A Twist of the Knife

by Becky Masterman

  “So what’s the story?”

  She started, “You were five years old. Ariel was little, and I was in my first trimester with Todd, so I wasn’t showing yet. You remember Uncle John?” She spoke a little more slowly than usual, as if we had a lot of time to kill and she wanted to make the story last. Or as if she was telling me something complicated about economics and it was important I understand.

  “Sure. Dad’s older brother by ten years. Battle of the Bulge. World War II prisoner of war. Serious alcoholic. Used to go out to the car to take an extra nip during family get-togethers.”

  “He was always after me. John was.”

  Whoa. Not the story I was expecting. “As in sexually?”

  She nodded. “For a while it was pats on the bum that no one else saw.”

  “Why didn’t you tell Dad?”

  “You think Dad would have believed me?” Mom looked at me with her face closing together, as if speculating whether I was smart enough to get what she was about to say. “I was able to avoid John most of the time by never being alone with him. But there was a birthday party, your fifth. You were in the kitchen with me, watching me put candles on your cake. Uncle John came up behind me.”

  Mom stopped, and took a deep breath. She looked at her watch again.

  She said, “I thought it was Dad when he put his hands on my hips and turned me around. John kissed me before I could dodge away. Your father came in and saw us.”

  I remembered things from when I was five, but I couldn’t remember that and told her so.

  “Of course you don’t remember. This was my life, not yours.”

  I pictured instant throwing. Maybe the birthday cake against the wall. What else could there have been? “What did Dad do?”

  “He was quiet, but after everyone left he blamed me. He was so angry.” She stopped again, crossed her arms over her elder belly in remembered pain, and added, “I almost lost Todd that night.”

  “Did you lie when you told me he never hit you?”

  “He didn’t hit me.”

  We both stopped, and our eyes connected for longer than they ever had before. I didn’t call it marital rape. Fifty years ago no one did. Fifty years of knowing how a man could hurt a woman, but I had never known my own house. Five years old, what would I have done? I asked, “What happened to Uncle John? I remember seeing him every holiday and family celebration after that.”

  “Dad never blamed John. He was the heroic big brother. I was only the wife. Blood—”

  “—is thicker than water,” I finished for her.

  Now there’s a piece of intel I never had. Over something so small. A kiss. Can the course of life turn on something so small? There was something in me that wanted to go back and view our family past differently from the way Mom knew it, the way she was telling me. Stupidly, still a child in some respects, I wanted to salvage us, to force her to remain the old Saint Mom I knew. “He didn’t divorce you. And he was pretty good to us kids, roughhoused with us, taught us to shoot, even the ride-alongs as soon as we were old enough.” But it sounded lame even before the words finished.

  “After that night he never touched me again. But that’s not all. Among your father’s many qualities is the ability to hold a grudge.” She glanced down the hall as if feeling at a distance the tug of anger that connected the two of them. “You think I wanted you to grow up into such a hard person? You think I wanted you to become bait for sex maniacs?” Then she calmed herself down as the rest of us would not. She looked at her watch. “I tried to keep it out of the house, but the more I protested, the more he brought home the stories, left the photos lying around for you to see. Giving you a copy of In Cold Blood for your thirteenth birthday. Looking at me as he did it with a little smile and a twinkle in his eye, daring me to challenge him. He treated it all like a joke between us, and I hated him for it. Oh, I don’t think he had a specific plan to avenge my kissing his brother.” Mom nearly chuckled. “He’s not that clever. But it was after that night that he started to change. I got so tired of fighting him. So I let him suck you into his world. And that’s what happened, didn’t it? He took all of you.”

  I was caught partway between adult sympathy and protecting anything good in my memory of childhood. “You gave up easy. Those photograph albums that don’t have pictures of me after the age of ten. That’s why you stopped taking pictures of us, because you’d given up.”

  Mom must have been able to tell this was hurting me even if I swore it wouldn’t. She stroked my arm as if it would calm me. I was surprised that it did.

  She said, “What possible good could have come out of making you love me, but hate him? And I didn’t give up. I tended the house and sewed little dresses and listened to the occasional sly remark about how I wasn’t like the rest of you. I never gave up, I only kept trying to show what normal looked like. Even now I’m not sure there isn’t a good reason for keeping my mouth shut.” She looked at her watch again. We had been sitting there about fifteen minutes. “But you know, dear, there comes a point when you’ve had it with self-sacrifice.”

  I felt my heart speed up, still not knowing why. I always thought I knew Mom. I still did. “So why are you telling me this now?”

  “Because I want, just once, for you to know me. Me. This is my one chance to either win you back or lose you forever. I know I don’t have your love, but oh my dear, I deserve it. I deserve it.”

  I held up my hands as in giving up. “I don’t understand. What do you need me to do?”

  “I want you to give him up,” she said.

  “It’s not up to me,” I said.

