Mind Games - Page 207

“You overloaded, and I’m part of the reason. So let me get this out of the way. We’re not leaving. I was going to change the locks, put up a fence, security cameras because I thought you’d screwed with us. I don’t know what else I was supposed to think—but we’ll get back to that.

“I was going to leave. Bray comes first. And you hurt me, okay? What I thought you’d done hurt. I’ve got a history with this we can get into later. I was going to leave,” he continued, “and stuck with that when I thought Bray was just pissed at me for it. If you don’t piss off your kid now and then, you’re probably not doing a good job as a parent.”

He put a hand on the glass to nudge it back up. “Drink a little more. You’re still pale.”

“I don’t need anyone to take care of me.”

“Right. Still pissed. Accepted. But after yesterday, after we had our mutual detonation, then I couldn’t find him…”

The memory of it had him rising, circling the room. “What if he’d headed to Lucy’s, walking along that road, no sidewalks, barely a shoulder? What if someone … Can’t think about it. I’ve never been so scared, and I hope to Christ I never have a reason to be that scared again. My fault. Mine, because I wouldn’t listen to him. Father knows fucking best, so I wouldn’t listen to him.”

He stopped, looked at her. “Then you brought him home, wrapped in your sweater. Safe. He wasn’t just pissed at me. I broke his heart, I pulled everything out from under him because you hurt me. Because I was pissed at you. Because I have a history. I’m not taking him away from his home, from his friends, from a place that makes him so goddamn happy. I was going to change the locks and all the rest, but I’m not going to do that, because I believe you. I might’ve been a dick, but I’m not a complete dick, and I believe you.”

“All right.” She set the glass down. “All right.”

It wasn’t, he thought, but he hoped she would be.

He sat beside her again. “I’m sorry. I’m not going to dump my history, that baggage on you right now. You’ve had enough. I could take on some of yours. Does Lucy have this?” he asked before she could protest.

She sighed instead. “That night when I woke up, I ran to her room. She was sitting on the side of the bed, crying. She knew, she’d seen—not like I did. She wasn’t there like I was, but she knew. It comes down through the women in the family.”

“Okay. Can you tell me what happened next?”

Chapter Twenty-seven

What could she say? What could she think? He’d said Okay as if she’d told him black hair came down through her family.

Her headache had dwindled to just that. An ache rather than a stabbing pain. When she looked down, she watched his thumb rubbing circles over hers.

Not ready to feel again, she drew her hand free.

“Rem was only ten. We didn’t wake him. She called Sheriff McKinnon. Maddy’s father. He knew Grammie, and he believed her. Everyone knows Grammie has a gift.”

“Everyone?”

“She grew up here, her mother grew up here, and her mother’s mother. The sheriff called the police in Virginia. When they went to the house, they found where he’d used the glass cutter on the sliders. They went in, and found them. In bed, holding hands. They loved each other so much.”

She shuddered a breath in and out.

“It had to come out how we knew to call the police. The detectives didn’t like that much as it turned out, but they sent down a police artist, and I could describe him. I saw him in that mirror as clear as I see you. I could see where he was, sleeping in that motel room bed, with my picture on the table beside him. My mother’s watch. I could tell them where he left the car he’d followed my mother home in. A car he’d taken from someone else he’d killed.”

“They found him, where you said.”

“They found him. He had their things, my picture, the gun, all of it. But the detectives, they came down. He’d confessed, but … They still had the death penalty in Virginia then, and he confessed, so they gave him life—two life terms—instead. But the detectives came down.

“The one, Detective Musk, he thought the gift was bullshit, and maybe we’d planned it, or Grammie had, for the money. There was money. Or I had told Riggs to do it out of some sort of ugly rebellion. I just knew too much for it to make sense to him. Grammie got so mad. I’ve never seen her so mad. Not even when she talked to my father’s mother, to say how sorry she was, and my dad’s mother said how they were going to bring Dad out there to California, just him, and how they were going to bring us out, Rem and me, for boarding school.”

“Well, Jesus,” Ty murmured.

“Grammie let her have it good. Our parents made Grammie our guardian in their wills for a reason. That reason. Mom, Rem, me? We were never good enough. We were a mistake, just hicks from Kentucky.

“They didn’t even come to the funeral. Not one of them.”

She shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. Never did. Grammie loved my father like a son, and he always knew it. But the detectives didn’t know that, Musk didn’t believe that. So I proved it. Like G minor seventh. I told them things, about themselves, their families. Things I could pick up easy enough by looking. It’s rude, invasive, but I had to. I had to protect my family. And they believed me, they had to.”

“You protected your family.”

“I had to. I did. But I made a mistake. Rem said something to the deputy about wishing they’d killed Riggs like he did our parents. And the deputy said prison was worse. Knowing you’d never get out, never be free again. I wanted to see, to be sure of that, so I went there.”