I want him to defy me. I want to kill him. I want to shoot him the same way he shot my uncle, in all the places it hurts, maximizing his suffering, making him beg for his life, before driving a red-hot stake through his kidney—
“I’m not going to admit something I didn’t do,” Noah says with control, with calm. “You can shoot me if you want. But I don’t think you will. Because you’re a fair person. And deep down, I think you know—”
“Shut up! You … you took him from me … you took him …”
My entire body quivering, my voice choking off, tears rolling down my face, my breath coming in tight gasps, I lower the gun, then raise it back up, the screams in my head drowning out everything else.
“What are you talking about?” he asks.
I shuffle toward him, only steps away from him, both hands desperately clutching my gun. “Say it!” I scream.
But it doesn’t matter what he says anymore. I’m going to do it. I’m going to pull this trigger.
“I didn’t kill anybody,” he says.
My breath held tight in my lungs, I pull the trigger once, a single bullet, and then drop the weapon to my side.
21
I STAND OVER the grave, the outlines of the freshly dug earth a tangible reminder of the funeral yesterday. It was a nice affair, with the police force in formal dress, a gun salute, the works. It was the very opposite of a private family ceremony, in part because Lang didn’t have any family besides me, but appropriate, too, because Lang was such a public figure, a giant in this community, the chief law enforcement officer for almost two decades.
Lang died in surgery that night at the hospital. The hemorrhaging was too massive, the doctor said. Too many wounds. Too much blood lost for too long.
Chloe Danchisin—Aunt Chloe—slides her arm inside mine and perches her chin on my shoulder. “He always loved this cemetery,” she says. “He bought these plots for us when we were first married.”
I blow my nose and take a breath. My throat aches from all the crying I’ve done over the past several days. “I … still can’t believe he’s gone.”
Chloe rubs her hand on my back, tiny circles. “It’s not fair to you, honey. It seems like just yesterday that Lydia died.”
Almost three years to the day, actually, that my mother gave in to the cancer.
“You know how much Lang loved you, don’t you?”
I nod but don’t speak. My throat is so strained that I don’t even sound like myself. My head is filled with a constant ringing.
“Oh, when he hired you to work here—he was so excited. He called me. We hadn’t spoken in over a year, but he called me to give me the news. He was like a giddy schoolboy.”
Despite the fact that I’ve shed enough tears over the last few days to fill a small lake, my eyes well up again. “I questioned his judgment,” I say. “I doubted his investigation of the Ocean Drive murders. I actually—I actually suggested that Noah Walker might be innocent.” I scoff at the notion in hindsight. It’s so clear to me now. Noah killed Lang so he couldn’t testify, and in much the same way he killed Zach and Melanie, and the prostitute in the woods. Different methods, but the same sociopathic brutality—maximizing their suffering, making sure they would bleed out in painful deaths.
Chloe directs my shoulders away from the grave, south toward the beach, and moves me along. “You were doing your job. I’m sure he was proud of you. Don’t confuse his stubbornness with disappointment.”
We walk toward the beach. Chloe looks good, notwithstanding the circumstances. Now single again for two years, she has lost about twenty pounds, cut her hair in a stylish bob, and dresses like she doesn’t mind being noticed. Sixty is the new forty, and all that.
My head is finally clearing of the hangover, from the extra bottle of wine after I left Chloe last night and went home. The nightly drinking is weighing me down, leaving me off balance and foggy. But right now, foggy feels like the best I can do.
Ocean Drive is teeming with joggers and bicyclists and people heading, like us, toward the beach. The activity, the smell of the ocean—this is precisely what I remember as a kid.
“Chloe,” I say, “why did we stop coming here when I was a kid?”
She keeps her head down, strolling along with me.
“Lang said there was a story.”
“You don’t know?” she asks.
“No.”
“If you don’t know, I don’t know.” She looks up at our surroundings, half-built structures and carved-out foundations. “That’s the house, isn’t it?”