His jaw bunched up. His eyes were still on my gun.
“Tell me what you’re doing on Providence Street.”
“Look, can you put that away?” He nodded at the gun.
“No. You need to start giving me some answers, Kenny.”
He pressed his lips together in a thin, hard line. He didn’t look angry. He looked afraid. Of me. “She hangs out around Mallory’s daughter, right?” he said.
“You tell me.”
“I’ve seen—shit, Roxane, do we have to do this?”
“Yeah, we do,” I snapped, taking a step closer. “What do you know?”
“I don’t know anything! I saw her on the news. Veronica. And I’ve seen her, with Mallory’s daughter.”
“How do you know Shelby?”
“I sometimes, I don’t know, I just like to make sure everything’s okay over there.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Can you please put that gun away?”
I had a suspicion that the cylinder of my revolver was empty anyway, but he didn’t know that. I kept it where it was. “What are you talking about,” I repeated.
We watched each other for a few seconds.
“When Mal told me she was pregnant,” he said, more quietly, “I didn’t react too well.”
Oh my God, no. I felt like I was waking up from one of those dreams where you tumble off a bridge.
“I said, are you sure it’s, you know, mine? Because there were a lot of guys, there was no getting around that. And I don’t know how she could have known. But I still shouldn’t have said it. She was coming to me for help. She wanted to get an abortion, like before anyone found out.” He looked down at the muddy ground. “We argued and then I didn’t see her for a while, she dropped out of school, and I heard she married that mechanic and they were going to have a family. And I just felt relief, okay, I was a junior in high school at that time, I didn’t know shit.”
I thought of Shelby and Joshua and how close they were. This was not happening.
“And eventually, Mallory came around again and we started, you know. Started back up with being together. She told me the guy, Josh, she said he was dumb as a box of hair but he loved the daylights out of that little girl. So she obviously made the right choice, going to him.” Kenny wiped at his eyes. “I said I’d always, you know, support her. Them. If they needed it. I gave her money, but that usually went right to drugs. When she disappeared, she was using a lot. Heroin. I don’t go there, I don’t mess with that. And then she was just gone one day, she just didn’t call me and she never picked up the phone when I tried to get her—I can’t even tell you how many times I hung up on her husband, when he answered. I figured she needed a break, from, you know, life. She always had that free spirit thing going on.”
“You’re telling me you didn’t know what happened to her.”
“No, I had no idea. I thought she just took off. But I’d drive by that little house sometimes, though, during those few months when she was gone, and I’d see Josh and the little girl and they both looked so happy to be together, and that just made me feel good. Like good. If Mal and I had tried to raise a kid together—there was no way. There was no way anybody would turn out happy.”
The free fall I’d felt when I was talking to Tom was far from over. I felt like I was only gaining velocity. “Why didn’t you tell me any of this the other day?” If it’s true, I added in my head. Although my arm was beginning to tremble, I kept the gun trained on him.
“Because I don’t like talking about it,” he said. “Shit, I’m sure you can see why.”
“You never talked to the cops investigating her death. Did you?” I guessed.
He shook his head. “The lawyer told me not to.”
I rubbed my forehead with my free hand. “The lawyer.”
“Mort. Uncle Mort. I mean, I told my dad first, that I knew Mallory. Then he had me tell the lawyer.”
It took a certain kind of family, I thought, to have a lawyer named Mort, let alone one close enough to be called uncle. “What did you tell him?” I said.
“I told him that we used to hang out, get high, you know, that kind of stuff. And he had me talk to Mr. Lassiter, who told me to just keep that to myself.”
“The police chief just kept that secret for you?”
“My dad and him, they go way back,” Kenny said. “He’s kept me out of a lot of trouble, over the years. And listen, it’s not like I feel good about this. It fucking haunts me, what happened to Mallory.”
This really could not be happening. I wasn’t sure which was worse: that Lassiter had the nerve to jam me up for interfering with an investigation when he was clearly capable of the same, or that after everything in the last twenty-four hours, I was starting to believe what Kenny was telling me.
“Talk to me about Colleen Grantham.”
He shook his head. “I didn’t know her, Curt’s only been working for me for a year. I didn’t know he had another daughter. I’ve met his other two, but not Colleen.”
“Where did you go Monday night? During the game.”
“I had to check on some displays, I told you that. I went to this bar, the Varsity Lounge. And to Kroger, it’s in the same plaza, and to the liquor store on Clover. I needed to make sure they had the right displays set up because my client, the owner of the vodka company, he was coming to town yesterday to have dinner with my dad, and they wanted to check it out.”
I lowered the gun slowly, unable to keep my arm up anymore. Kenny visibly relaxed. I didn’t know what to think of any of this, the way he seemed to have an answer for everything all of a sudden. But he was no longer tripping any of my shiftiness detectors the way he had been before. “Why do you still drive down Mallory’s street?” I said. I snapped out the cylinder of the revolver and saw that it was indeed empty. I wondered which of the Belmont cops had relieved me of my bullets.
He rubbed a hand over his face. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s like, I just like seeing her kid. She looks exactly like Mallory. Like exactly. And I like knowing that she’s okay. It makes me feel, I don’t know, calmer. Please, you have to believe me. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you all this the other day, and I’m sorry my dad called Mr. Lassiter and set all of this in motion. But I am telling you the truth. And if I could help you find that girl, Veronica, I would. I would help you in a second.”
“You didn’t see her when you were at the Varsity Lounge.”
“No.”
“You didn’t drive down that street on Monday night.”
“No.”
“How did you know the body in the woods was Colleen Grantham?”
“Mr. Lassiter,” Kenny said. “He came and told my dad, because my dad’s an investor in the apartment development back there. He thought he had a right to know, before it came out in the news.”
I sagged against my car, barely feeling the damp, cold metal. I wondered if Lassiter had told Mr. Brayfield before he even told Colleen’s parents. There was not a single person in this story who came out looking good. I finally said, “Kenny, you can never tell anyone what you told me. About Mallory’s daughter. Never. Joshua Evans is her father.”