by Jen Blood
“Why did you lie?” I asked. My voice sounded small, that of a child instead of a thirty-three-year-old woman with degrees and awards and a recent divorce under her belt. My eyes were still closed, my head spinning.
“I think you should get some rest. You don’t look well,” she said.
I shook my head in an effort to clear it. Opened my eyes. My mother was closer now, peering interestedly at me.
“Shit. You…” My voice faded. “You drugged me.”
“You’re so dramatic. I’m a doctor, Erin—I medicate people, I don’t drug them. You need to sleep. This should help.”
She pulled me to my feet and led me down the hall. I’d already told her she could take my room, and I’d take Juarez’s for the night. His bed was a mattress on the floor that seemed much lower than I suspected it would have if my mom hadn’t slipped some kind of elephant tranquilizer in my tea. I crashed onto it like a tree felled in the forest. Kat pulled the blankets up around me. I couldn’t remember her ever tucking me in like this as a child.
“Where’s Dad?” I asked.
She looked sorry for just a moment—a flicker of regret that touched her pretty green eyes for an instant before it vanished.
“Your father’s dead,” she said. There was no emotion in her voice. “Go to sleep, Erin. We’ll talk in the morning.”
I was dimly aware of her leaving my side. Einstein’s cold nose nuzzled my neck before he settled down beside me, his body warm against mine. The bed smelled like Juarez. It wasn’t familiar per se, but it wasn’t unpleasant, either. I closed my eyes.
And slept.
Chapter Twenty-Two
I woke an indeterminate number of hours later to blinding sunlight streaming into windows devoid of drapes or dressings. It took a few seconds to reorient myself to my surroundings: strange bed, cardboard boxes sealed with duct tape against one wall, a table lamp and a dog-eared copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude on the floor by my head.
Juarez’s room.
Einstein was nowhere to be found. My cell phone was on the kitchen table and the house was spotless, dishes washed and stacked neatly in the strainer. There was no sign of Diggs, Juarez, or my mother. I dialed her cell while waiting for my coffee to brew, disoriented and pissed off. The clock on Diggs’ microwave read 1:20.
Kat answered on the fourth ring, her voice clipped and professional.
“Where the hell are you?” I interrupted, before she could finish her greeting. “And please tell me you have my dog.”
“He’s spreading a little cheer—I thought he could use an outing, and you clearly weren’t getting up anytime soon.”
“Because you drugged me, you psychopath.”
“And again with the drama. I’m at the clinic—I figured since I was in town, I should make some time to check the place out, make sure they’re still doing my name justice. I’ll just be another hour or so. You can meet me here if you’d like.”
I suppressed the urge to reach through the phone and strangle her. “No, that’s all right. Just come by the Trib when you’re done. An hour, right?”
I hung up and drank my coffee, no doubt in my mind that I wouldn’t see Kat before four o’clock.
At the Trib, Diggs was still weeding through conflicting reports from the cops about Hammond’s death. I retired to my office to sort through my own evidence, in a vain attempt to make sense of the latest bizarre developments in the story. My wall looked like one of those creepy serial killer shrines they have on all the primetime cop shows: charred bodies, medical reports and newspaper clippings, a sketchy timeline written in washable marker on the wall below.
As expected, there was still no sign of my mother when four o’clock rolled around. Diggs came in with coffee and a sandwich, and took his customary seat on the edge of my desk.
“So, what have we got here?”
I broke off a corner of his sandwich and popped it in my mouth, then grimaced when I realized it was some kind of that tofurkey crap he’s always eating.
“That’ll teach you to steal my food.”
“Probably not.” I considered his original question. “I think whoever attacked me had to be the one who killed Hammond.”
“Makes sense. Any idea who that could be, though?”
I went through the list of suspects. Matt Perkins was missing now, but as far as I knew he had been safely tucked away in a hospital bed during my attack. Joe Ashmont, on the other hand...
“You’re sure it wasn’t Ashmont who jumped you?” Diggs asked, reading my mind.
“I think so. I can’t really explain why, but I just don’t think it was him.”
“’Cause he’s too sweet?”
I laughed. He took a sip of my coffee without asking, and pushed the rest of his sandwich toward me. I picked at a scrap of crust.
“No, I just—I would have known if it was him. I saw him at Hammond’s last night after the fire, and I just…” I stopped, trying to figure out how to verbalize what so far was nothing more than a gut feeling. “I feel like he wants to tell me something, but he can’t. As much shit as he’s given me, I’m not sure he’d actually hurt me.”
Diggs didn’t look convinced.
“What about you?” I asked. “What’s the word so far on Hammond and the fire?”
“Officially? Undetermined. Unofficially—arson, and Noel was killed before the fire. It seems we have a killer with a conscience, though.”
I looked at him curiously.
“The cats,” he explained. “Whoever blew up the house took the time to get them out first—a neighbor found them prowling around the wreckage this morning.”
“So, a killer who doesn’t mind beating the crap out of girls or murdering an ex-cop with tow-headed grandbabies, but gets squeamish about torching the family feline. Bizarre.”
“Very,” agreed Diggs. “What did Kat have to say on the subject?”
