He nods in acceptance. “Thank you,” he says. “Marisa’s mother and I have been devastated.” He claps his hands together and leans forward onto his desk. “I wanted to apologize to you as well, Mr. Faulkner. I understand you and Marisa were … involved.”
I feel my face redden, although I’m not surprised. At this point the police have found Marisa’s website in addition to her phone records and have no doubt shared them with her parents. “We were coworkers at Archer,” I say carefully. “And we did date, for a time.”
“I’ll be frank, Mr. Faulkner,” Devereaux says. “Marisa was disturbed. She’s always been rather sensitive.” He unclasps his hands and sits back in his chair. “There was an incident at her previous school, in Connecticut. She began a relationship with another teacher, a young man named Todd. She became infatuated. Her mother and I thought it was just first love, but … it did not end well. She thought Todd was flirting with another teacher and stole his phone to check his texts. The school’s HR and legal departments got involved. Todd contacted me directly, complained that Marisa was harassing him, prying into his private life, his family.” He gazes intently at me. “Todd demanded that I pay him to not press charges.”
Poor dumb Todd, I think. “That’s unfortunate,” I say.
Devereaux nods as if I have hit the nail on the head. “Yes,” he says. “Marisa called us, frantic. The school was considering terminating her contract for unprofessional behavior. She wanted us to help, hire a lawyer, sue the school. It was ridiculous, of course. Her mother and I told her we would do no such thing. We argued; she said hurtful things to her mother.” He pauses, then sits up a bit straighter in his chair, forging ahead. “Her mother was distraught, got behind the wheel when she shouldn’t have. There was a terrible accident, another driver died, and my wife suffered a traumatic brain injury. She has recovered, thank God, at least somewhat. But in those first weeks after the accident …” He pauses again, his eyes for the first time becoming a bit unfocused. After a moment he sighs and shakes his head. “It was horrible. Marisa came home, to help.”
And to leave Todd and her previous school behind. “I’m so sorry,” I say.
Devereaux dismisses that with a short wave of his hand. “I thought we could help her if she came home, get her back on the right path. And for a time, things were … not fine, but manageable. She was going to therapy.” He glances at his desk, then back at me. “And then she met you.”
Neither of us says anything for a minute. Several possible responses come to mind, and one by one I dismiss them. I don’t much like Jackson Devereaux, his calculated businesslike response to his family’s tragedy. I remember what my mother used to say about parents, that when parents are upset or angry they are mostly just reacting to their own fears about their children’s struggles. But I find myself wishing Devereaux would react differently.
“Mr. Devereaux,” I begin. “Your daughter and I … for a short time, at the beginning of our relationship, it was good. I cared for her.”
Devereaux considers me across his desk. “My daughter was very good at getting people to do that,” he says. He says it in a way that makes me feel like a sucker. “She was ill, Mr. Faulkner. I don’t expect you to have realized that, not at first. She was good at hiding it.” He opens a drawer and takes out a calfskin notebook and places it on his desk. “I know from the police that she ferreted around in your life, tried to find some problem she could solve for you.” He closes the drawer with a quiet thunk. “I apologize for that.” He opens the notebook, and I see it’s actually some sort of checkbook. Devereaux picks up a pen and writes a check. “I wanted to show you how sorry my wife and I are for your troubles with Marisa.” He tears out the check and holds it out to me.
Slowly, I stand and take the check and sit back down to read it. There are far too many zeros. I look back at him. “I can’t accept this,” I say.
“Nonsense,” he says. “I know you suffered an injury to your hand from the same man my daughter was … investigating.” He says this last word with distaste.
“You mean the same man who murdered your daughter.”
Again he waves my comment away. “Take the check, Mr. Faulkner.”
“I could buy a brand-new hand for this and have money left over.”
He nods. “Consider it payment to cover your emotional trauma.” He glances at his watch, then places his hands on his desk, a CEO closing a deal, and stands.
I pause, then stand and place the check down on his desk. “I won’t accept it,” I say. “You should donate that to a worthy charity. In Marisa’s name.”
