by E. C. Diskin
“Where’s Ginny?” Brooklyn asked as the kids rambled toward the house.
“She wouldn’t go to church with us,” Simon said. “She said she was done with that place and wanted to go to an AA meeting.”
“Well, going to a meeting is good. Right?”
“Maybe,” he said, shaking his head as if he were done trying to understand her. “Come on in.”
The kids disappeared inside, and Simon led Brooklyn into the kitchen for coffee.
“Brooklyn, I suppose I should tell you,” he said, lowering his voice. “I finally told Ginny that I want a divorce—”
Brooklyn sat at the table. “Oh, Simon, I’m so sorry.”
He waved off the concern. “She’s not taking it well, even called Pastor Gary over here Friday night, but it had to happen.”
“Pastor Gary?” Brooklyn asked.
“He runs the youth group at the church, and he’s been great counsel for Ginny. You know him, right?”
“I don’t think so. Should I? I’ve never been to your church.”
“Oh, right, but he actually used to be at your church in Eden. He’s known Ginny since she was a little girl.”
That pastor. The one Bonnie said Ginny loved. “Sure,” she said.
“He’s been here for more than a dozen years, so maybe you wouldn’t even remember him, but he seems to be the only one who’s ever helped her.”
Brooklyn recalled the newspaper clipping—the church pastor who’d provided the teen an alibi for the time of the shooting at the abortion clinic. She nodded while Simon poured the coffee.
“Have you and Ginny been able to agree on a game plan for your dad?”
“I don’t know, actually. I was hopeful when we last spoke on Thursday, but there’s a lot we need to talk about. She set up a bed for him at the house, but yesterday I learned that she’s lined up a rehab facility, probably found him a nursing home too.”
“Well, the rehab facility is the best place for him right now. But there aren’t great options for nursing-home care around here. There’s just not enough help to go around.”
“Exactly.” It was Brooklyn’s biggest fear.
“Well, please feel free to wait for her. I’m guessing she won’t be too long, but I’ve got to do some work in the study, if you don’t mind, and then I’m taking the kids fishing in a little bit.”
“Of course. Don’t let me keep you. I’ve got a bunch of emails to get through anyway,” she said, raising her phone.
Simon left her in the kitchen, passing the kids, who’d planted themselves in front of the television in the adjoining room, and went down the hall to his office.
Brooklyn sipped her coffee and stared at the mess on the nearby desk. She’d raced over here, convinced Ginny might have shot Darius Woods, but as she looked around the kitchen, and at those two kids in the next room, it felt impossible. She didn’t know her sister, and the chaos of the kitchen sink alone suggested someone depressed or overwhelmed or unorganized, but . . . this house was filled with love. The evidence was all over the room—the painted handprint pictures on the fridge, the little handmade pottery on the table adorned with Lyla’s and Mikey’s signatures, the piles of crafts on the counter. Ginny was a good mother. Brooklyn couldn’t believe that a good mother would shoot someone. It seemed absurd. She might have done something awful as a teen, and maybe Darius wrote about it, but Brooklyn had to believe that Ginny went to his hospital room to talk to him. That had to be all.
Of course, if Ginny had shot that doctor back in high school and the screenplay would expose that secret . . . she’d feel desperate. She’d drink too much. She’d lie. And Brooklyn still felt like she hadn’t gotten the whole story about how Dad fell.
What if Ginny shot Darius? What if Dad tried to stop her and she pushed him . . . What if she really was the reason Dad was in the hospital? What if she had hit him in the head? That cast iron doorstop. He could have fallen on it. He could have been hit with it. She didn’t know Ginny at all.
Brooklyn took another breath and a sip of coffee. Was this her melodramatic mind at work? Or was Ginny struggling to hold her life together, with a marriage falling apart, a substance problem, and a secret she was desperate to stop from getting out?
She looked around the kitchen. If Dad’s gun was in this house . . .
