#7-9--The O’Connells

by Lorhainne Eckhart

  “Marcus, you should listen to your wife,” he finally said, then took in the exchange between them as if they’d figured out something was up.

  “You know what?” Charlotte said. “Eva, why don’t you give me a hand putting the laundry away?”

  Owen watched as Charlotte held Eva’s hand while they went upstairs, and he still said nothing, taking in the open kitchen.

  “Okay, so what’s going on?” Marcus finally said. Owen gave everything to his brother, who was leaning against the island after shoving the last of the granola bar in his mouth, crumpling up the wrapper, and tossing it in the garbage under the sink.

  “Heard you had a word with Rita Mae,” he said. His hoodie was pulling at his shoulders, and his back was damp. He dragged his hand over his face, hearing the scrape of whiskers.

  “You came over to talk about the fact that I had a talk with Rita Mae because of the heads-up you gave me?” Marcus said.

  “Well, actually, I wanted to talk about Jackson and what you found, as well.”

  Marcus stilled for a second before leaning back against the island, saying nothing as he glanced around him to the front of the house. Owen could hear the distant voices of Charlotte and Eva upstairs. “You’re asking me about an investigation? That’s not something I would have expected from you.”

  He knew what his brother was saying. He was having trouble getting his words out.

  “So what’s really going on?” Marcus finally said. “Why are you really here?”

  “I was having lunch at the diner, and who showed up but Rita Mae? Now, you know I would never interfere in your business, but there’s something about that woman that isn’t right. I’m telling you, she isn’t sitting right with me.”

  His brother frowned, his brow furrowing. For a second, Owen wasn’t sure whether he was going to laugh. “I think you may need to elaborate a lot more, Owen, because you’re talking in circles, and this isn’t something you normally do. Are you saying Rita Mae is still talking about my investigation even though I told her to shut her damn mouth?”

  He dragged his hand over his face again and took a step farther into the kitchen. This was more difficult than he’d expected, finding the words to say what he needed to say. “Look, when Tessa said last night that Rita Mae had called and brought up our family and the case, I was bothered. But when she came into the diner today and sat down and started talking, it took me a minute to get my head around the fact that she wasn’t just being careless. She went out of her way to point out that she had gone into the closet to get something to help clean up the mess, which, sure, that’s plausible. But why did she then bring up that she knows something about our family, about me, something I did?” He stopped talking, because he was staring at something he’d seen only a time or two in his brother’s face.

  Marcus took a step away from the island, looking out into the hall. Charlotte and Eva were still talking upstairs. He inclined his head to the back door, which led out to an enclosed porch still filled with junk Marcus had to deal with, things that had come with the house he’d bought. “We should talk out here,” was all Marcus said.

  Owen followed him out and closed the door before giving him everything again. It shouldn’t have mattered, but it did, this privacy.

  “This is something recent?” Marcus said.

  How could he explain what he’d done so long ago? He remembered the night he’d walked downstairs after hearing something, remembered what he’d seen, what he’d known he had to do to protect his family. He shook his head. “No,” he finally replied, and he could see the moment Marcus almost threw his hands up because he couldn’t get the words out. “There’re some things you don’t know about what happened the night Dad left.”

  Now he had Marcus’s attention, all of it. He didn’t say a word, but those O’Connell blue eyes flashed with shock, disbelief, and something else. Marcus appeared about ready to grab him and shake him. “Owen, for fuck’s sake, whatever it is, spit it out. You make everything painful with how you don’t say anything. Did you do something? What the hell happened?”

  Yeah, there it was. He’d touched that one nerve that was still raw in all of them because the man they’d loved had been there one day and then gone the next.

  “Look, you remember the office Dad had in the basement?” Owen said. “Well, I thought I heard something. It was late, everyone was asleep, and I got up and started downstairs. When I opened the door, light was coming from Dad’s office, and Mom was just coming out. She’d been crying, upset, with blood on her hands, and she was shaking. I had never seen her so upset.