“You mean before or after she slipped me a mickey and stole my dog? Precious little. She doesn’t actually deny any of it, but she’s definitely reticent about sharing her motives. As soon as she gets here, we’re gonna have a conversation.”
Since he had no response for this, I took the time to study my graffiti timeline. It was beginning to shape up in terms of names and dates, the ink still wet on the latest addition: July, 1990—Rebecca Ashmont joins Payson Church.
“I still think it goes back to Becca Ashmont,” I said. “Which means Matt Perkins and my buddy Joe have to be in on this, one way or another.”
Diggs was quiet for a second or two. “And my father? You think he has something to do with this, too?”
I thought of the conversation I’d had with the Reverend yesterday afternoon—something I still hadn’t shared with Diggs. I’d known the question would come up eventually, of course. I just wished I had a better answer for him.
“There’s a chance he was involved.”
“With the fire, or with Rebecca Ashmont?”
I didn’t say anything for a second too long. I’m not a bad liar in general, but I’ve never been able to pull one over on Diggs.
“So, Daddy Diggs was a philanderer in his day,” he said. There was no real bitterness in his tone, but I knew better than to think that meant he was okay with the news. “The old man’s full of surprises. And you think he might have had something to do with the fire?”
Now that the big secret was out, it was pointless to hold anything else back. I began, relieved that I could finally paint the whole picture for someone else, in the hopes that he might see something I hadn’t. I told him about the call my father had received the night before the fire, and the subsequent call Adam had placed to Reverend Diggins before he dropped out of sight. I finished with my theory that the Reverend and Joe Ashmont had been headed out to the island to take Rebecca and her son away from the Paysons.
“And you think that kind of thing could have unsettled Payson enough that he might have lost it and killed the whole congregation? You knew this man, Sol—you honestl
y think he would have done that?”
I thought about it, flashing back to my own memories of Isaac Payson: a revival that ran late, with me stretched out on a homemade pew, my chin propped in my hands as I watched a woman writhe on the floor in the aisle, her skirt hiked high, tears streaming down reddened cheeks. Isaac’s hands on my shoulders, pushing me under frigid ocean water with my father looking on, waiting until I came back up.
“You are baptized in the holy spirit, washed in the blood of the lamb,” Isaac says to me. “Let it be known that him who goes against you goes against God, and he shall perish in the flames.”
I hadn’t been afraid.
But should I have been?
“I don’t know,” I finally said. I shook my head, the images coming back more quickly now, my head pounding once again. A man on his knees at the front of the church, his back bared; a woman with a cruel-looking switch in her hands, both of them crying. My father taking my hand.
“Come on, baby—let’s go back to the house. This isn’t for us.” Isaac standing in the background with his hands in the air, his eyes cast to the ceiling. The preacher’s voice, for us alone—“Stay.” An order. “She needs to see what happens to Satan when he dares walk among us.”
“Erin?” Diggs had gotten up. He stood in front of me, clearly concerned. “You still with me?”
I managed a nod. “I have to go. I need to talk to Kat.”
When I was a kid, the clinic was where I hung my hat more often than not. It was housed in a modular unit with a wheelchair ramp out front and limited off-street parking, just a few buildings down from the Diggins church. I wasn’t ready for the sense of familiarity it sparked when I walked through the front doors. More than the island, more than the Tribune, more than anything else I’d encountered since crossing the Littlehope town line, this felt like home.
I hung my coat on a wooden peg just inside the door, then took in the lobby. A pregnant girl no more than fifteen years old sat in an orange plastic chair, thumbing through a back issue of Cosmo. The woman behind the counter looked vaguely familiar, but only because Littlehope is a small town—a limited gene pool means just about everyone looks vaguely familiar. She was in her early twenties at the most, way too young for me to have known her when Kat was running the place.
“Can you tell me if Dr. Everett is here?” I asked.
At the sound of my voice, Einstein came barreling out of one of the back rooms. The receptionist did not look amused.
“She’s back there,” she said flatly.
Kat was reorganizing the old storage room—which, to her credit, did actually look like it could use some reorganization. Or a blowtorch.
“Can you believe this shit?” she asked. She didn’t even look up when I came in the room. “I obviously need to come back here more often—have you met the teenager at the front desk? And the so-called doctors here are a joke. I know it’s a full load, but there’s no excuse for this kind of laziness.”
I leaned against the doorsill, my arms crossed over my chest. Once it dawned on her that I wasn’t speaking, she stopped working and looked at me.
“I know—I’m late,” she said.
“Two hours late, actually, but who’s counting?”
“Just let me finish up here, and I’ll be right out. Another twenty minutes and I should have things wrapped up.”
Rather than starting another pointless argument, I dove into the fray with her. I started at a wall a few feet from where my mother was working, stacked floor to ceiling with shelves of unlabeled supplies.
“You have a marker?” I asked.
She smiled—a genuine Kat smile, almost impossible to find in nature. I felt that little thrill of triumph I used to get when I’d made her happy, which only succeeded in pissing me off further. I took the black Sharpie she handed me and got to work.
