"Of course," he says. "Nothing could change how I feel about you."
"Then kiss me."
He cups my face then his lips press against mine. His eyes close, but mine stay wide open.
Without hesitation, I kick him in the groin as hard as I can. He keels over, making a high-pitched noise that borders on sounding like a fire alarm.
I grab the rope, move behind him, and loop it around his neck. I have the rope tight against his throat, crossing against the back of his neck. His arms reach up to try to grab the rope. As he struggles to get it off, blood begins to drip from the bandage on his arm.
He struggles to stand up. The rope is cutting in the general area of his carotid arteries, so he should be passing out from the lack of blood flow to his brain. Why the fuck won't he go down?
When he's almost onto his feet, his legs give out from under him. Like a sack of shit, he slumps to the floor of the hut, hitting his head against a tackle box.
"Damn," Debbie mutters, sitting cross-legged inside the boat. "I guess lifting up all of those cheerleaders to do those stupid flips really does make you strong."
"You should probably make sure he's dead," Brianna says, standing near the doorway. "He could have just passed out."
Debbie mouths to me, what the fuck is she doing here?
I lean over Nick and check his pulse. For a moment, there's nothing, but then I feel the slightest pulse. "He's still alive."
"Then kill him and let's go," Debbie says. "Why didn't you just use your bowie knife?"
"Because if Aaron finds out someone killed his foster son, he'll be searching for his murderer day and night. I don't need that amount of scrutiny."
"I'm pretty sure Aaron will find out that Nick was murdered when he sees Nick's dead body."
"Not if it looks as if Nick committed suicide." I look up at the ceiling of the hut. One large beam crosses between the two side walls.
"If he comes into your head, we're going to have a problem. Two apparitions is already one too many," Debbie grumbles.
I make a small loop with one side of the rope and knot it. I slide the other end into the loop, so that it forms a noose. I slip the noose over Nick's head and tighten it around his neck. I get on top of the boat then throw the end of the rope over the beam. I grab the rope, and then jump off the boat. Nick's body jerks up, his toes barely touching the floor. I keep using my weight to pull the rope until he's a centimeter above the floor and I can tie it to the cleat of the boat.
I turn to Debbie, and she smiles.
"He was innocent," I tell her.
She shakes her head. "Nobody's innocent."
Chapter Twenty-Four
Aaron, 2015 (Thursday morning)
JESSICA BLUNT IS the youngest waitress, at sixteen years old, at The Charcoal Grill. She has wavy bronze-colored hair and freckles that decorate her nose and cheeks. She's also rather short—maybe five one if I was estimating high. When I see her walking toward the school, I step into her path.
"Hey, Jessica, I'm Acting Chief of Police Grant," I say. "Could I talk to you for a minute?"
She shifts the books in her arms. "Um, sure. I'm not…I'm not in trouble, am I?"
"No, no, I just wanted to ask you a few questions." I gesture for her to sit down at the bench in front of the school. She does and I sit down beside her.
She glances around at her classmates. She's either nervous about being seen with a police officer or nervous about what I need to talk to her about. I don't blame her.
"My first question is completely different than the next few, but it's still important. Did you see Nick Arkelian today?"
"Nick Arkelian? I don't even know who that is."
"He's, uh, pale…thin. Black hair and dark brown eyes. He's about five seven or so. He moved here a month ago."
"Ohh, the kid that started coming here in the middle of September," she says. "No, he wasn't here. I have homeroom with him, but he wasn't there."
"Okay, thanks."
"Is he okay?" she asks.
I shrug. "I think so, but I'm not sure. That's not why I have you here, though. I wanted to ask you about Patrick Duff Junior, or as you know him, Junior, your boss."
She shifts on the bench. "Um, okay. He's an all right boss."
"Have you ever had any issues with him?"
Her face turns beet red.
"It's okay, Jessica. You're not going to get in trouble."
"He's just…touchy. But he hasn't done anything with me."
"Has he done things with the other girls? Do you know if anything happened between him and Brianna?"
"What? No," she says. "Brianna and Sarah are the two girls he won't ever go near. He won't touch Brianna because she's his niece, and he won't go near Sarah because her father is Judge Latham."
"That would be a good reason to not touch somebody," I mutter. I hear tires screeching. A police car comes driving right at us, slowing to a stop before the pedestrian crossing. Greg jumps out of it and runs toward me. His face is stark white.
"Aaron, it's Nick," he tells me, forcing the words out.
"You found him?" I ask. "Where is he? Is he okay?"
He swallows and pulls me away from Jessica. He stares at me, but doesn't say anything.
"Did he hurt himself?" I ask. "Just tell me."
"We…we found his body."
No matter how many times you hear about someone you care about dying, there is still the feeling of plunging into some deep hole, and all you want is to crash at the bottom. You want to break your spine so you can no longer feel anything.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Aaron, 2015 (Thursday morning)
THE FISHERMAN'S HUT is too small to be inside it, so the medical examiner, Lyra Blair, is currently taking photos of Nick while everyone else lingers outside. I try to act casual as if this is just another case, but I can't look at Nick, so I stare out at the lake.