  “She had this rag, and I just stood there, frozen. I didn’t know what the hell had happened. She handed it to me. There was something in it. She told me not to look at it, to put it someplace no one would find it, to just get rid of it. I could see his office was a mess. Things were wrecked—the lamp knocked over, papers on the floor, pictures shattered. I didn’t know what the hell had happened.

  “She asked me again to help her, so I did. I went back upstairs and put my shoes on and snuck out of the house, grabbing my hoodie and a flashlight. I started running. I made it to that place at the edge of the woods where we used to go as kids, and I didn’t think. The rag was wrapped around a knife, a switchblade. I buried it, the whole time wondering what the hell had happened.”

  He didn’t think he’d ever get it from his head, the way his brother was looking at him in shock, horror. He just gestured toward him as he walked back and forth, buzzing with the energy that had suddenly broken free from a memory he’d been holding on to for so long.

  “…What?” was all Marcus could get out.

  “It was a secret,” Owen said. “I never told anyone, but then Rita Mae brought it up at the diner as she slid around to me. She said we all have secrets, and she knows all about what I buried that night in the woods. The only reason I’m telling you is because she indicated her knowing what she does could hurt your chances of re-election, but all of this came up around Jackson Moore’s body, the investigation. So I’m asking you, brother to brother, because of this, is there something in the investigation that could jam up Rita Mae, something that would make her use this to hurt our family and protect herself?”

  He thought about Tessa. Was Rita Mae trying to warn her off of him, as well?

  He wasn’t sure Marcus was going to say anything for a minute. Then he seemed to pull it together and glanced to the door into the kitchen. Charlotte and Eva were still upstairs. “You buried a knife in the woods with blood on it. Dad’s blood?”

  All Owen could do was shake his head. “I don’t know.”

  Marcus just stared at him before taking a breath as if trying to figure out how to deal with the fucking bomb he’d just dropped on him. “Now at least it makes sense why you’re so against searching for Dad. What the fuck, Owen? What the hell happened? Why didn’t you say anything? You kept this a secret all these years? …Did Mom kill him?”

  Owen glanced away for a second, then pulled his gaze back to Marcus. “I don’t know what happened. I really don’t. I was a scared kid, and I did it for us, for Mom. Did she kill him? I don’t know what happened downstairs. All I know was that Dad wasn’t there, and I’ve never seen Mom so upset. When I came home after burying that knife in a spot that will forever be burned in my mind, Dad’s office was cleaned up, the mess put away. The next morning, Mom sat everyone down, all of us, and said Dad was gone. When I asked Mom later what happened, she wouldn’t tell me. She said he was gone and told me to forget what I had seen. She said Dad wasn’t who we thought he was. She said she needed my help to keep us together, that she didn’t want us to know anything bad about him.”

  He’d listened to her cry for so many nights after, wondering what had happened downstairs.

  Marcus pressed his hands to his face and then pulled them away as if trying to figure out how to come to terms with this, how to deal with this. “Rita Mae, Rita Mae…” was all Marcus said. “I wasn’t focusing on her, bu
t now I am. Why the hell would she threaten us like that?” He was thinking, then turned to Owen and said, “Can you take me to the spot you said you buried the knife?”

  Owen just took in the brother he’d protected for so many years. “Yeah.”

  Marcus nodded, then rested his hand on the knob of the old door. “Let me tell Charlotte we’re going, and then you take me there.”

  “And then what?”

  “First, we find it, because if you’re right and Rita Mae saw you that night, did she dig it up and take it, or is it still there? Either way, it seems now I’ve got two problems to solve, the murder of a kid and the question of how to protect our family.”

  Marcus stepped back inside and called out for Charlotte before turning back to him. “You know, you’ve held this secret for a long time, Owen. It’s time that everyone knows, Suzanne, Karen, Ryan, and Luke. You have to tell them everything.”