She walked to Simon’s study and stood in the doorway. “Sorry to interrupt. Ginny said she had one of Mom’s sweaters that I wanted to get. Would it be okay if I went up and checked her closet?” She couldn’t imagine where in this big house Ginny might have hidden Dad’s gun, but the bedroom seemed like a good place to start.
“Knock yourself out,” Simon said.
Brooklyn walked up the steps, passing all the pictures of the kids on the wall. In the master bedroom, she found a large closet that must have been a small bedroom at some point in the home’s history.
Both Ginny’s and Simon’s things filled the space, and the entire back wall was covered in shelves. She opened a few shoeboxes and pushed around some of the clothes on the shelf. Nothing. She couldn’t tear the whole closet apart. It could take an hour. But as she walked back toward the bedroom, she spotted some big hardback books stacked on a shelf. Eden High yearbooks. The design hadn’t changed in the two decades between their graduating classes.
Ginny had gone to school with Darius. Had they known each other well enough to write in each other’s books? If they were friends, she couldn’t have . . . Brooklyn had to look. She pulled the first one. Ginny’s freshman year. She leafed through the pages until she found Ginny’s picture. A waif of a girl with a self-conscious smile. No one had written any notes, but a few of the other kids’ photos were framed with marker—her friends, Brooklyn guessed. She leafed from the As to the Ws and spotted a young Darius. If he hadn’t been the only black kid on the page, she might not have recognized him. He looked so small as a freshman, like he still belonged in middle school. There was no marker around his face. Brooklyn grabbed the next year’s book and checked again. No marker, but Darius had transformed, his shoulders now broad and his smile wide. She closed the book. She was getting sidetracked.
But as she turned the book on its side to put it back, a large photo slipped out from between its pages. It was a shot of the church youth group, on a mission trip, dated 1997. Brooklyn found her parents in the photo, the chaperones, no doubt, alongside about fifteen kids. Ginny was standing at the end of the row, a big grin on her face, the pastor behind her, his hands resting on her shoulders. Brooklyn had never seen her sister look so happy. But those hands on her shoulders reminded Brooklyn of that creepy Pastor Neil from First Hope, always massaging Brooklyn when he came up to talk to her and her parents. She’d never been able to articulate why she found him creepy and even felt a little guilty for her discomfort, but after Spotlight came out, and then The Keepers, Brooklyn realized that no men were above suspicion. Something had told her to be wary.
She put the picture back in the book. She was supposed to be looking for a gun. She went to Ginny’s dresser in the bedroom and felt around inside the drawers. She felt something hard and grabbed it. A half-empty wine bottle. More lies. When she’d talked to Ginny on Thursday at the hospital, Ginny had sworn she’d had her last drink. She’d told Simon she was going to AA this morning.
Brooklyn looked at the bed and the tables beside it. One table housed a medical journal and reading glasses, so she went to the other side of the bed, quickly pulling open each drawer of the table. No gun. She grabbed a notepad from the drawer, scanning the empty pages until she was left with the inside of the back cover. On it was a handwritten list of usernames and passwords.
Brooklyn sat on the bed and scanned down the list . . . email, bank, PayPal, Facebook. She grabbed her phone, took a snapshot of the list, and then, after only a brief hesitation, signed in to Ginny’s email. She didn’t even know what she was looking for.
Lots of unopened junk mail.
She closed out of the email and opened her own Facebo
ok app, signing in with Ginny’s information. She searched Ginny’s friend contacts. Darius was there. Checking Messenger, she found his name again. Ginny had been in touch with Darius just before he arrived in town. And there was an attachment.
The screenplay.
Brooklyn could finally see for herself what happened all those years ago and whether this script had anything to do with his shooting. She downloaded it to her phone.
“What are you doing?” a voice said from the doorway.
Brooklyn jumped and looked up. Lyla was standing there, head cocked. “Daddy said you needed a sweater.”
Brooklyn smiled. “That’s right. Just checking something on my phone.” She dropped the phone and went to the walk-in closet. Lyla trailed behind her.
“What does it look like?” Lyla asked.