“I want you to tell me about Noel Hammond—your relationship with him. What happened the day of the fire,” I began, after we’d been working a while.
“It seems like you have it all figured out—that’s what Noel said, anyway.”
“You spoke with him?”
She met my eye. I tried to read her—to find a trace of remorse, some regret over the death of someone who, at the very least, had shared a bed with her once upon a time. True to form, she gave nothing away.
“He called me a few days ago to tell me I should call you and explain some things.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I didn’t see you burning up the phone lines to get to me, either. I knew you’d call once you ran out of alternatives.”
If the comment was meant to make me feel guilty, it didn’t succeed. I pulled down another box, this one filled with sterile dressings, and counted, repacked, and labeled the contents.
“I just want to know what happened. The morning of the fire twenty years ago…” I prompted her.
“You mean when you and Adam were holed up in that hotel?”
There was no missing the challenge in her tone. She was standing on a stepstool, back to the wall, her eyes hard on mine. And like that, she was the adult and I was the child, caught in a lie I’d been keeping far too long.
“You knew he left me alone? How?”
“I saw him that day—early that morning. I got called in for an emergency at Ethan Diggins’ church.”
The church where my father had been heading that morning, according to Reverend Diggins.
“Who made the call?” I asked.
“The Reverend. Joe Ashmont had shown up on his doorstep—six sheets to the wind, beaten till he was half-dead in a bar fight. The Reverend called me to come patch him up.”
“And you saw Dad drive in, just as you were getting there,” I guessed.
“He saw me and took off before we could talk.” She dropped her eyes for the first time. “I assumed he was going back to the hotel. If I’d known he wasn’t, I would have gone to the hotel to get you.”
“How did you find out he hadn’t gone back for me?”
She didn’t answer. This was the key—what I’d been looking for all this time. I sensed it, more from the way she wouldn’t meet my eye and the thick tension that filled the room than anything else. I sat down on a cardboard box and waited for an answer my mother couldn’t seem to give me.
“Did you see him go out to the island that morning?” I pressed.
She hesitated. The look on my face must have convinced her there was no putting the conversation off any longer, because she finally gave in. She sat on the stepstool, her legs crossed and her hands in her lap, the picture of composure.
“I didn’t see him. The others did, though—Matt Perkins saw him leave the town landing that morning, headed for the island.”
“You didn’t see him, though? Only Perkins?”
“Joe said he’d known Adam was going out there. And the Reverend said the same thing—said he’d sounded strange, desperate, on the phone. There was enough circumstantial evidence. Thirty-four people died out there; there wouldn’t have been an impartial jury, no due process. The press, the locals, anyone and everyone was ready to lynch the first likely suspect.”
“So, you just…what? Went out there and destroyed anything you thought might look bad, and created some fantasy story—”
“I don’t expect you to understand.” Her voice was dangerously calm. “I did what I needed to do to keep your father safe. To keep you safe.”
“Because Dad did it—” I choked on the words. The images came back again: Isaac shouting, a child crying, my father…where? When all of these things were happening on the island, when I was being dunked under frigid waters or watching Isaac dole out retribution to his congregation, why hadn’t my father intervened?
“Is that what you’re saying?” I continued, hating the weakness in my voice. “Daddy set the fire, killed all those people? That’s what you were protecting? What about the man I told you I saw out there? The one you and Dad told me I was crazy for mentioning? Or what about Isaac, for C
hrist’s sake? He was on the outside of the locked door, right? He could’ve done it.”
She didn’t say anything. Her eyes slid from mine to the floor, her hands twisting in her lap—the only sign that something might be breaking through that cool exterior. I stood so suddenly I knocked a pile of cardboard boxes to the floor. Einstein had been at my feet, but now he leapt up and skittered out of the stockroom like I’d made some physical threat.
“Finish up here,” I said. I did my best to force some strength back into my voice. “We’re going for a ride.”
“Where?”
“I’m going to prove to you that my father didn’t set that fire,” I said. “I’m going to prove the ghoul that chased us in the woods that day was real, and you’ll see for yourself exactly what you’ve been protecting all this time.”
Tough words for someone who didn’t actually have a clue what the hell she was talking about, but I didn’t care. There was one man who I suspected might be able to answer at least a few of my questions, and I was damned well going to ask them before something happened to him, too.
Since it was likely I would kill either my mother or myself—or some combination thereof—before the day was out, I left Diggs with our furry love child and vague reassurances that everything was under control. Einstein stood at the office door with Diggs by his side as I was leaving; neither of them looked happy to see me go. I could understand their concern.
At the town landing, I paid no attention to Kat’s protests as I took the helm of my trusty speedboat and we left Littlehope Harbor.
“I’m not high on Joe Ashmont’s list of favorite people lately,” she shouted to me above the boat’s engine.
“We won’t stay long.”
“If he even lets us come ashore.”
I shrugged. My mother wore jeans and an LL Bean jacket, her hair pulled back and her cheeks attractively flushed from the cold. Despite a few years of heavy drinking when I was a kid, good genes had paid off—at fifty-two, Kat had a toned, slender body that I imagined still turned men’s heads.