  He knew what his brother was saying, but as he heard the footsteps on the stairs and watched as Marcus walked over to Charlotte, he dreaded going back to that spot. It had set in motion all he’d done since the night that had changed everything for their family.

  Chapter Ten

  The scent of rotting leaves and dirt and the snap of branches surrounded them as they made their way into the forest, to the spot he had run to in the dead of night. Even though Owen knew it well, he hadn’t been back since that night so long ago.

  Marcus still hadn’t said more than two words to him since kissing Charlotte and then climbing in his van so Owen could drive. He knew this kind of evidence could stir up a world of problems for all of them.

  “I don’t understand why you’d bury a knife,” Marcus said. “You ever heard of washing it, bleaching it to destroy the evidence, and then burning the rag? And I still don’t understand how you didn’t question Mom on what happened. You said you heard something, a fight—what else?” Marcus had transformed into the cop who wasn’t letting anything drop.

  “I was sixteen, Marcus. Seriously, fuck off, will you? Think back. I was a kid, a teenager. I had just started dating, just started shaving. I was protecting Mom, all of us. You want to bust my balls because I didn’t think it through and hide the evidence better, go ahead, but I can’t go back and change it. I wasn’t planning out a crime and thinking through the details.”

  He took in the hill and the bushes, which seemed taller, and then the spot off to the right beneath a thick fir tree. “It’s right here,” he said, looking at the ground, trying to see the exact spot. He remembered how he’d used his hands then to dig through the tough ground, the fingernails he’d busted and the blood that had oozed from under them. Marcus had tossed a shovel in the back of his van and carried it with him now.

  Owen reached for it. “Give it to me,” he said. “You shouldn’t get your hands dirty.” He took the shovel and started digging.

  “You sure about where you put it?” Marcus said.

  Owen didn’t look up as he kept digging. It shouldn’t take that long until he found it, and he thought about the color of the rag: dark blue, stained with blood. Right, it would have been easier to clean it off, hide it, and burn the rag, but how the hell was he supposed to have known that then?

  “I’m sure,” he said, widening the hole and glancing up at Marcus standing there in his uniform, with his sheriff’s badge and holstered gun, watching him and looking around. The perfect crime, he mused to himself, having the sheriff watch his back while he dug up possible evidence. He’d have laughed if the situation weren’t so dire.

  “You know, I’ve spoken with dozens of kids from the school today, and so has Harold, and Lonnie too. No one wanted to talk. I even had a few parents shut us down, ask us to leave, as soon as they had an idea that their kids could be implicated. I brought up the fact that one of the kids had already spilled about the grad prank, running naked around the school after popping pills.

  “I’m going to have another word with Alison, since every one of the kids has suddenly gone mute. Never thought it would be that hard to get one of them to talk, but then, after seeing the shock on a few of the parents’ faces when they heard the details of the prank their kids could’ve been part of, I suspect they wanted us out of the house so they could sit down with their kids one on one to ask them what the hell they were thinking. Then we add in the questions about Jackson and who was dealing the pills. Every one of them wanted to know.”

  Owen started widening his circle more, feeling dread in the pit of his stomach. “So what you’re saying is that you’ve gotten nowhere on finding out what happened.” He shoved the shovel into another spot even though he knew it was too far out. He hadn’t buried it that deep, just deep enough that an animal wouldn’t sniff it out and dig it up or the winter conditions wouldn’t erode the dirt away and uncover it. At least he had known that much about burying something.

  “Didn’t say that,” Marcus said. “Harold had a word with three friends of Jackson—Petey, Belinda, and Hunter. We’ve both been shut down by Belinda and Hunter’s parents until later tonight. We’ve arranged to talk at seven when the parents are all there, and likely their attorneys, too, since news has already circulated that we’re questioning the kids. Petey did talk to Harold, said he didn’t know anything about the pills but that Jackson had been hanging out with Hunter and Belinda again. Said the two of them weren’t really friends to him, just using him when they needed something, whatever that meant. I guess we’ll find out what the other two have to say about that tonight.”

