A Family Secret

by Cross, Kennedy

  “All right.” He nods. His expression has stiffened with understanding. “That’s all I can ask for.”

  Yes it is. And it’s much more generous than I feel—I know I’m conceding and I hate it—but right now a compromise is a lot more effective than another argument out here in the dead of night.

  I don’t even stow the flowers in a vase when we go inside. I set them in the sink, grab my backpack from the kitchen and watch to make sure Ethan settles on the couch, then I immediately retreat down the hallway to a small office room. It’s Alison’s former bedroom that Daddy filled with a desk and a pullout couch when she went to college. I still refuse to sleep in my old room, the master bedroom, or anywhere else upstairs. I hadn’t even intended on disrupting things so far as dragging out the pullout couch, but it’s far better than the alternative.

  It’s also already fitted with a sheet, and to my surprise, there’s a neatly folded comforter and pillows in the closet. Kudos to you, Dad.

  I crawl into bed with urgency stirring embers in my chest. It’s already been five days since his murder. That’s a hundred and twenty hours with no answers and no real progress. The seconds tick like firecrackers in my ears as I hold my eyes shut.

  I’m running out of time.

  The sound of shattering glass thrusts me into consciousness. For a second I lie completely still, staring at the ceiling. Was it another dream? It had to be. I feel like I’ve only just closed my eyes, which the little red digits of the clock on the desk confirm. It’s 12:57 AM.

  There’s a loud thump somewhere in the house. Several thumps. The sound of a presence down the hall.

  Someone is in the house. This is not a dream.

  I think of Ethan. Adrenaline courses through my limbs and seizes my chest. It’s not him causing the commotion, it’s too loud and frantic. But he’s out there.

  I leap out of bed.

  Hastily, I reach for my backpack and unzip the pocket holding my handgun. It’s loaded, I can feel the weight of the bullets as soon as I pick it up, but I check the magazine anyway. Confirmed.

  I glide to the door and pause, listening for any indication of what’s going on and where, but there’s nothing. No distinguishable stirring, not even the sound of steps. Slowly, I wrap my hand around the doorknob, then twist as gently as I can. The door eases open. A masked face immediately snaps towards me.

  My heart shudders as my every muscle responds in instinctual unison. I raise my gun, but as I press the trigger there’s a shot from the living room and the body drops to the floor.

  I rush down the hall with my gun raised, crouch down, and press my fingers to their neck to check for a pulse. The body is dressed in black—just like my dream—and sprawled against the wood floor with a pistol in hand. There’s only one bullet wound, but it was a kill shot. And when I look up, Ethan is standing in the living room with a revolver still raised.

  The hot scent of gunpowder fills the hall with a sharp, bitter stench. Ethan lowers his weapon. He looks at me. “Are you okay?”

  11

  Claire

  I hadn’t realized I’m panting. Ethan hurries towards me. He’s crouched at my side, arm around me, before I’ve even caught my breath. “Are you okay?” he repeats.

  “I’m fine.” I suck in two lung-fulls of breath and rest my arms on my knees as I slowly breathe out. I look at him. “This was your shot.”

  He nods, opening his palm to unveil his revolver. It’s his concealed carry, a gun I’ve seen many times, one I’ve shot at the range with him.

  I release another heavy breath. “What the hell?”

  Ethan closes his eyes and leans his head back in relief. I place my gun on the floor, then curl my fingers under the ski mask and rip it off. It’s a female, her blonde hair knotted above her head. Ethan opens his eyes and I feel the air leave his body before I can recognize the face lying on the ground in front of us.

  “Anna,” he barely mutters.

  I bounce to my feet. “Why is she here?”

  Ethan stands, his eyes glued to the body.

  “What the hell is she doing here?” I shout.

  “We need to call the police.”

  “I am the police,” I say. “Tell me why she broke into my house!”