“Uh. Pink. Stripes,” Brooklyn said. She went to the back of the closet, facing a wall of shelves and began lifting the stacks while Lyla, crouched on the ground, looked on a shelf by the door.
“I don’t see it,” Lyla said. “Mom hates pink.”
“I guess it’s not here,” Brooklyn said, her hand deep under a pile of sweaters on the bottom. But then she felt the corner of something. A plastic bag.
Brooklyn let the sweaters fall back down and turned to Lyla. “Shall we go back downstairs?”
She waited until the little girl had left the closet, then she lifted the stack of sweaters, peering beneath.
There was a Ziploc bag. And in it, Dad’s gun.
CHAPTER THIRTY
GINNY PULLED INTO THE DRIVEWAY and looked at the huge house. When Simon had shown it to her all those years ago, it had almost felt like a dream, like he was going to save her from despair. But now, the only thing she knew was that it was over, and she and the kids had to get away from here.
It had only been three days of sobriety, but she was feeling stronger. Clear. She knew what she had to do.
The law would be on Simon’s side, she’d learned after a few Google searches, because he’d always believed the kids to be his, had signed their birth certificates, and she supposed that was how it should be. She hoped that once Simon learned the truth, it wouldn’t affect his love for them. She didn’t want them to lose the only dad they’d ever known.
When she walked inside, both kids left the TV and ran to her with hugs and hellos. She kissed them both and asked how church had been. “Boring,” they said in unison.
“You just missed Brooklyn,” Mikey said.
“I did?”
“Yeah, she wanted one of Grandma’s sweaters. But she couldn’t find it.”
“She was in my closet?” She began running up the stairs before Lyla answered.
If Brooklyn had found Dad’s gun, she might go to the sheriff. Ginny had never given Brooklyn a reason to trust her or care about what happened to her. She’d lose the kids for sure.
Ginny ran into the closet and shut the door behind her. She went to the pile of clothes that sat atop the gun. It was gone.
When she opened the door, Lyla was standing there, her arms on the doorframes like a barricade.
Ginny grinned, attempting a calm she couldn’t even remember. “You scared me!” she said.
Lyla laughed. “I scared Brooklyn too.”
Ginny looked around the room. The bedside drawer was open. Her notepad was on the bed. “Were you up here with her?”
“Yeah. I helped her look in the closet.” Lyla stepped inside the space. “I looked through these stacks,” she said proudly, her hand brushing up and down the shelves, “and Brooklyn looked at all of those.” She was waving toward the area where the gun had been.
“And what was she doing when you scared her?”
“She was just sitting on your bed, looking at her phone. You ready to play with me now?”
Ginny patted the top of Lyla’s head and smiled. “Soon, baby,” she said, looking around the room.
“What’s the matter?”
Ginny crouched down to eye level with Lyla. “Grandpa gets out of the hospital today, and I gotta get him situated at his house. Daddy’s taking you and Mikey fishing, okay?”
“But I want you to come,” Lyla said.
“Me too. But we’ll do something special after school tomorrow, okay.”
“Like what?”
“It’s a surprise. It’ll be an adventure, though. Okay? But I gotta go.”
Wilson had brunch with his daughter and her family at Mary’s Diner after the ten o’clock service. At least some things would never change. He’d thought of Eddie all morning, sitting in a jail cell, but it hadn’t even been forty-eight hours. Eddie needed all the mandatory sobriety he could get.
Wilson walked to the counter to pay the check. Donny was there, paying his own bill.
“Hey, there,” Donny said. “I kind of liked your Sunday ritual. Figured we’d give it a try.” He nodded toward the table where Rosa, sitting with two young kids, was finishing her coffee. “Anyway, you got a minute?”
“I got endless minutes,” Wilson said.
“Step outside?”
Wilson followed Donny out the door.
“I wanted to talk to you about the case, and about Eddie.”
“Yeah, about that. It was my house gun on Eddie at the hospital on Friday, but I’ve already had it checked. It was not the gun used against Woods.”
“I heard.”
“But I’m hoping you’ll keep him locked up for another day or two. Maybe we can scare him straight. I’m running out of ideas.”