  “No. It’s up to me,” she said. She looked down the hall toward Dad’s room, and I looked, too. A nurse had gone in. She wasn’t in there very long. As Mom and I watched, she came back out, moving faster now, back to the nurses’ station. Immediately there came a voice over the PA system, “Paging Dr. Sinclair. Paging Dr. Sinclair.”

  Mom looked at her watch again. “I’ve spent so much time here I know that code. We can go now,” she said. “I think we can go.” But she didn’t move.

  I jumped up from the chair, wanting to run down the hall and stay by Mom’s side in equal measure. “You’re telling me Dad is dead.”

  “He wasn’t altogether, when you arrived.” Mom didn’t stand. She placed the hand that had been holding mine over the other, which rested in her lap.

  In a voice too small to be Brigid Quinn’s, I said, “Mom. What did you do?”

  She took my hand in hers and pressed my palm to her cheek as if she was forcing me to reassure her rather than the other way around. “If you know nothing else, you have to know I did nothing. I just let him go. Maybe it was a heart attack. I only know I watched his breath get lighter and slower, and with each one I felt this lightness growing in my chest, like a response. I couldn’t force myself to stop the lightness. So I did nothing, didn’t call someone to bring him back. I wanted to let a little time go by to make sure he was gone. That’s all I did.” Maybe later reality would hit her, but for now she seemed ethereally calm as she said, “I’ve never watched someone dying before. I suppose you have.”

  Forty-nine

  Two days later …

  I kept in constant touch with Carlo as we arranged for the funeral and picked out a casket. I told him how the hospital had said the tissue of Dad’s lungs was thinner than we thought, too thin to withstand his coughing without rupture. They said he died peacefully and rather suddenly, probably of heart failure, and there was no sign of distress. They appeared to be relieved that Mom was not going to sue them for moving Dad out of ICU, where his life would have been prolonged.

  We couldn’t reach Ariel, my sister in the CIA. So the wake at Kreller’s Funeral Home was the rest of us and whoever knew Todd. After everyone had left, I heard a mild commotion out front. A voice said, “Service animal,” and then Laura walked into the viewing area with Larry, who didn’t have his uniform on. I bent over to pet him.

  “Am I forgiven?�
� I asked them both. Larry wagged his tail, apparently letting bygones be bygones.

  Laura paid her condolences to Mom, and we sat down for a moment in one of the empty chairs. I could tell she hesitated to talk about the case, with my father having just died and all, so I started for her. “Hey, it was really really nice that you didn’t kill Alison.”

  “I couldn’t kill his child,” she said, and added, “I’ve been to see her.”

  “That’s good,” I said. “I’m hurting for that kid.”

  Laura didn’t point out that she and Alison were about the same age. She said, “I took her Marcus’s photo album.”

  “Also good.”

  “And Will Hench is going to take her case. He and I will make sure she gets the best defense possible. The prosecutor loves her because of her work, and we’ll make a deal. Maybe parole after five years.”

  “Good for us all,” I said, taking a deeper breath than I had all day. This time I felt more confident that Laura would win.

  When she left, I noticed Todd down on the kneeler they put out for anyone who wants to pray in front of the casket. The thing reminded me of an immense silver bullet, kind of appropriate for sending off a cop. And Quinn-like, we weren’t talking about Dad, but no one was there to notice, as this was the family time before the casket was finally shut. I don’t recall that any of us cried that day, or the day before or after, but maybe in the privacy of their own homes the others did.

  “It was nice working with you, little brother,” I said.

  “Likewise. We should do it again sometime.”

  “Better we shouldn’t press our luck.”

  Todd placed his palms together in that pious way they taught us as kids and raised his eyes to the crucifix on the wall behind the casket. He said, “Listen, I talked to Delgado and Madeline together. They tried to remember what happened back then with the fingerprint examiner and the Creighton case. Best I can piece together after all this time is that they remember acting in an upright manner. No threats, no coercion of any kind to get Mack to interpret those prints. They said why bother, they had Shayna Murry blowing the alibi to get the conviction. As upright as you and me, I guess.”

  Maybe more so. “It’s hard enough to remember exactly what you say, let alone try to figure out what the other person heard. Chances are good Mack is funneling it all through his own warped sense of what he was called to do. And it was a long time ago. You’re going to just let it go, right?”

  “Right. If Mack wants to stir the shit if and when he comes to trial, that’s up to him.”

  “Good call. Delgado express any regret about sending an innocent man to his death?”

  “Not to me, but no telling what a man thinks to himself.”

  The kneeling was for show; Todd thought Mom would like it. I was the only one who knew how Mom really felt, and I didn’t think I’d tell Todd. No need to make him hate Dad more than he already did. I got up from the kneeler and moved to the head of the casket. They had Dad in the same suit he wore to Todd’s wife’s funeral. He had lost so much weight in his final illness I could feel his bones through the padded shoulders. I leaned over and kissed his screwed-up head, not out of forgiveness, but with the thought that if I didn’t, maybe someday I’d wish I had. I turned toward Todd, but he had already moved away.

