He looks up without moving his head, his chin still planted close to his chest. “You don’t know?”
A moment of silence slices by as I lean in and press into him with my curiosity. “Know what?”
“Your mother filed for divorce a week before the accident. I don’t know if your father was ever served—or if he knew about it.” He folds the paper and slides it back my way as I try to digest the words he just shot at me.
“My parents were happy.” The words come from me numb as I search the floor for answers. “Weren’t they?” That rumored affair Rich tried to sell me still hasn’t penetrated my gray matter. God knows I’m not up for accusing my father. Not now. Maybe not ever.
“Apparently not. At least not your mother.” He leans into his seat and rocks at a slow and steady pace, but those eyes, my mother’s eyes, they pin me with a look that screams figure it out.
“What’s going on? Do you know something?”
“Look”— he wipes his face down with his hand—“you have a lot of shit on your plate right now. You don’t need to go digging up the past, sifting through rumors. There’s no time for this.” He picks up the envelope once again and tosses it to my end of the table.
“You know something.” A shot of adrenaline spikes through me, and suddenly the only thing I want to do is turn this desk on its ear and bash Richard’s head through the window. “You’re right. I am in a shitload of misery, and I certainly don’t need to add to it. So why don’t you tell me what you know and I won’t have to kick your ass and embarrass you in front of the entire precinct?”
“They’ll shoot you in the leg.” A smile warms his face as he rocks back, connecting his fingers at the tips in amusement.
“It will be worth it.” My voice shakes when I say it and Rich blows out a breath, gets up and shuts the door before settling back into his seat. “You just remember, you asked for it. When you can’t sleep at night? Remember that I had no intention of breathing a word.”
“You think I sleep at night?” I lean in, rabid with anger. “What the hell are you keeping from me, Rich? Did my old man do something? Is he a killer?”
His Adam’s apple rises and falls. That doughy, pasty face of his takes on a fight-or-flight expression. “People have wondered. Your mother was a brilliant woman, always stifled by that man. My mother’s words, not mine, but I happen to agree.”
“You think he killed her.” My body goes numb. My ears grow a heartbeat. “My mother was alone. She could have gotten out of the car. Why the hell was she on the railroad tracks to begin with?”
“It’s a common pass through Donaldson Avenue. Witnesses say she was on the tracks a good five minutes before the train came.”
“She had time to escape.” Is he implying a suicide?
“She did have time. She had help, too. A gentleman got out of his car and tried to get her out, but he said the door was jammed. He narrowly jumped off the tracks before the train came barreling through. According to him, she was panicked, screaming that she couldn’t get the door open.”
“Makes no sense. Car stalls on the railroad tracks and the door fails to unlock?”
Rich keeps that iron fisted stare planted over me. “That’s not the part I found odd.”
My head swims with the dark possibilities. “Let me have it.”
“The gentleman said she wasn’t sitting on the driver’s side—she still had her seat belt on.”
The floor sways beneath me.
“Anything else?” My voice comes out hoarse, but Rich simply closes his eyes a moment. I slam my hands over the desk like a gavel. “What else do you fucking know?” I roar it out so loud my voice comes back as an echo.
The door swings open, ushering in an icy breeze right along with two beefy officers with their hands on their weapons.
“It’s fine,” Rich assures the cavalry, and we wait until they seal the door behind them before getting back to this hell I’ve dragged us into. “My mother has always been a little suspicious of what happened with Wilson.”
There it is again. A knife in the gut. First McCafferty, now Rich—Aunt Jolene by proxy.
I lean in. “She thinks my father killed him.” Shit. I sink my head into my hands for a moment. “Do you even know who my father is?”
Rich nods. “He knows his way around the law.”
“He is the law!” My father would have destroyed this office long ago. He prided himself on his perfect little family. His perfect wife, his perfect children. And then it hits me like a semi-truck. “Wilson wasn’t perfect.” I flashback to those hazy days before his death. They fought. They outright hated one another. “McCafferty said he was poisoned with antifreeze—said they found ethylene glycol in his bloodstream.”
“Shit.” He sits up a little straighter. “And Rachel?”
“What about Rachel?” My God. Has my father been offing his imperfect children? His imperfect wife?
“What did she die from?” Rich opens his laptop and his fingers start dancing over the keyboard.
“I don’t know. Female issues. My mother mentioned it once, and that was all I cared to know. She was dead.”
He shakes his head at the screen. “I’ll talk to my mother. She made a comment once about it being enough already. That some people weren’t above the law.”
“My father.” A wound so deep, so inherently painful spears through me. It tears my heart from top to bottom. How could this be? How could any of this be?
I shuffle out into the bitter cold night, my body anesthetized by the sting. Everything I’ve known, everything I’ve ever felt has been challenged tonight, challenged over the last few months, stretching as far back as that fateful summer day in L.A.
The wages of sin is death. My father beat that mantra into each one of us. And if what Aunt Jolene suspects to be true is a reality—my father appointed himself God over the lives of my mother and my siblings.
Shit. I slump against the side of my truck. He couldn’t have gotten away with this. He didn’t do any of it, did he? Why would he kill Rachel? It doesn’t make sense.
I drive home dazed, out of my mind, enough adrenaline pumping through me to shoot me to the moon.
Just when I didn’t think life could dole out another curveball my way, wham, right in my face.
My phone bleats and lights up. I pull over in the event it’s an emergency. In the event this nightmare has reversed itself and Reagan is home where she should be. But it’s a text from my father.
Pick up some milk if you can. Need to take my medicine with it.
Pick up some milk.
Would you like a side of antifreeze with that?
* * *
The Sunshine Market is open late—open from sunshine to sunshine the slogan reads. Reagan and I read it once together in sync. We found it hysterical and engaged in a good old-fashioned belly laugh over it.
It doesn’t sound so damn funny anymore.
A small gray sedan makes the left on Imperial at the same time I do and I frown. Now that McCafferty has all but let me in on the fact Allison and I have a stalker, I’m mindful of shit like this.
I pull into the Sunshine Market parking lot, and sure enough, about a minute later they do the same. Long hair, lots of it. Full double-handed grip on the steering wheel. My money is on Monica. Although she wouldn’t technically qualify as the stalker who took that picture of us. She’s a stalker of another color.
I get out of the truck and pretend to tie my shoe as the scuttle of heels click-clacks from the distal end of the parking lot moving in this direction.
“Pssst!”
I get up and stride back there, fully expecting to find my ex wearing her crazy out in the open like a straitjacket. Something that I’m pretty certain she’ll be wearing sooner than later—and my heart stops.