“Actually, we’re gonna have to let him out today. It’s the law.”
Wilson smiled. “So a favor then. I’ll get him in the morning, Donny. Sunday’s supposed to be a day of rest, right?”
Donny’s face hardened. “Sheriff, please don’t take offense, but I’m just gettin’ started, as you know. I’d really like to avoid letting personal connections influence justice. So just do me a favor and get him today.”
“Wow,” Wilson said. “Kinda thought we’d become friends this week.”
“It’s not personal. We are friends. I’m just trying to do my job. I don’t need to start my time in office with a lawsuit for civil rights violations.”
“Eddie’s not gonna sue anyone, but sure, okay,” Wilson said. Thirty-five years running this town and suddenly, it meant nothing.
“Anyway, I thought you’d be interested in this. I finally talked to Woods after you left the hospital,” Donny said.
“Did he see anything?”
“No. He did have a few run-ins with Eddie back in high school, though. Pretty racially charged. And that scene in the screenplay at the Garden of the Gods—the kid who got roughed up on those rocks—that was Eddie.”
Wilson stopped him. “Yeah, I know.” He’d remembered taking Eddie to the hospital for that dislocated shoulder. Eddie had told him a story about fighting off some black kid who was messing with a girl. The sheriff had asked for a name, but Eddie had refused. He’d figured his kid had been doing something chivalrous and let it go. He’d always had a blind spot when it came to Eddie.
But he still didn’t think that confrontation would make Eddie want to hurt Woods now. “I really think that yesterday’s nonsense was about drugs, unfortunately.”
Donny nodded. “There’s something else, though. Woods sent a copy of the script to your friend’s kid, Ginny Smith, before he arrived in town. Far as I know, she’s the only one who saw it before he got shot. I’m gonna have to pull her in today and ask some questions.”
Wilson kicked at the dirt under his shoe. “You’ve read the screenplay. Do you think Ginny would shoot Woods?”
Donny shrugged. “Maybe. I’m not ruling it out. She can’t want all this to come out—maybe she never even told her husband about what happened in high school.”
Donny still didn’t understand exactly what that screenplay revealed, and Wilson wasn’t about to enlighten him. “I just don’t believe it coulda been Ginny,” Wilson said. “What about the stalker?”
Wilson didn’t like it. “Well, Woods is okay. His dad tells me he’s getting out today. Maybe you should just move on.”
“Are you suggesting I drop this investigation?”
“I’m just saying, if I were you, I wouldn’t want my first case in Eden to be another racially charged, high-profile case. No one’s gonna notice if that shooting doesn’t get solved. I’m sure Woods is leaving town soon, anyway.”
Donny tilted his head. “Sheriff, I get that the Andersons are friends of yours, but I need to follow the law and let the chips fall where they may. You must see that given the racial tension these days, getting justice for the Woods family is more important than ever. I checked the ambulance records. Woods’s father called an ambulance at 8:44 p.m. last Sunday. Mrs. Smith called an ambulance for her father, just four miles away on the other side of town, at 8:58. She could have shot Woods, watched from her car down the road—maybe trying to see if he was dead—and still got home in time to make that call for her dad.”
Wilson’s thoughts were on John. He’d sarcastically agreed when Wilson said John had been lucky that Ginny found him. Maybe because he knew what Ginny had done? Maybe because she’d hurt him too? Now that Wilson had read the screenplay, he finally understood why she might have hated her father. But regardless of their strained relationship, John loved his daughter and wanted to protect her. If something happened to her, he’d suffer.
“Well, Ginny’s in touch with the pastor,” Wilson offered, hoping to move the focus from his friend’s daughter. “If he knew what was in that screenplay . . .”
“I’m gonna pull him in today too.”
“Good. I gotta get home,” Wilson said, walking away. “I’ll get over there for Eddie in a little bit.”
It was the first time he’d lied to a fellow officer of the law. Wilson had lost his power, but he couldn’t sit idly by and watch Donny, so eager to prove himself in Eden, destroy the Andersons.