by Nic Joseph
She smiled slightly and nodded. “Crazier.” She took a step closer. “Amy’s an amazing young woman. On the way here, she didn’t say much, but she said something I think you should know.”
“What?”
“She said she wished you’d stop being so hard on yourself because—and this is a direct quote—‘even though it’s been hard, maybe all three of us are better off now.’ I’m not totally sure what she was referring to, but it seemed like—”
“She said that?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Better, not broken…”
“What?”
“Oh, nothing,” I said. “Just something someone said to me recently.”
Cam raised an eyebrow. “Well, I should get going.”
I nodded, and she moved past me, toward the door.
Better, not broken.
“Wait, Cam.”
“Yeah?” she said, turning back.
She stood in front of me, expectant, waiting, and my tongue felt like a pile of soggy paper towels in my mouth. I didn’t know what I was feeling, so I had no chance of getting it out. I cleared my throat. “Um, I’ll walk you out.”
Something flashed in her eyes, but she didn’t say anything. We moved into the hallway together, and she went straight for the stairs without saying a word. As we walked into the stairwell, I felt like the biggest idiot on earth.
Not only could I not bring myself to make a move, but I was forcing her to walk down the stairs. Still, I couldn’t turn back now. We went down in silence, her a step ahead of me, and I tried to think of something else to say.
She beat me to the punch.
When she reached the bottom step, she whipped around. I had to stop myself from barreling into her, and I reached out a hand to grab the banister.
“Are you seriously going to make me do all of the heavy lifting?”
“What?”
“I swore to myself, after that night in Milwaukee, that I would never bring it up. Never. I’m always the one who brings it up. I always say something, put it out there. Has it worked out for me so far? No. So I talked to myself. I literally stood in front of the mirror and said, ‘Cam, if he’s interested, he’ll say something. He’ll do something.’”
I stumbled to find a response. “Cam—”
“Because for some reason, when you’re a woman with a brain and a mouth, guys seem to forget you’re still a woman, and you still want to be treated like a woman sometimes, and you still want the guy to make the first move, even though you know you can.”
“I—”
“And I know this is not the best time to bring this up, but you keep looking at me like that, and I keep telling myself not to wait around, and I still am, and I’m tired of waiting for you to stop acting like there’s not a thing, because it sure feels like there’s a thing—”
“There’s a thing,” I said, cutting in, feeling like the biggest idiot in the world, but knowing this was my last shot. “That’s for fucking sure; there is a thing.”
It was the most eloquent thing I could come up with.
“Then what’s the problem?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I thought you weren’t interested because you never said anything after Milwaukee—”
“You never said anything!” she said. “Do you know how that feels? You never said a word.”
“I thought we both weren’t saying a word!” I said. I shook my head. “And that was so incredibly…dumb.” I took one more step down until we were inches apart. “I can’t justify it. Of course I’ve thought about it, and every time I thought about saying something, it hit me that you’re pretty much the only person I have, besides Amy, and if a relationship would ruin that, I don’t know. I guess I just got scared.”
“Oh, please. I am way too old for that bullshit, and so are you,” she said. “Being scared of a relationship is for twenty-three-year-olds and pop stars. If you—”
I stepped forward and closed the small gap between us, dropping my lips on hers. She tasted like anger and sweetness and a bit of the Cam smirk, and after a couple of seconds, she gave in, reaching up to loop her arms around my neck and pulling me closer. It was a gentle, sweet kiss, and I let my hands settle on her waist. We stood like that for a long moment, drinking each other in.
We pulled away slowly, breathing heavily, and the expression on her face was intoxicating. I leaned in for more, but she put a hand on my chest.
“That’s a good start,” she said. “But I should probably go now. For real this time.”
I smiled softly and dropped my hands from her waist. Together, we walked through the stairwell door and into the lobby. We went outside to her car, and she got inside.
“I’ll call you tomorrow,” I said, kissing her lightly again before she closed the door. She waved as she drove away.
I took a deep breath and turned to head back up the stairs. I was opening the door when I heard a woman’s voice behind me.
“Francis?”
I spun around, looking for Cam, but instead, I came eye to eye with the last person on earth I expected to see at that moment.
Kira Jones.
I frowned. “This is not the right time,” I said. “I’m not telling you anything, so you might as well—”
“Why haven’t you been answering your phone?”
“I’m not telling you anything about Matthew Farr—”
“You found him?”
“Yes—”
“Is he okay?”
“Yes,” I started, but she put her head in her hands and crumpled forward.
“Thank God,” she said. “Where was he?”
“Not with my father, if that’s your question, but I’m not going to talk to you about this. I can’t believe you came here—”
“No, no,” she said. “That’s not why I’m here. I mean, I’m so thankful he’s okay, but that’s not why I came. Shit, so you didn’t listen to my messages?”
“If you didn’t hear me, I was very busy tonight,” I said.