Devereaux frowns. “I want this to be a clean break here, Mr. Faulkner,” he says.
I give him a tight smile. “You don’t need to worry,” I say. “You won’t hear from me again. I’ll show myself out.”
I leave him standing there, the check on top of the desk, and find my way down the hall and through the foyer. As I head for the front door, I pause. There is a woman in the front sitting room, wearing a monogrammed bathrobe and sitting on a couch. A younger woman in pressed nursing scrubs is standing next to her, murmuring something. The woman on the couch is at first glance beautiful, pale blonde hair and blue eyes, but there is something slightly vacant about her expression, a slackness in her jaw, her eyes dull. She has Marisa’s mouth and nose, I realize, and for a moment I can’t breathe.
Marisa’s mother turns her head to face me, the nurse glancing up but still murmuring into her ear. There is a look of confusion in her eyes now, confusion and sadness and loss. I bow my head to her. After a moment, she bows back, and her eyes shine with tears. I go out the door and close it behind me, then make my way down the steps to my car.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
On Monday, when I get home from the grocery store and walk through my front door, there’s a rustle of movement from the kitchen. I put my grocery bag on the floor and pick up the fireplace poker. Then Susannah walks out of the kitchen, a bag of chips in one hand, and gives a breathless little cry when she sees me. “Jesus, you scared me,” she says.
“I scared you?”
“You’re the one carrying a poker.”
I set the poker back down on the hearth. “You broke into my house. Again.”
“Au contraire, mon frère.” She reaches into her pocket and holds up a key.
“You had a key made? When did—” I shake my head. “Never mind.”
She puts the key down on the coffee table, along with my bag of chips. “Key’s all yours. You find my stuff yet?”
After I get the groceries out of my car, we conduct a sweep of my house, and Susannah is poking around in my bedroom when I find a plastic Target bag under my couch. “Think this is it,” I call to her, and I open the bag to find a short stack of T-shirts, haphazardly folded. Then I pause and look closely at the T-shirt on top, and my breath stops, cold realization like an icicle through my brain.
Susannah is coming down the hall and saying, “Good, ’cause I hate shopping and didn’t want to—” She stops when she sees me kneeling on the floor, holding a T-shirt. “Ethan?” she says.
I hold up the T-shirt. It’s black, with the words Get Up the Yard slashed across the front. “Where did you get this?” I ask, my voice hoarse.
She’s very good. It’s only a flutter of her eyes, a slight catch, that gives anything away. Then she shrugs. “Bought it at a concert,” she says. “Athens, I think.”
“Susannah.”
She looks back at me, arms across her chest. “What?” When I don’t say anything, she frowns. “Seriously, what is—”
“Marisa was wearing this when she walked out of my house,” I say. “The last time we saw her. Before she died.”
Susannah pauses for only a moment, no more than to count one, but that pause tells me everything. “I must have bought a couple,” she says. “Impulse purchase. I was drunk; the band was—”
“Don’t lie to me,” I say.
“Ethan, seriously, what—”
&
nbsp; “Don’t!” I shout. “Just … don’t.” I drop the shirt and feel myself sag and hang my head, as if I’m observing myself from far away. “What did you do?” I whisper.
Susannah says nothing, and then she is out the front door and gone. I stay there, kneeling on the floor of my living room, too stunned to move. It’s only when I wonder where Wilson is, and why he isn’t trying to lick me to death, that the tears come.
* * *
RONAN’S IS BUSY for a weeknight—I can see through the front windows that customers line the bar and the tables are full, and I can hear the noise as I enter the service door and walk down the short hallway to the stairwell. I climb the risers one at a time deliberately, gathering myself, and then I’m standing on the faded blue carpet runner in the upstairs hallway outside my uncle’s office. I open the office door without knocking.
Uncle Gavin is sitting behind his desk, which has its usual assortment of papers, wrappers, file folders, and other assorted junk. “Ethan,” he says, like he was expecting me.
