” I said. “She’s worried about you. That’s all.”
“If she’s so worried about me, she shouldn’t have lied. That’s what hurt me. If she’d told me from the beginning, I wouldn’t have cared.”
With as much empathy as I could, I encouraged Austin to talk to Leo about the situation. He couldn’t let all of that anger and frustration well up inside him without venting it. I wanted to tell him to talk to Nikki again, but that seemed to be off-limits. The last thing I wanted was to make life harder for him. The kid deserved a break.
Finally, I said goodbye and left the house. As I pulled out of the driveway, I gave the Krantz house one final look. Something had felt incredibly off about the whole visit. I couldn’t quite put it together, but I knew my brain would keep working on it.
I stopped by t
he school on my way back to the bakery. It looked like the buses were all lined up, just getting ready for school to let out. Leo and Austin’s free final period and senior status gave them the ability to go to the open gym or the bakery after about 2:30pm, but the rest of the students were apparently still in their last classes.
As I turned to go up Mockingbird Lane, I happened to glance at Frances Barnett’s house. There was a familiar Harley sitting curbside, and there was no mistaking the very familiar helmet strapped to the back. It was Derek’s—black with orange flames.
I kept driving, but something else caught my eye as I passed the house. Derek was kneeling next to the side door of the garage, nearly hidden by a row of bushes, fiddling with the door. I made a quick pull-in, leaving the Tank on the curb, and ran back toward the Barnetts.
By the time I got to the door, he was gone, but there were scratch marks on the lock and the door itself was open.
Derek Hobson had broken into his mother-in-law’s house.
Chapter 23
One side of the Barnett garage was empty—the side closest to the open door. A Jeep sat in the other slot. Blue, clean, shiny. I couldn’t imagine Frances Barnett driving that vehicle, but stranger things had happened.
I whispered Derek’s name into the darkened space, but he didn’t answer. If I kept following him, would I be breaking and entering? To be fair, the worst I was doing was “entering.” Derek had already done the “breaking.”
Someone had to save this man from himself.
With an indrawn breath, I pushed through the door leading to the house. A laundry room, leading into the kitchen. I didn’t see Derek in either room. I had to get him out of here. It would be worse for all of us if he got caught by Frances. She would have no qualms about having him arrested. Then the knife would be found, and if it really was the murder weapon…
I moved around the corner, whispering his name. There was a slight muffled sound somewhere ahead of me, and I was about to call out to him again when a flash of black darted out from around the corner. My heart jumped up to choke my breath off.