“I’ve been looking for you all day.” She reached into her bag and pulled out a stack of crumpled papers.
“What’s that?”
“It’s my draft,” she said breathlessly. “My draft of Sam Farr’s memoir.”
She held the bunched papers in her hands, and she stared at me as if she was waiting for me to understand, to grasp something. She was breathing heavily, and her eyes were wild, and she thrust the papers toward me again, some scattering and blowing off into the night.
“What the hell… Why are you giving me this?”
“It doesn’t make sense,” she said, her voice shaking. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“Kira, calm down and tell me what the hell is going on.”
“I was writing it. I was in the middle of writing it, and I was looking at my notes from my last meeting with Sam Farr. And I realized it doesn’t make sense!”
“What doesn’t make sense?” I asked, raising my voice, too tired to stand out there talking about her ridiculous book.
“The story doesn’t make sense, and I finally figured out why. Sam Farr has been lying about what happened that night, and I have proof,” she said, lifting the stack of papers again. “He’s been lying for twenty-three years, and the proof is all right here.”
Chapter Forty-Two
Not for the first time that night, I felt as if I’d been lifted clean off the ground and tossed over the side of a cliff. The papers were swirling all around us now, dancing in the wind, taunting us and mocking us.
She was watching the papers and watching me, and I could tell she was having trouble concentrating, alternating between mumbled words and reaching out to catch the floating pages.
“What are you talking about?” I asked, grabbing one that had just smacked me in the face and peeling the
paper away from my skin. I looked down at it, and the words seemed to crawl together, a failed attempt to make sense of something completely nonsensical, something unexplainably tragic.
“I was writing, and the notes didn’t add up. I just…” She stopped and looked around her in dismay at the mess. She reached down and picked up a few more papers. “Can we go inside?”
I nodded, and we walked into the building, leaving Sam Farr’s story to litter the street and sidewalk. As we went in, I held up a finger toward Amy’s closed door and led Kira to the kitchen counter, where she sat down, shivering.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
She took a deep breath, and then the words tumbled out of her. “I write off of my tapes. That’s how I’ve been doing it. No structure, barely any fluff. Just the straight facts and details, based on what Sam tells me. He remembered so many details. I’m going to go back later and add more. Up until now, I was just trying to get the timeline down. But now that I know he’s lying to me, who knows what I’ll have to go back and fix.”
“Kira,” I said, resisting the urge to shake her, “you’re not telling me what’s going on. What happened?” I leaned against the counter. “What do you mean you know he was lying?”
“Because,” she said, “Sam told me he went back upstairs after the puppet show. And he heard some sort of noise, and he went into the bathroom and found Lucas in the tub.”
“Yeah,” I said. “So?”
“And then he ran downstairs, and everyone followed him back upstairs, and then your mother, Kate, was screaming at him, demanding he tell her what happened.”
“Right,” I said slowly. “That’s not a lie. I was there.”
“I know,” she said. “But what did Sam do after that?”
“He didn’t answer her,” I said. “That was one of the things the prosecutors harped on. He didn’t say anything. He just put his toys away.”
“His puppets.”
“Yeah. She’s yelling, and he’s putting the puppets away like a little…robot.”
“That was the problem,” she said.
“What?”
“Don’t you see? When everyone came back upstairs, they found him putting the puppets away. The other seven puppets. Sam Farr had a collection of nine, and he used only two for the show that night.”
“So what?” I asked. “What’s that got to do with anything? The significance of the puppets was analyzed over and over again. I know it’s weird, but the kid liked puppets. What did that have to do with anything?”
“The puppets are everything,” she said. “Because he only took two downstairs with him. Sam left the other seven puppets sprawled out across the bed of a boy he didn’t know that well and that, it turns out, he didn’t like all that much.”
I paused as her words began to sink in. “You mean…”
“There’s only one world where Sam Farr would have left his puppets upstairs, out of the case, sprawled out on the bed, as you, he, and everyone else that night described it. The puppets he guarded with his life. There’s only one reason why he would have left them there, unprotected, while he was downstairs performing in front of you and your family, and that’s because he knew there was nobody upstairs who could have harmed them.”
“What?” I asked. “But…”
“When everyone rushed upstairs to find Lucas, Sam had only one thought: protect them. But he didn’t need to protect them when he went downstairs to perform. Why? Because—”
“Lucas was already dead.”
The words slipped from my lips, and even though I couldn’t believe what I was saying, I knew they were true.
“The medical examiner was close, but not close enough. Or maybe he said what the town wanted him to say. Your brother didn’t die after the puppet show. He was dead before Sam went downstairs, and Sam knew it.”
“Why would he lie?” I asked. I stood and walked quickly toward the door.
“Where are you going?”
“Back to the hospital,” I said. “I need to talk to him.”
“I’m coming with you.”
We were heading out the door when I stopped, and Kira crashed into my back.