“I just walked right up here into your office,” I say. “You might want to rethink your security. Since you’re in a dangerous line of work and all.”
Uncle Gavin picks up a tablet that sits on a stack of invoices on the corner of his desk and holds it so I can see the screen. It shows four different video feeds, including the service door entrance and the hallway outside his office door. When he’s sure I’ve seen it, he puts the tablet down again. “I’m quite happy with Caesar’s security,” he says. “What’s on your mind?”
His matter-of-factness is infuriating. I want to sweep everything off his desk and onto the floor, then maybe overturn the desk for good measure, never mind that the desk is massive enough to take four people just to move it. For a moment I stand there, clenching and unclenching my fists.
Uncle Gavin pulls open a drawer and retrieves a bottle of whiskey and two glasses, then shoves a stack of file folders to one side so he can put the glasses down on his desk.
“I don’t want a drink,” I say.
He pours one glass, then another. “You need one.”
“No thanks.”
He holds a glass out to me. “It’s a twelve-year-old peated single malt from Ireland. Be civil.”
I take the glass and drink, the whiskey smooth and smoky with a touch of raw heat at the back of my throat. I take another sip and sit down. “There. Civil.”
Uncle Gavin hmphs and drinks from his glass, setting it down on his desk. “Is Susannah all right?” he asks.
I laugh, a sad, ugly sound. “No,” I say, “she’s not all right. You know that.” I finish my glass in one go and put it down on the desk.
As usual, my uncle’s face is unreadable. “Talk sense,” he says.
“Sense?” I shake my head. “Okay, here’s ‘sense.’ Susannah killed Marisa.”
Uncle Gavin sits back in his chair. “Donny Wharton killed Marisa,” he says.
I rest my face in my hands, suddenly exhausted. “My sister did it,” I say. “I know she did it.”
Uncle Gavin’s chair creaks as he shifts in it. “Your sister was in the hospital when Marisa died,” he says.
“Then she got out somehow,” I say, annoyed. “It’s not like she didn’t have the motive. Marisa slept with her to get back at me. You know how Susannah would react to being used like that. She got out of the hospital and found Marisa and killed her.” I look up at my uncle. “And then she called you to help her.”
Uncle Gavin says nothing but takes another swallow from his glass, looking past me at some spot in the near distance only he can see. I wait.
“She was never in the hospital,” Uncle Gavin says. “At Northside.”
I frown. “I dropped her off. I saw her walk inside and talk to the nurse.” Then understanding hits me, and I collapse back in my chair like a sigh. “She never actually got admitted, did she?”
“She told the nurse you were an abusive boyfriend and she was trying to get away,” my uncle said. “The nurse let her walk in and then walk right out the back door.” He finishes his glass, pours himself another, then raises an eyebrow at me. Wearily I nod, and he refills my glass. We sit sipping whiskey. It’s excellent, but the warm glow forming in the pit of my stomach is doing nothing to make me feel better.
“Your sister,” my uncle says, and then he sighs. “Do you remember when I told you about those two men in Jacksonville? One of them was the man who fought with your father that night. Bridges, the one at the monastery.”
I nod. “You brought me a newspaper article. Bridges and Gardner were arrested for drug trafficking.”
“You threw it away. The article.”
I shrug. “I guess so.”
“Your sister took it out of the trash and kept it,” he says.
I can’t think of a response at first and just stare at my uncle instead. Someone down in the kitchen is shouting about an order for a table of twelve. “Why?” I ask finally.
“She came to me,” my uncle says, “when she was about to graduate from high school. You were in college. She showed me the article and asked me if I knew where those men were. I told her they were still in prison. Then she asked me if I knew where the man you called Ponytail was.”
My heart feels as if it’s pounding in my throat. “Did you?” I ask.
He sips his whiskey again. “I had an idea,” he says. “Susannah wanted to find him. I told her no, tried to talk her out of it. She … wasn’t persuaded.” He gives me a faint smile. “She told me she would go look for him with or without my help.” He shrugs. “I thought she might be safer if I helped her.”