"I told you that you didn't have to come here," Greg says, standing behind me. "I only told you because I thought you should know. If I had known that you would come here, I wouldn't have told you until they were done."
"Then I would have fired you," I tell him. "I'm the chief. I have to know these things."
"You were also his foster father," he says. "Which means that you'll be taken off the case anyway because you had a close relationship with him."
"Can you just tell me what happened? I just need to know. He ran out of the hospital and…went to a fisherman's shack? Why?"
"Aaron," Greg says, hesitation at the edge of his voice.
"Just say it."
"He killed himself," he says. "He was hanging from a beam inside the hut."
I shake my head. "Did I say the wrong thing? Should I have taken him to the jail?"
"It's not your fault."
"Don't use that shrink bullshit on me," I snap. "I've already gone through all of it when Lisa and Becky died. I don't need to be told what is or isn't my fault. I don't need to be told to express my feelings. I don't even need to be told that sometimes bad things just happen. I've heard it all. It doesn't change the fact that they are all dead."
"Aaron," a woman's voice calls out.
I turn my head to look past Greg.
It's Teresa.
Her hair isn't in its usual braids. It's now styled into Senegalese twists, which resemble her braids but the sections of her hair are twisted instead of weaved around each other. There's something about it—or about her—that makes all of my anger slip out of me.
I stand up. "Teresa."
She wraps her arms around me. "I'm so sorry."
"How did you know about…it?"
"Greg called me."
I glance over at Greg.
He shrugs. "I thought you might need more support than I could give."
"Thank you," I tell him.
Teresa takes a step away from me, but she continues to grasp my hand. "Are you sure you want to be here during this?"
I nod. "If I wasn't here, I would just b
e somewhere else thinking about what's happening here and worrying that they're not doing Nick justice."
Lyra steps out of the hut and walks toward Greg. "I'm not sure this was a suicide."
"Why not?" I ask.
"The bruises around his neck show that the ropes were originally cutting across his neck," she says. "There's also bruises slanting upward, which is how it should be in a suicide, but…I can't see why the rope would cut across his neck unless someone used it to strangle him first."
My chest feels like all my bones are shifting toward my sternum, crushing it.
Teresa wraps her arm around my waist. "It's okay. We'll figure out who did this."
"What if whoever it was wanted revenge against me?" I ask. "What if it was the shooter?"
I turn to Greg. "What if it was Junior? He could have found out that I was looking into him. I was looking at his photographs at The Charcoal Grill, but I didn't think anyone really noticed. I was in the corner booth and none of the waitresses were lingering…except Sarah."
"Sarah Latham?" he asks.
"Yeah," I say. "I just talked to her for…a minute maybe, but she could have seen the photographs. Maybe she told Junior about them and now he's retaliating against me. Maybe he knows that I quit working after my wife and daughter died, and he's hoping I'll do the same again."
"That seems pretty farfetched," he says.
"Greg, two teenagers have been killed in the last few days," I say. "Nothing about this is normal. This isn't a rational mind that's thinking up these murders."
"You know what? I'm gonna get the team to look for fingerprints and we'll run it through all of the databases. If something—"
"Junior won't be in any of the databases. He hasn't been arrested."
"Aaron," Greg says, his voice becoming weary. "It's time that you went home. Take a nap. Just…trust that I can take care of this."
I nod, but my mind is working too fast for me to concentrate on what he's saying. He walks back toward the fisherman's hut with Lyra.
Teresa turns to face me. "Do you want me to question Junior? He might be more willing to open up to a female."
I shake my head. "I don't think we should go at Junior first."
"Well, I know your facial expressions pretty well, so I know you're setting up some kind of plan. What do you want to do?"
"I'm going to question Sarah Latham. If Junior has never touched her, maybe she doesn't know how bad of a guy he is and she's helping him."
"You realize I have no idea what you're talking about," she says. "How many people have died since we stopped talking?"
I sigh. "Let's get in my car. I'll explain on the way to the school. Sarah will still be there."
Chapter Twenty-Six
Sarah, 2015 (Early Thursday afternoon)
"NEWTON'S THIRD LAW states that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction," my physics teacher, Miss Lyle, says. She pulls back one of the spheres of Newton's cradle. "For example, when I pull back this marble and I let it go…" She releases the ball. It hits the one next to it, but it's the fourth ball on the opposite end that swings in the opposite direction. "…that action causes the last ball to swing up, which is the equal and opposite reaction. Another example is when a fish swims; it pushes against water with its fins—but if it were only doing that, only the water would move. The fish also moves because the water is exerting the same amount of force on the fish as the fish exerts on the water. And when that second hand hits twelve, all of you rush out of that door, which isn't Newton's Law, but an inevitable occurrence between action and reaction."
The second hand hits twelve and, just as she expects, everyone jumps to their feet—most of them having already packed their notebooks back into the bag as the final minutes of class came closer—and rushes out the door. Except me because I've been staring at Nick's seat—two seats across from mine—wondering if his apparition is going to appear in it.
"Sarah?" Miss Lyle asks, walking up to me. "Are you doing okay?"
