EPILOGUE
DAY SIX
Teague and I had pleasurably celebrated the arrival of the new year last night with Clara and Ned at my house — our house.
It included more talk of the two murders.
Teague admitted knowing about the pillow the first day, along with the fact Beverly brought it. He was unapologetic about not telling us.
Clara reported she’d seen Mamie in Shep’s again yesterday.
The girl was morose, which was explained when she said Robbie was going to start college out of state later this month, after a school counselor arranged early acceptance.
Even if that ended their relationship, I hoped someday they’d both look back and know she had done him a good turn at the most difficult time of his life.
I did not wonder aloud how that counselor found out about the situation so quickly over the holidays. Because I didn’t really wonder.
Teague volunteered nothing.
****
Another romance — not between high school kids — might also be on the line.
And I very much feared Teague would not have cause to look back and think that I had done him a good turn.
Now, Teague gave a luxuriant stretch from his spot beside me on the couch, watching football. He ended the motion by sliding one arm around my shoulders and pulling me into his side.
“I’m liking this consulting gig,” he said.
“Really?” I couldn’t help wondering if he’d prefer to be back to full-time law enforcement.
“Absolutely. Lot less paperwork, but you still get to catch the bad guys.”
“Or gals.”
He kissed the top of my head. “Or gals.”
“Teague, how did you lose the sight in your eye?”
He twisted to look at me. “You don’t ask about that.”
Here we were at the precipice...
“There’s a reason for that,” I said.
...and those words pushed me to its edge.
“I’ll tell you the reason, but that doesn’t mean I’m forgetting you don’t talk about what happened that blinded you in one eye and why you didn’t fight to stay with your old department when your old partner says you were the best. And not only are you good at it, it’s important to you, yet you stopped doing it and I want you to tell me why.
Maybe I need you to tell me why.” I sucked in a badly needed breath.
“But before I can ask, I have to tell you...”
“Tell me.”
“I want you to know this isn’t Kit’s fault. It was my decision to do it. I’m afraid it’s going to cause you difficulty and I don’t know how we’re going to work that out or—”
“How about telling me before we jump down all those other rabbit holes.”
“Right. Okay. Well, here it is. I’m not who you think I am. Well, I am. Now. But I wasn’t always. Except who I am now is more of who I am than who I ever was before.”
I shook my head at the word spaghetti I’d just twisted up in front of him.
“I know that makes no sense...”
Teague waited.
It was one of the things I usually liked about him. That he didn’t jump in, try to guess — or guide — what I might have intended to say.
But this time I could have used some guessing and guiding. I’d wound down to silence and didn’t know how to restart.
“It makes sense,” he said slowly. “But you’re going to need to say it.”
“Why?” I asked a little desperately.
“Don’t you think the way things are going between us that we need to tell each other things. You said you wanted to hear things from me. Well, I want to hear them from you.”
I dipped my head in acknowledgement. I sucked in a breath, then hiccupped. And hiccupped again.
Of all the times...
But I was not interrupting this moment to sip water or breathe into a paper bag.
Grimly, I spoke through mini eruptions.
“For fifteen years, I was known as the author of Abandon All.”
No reaction.
“I know you’ve heard of it, Teague. You and Clara discussed it numerous times.
” A little bitterness might have leaked into my voice.
They couldn’t have made me more uncomfortable during those conversations if they’d tried.
“I used that name then — family names, though Sheila Mackey is my real identity now and close to my birth name. Anyway, I used that name. But—” I searched his face, seeing no condemnation in it, waiting for a hiccup to pass. “—I didn’t write the book. Kit did.”
Still, he didn’t say anything.
Deep in his eyes, I thought I saw the glint of amusement that so often lingered there. But maybe I was hallucinating. It was hard to keep focus with the hiccups bobbing my head around.
“I’m not who you think I am,” I repeated, to make sure he understood.
“At least I wasn’t for all those years. And that’s who the world would think I was, if it ever made the connection.
I stepped out of that life — well, Kit pushed me, but either way, I didn’t tell anyone in that life where I went and I haven’t told anyone in this life who I was. ”
Another hiccup struck. I tried another deep breath. It fueled the next hiccup.
But after that passed, I got out, “I’ve lied to you about teaching and inheriting money from an aunt and all that.”
“I know.”
“You know,” I repeated blankly. “You mean because I just told you?”
“No. Before that.”
“You... knew before ? But... When...?”
“About the book? That you didn’t write it? Wondered for a while. Then, after meeting Kit a few weeks ago, I re-read Abandon All . Was clear she wrote it.”
“I don’t—” I hiccupped irately. “—mean about the book, I mean about me .”
“Remember the day at the dog park, when Clara told me you always said Call me Sheila .”
The hiccups disappeared.
“That was the first day we met. You’re saying you knew who I was — had been — the first day we met ?”
At one level I was incensed. I’d wrestled, struggled, and tortured myself over what, how, and when to tell him and he’d known all this time?
More broadly, I was that wonderful British term gobsmacked .
I was also relieved the hiccups stopped.
“I wouldn’t say I knew then, exactly.”
“But how ? How on earth could Clara saying that I said Call me Sheila M lead you to me being known as the author of Abandon All ?”
“It didn’t. Not in one jump. But call me was an interesting way to say it—”
Abruptly, I remembered being uneasy when he’d repeated those words. Shivered a little. But, then, it had been a January day at the dog park, so I’d passed it off.
“—not I am , but call me , like it wasn’t really your name—”
“It is,” I protested. “Part of it. More than the other one.”