  Ethan drags his hands through his hair. “I don—I don’t know,” he stammers. He turns around and takes several steps toward the living room before turning around and circling back. He’s shaking his head. He drags another hand through his hair, this time grasping and pulling at a fistful. “I don’t know,” he repeats to himself.

  I leave him there while I retrieve my cellphone plugged into an outlet in the office and call the department dispatcher. I report a home invasion, identify myself as Detective Claire Brooks, and add that the assailant has been shot and killed before disconnecting. When I return to the hall, Ethan is crouched with his arms on his knees and his hands joined in front of him. He’s staring blankly at the body.

  I stop when I’m several feet away. His gaze lifts and his eyes find mine. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “Tell me why she’s here.”

  He stands up. “I have no idea.” His face is stricken with shock. He takes a step toward me, but I take an equal step back.

  “How the hell did she know where we are?” I ask.

  He shakes his head deliriously, his eyes still wide with panic. After another moment passes without a word, I step around him to get a glass of water.

  There’s a cabinet above the kitchen counter that’s shredded from a bullet. I open it up, and without rummaging through the broken glasses, I can identify a .40 caliber lodged into the wood. The bullet from my Springfield XD. Just as I guessed, Ethan beat me to the kill shot.

  In less than five minutes, there’s an ambulance and four Marvel County squad cars with their lights flashing in the driveway. The paramedics pronounce Anna dead while officers begin tracing the house, inspecting the shattered window beside the door, the cabinet in the kitchen, the office where I slept and the couch where Ethan slept.

  This is my worst nightmare.

  They’re my own colleagues, but still, they’re converting my scene into another crime scene. They’re encroaching on rooms where Dad’s trace is still trapped in the air. They’re disrupting things that I’ve left so precisely positioned in the way they sat on the night he died.

  But it’s not their fault. It’s Anna’s. And it’s Ethan’s.

  If it weren’t for his cheating little escapades, this would’ve never happened. She came to try and kill me. Anna wanted to murder me. There’s no other reason to break in armed with a loaded weapon.

  Ethan ended things between them, and she came to eliminate me from the equation. Their twisted relationship is the reason I’m now cut off from the answer to who stole my father’s life, because I know it’s in there, somewhere in that house. And now all I can do is watch from outside.

  “Not the way you expected to spend your night, huh?” Captain Rizzo drops a hand on my shoulder, breaking my trance. He gives me a friendly squeeze.

  “Not exactly.”

  The ocean salt is so thick in the air that it feels like it’s sticking to my skin. The humidity has a muggy, early morning density to it.

  Captain Rizzo bobs his head to where Ethan’s standing, talking with Sergeant Travis. “Intruder was a colleague of his?”

  “He was screwing her.”

  Rizzo scoffs. “And what, she came to even the score?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Well it sure cost her. At the hands of her lover, too.”

  “Yeah.” I cock my head. “I wonder if he still would have pulled the trigger if he knew who was behind the mask.”

  “Sounds like poetic justice if you ask me,” he says.

  I look up at the captain. “I had a dream about this.”

  “You had a dream your ex-boyfriend’s lover broke in to kill you?”

  “Not—no, not exactly. But the glass shattering, and—” And the feelin
g of danger. Of an intruder. But in my dream they had a knife, not a gun. And it was just a dark figure. But tonight that figure became Anna. “—and someone breaking into the house,” I finish.

  “When was this?”

  “Last night.”

  Captain Rizzo takes a step so that he’s facing me. “You sure have had a lot goin’ on recently.” His voice is low, and he pauses to wait for me to meet his eyes. “Are you good, partner?”

  I nod.

  “Can’t be easy,” he says.

  “It’s not.”

  “You need to take some time. Do what you need to do to get yourself right.”

  “I’ve been try—"

  “Somewhere besides your dad’s old house,” he says quickly, like he anticipated my response. He eyes me while letting that settle in the air between us. “Is there somewhere you can go tonight? We’ll get all this taken care of and drag Mr. Ex over there in for questioning. It’s almost 2:00, you should go get a few hours while you still can.”

  Good—get Ethan’s ass in for questioning. Grill him. But the rest of this feels a little like overkill. There was an intruder, my ex-boyfriend’s psychotic lover, and now she’s dead. She’s identified. It wasn’t a burglary, wasn’t anything that needs to occupy our resources. She came to kill me, and mission failed. All I want is to go back inside.

  Is this what people think when we respond to a scene?

  Surly it’s different when you’re a member of law enforcement. When responding officers feel redundant.

  “Don’t you have a sister close by?” Rizzo asks as my hesitation stretches on.

  I nod.

  “She’d be a good one to call,” he says. His voice returns to a gentle murmur. “I can only imagine the strain you’re under right now. Give yourself a break. Go be with family.”

  I nod stiffly again, though I can feel his stare starting to crack my defiant expression. Rizzo returns my nod, setting his hand on my shoulder once more as he shoots me a parting glance, then turns and ambles back toward the house.

  It’s ungodly late. Actually, it’s brutally early. Alison will want to know all about this, obviously. But there’s no point in startling her out of bed at this hour just to put her into a helpless panic. Everything’s already taken care of.

  I debate my next idea for a second longer, then decide before I have the chance to talk myself down. I unlock my phone, pull up Liam’s contact, and call.

  12

  Liam

  I’m tugged out of sleep by a loud buzzing. It’s my phone on the bedside table.

  My head is thick with exhaustion as I roll over and peel back my eyelids just enough to glimpse the clock. It’s 1:54 AM and it’s an unknown number, which either means this is really bad or I’m going to be really pissed at some idiot who fumbled with a wrong number at this hour.

  “Hello,” I mumble.

  “Liam?”

  “Yes?”

  “This is Claire.”

  “Hey—” I sit straight up in my bed. “—is everything okay?”

  “I’m sorry to wake you up,” she says softly.

  “No—no, it’s okay! Is everything all right?” It’s the middle of the night, but still, I feel guilty for not sounding more collected.

  “My house was just broken into.”

  “Holy shit.” I swing my legs off my bed. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. I’m fine.” She sounds like it, too. “The intruder was shot and killed.”

  Jesus.

  “What happened?” Dumb question, I tell myself as I throw on a pair of pajama pants.

  “It’s a long story,” she says through an exhale. For a second I wonder if she’s about to continue, but she leaves it at that.

  I sit back down on the edge my bed. “Can I do anything to help?”

  “Actually, I was wondering if you’d be willing to let me come hide out at your place for a few hours.” She pauses, but not long enough for me to answer. “I know it’s an ungodly hour. I just—”

  “Of course,” I say quickly.

  “I’m really sorry to—”

  “No, stop. Don’t apologize,” I say. “It’s no problem. Do you need me to pick you up?”

  “Oh no, that’s all right. I can drive over. Can you send me your address?”

  I can see her headlights pulling into my driveway before the coffee has even finished brewing. I meander to the front door and twist it open before she has the chance to knock.

  She looks up, her eyes just as deep and soft as the early morning darkness.

  “Good morning.”

  She smiles and humors me with a short laugh. “It’s been quite a morning,” she says.

  “I’m sure. Come on in.” I take a step to the side and watch as she slips her shoes off, waiting for her to meet my eyes again. Eventually, they do.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” I ask. She nods. I wait, allowing her a chance to add to that even though I know she won’t. “Well, I’ve got coffee brewing, but I also have a guest room just down the hall if you’d like to steal a few more hours of sleep,” I offer.

  “Some coffee would be wonderful, actually.”

  “Great. Well make yourself comfortable. Cream and sugar?”

  “Black is fine,” she says.

  She’s seated at one end of the couch when I eventually make my way into the living room with two small mugs of coffee. For some stupid reason, I’ve also imagined cops to maintain a naturally rigid posture at all times, legs bent at ninety degrees, elbows tight, hands poised. But Claire is balled up with her feet on the couch and her knees pulled close to her chest. She actually looks comfortable.

