I can’t get my breath. I realize I’m sucking in air too fast, and I duck my head and try to control my breathing. I feel light-headed, and I hear the scrape of the chair as Prester gets up and comes around to rest his hand gently on my back. “Easy,” he tells me. “Easy, slow down now. Deep breaths. In, out. Good.”
I pant the question out, ignoring his advice. “What did he do?” Anger is what I need. Anger steadies me, grounds me, gives me a purpose and forces the panic right out. I straighten up, blinking away the spots, and he takes a step back. I wonder what he’s just seen in my face. “Is it him? Is Sam the one who killed those girls?” Because wouldn’t that just be perfect. Gina Royal falls for a serial killer, twice. Can’t say I don’t have a type.
“We’re looking into that,” Prester says. “Point is, Mr. Cade is a person of interest, and we’re questioning him. Sorry about springing it on you that fast, but I wanted to know . . .”
“You wanted to see if I already knew who he was,” I snap back. “Of course I fucking didn’t know. I’d never have left my kids with him, would I?”
I can see him taking the idea out for a spin. No way I’d willingly allow a victim’s relative into my life, into my house, if I had known better. Prester’s trying to fit some scenario together where Sam Cade and I have done this together, but not only do the edges not fit, they’re not even from the same damn puzzle. Either I killed these girls or Sam Cade did, in some crazy attempt to implicate me and earn me the prison sentence he thought I’d cheated . . . or neither of us did it. But we didn’t do it together. Not by the facts he’s got before him.
Prester doesn’t like this at all. I can see him working at it, and I don’t blame him for looking like he needs a bottle of bourbon and a day off.
“If Cade did this,” I tell him, “then you nail his ass to the wall. For God’s sake, do it.”
He sighs. He’s in for another long day, and I can tell he knows it. He reads the file folder again, flipping pages, and I let him think about it.
When he finally stands up, he gathers his files and pictures. I can see he’s made a decision, and sure enough, he holds the door open for me and says, “Your kids are down the hall to the right, in the break room. Sam drove them here in your Jeep. Take ’em home. But don’t leave town. If you do, I’ll make it my personal mission to set the FBI on your trail, and I will ruin whatever life you’ve got left. Understand me?”
I nod. I don’t thank him, because he’s not really doing me any favors. He realizes that he’s got precious little to hold me on, if anything, and a good defense attorney—like, say, one from Knoxville—would knock his case into the trash without even breaking a sweat, especially with Sam Cade right there hiding in plain sight. Christ, I even feel a little sorry for Prester in that moment.
But not enough to hesitate. I am out the door in a second, rushing past the small bullpen room of the Norton Police Department. I see Officer Graham filling in some paperwork, and he looks up as he sees me pass. I don’t nod or smile, because I’m too fixed on the break room door. It’s clear glass with miniblinds hanging at a cockeyed angle, and through the gap I see Lanny and Connor sitting together at a square white table, dispiritedly picking at a bag of popcorn sitting open between them. I take a breath, because seeing them alive and fine and unharmed feels so good it physically hurts.
I open the door and step in, and Lanny stands up so fast her chair skids backward across the tile and nearly tips over. She rushes to me and remembers that she’s the oldest just in time to not throw herself into my arms. Connor blasts past her and flings himself at me instead, and I hug him fiercely and open one arm to her, and she grudgingly accepts. I feel the stabbing relief start to melt, replaced with something sweeter, warmer, kinder.
“They arrested you,” Lanny says. Her voice is muffled against me, but she pulls away to look directly at me on the last word. “Why did they do that?”
“They think I might be responsible for—”
I don’t finish the thought, but she does. “For the murders,” she says. “Sure. Because of Dad.” She says it like it’s the most logical conclusion in the world. Maybe it is. “But you didn’t do it.”
She says it with casual conviction, and I feel a swell of love for her, for that unthinking trust. She’s usually so suspicious of my motives that having her grant me this one thing means more than I can begin to comprehend.
Connor pulls away, then, and says, “Mom, they came and got us! I said we shouldn’t go, but Lanny said—”
“Lanny said we’re not getting into a stupid fight with the cops,” Lanny supplies. “Which we didn’t. Besides, they didn’t come for us, exactly. They just couldn’t leave us there alone. I made them bring the Jeep. So we’d have a way home.” She hesitates for a moment and tries to make the next question look casual. “Um . . . so did they tell you why they want to talk to Sam? Was it something you told them?”
I don’t want to open up the subject of what their father did, how many people he destroyed, how many families he shattered, including his own . . . but at the same time, I know I have to explain. They’re not little children now, and things—I know this instinctively—are about to get a whole lot worse for all of us.
But I’m reluctant to destroy Sam Cade in their eyes. They like him. And as far as I could tell, he liked them, too. But then again, I thought he liked me.
Maybe he is part of the murder plot that has cost those two girls their lives. I still can’t see Sam killing them, even now, and yet . . . yet I can easily understand how grief and rage and pain pushes someone past limits they never think they’d cross. I destroyed the old Gina Royal and rebuilt myself from her ashes. He’s focused his anger outward, at me—at his imaginary enemy. Maybe the young women were, to him, collateral damage, cold military math to reach an objective. I can almost, almost believe that.
“Mom?”
I blink. Connor’s looking at me with real worry, and I wonder how long I’ve wandered off in my thoughts. I’m so tired. Despite the sandwich, I find I’m starving, and I need to pee so badly I wonder if my bladder will burst before I can make it to the bathroom. Funny. All these were unimportant details until I knew the kids were safe.
“We’ll talk on the way home,” I tell him. “Quick pit stop and then we’ll go. Okay?”
He nods, a little doubtfully. He’s worried about Sam, I think, and I hate to break his heart, again. But this one isn’t my fault.
I make it to the toilet in time and shiver and cry silently as I sit there. By the time I’ve washed my face and hands and taken some deep breaths, the face staring back at me from the mirror almost looks normal. Almost. I realize that I need to get a haircut and renew my hair color; a few gray hairs are starting to make an unwelcome appearance. Funny. I always thought I’d die before I got old. That’s a whisper from the old Gina, who’d seen the day of The Event as the end of her entire life. I hate the old Gina, who’d somehow naively believed in the power of true love and the smug certainty that she was a good woman, and her husband was a good man, and that it was something she deserved without putting out any effort at all.
I hate her even more now that I realize I’m still, even after all this, very much like her.
The drive home starts in silence, but I can tell it’s weighted. The kids want to know. I want to tell them. I just don’t quite know how to find the words, so I reach out and fiddle with the Jeep’s radio knobs, jumping from new country to southern-fried rock to old country to what sounds like tinny folk music, until Lanny reaches forward and switches it off with a decisive punch of her finger. “Enough,” she says. “Come on. Spill. What’s the deal with Sam?”
Dear God, I don’t want to start this, but I swallow that impulse of cowardice and say, “Sam’s sister—it turns out that Sam isn’t who he said he was. Well, he is, but he didn’t tell us the whole truth.”
“You’re not making any sense,” Connor tells me. He’s probably right. “Wait, is Sam’s sister in the lake? Did he kill his sister?”