“The guy with us. Driving the car. At the hospital yester—The day before, or whenever.” Andy had lost track. “You told my dad you were sorry his family was going through this. How did you know he was my father?”
Mike rubbed his jaw again. “I’m kind of nosey.” He spoke with a mixture of embarrassment and pride. “I blame my three older sisters. They were always keeping things from me, so I just kind of got nosey as a way of self-preservation.”
“I haven’t drunk so much that I didn’t notice that you didn’t answer the question.” Andy never articulated her thoughts this way, which should have been a warning, but she was sick of feeling terrified all of the time. “How did you know he was my dad?”
“Your cell phone,” he admitted. “I saw you pull up the text messages and it said DAD at the top, and you texted ‘hurry.’” He pointed to his eyes. “They just go where they want to go.” As if to prove the point, he looked down at her mouth again.
Andy used her last bit of common sense to turn back toward the bar. She rolled her glass between her hands. She had to stop being stupid with this man. Mike was flirting with her when nobody ever flirted with her. He had been at the hospital and now he was hundreds of miles away in a town whose name Andy had never even heard of before she saw it on the exit sign. Setting aside her criminal enterprises, it was just damn creepy that he was here. Not just here, but smiling at her, looking at her mouth, making her feel sexy, buying her drinks.
But Mike lived here. The bartender knew him. And his explanations made sense, especially about Gordon. She remembered Mike hovering at her elbow in front of the hospital while she wrote the text. She remembered the glare that sent him to the bench on the opposite side of the doors.
She asked, “Why did you stay?”
“Stay where?”
“Outside the hospital.” She watched his face, because she wanted to see if he was lying. “You backed off, but you didn’t go back inside. You sat down on the bench outside.”
“Ah.” He drank a swig of beer. “Well, I told you that my granny was sick. She’s not a nice person. Which is hard, because, well, as my granny herself used to say, when somebody dies, you forget they’re an asshole. But at that point when you saw me outside, she wasn’t dead yet. She was still alive and disapproving of me and my sisters—especially my sisters—so I just needed a break.” He took another drink. He gave her a sideways glance. “Okay, that’s not completely truthful.”
Andy felt like an idiot, because she had bought the entire story until he’d told her not to.
Mike said, “I saw the news and . . .” He lowered his voice. “I don’t know, it’s kind of weird, but I saw you in the waiting room and I recognized you from the video, and I just wanted to talk to you.”
Andy had no words.
“I’m not a creep.” He laughed. “I understand that’s what a creep would say, but this thing happened when I was a kid, and . . .” He was leaning closer to her, his voice lower. “This guy broke into our house, and my dad shot him.”
Andy felt her hand go to her throat.
“Yeah, it was pretty bad. I mean, shit, I was a kid, so I didn’t realize how bad it really was. Plus it turned out to be the guy he shot was dating one of my sisters, but she had broken up with him, and he had all this shit on him like handcuffs and a gag and a knife, and, anyway—” he waved all of that off. “After it happened, I had this sick feeling in my gut all of the time. Like, on the one hand, this guy was going to kidnap my sister and probably hurt her really bad. On the other hand, my dad had killed somebody.” He shrugged. “I saw you and I thought, well, hey, there’s somebody who knows what it feels like. For, like, the first time in my life.”
Andy tilted the vodka to her lips but she did not drink. The story was too good. Somewhere in the back of her head, she could hear warning bells clanging. This was too much of a coincidence. He had been at the hospital. He was here. He had a story that was similar to her own.
But he had the driver’s license. And the truck outside. And this was obviously his local bar, and coincidences happened, otherwise there wouldn’t be a word called coincidences.
Andy stared at the clear liquid in her glass. She needed to get out of here. It was too risky.
“—doesn’t make sense,” Mike was saying. “If you look at the part where—”
“What?”
“Here, let me show you.” He stood up. He turned Andy’s barstool so that she was facing him. “So, I’m the bad guy with the knife in his neck, right?”
Andy nodded, only now realizing that he was talking about the video from the Rise-n-Dine.
“Put the back of your left hand here at the left side of my neck like your mom.” He had already picked up her left hand and placed it in position. His skin was hot against the back of her hand. “So, she’s got her left hand trapped at his neck, and she crosses her other arm underneath and puts her right hand here.” He picked up Andy’s right hand and placed it just below his right shoulder. “Does that make sense, crossing all the way underneath to put your hand there?”
Andy considered the position of her hands. It was awkward. One arm was twisted under the other. The heel of her palm barely reached into the meaty part of his shoulder.
One hand pushing, one hand pulling.
The calm expression on Laura’s face.
“Okay,” Mike said. “Keep your left hand where it is, pinned to my neck. Push me with your right hand.”
She pushed, but not hard, because her right arm was mostly already extended. His right shoulder barely twinged back. The rest of his body did not move. Her left hand, the one at his neck, had stayed firmly at his neck.
“Now here.” He moved her right hand to the center of his chest. “Push.”
It was easier to push hard this time. Mike took a step back. If she’d had a knife sticking through the back of her left hand, it would’ve come straight out of his neck.
Mike said, “Right?”
Andy mentally ran through the motions, saw Laura with the knife, pushing and pulling—but maybe not.
Mike said, “No offense, but we both know your mom knew what she was doing. You don’t catch a knife like that, then your next move is to tweak the guy on the shoulder. If you’re gonna kill him, you’re gonna shove him hard, center mass.”
Andy nodded. She was starting to see it now. Laura had not been pushing Jonah away. Her right hand had reached for his shoulder. She was trying to grab onto it.
Mike asked, “Have you looked at her feet in the video?”
“Her feet?”
“You’d step forward, right? If you were planning on yanking out that knife, you’d counterbalance the movement with one foot in front, the other in back. Basic Einstein. But that’s not what she does.”
“What does she do?”
“She steps her foot out to the side, like this.” He slid his feet shoulder-width apart, like a boxer, or like someone who does not want to lose their balance because they are trying to keep another person from moving.
Mike said, “It’s Helsinger who starts to step back. Watch the video again. You can see him lift his foot, clear as day.”
Andy hadn’t noticed any of this. She had assumed that her mother was some kind of cold-blooded killing machine when in fact, her right hand had gone to Jonah Helsinger’s shoulder to keep him from moving, not aid in his violent murder.
She asked, “You’re sure he was stepping back on his own? Not stepping back to catch himself?”
“That’s what it looks like to me.”
Andy replayed the familiar sequence in her head. Had Jonah really stepped back? He’d written a suicide note. He’d clearly had a death wish. But was an eighteen-year-old kid really capable of stepping back from the knife, knowing what a horrific death he would be giving himself?
Mike asked, “She said something, right?”
Andy almost answered.