I stared at him. “What are you saying? That she was … on some sort of vendetta?”
“She blames herself for what happened to you and your parents,” he says. “You went running down the hall to give your father his pistol. She was angry with you, thought you were dismissing her. So she tripped you.”
I’m running down the hall, the gun in my hand, my father and Bridges struggling, my mother and Kayla crying out. Susannah scowls at me from her doorway. She sticks out her foot. I trip and fall, the gun in my hand going off. And then Ponytail comes in with a hand cannon and shoots, and there’s blood and screams. I shut my eyes and raise my hand as if to blot the memory out. “It’s … she didn’t—”
“Doesn’t matter,” Uncle Gavin says. “She thinks it was her fault. That’s her perception, so that’s her reality. And she was going to do what she could to make it right.”
I open my eyes and look at my uncle, horrified. “Are you saying that for the past few years, she was looking for Donny Wharton?”
“She was looking for justice,” my uncle says. “Or whatever version of it she could find.”
Nashville, Susannah told me when I asked where she had been. Cleveland for a little while. Saint Louis. Wanted to head out west, maybe Montana. Had she been following Donny, tracking him from one town to another?
“You said you helped her,” I say, my voice sounding as if it is coming from far away. “What do you mean?”
Uncle Gavin puts his glass down, then gives it a quarter turn on his desk. “I tried to help her find him,” he says. “Sent her money if she needed it. She would check in every month—it was my rule; she had to call at least once a month. Sometimes she’d call and just say she was fine, then hang up. Other times she would need cash wired to some town in the middle of nowhere, or ask me if I had any contacts in Kansas City, or Saint Louis, or Biloxi.” He shakes his head. “Here in Atlanta, I know lots of things, the right people to call. Out there …” He sighs again, gives his glass another quarter turn.
“What happened with Marisa?” I murmur.
He holds the glass still and looks down into it. “Susannah called me late that night,” he says. “She needed help. I couldn’t send anyone; I had to come myself. She was on Roswell Road, all the way up near Dalrymple in the parking lot of some strip mall. Most of the businesses were shuttered. I drove up there and pulled into the parking lot
, and she was standing at the far end of the strip, as far away from the main road as she could be. Almost didn’t see her, but she called when I turned into the lot and told me where she was. She took me behind the building to the service bays. There was a red Audi parked in one. Marisa was in the car, sitting behind the wheel.” He turns the glass another quarter turn. “She was dead.”
I drink the rest of my whiskey, my hand shaking ever so slightly, then put the glass down and drop my face into my hands again. Suze, I think.
“Susannah told me what Marisa had done to you, to her. Marisa found that article about those men from Jacksonville in your sister’s backpack. That must be how she learned their names. I don’t know how your sister found her, but she got Marisa to agree to meet her after … the situation at your house. They met, and argued, and Marisa told her what she’d done, how she was looking for Donny Wharton and the others.” My uncle looks directly at me, and for the first time ever his face is completely unguarded—he looks old, old and tired, like a rock face etched and worn down by wind and weather and time. “Your sister told her to stop, and Marisa started yelling, going berserk, tried to claw out your sister’s eyes. So your sister hit her, in the throat. She told me she just wanted to shut her up. Instead, she crushed her windpipe.”
My sister killed her, I think. Murdered her. I want to tell my uncle to stop, to not tell me anymore, and yet I’m drawn to listen, to hear, no matter how sick it makes me feel.
“We put Marisa in the trunk of her car, and I drove it onto 285,” he says. “There’s an industrial district on the Chattahoochee south of Six Flags. I left her car behind one of the warehouses down there, tucked behind a dumpster. If I’d had more time, I could have maybe made her vanish, but this was the best I could do. Susannah followed in my car, picked me up, and we left. Then I drove her to Birchwood and she checked in.”
I stare at the blue carpet on the floor, trying to discern some pattern in the threads. “What about fingerprints?” I say. “Hair, all of that?” I look up. “Jesus, Uncle Gavin, you could both go to prison. Get the death penalty.”
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