I glance up at her. "Oh, yeah. I'm fine. I was just…thinking about your lesson. Do you think that's where the idea of karma comes from? That if you do something bad, something bad will happen to you, too?"
She shakes her head. "I don't believe in karma. I believe that bad things can happen to someone who does bad actions because of a series of cause and effect, but not because of karma. Is this about your kidnappers?"
I blink several times. "Uh, yeah, I guess."
"No, it's not," Debbie says, sitting behind me. "It's about the fact that you killed your lover, who happens to be the foster son of the chief of police, and now karma is gonna bite you in the ass with a jail sentence to boot."
"Well." Miss Lyle sits on the edge of the science lab table. "Your kidnappers were killed because they put themselves into a dangerous situation. It's not karma, but it is justice."
"But if it was an equal reaction, wouldn't they have been kidnapped and not killed?" I ask.
She smiles, condescendingly but comforting. "Physics only applies to the physical world, Sarah. And humans are definitely something that simple laws can't determine. Who knows why your brother killed them?"
"He didn't kill them."
She sighs. "You should probably get to the lunchroom before all the chairs are taken."
I shove my notebook and pen into my canvas bag. When I walk out of the room, contemplating physic laws, fate, and karma, I barely notice Aaron standing across the hallway. If he weren't with his girlfriend—a tall, beautiful woman that's difficult to miss—I likely would have walked right past him.
"Sarah," he calls out. "We need to talk."
I swallow. What the hell is he doing here? There's nothing they could have found at the hut that could have led back to me…unless they secretly got my fingerprints after the kidnapping.
Debbie whistles a dirge as Aaron gestures for me to take a step out to the courtyard. We sit down at a picnic table under an apple tree, whose leaves are all gone. It's cold, so I wrap my white jean jacket closer around me.
"I have some bad news, Sarah," he says. "I don't really know how to tell you this."
I wait, but his face contorts as he tries to form the words. Teresa takes his hand and squeezes it.
"Do you want me to tell her?" she asks him.
He shakes his head, but stands up and walks away from the picnic table, staring up at the school building.
Teresa watches him for a few seconds, the corner of her lips downturned, before she looks back to me. "Sarah…Nick is gone. He…passed away."
My eyes widen, but it's not a completely fake reaction. Witnessing Nick hanging from his neck in the fisherman's shack is one thing—I could pretend that maybe it was just another hallucination like Debbie and Brianna, or it's just another one of my fantasies that won't affect anybody else—but now that I've heard someone else say the words, it becomes a physical reality.
"Are you sure?" I ask. "I just saw him…yesterday in school."
"Yeah," Teresa says, her lip barely quivering. She shakes her head, trying to get rid of the negative feelings. "I'm sorry. It initially looked like a suicide, but there is some evidence that it could have been a homicide."
What? How the hell did they figure that out?
"What…makes you think it's a homicide and not a suicide?" I ask.
She tugs on one of her hair twists. "Well…it's a medical examiner thing. You don't want me to go too far into it. It's a bit graphic."
I grab her hand. "I want to know. I need…I need it for closure."
She grimaces. "Well, bruises on his neck show that the rope was pulled horizontally across his neck, which wouldn't happen if he just hung himself. If he hung himself, the bruises would have been diagonal."
I stare past her to the apple tree. There's a part of the bark where there's an indent. It looks like someone took an ax to it. Maybe whoever built the school originally didn't want the tree there, and then changed his mind. Or maybe it was a prankster who wanted to cut it d
own, but changed his or her mind when they realized how difficult it would be. I suppose intent changes everything. One is a mistake. The other is malice.
"So…he was hung?" I ask, making sure I don't get caught in the same mistake that allowed Nick to realize what I truly was. "Or strangled?"
She nods. "It seems that way."
Aaron walks back over to us. "Did you tell her?" he asks Teresa.
She nods again.
He turns back to me. "I have to ask you a question. It's about when I was at the restaurant a couple days ago. Do you remember me being there?"
"Sure," I tell him, unsure where this conversation is going. Is he trying to confuse me? Catch me off guard? Did they take me as far away from the students as possible, so that I couldn't make a scene? "You ordered the On-The-Go Burger."
"Did you see what I was looking at?"
The photographs of Junior being a pervert. Is there any use in lying? Does he already know the answer? I didn't think he'd been paying attention while I was talking to him.
"Uh, photographs," I say.
"Did you see what they were photographs of?" He prods.
This is it. I'm going to need to use my most powerful weapon. Innocence.
My face flushes and I look away from both of them. "I-I'm not sure."
"You seem like you have some idea, Sarah," he says, but his accusation is wrapped up in the kindness of his voice. "Look, I don't mind that you saw the evidence, I was just curious if you told Junior about it."
Why would I tell Junior that I saw photos of him watching porn?
I don't know, but considering Aaron's tone of voice, it's best to keep him thinking that I did.
"I…may have. I didn't think about the fact that it might be part of an investigation. I was just having a conversation with him and it slipped out. Are the police investigating him for watching porn?"
Aaron and Teresa exchange a look. I wonder what that's like—to be able to look at someone and have a whole conversation without saying anything aloud. I assume it's rather convenient.
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