  I hand her a mug and she accepts it with two hands. As she sips, I take a seat on a chair on the other side of a small—and embarrassing cheap—coffee table.

  “I’m sorry I woke you up at 2:00 in the morning,” she says.

  “Hey. Stop apologizing. Really.”

  “I don’t want to keep you up. You can go back to sleep.”

  “No, I’m good. Don’t worry about it.”

  “I really am sorry I—"

  “If you apologize again I’m going to kick you back out,” I say. She ducks her head and surrenders a soft laugh. Her dimples pinch and her smile lingers on her lips.

  I take my first sip. Oddly, these mugs are some of the few belongings that have stuck with me through all the moves. There’s about four that have survived. Each time, I’ve stowed them in a box with several plates and bowls, glasses, silverware, and a few pots and pans. And that’s my traveling kitchen.

  With that thought, the stark emptiness of my house makes me feel suddenly uncomfortable. It’s embarrassing. I’m thirty-five with furnishing that looks like I just moved out of my parents’ basement. Her eyes are wandering, perusing the sparse layout and blank walls. The silence feels thicker in such an obviously bare room.

  “You really just can’t catch a break lately, can you?” I ask. I have to say something. To my disappointment, her eyes continue roaming for a moment more before they finally settle on me.

  “It’s been a week from hell,” she says. “I’ll tell you that.”

  “I can only imagine.”

  Her dark eyes fix me in a new, focused stare. She holds it for a long beat. “You know, the police academy likes to say that there’s no such thing as a coincidence. Of course they exist, but it’s better to assume they don’t.” She starts slowly shaking her head. She hasn’t lifted her gaze, but there are thoughts playing in her eyes in place of the focus.

  Out of nowhere, her stare drops to the floor.

  “I don’t know what to believe anymore,” she says. It’s a confession to herself, not to me. She shakes her head again, takes a sip from her mug.

  I nod. “These are really difficult circumstances all at once,” I say, eventually. Here I am, trying to console a police officer. The words feel clunky even after they come out.

  Her eyes find mine. “I think my dad was murdered,” she says. I feel my back go stiff
against the cushion behind me. “He was murdered, and I know it, but I can’t prove it,” she adds.

  “Why?” It comes out as a breath with a hundred questions compiled into one word.

  There’s a weight to her stare that would feel imposing if it wasn’t so familiar. Her dark eyes have an anguished gleam that I recognize all too well.

  She blinks, a long blink that shelters the agony behind a wall. “They think he committed suicide,” she says. That agony is still there when she opens again. “But I know he didn’t.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “First of all, when it comes to suicide, men don’t jump.” Her voice is stiff. “It’s almost always women. Men go with means that are hands-on, like a gun or a noose.”

  “But your dad jumped?” I ask. With each sentence, I feel like I’m dropping the words and hoping they’ll land upright.

  Another slight shake of the head. “I don’t think he did.”

  “There wasn’t a note, was there?”

  “There was,” she says, “but it was bullshit.”

  “How so?”

  “It was typed, for one. And it doesn’t sound anything like my dad. The phrasing was… weird.”

  “Did anyone look into whether it was typed on his computer?”

  “Yeah, the note was saved to his desktop,” she says. “They also sent it to State Computer Forensics who confirmed that the document was originated on his computer. But that doesn’t mean someone else didn’t commit the murder, then type a letter as a coverup.”

  “Well, is there anyone you suspect?”

  Her head sways to the side as her tongue rounds the inside of her cheek, a new wave of thoughts playing in her eyes. “Not yet,” she says. “The county’s conclusion was that he jumped from his balcony overlooking the ocean. But I think he was forced off. He was out there all the time and I think someone he knew joined him out there and pushed him off.”

  I nod, chewing my bottom lip. “Why do you think it was someone he knew?”