  There was a startled cry behind us, and I turned to see Carlo had arrived and taken Mom by surprise, wrapping his long arms around her with arm to spare. I didn’t know if Mom would ever take to hugging.

  “You came,” I said. “I told you not to come.”

  “Yet here I am,” he said, and wrapped his arms around me next.

  * * *

  We invited Mom to come out to Tucson, but she said she wanted to stay at Weeping Willow, join the choir at her church, maybe make some friends. And, with that new lightness that had appeared when Dad died, she said that one Quinn was more than enough for Carlo to have on his hands. She said she was going home now to throw out Dad’s clothes.

  The best part of the funeral was when everyone went to their own places and Carlo and I were sharing a bottle of wine on the balcony of my hotel room. At first it was that beloved small talk, nothing where the stakes were life and death. Who was staying with the Pugs. Whether he had eaten the chili. But then the wine opened me, and I talked about Mom and Dad and their embattled life, and forming the words wondered whether, after all, it was sadder than any other life. I told how I had arrived at some understanding, if not love, as far as my mother was concerned. How it made me sad that I had never loved her.

  “Sure you do,” he said. “I’m having another. Want one?”

  I drained my wineglass and lifted it to him. I can’t remember if he noticed, or pretended not to notice for now, the bite mark on my forearm where Larry nailed me.

  “Depends,” I said. “Can we have drunk sex?”

  He took my glass and lightly ran the base against the side of my neck. When he came back with two refills, he handed me my glass and, with that small frown that said he’d been continuing our conversation without me, said, “Maybe we get it wrong sometimes. I’m not sure love is a feeling. Maybe it’s more like a decision. Like the decision your mom made to stick by the family.”

  Other than that bit of pith, he just listened to me some more, asking questions to get beneath what I was saying, but otherwise not speaking. This, too, was a great gift.

  Admittedly, gifts were rare this time around. A man executed for murders he didn’t commit. His guilt-ridden daughter driven to vengeance by her own unwitting culpability in the crime.

  And where’s the justice in the story? That Erroll found his, certainly. That Laura learned something about the limitation of her own power and chose to not kill Alison when she had the chance. That my mother could have fought the battle against my father with her children as the spoils, but she surrendered us to him for our sake. This was her story, and mine, too, that I never knew.

  The fact is, you may think you know someone else’s story, but you don’t. How can you, when you don’t even know your own? Maybe we’re all mysteries that can’t be solved.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to what has become a treasured team of editors principally led by Hope Dellon of St. Martin’s Press in the U.S. (oh, your patience and wisdom!), and including Helen Smith of Penguin Random House (Canada) and Bill Massey of Orion UK. I’m also grateful to India Cooper, the brilliant copy editor who occasionally “discorrects” Brigid Quinn’s speech.

  Helen Heller, my agent. One hour’s conversation with her is worth an MFA program.

  The following experts were always there, to answer any questions and make valuable suggestions. If you want to know more, I urge you to look up these names, as they’ve all written excellent books on their specialty:

  Dr. Jan Leestma and Dr. Scott Wagner, forensic pathologists.

  Peter Stephenson, digital forensics.

  William Bodziak, impression evidence expert, actually, but we talked about wrongful convictions.

  William Bell, correctional facilities.

  Barry Fisher, forensic science.

  Ted Vosk, law.

  Diane France, forensic anthropology.

  Sue Stejskal and the real Chili Dawg, human remains searching.

  Thank you to:

  Julie King, for helping me see Vero Beach, Florida.

  Dr. William Martin and Nadine Martin, for help with medications.

  Readers and authors William Bell, Victoria Bergesen, Ruth Davey, Mickey Getty, and Pat McCord. You were all right. About everything.

  My friend Aimee Graves, recipient of the 2016 Paladin Award for the fight against sex trafficking, and people like her. I have respect and admiration for all the heroes of our justice system, for law enforcement, for the Innocence Project, for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and for the Academy of Forensic Science. My story explores the limitations of science, legal systems, and the individuals within them. This is not to further any cause, but on
ly to discover how complicated is the pursuit of justice.

  And always finally and forever, Frederick Masterman, with whom I look forward to many more years of sharing stories real and fictional. I’m making spaghetti tonight.

  Also by Becky Masterman

  Fear the Darkness

  Rage Against the Dying

  About the Author

  BECKY MASTERMAN, who worked as an acquisitions editor for textbooks on forensics and law enforcement, received her M.A. in creative writing from Florida Atlantic University. Her debut thriller, Rage Against the Dying, was a finalist for the Edgar Award for Best First Novel, the Crime Writer’s Association Goldsboro Gold Dagger Award for Best Crime Novel, as well as the Macavity, Barry, and Anthony Awards. Becky lives in Tucson, Arizona, with her husband.

  Visit her online at www.beckymasterman.com, or sign up for email updates here.

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty