by Amanda Tru
Cosette heard his words but had a hard time trusting him at first. Was this just some sort of reverse psychology? Was this the adult equivalent of being told you’re going to the ice cream shop, but what isn’t mentioned is that you’re stopping first to get your annual shots?
“Well?” Dad was staring down at her.
Cosette met his gaze and saw only earnestness.
She swallowed hard and managed to find her voice. “Josh didn’t do this to me,” she said, her voice surprisingly steady. “It had to be someone else.”
Mom tensed her body, and Dad let out his breath. “Well then, let’s start going down the list. We have to keep in mind that this could have been some random and senseless act of violence, but we need to rule out every other option as well. Who else did you meet since you arrived here who might have wanted to hurt you?”
Cosette should have been thrilled to have her parents on her side now. She should have been ecstatic that they were at least entertaining the possibility that Josh was another victim in the attack, not the perpetrator.
But the questions her dad was asking her to answer were impossible. Cosette had no idea who’d want to attack her. Nobody had reason or motive. Nobody at all.
“I’d like to see if we can get that waitress in here to answer a few questions,” Dad mused, as if he were now the head detective leading this investigation.
Cosette had to chuckle. The idea of someone like Dottie having anything to do with a brutal assault was the most comical thing she’d heard all day.
“What about that girl you met at the airport?” Mom asked. “What’s her role in all this?”
Cosette paused to think. All along, Missy had been the one warning her about Josh in the first place.
Could she have had something sinister to do with this?
“Grace already talked with her,” Cosette told her parents. “She was in here earlier.”
“Good.” Dad gave a nod of approval. “Someone like that should be questioned.”
“She was the one who came here, though,” Cosette said. “They found her number in my phone. She came all by herself. It wasn’t like she was part of an actual suspect list or anything.”
“I still think we should tell Grace to keep a close eye on her.”
Cosette certainly hoped that Dad tired of his role as private eye soon, before he and Detective Grace started butting heads. The last thing Cosette wanted to witness was a power struggle between them right here in her hospital room.
“Did you see anyone else at the gas station?” Dad asked. “Did anyone follow your car or talk to you or anything like that?”
“No. Josh said his tank was low, and by the time we pulled into the station, I was feeling really nauseous…”
“What did the doctors say about that?” Mom interrupted. “I heard the detective say something about poison. She wasn’t talking about you, was she?”
“They found traces in her system,” Dad answered. Cosette was glad he was here to fill Mom in on the medical details she had somehow missed in their earlier conversations with the hospital staff.
“So why would he poison you if he was already planning to attack you?” Mom asked, and Cosette realized she was still holding onto Josh as her primary suspect, which meant that Cosette had to work harder to prove that he wasn’t.
“He didn’t poison me,” Cosette answered, hearing the hint of annoyance creeping into her voice.
“But someone did,” Dad inserted, “which means that this was likely something premeditated and not random violence at all.”
“Wait, I’ve got it.” Mom’s eyes lit up. Cosette was surprised to see her quiet, demure mother getting excited about her role as amateur sleuth. Didn’t she have nurses to interrogate about Cosette’s peeing habits?
“I think I know what happened.” Mom smiled with pride. “What if Josh poisoned you with one of those date rape drugs, you got sick and threw it all up, and then he got scared and ran away, but someone else came and attacked you instead?” Mom beamed as she glanced from Cosette to Dad and back to Cosette again.
Cosette had no idea where to begin.
“That seems like an awful lot of bad luck,” Dad began tentatively.
“There’s no such thing as luck,” Mom insisted. “But it does explain both the drugs and the attack.”
“I’m not really convinced,” Dad said, as if that in and of itself should be enough to end the entire discussion.
Cosette appreciated that both her parents were trying to help, but she still got the sense they weren’t really listening. Josh wasn’t the one to poison her or stab her with a knife. He was a victim too. And the longer it took them all to piece together what had happened, the more danger he was in.
She tried to imagine what Josh would do if their situations were reversed. If he knew that Cosette had been assaulted and kidnapped and nobody believed the story he told, he’d go out and find her by himself. But that was far easier for him than for someone like Cosette. He had a truck. He had his emergency kit in his trunk in case he ran into trouble. He knew the terrain, the roads. He was a trooper with experience. He could go out exploring, searching high and low for clues until he discovered where Cosette was being held. He wouldn’t stop, wouldn’t rest until he delivered her out of harm’s way and into the arms of safety.
Cosette knew that as certainly as she knew her parents loved her.
That’s what Josh would do if he were in Cosette’s situation. Except Cosette couldn’t do any of those things to save him. She was still drugged up, still weak from her injuries, still in a hospital bed with a detective and two parents who hadn’t once left her alone since they arrived by her bedside.
I don’t know what I can do to help you, but I’m going to figure it out, she whispered to herself, wishing that God might take her message and send it on angel’s wings to deliver to Josh, wherever he might be.
“I still want to talk to that waitress from the diner,” Dad said.
Detective Grace walked back into the room with a serious expression on her face. “I’m afraid that won’t be happening any time soon.”
“What? Why not?” Dad asked. “She might have been the last person to see my daughter before her attack. Why shouldn’t she come here and answer a few questions?”
This was the power struggle Cosette had feared. She knew her dad was never one to back down from a fight, but Detective Grace didn’t strike her as the type of woman who would cave in to anybody, especially someone from out of state with no police or investigative training.
Please just let her do her job, Cosette wanted to beg.
Mom stepped up and planted herself by Dad’s side. “I think that’d be a good idea as well. Even if the waitress’s not involved, she might have seen the truck or have some other information we could use.”
Grace shook her head. “I’m afraid that’s impossible. One of my men went to check out the restaurant to see if we could get any leads on the alleged poisoning.” She paused, and Cosette realized with trepidation that the detective’s hand holding her clipboard was trembling slightly.
“And?” Dad said, stretching himself just a little bit taller.
“And I’m afraid the waitress was late clocking in. I sent two men over to her house to figure out what was going on, and I just got word that she was killed last night. Stabbed with a knife, multiple times.”
No, no, no. The detective was getting everything all wrong. She didn’t have her story right.
Not right at all.
If Cosette could manage to quiet down the racing of her heart, she could take a deep breath and explain to Detective Grace that she was wrong. She’d sent her men over to the wrong house. Maybe there were two waitresses at the diner, and someone else was randomly killed last night. Something had happened, something that didn’t involve such a kind, encouraging woman as Dottie getting murdered in her own home.
“Was it the same knife that was used to attack my daughter?” Dad asked, and Cosette was appalled at
his lack of sympathy. Did he hear how heartless he sounded? Did he care at all that an innocent woman had lost her life? And for what?
Dad stood stroking his chin, a sure sign that he was thinking up something eloquent to say. Or at least something eloquent by his personal definition of the phrase.
“I wonder,” he said, “if this means we need to go back to our original suspicion that the man my daughter flew up here to meet is the guilty party.”
“I hadn’t realized we’d abandoned that premise in the first place,” Grace stated flatly.
Dad shrugged. “Apparently, my daughter believes him incapable of causing any harm.”
Grace didn’t meet Cosette’s imploring gaze but simply rolled her eyes.
“It’s even more important,” she went on, “that we identify the truck the suspect was driving. A lot of the security lights went out with last night’s outage, but according to the timeline, we can assume he was parked at the diner before the power quit.”
“We were there for at least an hour,” Cosette replied, but nobody seemed to be listening to her. Nobody at all. Even Mom abandoned her role of fluffing pillows and rearranging the cords to Cosette’s monitors to listen carefully to the detective’s words.
“I’ve got men combing for evidence at the waitress’s house right now,” Grace explained. “I’m hoping they’ll find something that will lead us to the attacker. If we’re lucky.”
“Not lucky,” Mom inserted. “Blessed.”
Dad let out a weary sigh. “Either way, I hope they find something we can use.”
Grace frowned and began flipping through pages on her clipboard.
“Oh,” Mom chimed in, sounding unnecessarily chipper and enthusiastic. “What about the other young woman, the one who drove Cosette to the restaurant in the first place? What do we know about her?”
Grace eyed Cosette’s mom and paused as if considering the question. Then she lowered her clipboard to her side and said, “Well, now, that’s a whole other development that I think is worth discussing. Would you two like to pull up some chairs? This might take a while.”
“Melissa Kennedy, the young woman who goes by the nickname Missy, happens to be the daughter of a state senator from Juneau,” Grace began.
Cosette glanced at her father, who was nodding his head in interest, and then at her mother, who was doing her best to straighten some of the wrinkles on Cosette’s sheet.
“Missy was involved in a tragic incident that took place ten years ago,” Grace continued, “in which her best friend was stabbed to death. The presumed killer was the victim’s boyfriend, a man by the name of Adam Bird. Sound familiar?”
Dad hadn’t stopped nodding, and Cosette did the best she could to keep up with the story.
“Adam Bird was eventually charged with his girlfriend’s murder and sentenced to fifteen years, based in large part off the testimony of Missy Kennedy.”
For a moment, Cosette had a flashback to her preschool Sunday school class and wished the detective had flannelgraph images to help keep all the different names straight. She decided the easiest thing to do would be to cut down everything Grace was telling her into small, digestible chunks, manageable enough for her to understand given how tired and weak she felt.
Girlfriend dead.
Boyfriend guilty.
Missy witness.
“None of what you’re telling us is anything we didn’t know before,” Dad interjected before the detective could go on.
Grace seemed more patient than Cosette would have expected at the interruption. “Well, here’s where the story gets more and more interesting. Adam Bird maintained his innocence during the entire trial period and after his sentencing. A high-profile pro bono firm known as the Innocence Taskforce took up Bird’s case and got him a new trial, but even before they started the jury selection process, the court threw out the case.”
“What?” Cosette asked. She’d been trying hard to follow but got lost in the intricacies of the legal process.
“The prosecuting attorney realized there was no way to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that Bird was guilty. The evidence just wasn’t there. Of course, conspiracy theorists have had a field day. During his senior year of high school, Bird was ranked the third-best hockey player in the state. Some people felt that his athletic record, plus the fact that he was an Eagle Scout and selected to be Alaska’s first native Rhodes Scholar, prejudiced the system. Other theorists, however, have cast their eye on Missy Kennedy.”
“The best friend,” Dad inserted.
Detective Grace nodded. “Right. Quite a few people believe that the details of the case — especially Mr. Bird’s exoneration — were veiled under so much secrecy because the senator’s daughter played such an important role in the trial. Others, however, have no difficult time speculating that her involvement was far from peripheral.”
“They think she might have killed her best friend and blamed the boyfriend to cover it up?” Dad asked.
Grace tapped her pen against the metal bar of her clipboard. “I’m just repeating what some people like to post in chatrooms and on social media pages. It was a huge deal when Mr. Bird was exonerated. The courts gave him an undisclosed settlement for the years he spent imprisoned, and he made quite the effort to remain as anonymous as possible after his release. It would appear he was willing to go to great lengths to hide his past.” The detective leveled her eyes and, with exaggerated significance, very slowly stated, “Including changing his name.”
For the first time since Grace had started her monologue, Mom straightened up. “So he is the same one Cosette’s been emailing all these months?”
“I requested an official confirmation from the department of vital statistics, but my initial perusal of the facts in this particular instance lead me to believe that, yes, Mr. Adam Bird did, in fact, change his name and is indeed the same individual currently known as Joshua Lawson.”
“Why would he change his name unless he really was guilty of that murder then?” Mom asked, her pitch growing high and grating Cosette’s ears. “An honest man with nothing to hide wouldn’t go to those lengths.”
“If he really wanted to hide, he could have moved to another state,” Dad said gently.
Grace was pouting but made a sound that Cosette guessed was an indication of agreement.
Cosette’s head was spinning. Josh was Adam, Adam was Josh. Josh was guilty, Josh was exonerated. None of it made sense.
Detective Grace’s cell phone rang, and she excused herself and stepped into the hall before answering it.
“Well, what do you think we should do?” Mom asked while they waited.
It was a ridiculous question. What was there to do other than what they’d already been doing? Trying to find clues. Trying to figure out what had happened to Josh, why he disappeared, where he might be, how they could find him and save him out of whatever danger he was in.
The end goal was still the same, wasn’t it? Find Josh. Ensure he was safe. Ensure he wasn’t in any trouble.
But the seed of doubt had found fertile soil in Cosette’s weary soul. If everything Grace said were true, even if Josh was entirely innocent when it came to his girlfriend’s murder, that still didn’t change the fact that he’d lied.
The realization hit her with even more force than a tidal wave. Josh had lied to her. It wasn’t that he’d forgotten his past. It was that he refused to share it.
It wasn’t that he’d spent the past half a year telling Cosette blatant untruths, but he’d certainly left out a few critical details. Like the fact that he’d been found guilty of murdering his girlfriend and even done jail time.
Did Cosette believe Josh murdered that poor girl? No. He might be a liar. She might not ever be able to trust him again, but he was certainly no murderer. And even the courts seemed to take his side in the end. Why hadn’t he told her?
She thought about their first few private message exchanges. There she was, a struggling actress who, after four years of fai
lure upon failure, had finally gotten called back for a role. Hey, can you tell me anything about the Arctic slayer? I hear that guy was a real sicko.
And all the while, she’d been talking to a man convicted of murder, however wrongfully.
Did she believe Josh was innocent?
With all her heart.
Could she ever find a way to trust him if she found out he’d been withholding this entire chunk of his life history from her all these months?
Probably not.
Maybe last night had been their one shot, their one chance at a happily ever after. Maybe Dottie had been wrong when she mentioned how strongly she felt that God had brought them together for a reason.
Dottie. Cosette still couldn’t understand how a woman so full of life could be dead.
And how?
Surely Josh hadn’t done it. But what if he was the one who got blamed for it after all? What if someone knew he’d make a likely scapegoat because of his background? A man might find himself unlucky enough to be accused once of a murder he didn’t commit. But twice?
No jury would think twice about sending Josh back to jail, whether or not he was actually guilty, which Cosette knew he wasn’t.
That meant there was something else going on. Someone else was after Josh, after his reputation. Someone else was trying to frame him. Trying to make it look like he was guilty, like he had attacked Cosette and killed the waitress who served them their very first meal together.
But who would want to frame him? What kind of enemy could he have made who would go to such lengths?
Was it somebody who’d followed his trial so many years ago? Somebody who thought he was guilty and wanted to land him back behind bars for good?
That was an awful lot of trouble to go through just to get someone sent to prison. Cosette remembered what Missy had said earlier, how multiple stab wounds almost always meant a crime was committed in a blind rage. It was personal. It was literally more hands-on than using a gun or nearly any other type of weapon.