He nodded, as if he already knew that, too, and kept talking. “Plus, I recognized Sheila M as an anagram for Ishmael — Call me Ishmael , the opening of Moby Dick . That got me to books. Fiction. A classic. Wasn’t a far jump to Abandon All .”
“Not a far jump?”
“Besides...” The glint definitely held amusement... and more.
“Besides, what?”
“I was a fan.”
“Of Abandon All .”
“Of you.”
“How could you...?” Stupid question considering the money, time, and effort that went into making the purported author of Abandon All a public figure. “Why?”
“Heard you on an interview when I was in the hospital.”
He had to mean after the injury that took part of his sight and caused him to leave the Chicago area — events he hadn’t talked about.
“Learned a lot about voices while I was recovering. Did you know your voice now is more like the public author of Abandon All than any other part of you? Or should I say it the other way around? That the public author of Abandon All ’s voice was more like the real you than any other part.
Anyway, I heard your voice. Ordered the book on audio right then, but as great as it was, it wasn’t your voice and it didn’t hit me the way that interview had.
Or all the other interviews and appearances of yours I tracked down. ”
“You saw other—?”
“Every one I could find. By the time I came here I’d accumulated quite a lot. Not an obsession shrine like a stalker—”
I’d have to remember that to taunt him with.
Later.
“—but a collection of research. By the time we met, I could see pretty well. And noticing more. Like your nails.”
“My nails? ”
“Perfect in every interview—”
And what a pain they’d been to keep up. But the PR people insisted.
“—but you keep them short now. Then you said having them long changes the angle of your hands on the keyboard and hurts your wrists, and it fell into place.”
When I told him about trying to write fiction, there’d been something in his reaction I hadn’t been able to pin down. I’d settled on laid back . But that hadn’t been right.
It had been this.
“But I don’t—Oh. Because I had long nails during my author-of- Abandon-All -days.”
“Yup. Which meant you weren’t writing then. Didn’t write the follow-up books, which came out while you were doing interviews, saying you did write them.”
“I could have been dictating.”
“You said you didn’t in several interviews. Talked about the feel of the keyboard as the words came out.”
I’d wondered at times if he sensed I wasn’t telling him everything. If that kept a sort of gap between us.
Turns out, he knew what I wasn’t telling him and waited for me to tell him. Perhaps reluctant to bank too heavily on our relationship until I did.
“I did have my reasons,” I said abruptly.
“Kit.”
“It’s really more her secret than mine. She didn’t — doesn’t — want to be known as the author of Abandon All . She wanted to continue her other writing — time and elbow room. But my not telling you, it was also about you.”
“Me?”
“You being back in law enforcement. I was all set to tell you when the sheriff’s department hired you.”
He looked a little blank.
I blurted out my concerns, which I’d thought through so many times it came out as one long sentence, ending with “...bad for your career because the department won’t like your association with me, if you have to tell them now that you know officially.”
I stopped because he was chuckling.
“You think the North Bend County Sheriff’s Department cares who did or did not write a book — even Abandon All ?
Not to mention it’s my personal life. Personal.
You think Travis Kelce asked the Kansas City Chiefs before he started dating Taylor Swift?
I guarantee he did not. A man’s gotta do what a man’s got to do. ”
My turn to chuckle at his grandiose tone.
But it faded quickly. “Still, we’ve established I was a liar and associating with me—”
“I’m associating with you, all right. Come hell or high water and that includes the sheriff’s department.”
Some might not consider that the most romantic declaration, but it put a lump in my throat.
“As for lying,” he continued, “are you back on whether you needed short nails to write and you didn’t have them when you were out in public as the author of Abandon All ?”
“Both. Either.”
He shook his head. “You didn’t lie about that.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because I knew when you were lying. Like about teaching.”
“Oh.”
“You’re not a very good liar.”
“Hey, nobody ever suspected that person didn’t write Abandon All ,” I protested, then wondered why I was defending my lying ability.
“They weren’t looking for inconsistencies. From that first day, it was clear to me you’d never spent a day in the classroom.”
“But you’d already recognized me from all those interviews.”
“Not right away. I knew something was off. Checked for Sheila Mackey, who was nowhere to be found. When I sat back and started thinking about how I’d reacted to you...”
He kissed my temple.
“That’s when the possible connection to the author of Abandon All scratched at me. I wasn’t a hundred percent sure—” He gave a short, negative jerk of his head. “My brain wasn’t. My gut was.”
That shivered something deep in me, that he’d connected the different parts of me, and recognized the whole.
“But I was lying.”
“Not about the core. Besides, I wasn’t drawn to you because you were lying.
I was drawn to you because you were you.
Partly you. From the first time I saw you — heard you.
There on that screen, behind what else you presented, I thought I recognized the.
.. structure of the person. Sort of like you and this house.
Seeing past what other people have done to it to what was meant to be.
“You knew you belonged in this house. I knew I wanted to marry the woman who was behind the facade — a very nice facade, but a facade — in those interviews.”
“Marry?”
“Oh, yeah, I think so. Don’t you?”
I threw my arms around his neck and lied to him one more time. “Maybe.”
****
We still have bumps to get over.
Including telling him I was likely on the hook to testify as the old me in a murder case from a cruise I took — a case winding its way through the legal system and ever closer to trial.
Also, whether, what, and when to tell Clara and Ned about my former identity.
Most important was getting over the bump of Teague telling me the secrets of his past.
He had them. For sure.
And I retained the powerful weapon of calling him boopsie-doodle in front of his colleagues if he didn’t come clean.