  He glanced up to Marcus, taking in the hole he’d dug and how big it was. He knew his brother could see the problem.

  “It’s not here, is it?” Marcus said.

  Owen shook his head. “No.”

  “You sure this is the right spot? Think about it, Owen. After all this time, all these years, you could be confused on where you put it. After all, it was a long time ago. You said yourself that you were freaked out, panicked.”

  He had a sinking feeling now that Rita Mae definitely had something on him, and worse, she’d had it all these years. Why? He had no clue why she’d done it.

  He looked around, taking in the forest. To anyone, this area would look the same as the rest, but he knew it well. He pulled in another breath and tapped the shovel on the ground before he stepped back up and started filling the dirt back in. “I know exactly where it was. You’re right, though. I screwed up. So I guess we know then, right? Rita Mae dug it up, but why hold on to it all these years?”

  Marcus didn’t say anything for a minute, just glanced away, something he did when he was thinking. “She was here, watching,” he said. “She did say she had been watching you, right?” He just shook his head.

  Owen didn’t want to answer anymore. He’d already talked about the one thing he’d sworn he’d never talk about with anyone. “She said enough. She knows. Evidently, she’s got the knife, and she plans to use it. Why? Maybe that’s the question you should be asking,” he said as he finished filling in the hole. His cell phone starting ringing, and he pulled it out, seeing Tessa’s name on the call display. “It’s Tessa,” he said and pressed the green answer button. “Hi, what’s going on?”

  Marcus took the shovel from him and smoothed out the rest of the dirt.

  “Was going to ask you the same question,” Tessa said.

  “About…?”

  She sighed on the other end. “Heard Rita Mae had words with you at the diner, and she called me again tonight. Look, she’s always had this thing about you, about your family. I’ve known her for a long time, and I know how she can be about everything. Maybe I just wanted you to know that I don’t feel the same way, in case you were wondering.”

  He would have laughed if he hadn’t been standing at the scene of a potential crime, where he’d hidden evidence eighteen years ago as a wet-behind-the-ears teenager. “She was just being nosey, is all, warning me off. Maybe she thinks I’m going to mess with you in some way,” he added, leaving out everything else. “So how did you
know she had words with me at the diner?”

  Marcus was listening as he held the shovel and gestured for them to go.

  “She just phoned again and told me, but I also heard it from someone I know who was there, one of the other teachers. I guess they’ve had their own issues with her and kept their head down when they saw her pull up beside you. She can get pretty in your face, you know. She did come out and ask me if we’re seeing each other, and she brought up your family and how I don’t really know you. But I pointed out that having dinner together doesn’t mean you’re putting a ring on my finger or registering for china, so who I see isn’t her business.”

  “So what are you doing tonight?” He couldn’t believe he’d asked. For a second, there was silence on the other end.

  “Getting the gutters up on the side of the house. You aren’t asking me out, are you?” If anyone could lighten up a dire situation, he’d never have thought it would be Tessa.

  “Well, how about if I swing by, give you a hand with your gutters, and then I’ll take you out for a bite to eat?”

  Marcus was now giving him everything.

  “This doesn’t mean we’re dating, though,” she said.

  He couldn’t fight the smile that pulled at his lips. “Absolutely not. It’s just some home maintenance and then two people grabbing a bite. Be there in an hour.” Then he hung up, seeing that Marcus had something else on his mind.

  “You really think that’s a great idea?” Marcus said.

  “It’s just dinner. I’m not about to let anyone tell me who I can and can’t see.”

  Marcus inclined his head to the ground. “You know, Owen, you always were the stubborn one, but if Rita Mae has something, you really want to take a chance of provoking her right now? I’m the last one who would let someone threaten us, any of us, but until we know what we’re up against, how about just lying low until I can figure out this Jackson thing and settle this issue with Rita Mae?”