“What?” she asked.
“But that means…” I shook my head as I tried to sort through what was bothering me the most about what Kira had told me. “That means he didn’t die while we were all downstairs in the living room.”
Her eyes widened. “You’re right, Francis. There were a lot of other people who were in the house that night who may have known something about what happened to your brother. The timing changes everything. Who went upstairs after dinner?”
I closed my eyes and tried to revisit that night, picturing the rooms as people scattered. My father had been in the kitchen, talking to me about being in such a bad mood. Elizabeth Farr had been in the living room, setting up the “stage” for her son so he could start his performance.
That left…
“Brian Farr,” I said. “I don’t know where he was. He could have been upstairs and—”
I paused, my mind going back to the conversation I’d had in the kitchen with my father.
“And what?” Kira asked, peering at me.
My father had said she’d been upstairs getting a board game—Clue—to keep me from being so bored that evening.
She’d been delighted about her party but disappointed I was having such a bad time.
She was one of only two people who couldn’t be accounted for at the moment Lucas had died.
“What is it, Francis?”
“My mother,” I breathed, turning to face Kira and watching the blood drain from her face. “My mother was up there too.”
Chapter Forty-Three
I didn’t lift my foot from the accelerator for the entire drive.
I sped along toward the home of one of the two people who could help solve the mystery of what had happened to my brother.
And it was then that the tears started again.
Kira didn’t say anything—she didn’t reach over to comfort me, or search for a tissue, or anything of the sort. She didn’t acknowledge my tears at all, and I was grateful for it.
I slowed only when I turned onto the street in front of my mother’s house. I drove past the house and pulled over a few houses down. Using the palms of my hands, I wiped furiously at my face.
“Are you okay?” Kira asked, peering at me with concern.
“Yeah. I’m just not sure what I came here to ask her.” She nodded as I put the car in reverse and backed down the street.
We opened the car doors and stepped out. As we walked up to the front door, I had to force myself to put one foot in front of the other and resist the urge to dart back to my car and drive away. Suddenly, I felt thirteen again, desperate to find a place to hide from it all.
I took a deep breath and rang the doorbell.
My mother opened it a full minute later and stared at me in shock.
“Francis. What are you doing here?”
“Can I come in?”
She moved back and allowed me to enter, a look of confusion on her face.
“Who is this?” she asked, looking at Kira, who followed me inside without saying anything. “Francis?”
“This is Kira Jones,” I said. “She’s a writer. She’s working with me on the Matthew Farr case.”
“Nice to meet you,” Kira said, reaching out a hand toward my mother.
My mother shook it cautiously. We stood in the foyer, and then she seemed to think twice and ushered us farther into the house. “Well, since you’re going to just stand there and look at me like I did something wrong, maybe we can get inside away from the door,” she said.
We walked into the kitchen, and she stood with her hands behind her, braced on the edge of the sink. I stayed near the door. Kira walked inside and stoo
d with her back against the fridge, and we all stared at one another.
No one spoke for a long time.
“What’s up?” my mother asked.
“Where did you go after dinner?”
Her eyes widened, and she looked quickly at Kira before returning her gaze to me. “What are you talking about?”
“After dinner. On the night Lucas died. Where did you go right after dinner?”
She blinked and stared at me, and her expression changed from confusion, to shock, to complete and utter fear.
“What are you talking about, and why would you ask me that?”
She looked again at Kira for help, or an explanation, but Kira didn’t say anything. My mother turned back to me, her eyes wider now, wild.
“Francis, if you have a problem, you should just say it,” she said.
“You lied. You never told the whole truth.”
“What?” she asked. “Why would I lie about that?”
“That’s why I’m here. To find out.”
She shifted, and her entire body was shaking. “Why are you bringing all of this up now? Is it because of your father? Because he took that boy?”
“No,” I said. “He didn’t take the boy. Matthew’s been found.”
“Well, that’s great,” she said. “Then why are you here?” She frowned, and I could see she was pleading with me to let it go. “If he’s been found, then what’s the point?”
“I told you, it doesn’t make any sense,” I said.
“Lucas didn’t die after Sam’s puppet show,” Kira said, chiming in. “He was dead before that. He died at least half an hour before that.”
My mother slumped back against the sink.
“What are you—”
“We can prove it. Now tell me where you went,” I said, “because I know you were upstairs.”
“What do you mean?” she hissed. “What are you talking about?” She stepped closer to me now, and everything changed. I saw what looked like a mixture of fear and rage in her eyes. “What the hell are you insinuating?”
“Just tell me the truth.”
“It looks like you already know,” she said, and my breath caught. “You don’t think I’ve judged myself enough? I mean, I know you’re here to find out what happened, but you must understand that I’ve kicked myself every day since that night, thinking about what I was doing, where I was, in the last few minutes before he died. Making out with another man right upstairs. You don’t think I’ve hated myself?”