by Karen Rose
‘How high off the ground were her feet?’ Bishop asked, her tone unforgiving.
Still on her toes, Faith clenched her teeth and blinked hard once, sending tears down her cheeks. ‘This far,’ she spat defiantly, spreading her hands about five inches. ‘Why?’
‘Had she kicked over a chair?’
Faith blinked again and slowly took a step back, looking at Bishop like she’d suddenly spoken a foreign language. ‘What?’
‘Had she kicked over a chair?’
Uncertainty clouded her eyes and she wiped away more tears. ‘I . . . I don’t know. Why?’
Bishop sat down. ‘All right. How did she end up in the car? This is important, because there have been a lot of car accidents. Yours, your mother’s, your uncle Jeremy’s. The mother in Miami. So how, Faith?’
‘I don’t know.’ Still standing, Faith suddenly looked sick. ‘My uncle took care of it.’
Deacon’s jaw dropped. ‘How?’
‘I don’t know.’ The exasperated words shot from her mouth. ‘I was only nine years old. He just told me he’d handle it.’
‘What happened that day, Faith?’ Bishop asked calmly. ‘Start from the beginning.’
Faith took another step back, then another, shaking her head as she blindly backed into the table. ‘I . . . I . . .’ She shot Deacon a look of panicked desperation. ‘I’m—’
She turned and ran for the little powder room and slammed the door. Deacon closed his eyes, exhaling at the sound of Faith retching. He dragged his palms down his face, unable to remember a moment he’d felt this helpless. Except the night his own mother had died.
‘Fuck,’ he whispered.
‘She needs to tell us,’ Bishop whispered back thickly.
Deacon opened his eyes to find tears in Bishop’s dark eyes. But his partner stood and tugged at the hem of her sweatshirt like she might a uniform.
They heard the sound of running water, then quiet. Bishop had lifted her fist to knock again when the door opened and Faith came out. Her chin was down, enough that her hair partially hid her face. Her arms hugged her torso and her back was slightly hunched. She trudged to the window with the million-dollar view and looked out, her face carefully blank.
Unsure of what to say or do, Deacon crossed the room to stand behind her, rubbing her back as she’d done his earlier. She swallowed a sob. ‘I’m sorry. It’s . . .’ She sighed. ‘I think it started the day before, at the reading of the will. My parents had an awful fight that night.’
‘About?’ he asked when her voice trailed away.
‘My mother was mad at her father for not leaving them any money and she was mad at my father for hitting Uncle Jeremy and calling him bad names.’ She leaned a little, stiffly, barely touching her head to his shoulder. ‘Dad was mad because she wouldn’t see that her brother was a pervert who should be locked up. And he was disgusted that money meant so much to her.’
She drew a breath and hugged herself tighter, tucking her fists under her armpits. Deacon kept rubbing her back, waiting. In the window he could see Bishop’s reflection as she stood behind them.
‘Why?’ Bishop asked softly. ‘Why didn’t he want the money?’
She shrugged. ‘He was going to be a priest. He didn’t care about things. But my mother did. She liked heavy draperies and silver teapots. The next morning we had breakfast and everyone was awkward. Everyone had heard them yelling at each other. I just remember making myself as small as I could.’
‘Invisible,’ Deacon murmured, and she nodded.
‘After breakfast he took our car, saying he needed to get away from the “mausoleum” and would be back later. My grandmother took some pills to sleep and my mother was . . . looking for something. It may have been a ring or a brooch. I don’t even remember what. She kept muttering about her birthright. Losing her birthright. She was scaring me so I backed away and went to my room to read. I knew Dad would be back soon and we were supposed to be ready to leave, but my mother hadn’t even started packing. So I went to find her. To remind her that she needed to hurry. I looked everywhere, but she wasn’t anywhere. The only place I hadn’t looked was the basement, so that’s where I went, counting the steps like I always did.’
She stopped and took a deep breath, than another, each exhale shakier than the one before.
‘You went down the steps?’ Deacon murmured.
She nodded. ‘When I got to the bottom, I turned around . . .’ She stopped again, pursed her lips and swallowed hard. ‘And I saw her shoes,’ she whispered.
Deacon rested his cheek atop her head and stood with her, waiting for her to be ready to continue. ‘Red Keds.’
‘Excuse me?’ Bishop said softly.
Faith cleared her throat. ‘Red Keds shoes. That’s what she was wearing. The laces were dragging on the ground.’
‘What did you do when you saw her?’ Bishop asked, still behind them.
‘I stared,’ she said quietly. ‘I couldn’t even scream at first. Then Jeremy turned around and saw me.’
Deacon’s brows shot up. ‘Jeremy was there when you found her?’ He’d been expecting her to say Jordan. Because Jeremy should have been gone by then. He’d told them he’d left after the reading of the will and had never come back.
A slow nod. ‘He was cutting her down. I started to scream then, and he covered my mouth with his hand. My mother’s body just . . .’ She shrugged. ‘Just fell to the floor in a heap. He told me that my grandmother couldn’t know that my mother had hanged herself. Neither could my father. That it would kill them. That suicide was a mortal sin.’
‘And your family was more Catholic than the Pope,’ Deacon said grimly.
‘I knew that suicide meant my mother couldn’t be buried with her family. I knew it meant she was in hell. But most of all, I knew that my father would be devastated. He’d decided not to take his vows when he met my mother. I knew it would kill him if he ever found out. And I love my father. So I never told anyone. Until now.’
‘How did Jeremy stage the car accident?’ Deacon asked.
She moved her shoulders restlessly. ‘I don’t know exactly. He told me that he and Jordan would take care of everything. To go up to my room and wait for one of them to come and talk to me, but not to talk to anyone else.’
‘Jeremy didn’t mention that,’ Bishop murmured. ‘Did they come to talk to you?’
‘Jordan did, because Jeremy was afraid my father would see him in my room and hit him again. They’d fought at the will reading because he put his arm around me.’
‘He did mention that,’ Deacon said. ‘What did Jordan say when he came to your room?’
Faith’s lips trembled. ‘That I shouldn’t blame myself. I hadn’t really, not until he said that. He said my mother had confided to him that she was unhappy with my father. Suffocating. That she wanted to leave him but was afraid.’
‘Was she?’ Bishop asked.
‘She was unhappy. She didn’t like being poor. I know that. I once heard her tell my father that she thought she’d been poor when Joy died, but that she’d been rich then compared to living with him. Jordan said my mother couldn’t deal with the guilt of leaving my father, but she couldn’t keep living with him either.’
‘She was unhappy,’ Bishop said, ‘but was she depressed?’
‘Looking back, I think so. After she had me, she tried to have other children, but she kept losing them. I know of at least three miscarriages. She cried a lot. I used to think about her and try to see a sign or some indication that she was going to do this thing. To kill herself. I used to think that if I’d paid more attention I could have stopped it. Now I know that’s not true. I was just a child.’ She shrugged. ‘I don’t know if anyone really could have seen it coming. All I really knew for sure was that I’d lost one parent that day. I couldn’t lose another.’
‘Were you afraid your father would kill himself too?’ Bishop asked.
‘Oh no. No. Suicide is a mortal sin.’ Faith shook her head. ‘But his heart wasn
’t strong even then. He’d already had one heart attack. I couldn’t risk it.’
‘You said your father took the family car when he left that morning,’ Deacon said. ‘Whose car was wrecked with your mother inside it?’
‘My grandfather’s. Everyone knew my parents had been fighting and they figured my mother was so distraught she lost control of the car.’ She swiped at her eyes with her fingertips. ‘She went off the road not too far from where I did on Monday night. Hell of an irony, ain’t it?’
Indeed. It was a wonder she’d functioned at all that night, but she’d more than done so. Deacon hadn’t thought she could impress him any more, but he’d been wrong.
‘So both Jeremy and Jordan might be capable of faking an auto accident,’ Bishop said thoughtfully. ‘What happened to the car you were driving three years ago?’
‘I’m sure it was junked. It was totaled. The first responders were amazed – both that I’d avoided killing anyone else and that I’d walked away with only minor injuries.’
‘You did some fancy driving Monday night too,’ Deacon remembered, ‘positioning the passenger side to take the brunt of the impact.’
‘I took some driving classes to make my father more comfortable. Because of my mother, you know. Guess they paid off.’
‘I’m very glad they did,’ Deacon said, keeping his tone gentle, because she seemed so very fragile. ‘Faith, all the connections you’ve found so far have been either to recent attempts on your life because of your grandmother’s will, or to the reading of the wills themselves. What was special about the timing of the accident three years ago?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve tried, but I can’t think of anything.’ She rubbed her forehead fretfully. ‘I’m tired. I’m going to try to get a little more sleep.’
Deacon waited until Faith had closed herself back in her room. ‘She may have tried to remember, but I don’t think she really wants to know.’
‘That the abductions of the Foundation recipients go back to the reading of her grandfather’s will is very significant. She dropped that little bomb and skipped right to the next thing. I’m pretty sure Isenberg would have caught that had Faith mentioned it to her.’
‘I know. Faith doesn’t want to admit to herself that the killer is one of her uncles, but I’m pretty much there. Trouble is, I don’t know if it’s only Jordan, or Jeremy with a helper, or whether the twins are working in cahoots despite their claims to hate each other. I don’t know if Stone and Marcus were lying about Jeremy being with them the day Maggie died, or if they were mistaken. Or if they were telling the truth.’ He sighed, new dread layering in his gut. ‘She’s also obviously not considering the implications of the fact that there was an abduction the day after her grandfather died. Because that was the day her mother died.’
Bishop nodded. ‘That’s why I kept pushing her about the chair.’
‘I figured that. If you’re thinking that Maggie Sullivan walked into the basement while the killer was either killing, or putting his souvenirs in jars, then yeah, I thought the same.’
‘If Maggie saw him, it would give him a reason to murder her and fake a suicide. Especially since the shoelaces were dragging on the ground. She wasn’t hanging that high, Deacon.’
‘I thought that too. We need to exhume the body, but I hate to ask Faith to go through that.’
‘I think she’ll want to know, once she’s able to grasp all this. It might be hard to accept that her mother was murdered, but easier than thinking she killed herself.’
‘I know. This would also explain the killer’s growing urgency to see her dead. If his motivation had been to keep intruders from the house, he would have stopped on Monday, as soon as we went inside. When he shot at Faith at the hotel, I thought it was to keep her from going into the basement to discover the changes he’d made – that he’d raised the floor sixteen inches – but then later he killed Pope to get to her. Now I’m thinking that he knew it was only a matter of time before we got her to talk about this secret that she’s kept all these years.’
‘Other than her uncles,’ Bishop said, ‘Faith would be the only one who’d know that the car accident had been a ruse. As soon as we found the bodies, it became more and more likely that she would start wondering about the circumstances of her mother’s death. I mean, what a coincidence that her mother would hang herself in a place where seventeen women were murdered and buried. Like you said, the question is, which uncle? One or both of them is lying. Or they’re in it together.’
‘And we don’t have any hard evidence linking either of them to anything.’ Deacon huffed in frustration. ‘Dammit.’
Bishop looked at Faith’s bedroom door, troubled. ‘I didn’t want to be so rough on her, Deacon. I didn’t want to make her relive it. I didn’t mean to make her cry.’
‘I know. But you got out of her what I wasn’t able to, and that could save her life. We have to find something concrete to nail one or both of the uncles, but right now I’m too worn out to think of what that could be. I’m going to catch a little more sleep. You should too.’
He turned for his own bedroom door, wondering where he’d find Faith. Hoping it would be back in his bed. He just wanted to hold her.
Cincinnati, Ohio, Wednesday 5 November, 5.25 A.M.
Deacon found her in his bed, curled up in a ball, her face buried in a pillow. Crying like her heart was broken, but silently. His own heart broke for her as he scooped her into his arms and settled them both in the overstuffed rocking chair tucked away in the corner of the room. Her fingers clutched at his shirt as she tried to stifle the sound of her sobs.
Bishop had pried from Faith the truth she hadn’t wanted to tell. It had been necessary, a critical piece of the puzzle that might prove to be the key to this case. But it had been more than a puzzle piece for Faith. It had been the most traumatic day of her life cracked open. Exposed.
‘You’ve never told anyone, Faith?’ he asked softly. ‘No one?’
‘No,’ she whispered. ‘I couldn’t. They’d tell my father. Please don’t tell him now.’
He couldn’t promise not to, because he wasn’t sure how much of this might become public knowledge, especially if one of her uncles was responsible for all the killing.
But mostly he didn’t promise because he could see that keeping this secret had hurt her, scarred her. And a part of him wanted her father to know that.
He kissed the top of her head. ‘Sshh now. You’re going to make yourself sick.’
Her body shuddered as she attempted to stop, without success. Finally Deacon gripped her chin, tilted her face up and kissed her. Hard, giving her no quarter. After a few seconds, she started kissing him back with the same intensity, opening to him when he licked at her lips. No carnal exploration, this was a duel of tongues and teeth, her nails digging into his chest as she worked through a flood of fury. He felt the power of it blasting through her and didn’t try to calm her. He let her embrace it. Battle it.
Containing his body’s whiplash response, he ignored the need to possess her, to throw her on the bed and sink into the heat of her body. Instead he let her take what she needed.
Abruptly she released him, her head falling back to his shoulder. Like the fire within her had used up all the available oxygen and simply burned out.
She moaned quietly. ‘I have an awful headache.’
‘I’m not surprised.’ He massaged the back of her skull, gratified when she sighed and cuddled closer. He set the chair in motion, the gentle rocking at odds with the war now raging in his body. It was impossible to hide the fact that he was as hard as a rock, but she wasn’t flinching away. He touched his tongue to his lip. That she’d actually drawn blood shouldn’t have been such a turn-on. ‘Better now?’ he murmured.
‘Much.’ Her fingertips petted his chest where she’d clawed him. ‘I hurt you. I’m sorry.’
He had to take a moment to control his voice, because her gentle caress was driving him wild. ‘I’m fine. I’m more worried about
you.’
‘She left me, Deacon. She was unhappy with my father, but she’d always acted like she loved me. But she didn’t. Not enough to stay with me.’
He almost told her what he and Bishop suspected – that her mother hadn’t committed suicide – but he held his tongue. If it wasn’t true, he would have upended her world yet again for no good reason. ‘I’m sorry, honey. I’m sorry you’ve borne the weight of this secret for so long. I’m sorry we had to rip it out of you that way.’
‘I’m not sure there was another way to make me tell it. A lot of therapists have tried over the years. They should take classes from Scarlett Bishop.’
‘Which therapists?’ He jostled her lightly when she didn’t answer. ‘Faith?’
She sighed. ‘My dad and I were spiraling down big-time after my mother died. He felt guilty for upsetting her so much that she lost control of the car and I felt guilty for keeping the truth a secret. He started drinking and it got bad. I took care of the house and kept things up so that no one would know. I kept hoping he’d snap out of it, but things kept getting worse and . . . I kind of snapped under the pressure. I had a breakdown and got sent to a hospital for a while.’
Deacon’s chest tightened. ‘Did you try to kill yourself, Faith?’ he asked hesitantly.
‘No. I went kind of catatonic. Just sat there and rocked. I still do that sometimes when I’m under a lot of pressure.’
‘I know. I’ve seen it.’ She’d rocked herself the night Vega had told her that the mother and child had died in her car. ‘What happened?’
‘I got therapy. Everyone I talked to knew something was wrong, but it almost became a compulsion not to tell. Like the anorexic who finds a sense of control in refusing food.’
That explained a lot. ‘That’s why you had such a tough time tonight.’
She nodded. ‘Old habits die hard. It turned out to be a good thing, though. Dad finally snapped out of it and went into alcohol rehab, which is why I lived with Gran for two years. She refused to let me go back to him until he’d proven his sobriety. He’s been sober ever since.’