Chapter Six
CHAPTER SIX
Aidan left the front door open and headed into the kitchen area, having no doubt that Malone would follow him inside the cabin. She was tenacious and wasn’t about to leave without getting what she came for. He just hoped that wasn’t him, in handcuffs.
“Holy moly,” she breathed as she came inside.
He grabbed a bottle of beer and a bottle of water from the refrigerator and carried them to the round table in the front right corner of the cabin. He set the water on the table, opposite him, and twisted open the beer for himself. As Malone toured her way around the great room of the cabin, mouth slightly open in wonder, he sipped his beer and watched her. Part of him couldn’t help feeling pride at her wide-eyed surprise as she ran her soft-looking hands over the rocking chairs, end tables, even the wooden animals he’d painstakingly carved over the past year for the grandchildren he’d likely never have.
She headed into the kitchen area just past him and stood in the middle, turning in a slow circle. “The cabinets,” she said. “Maple?”
He nodded. “Locally sourced.”
“Beautiful. You made those, along with most everything in the cabin? They have the same look, the same…expert craftsmanship as that table in your workshop.”
“They’re my work, yes.” He took another sip, telling himself not to let his ego get the best of him. Maybe she was impressed with his work, or maybe this was all part of a facade to make him like her, to feel comfortable enough to tell her whatever it was that she wanted to know. She wasn’t his friend, wasn’t on his side. He needed to remember that, no matter how much a part of him wished it could be different. The one consistent thing about his life ever since his wife’s death was an aching loneliness that no amount of hard work could fill, no matter how desperately he tried.
She finally joined him at the table, ignoring the chair across from him and instead sitting beside him. Maybe she hadn’t learned that lesson he’d tried to teach her after all, about getting too close to a potentially dangerous person.
“It’s incredible, gorgeous,” she said. “Everything you’ve built here. The cabin is amazing, too. These two-story-high ceilings are stunning. The carved banister on the staircase is amazing. And the picture windows frame the mountains like a master painter. Did you build this home, too?”
“Didn’t need to. I was lucky enough to find this place already here when I moved to Mystic Lake. The previous owner was retiring to Montana to be with his kids. He’s the one who commissioned the purpleheart patio table and chairs. The only thing I did was add the workshop and renovate the kitchen and bathrooms.”
She pulled the water bottle to her and twisted it open. “Thanks. Didn’t realize I was thirsty until I saw this.”
He nodded as she took a sip, then grudgingly said, “If you’re hungry, there’s some venison stew in the refrigerator, plenty enough to share. I’ve got fresh fruit, things for salad, too, if you want.”
She set the bottle down and crossed her arms on the tabletop. “It’s crystal clear that you don’t want me here, and yet you offer me food and drinks and welcome me into your cozy, warm cabin. Which man is the real Aidan O’Brien? The one who can’t help but act the host even when he doesn’t want any visitors, and offers safety tips, or the one who committed murder and went to prison for ten years?”
He winced and set his beer down. “No beating around the bush with you. You go right for the jugular.”
“I don’t know any easy way to ease into asking you about your wife’s death.”
He briefly closed his eyes, then sat back in his chair and crossed his arms. “You obviously read my record. Everything is in my files. Why do you want me to talk about it?”
“Because I want your perspective, your side of it, not what police officers and lawyers summarized in their reports. You’ve lived most of your life in Nashville, right? That’s where you met Elly?”
He sighed deeply, then cleared his throat. “Her name was Elly Larsen back then.” He cleared his throat again. “My parents came here from Dublin when I was a teenager. That’s the Irish brogue you mentioned. They moved several times until they settled in Nashville, bought a house two doors down from the Larsens. Our parents became best friends. Elly and I naturally became friends, too. That lasted through high school, then college where we began dating. A few years after graduation, once I had my furniture-making venture up and running, we got married.”
“Furniture-making. You started your own business right out of college?”
“Pretty much. My grandparents on both sides were woodworkers all their lives. Although my father wasn’t into that, I was fascinated by the stories my grandparents told and loved the carpentry and carving projects they involved me in whenever they visited. The only reason I went to college was to learn about running a business so I could start mine as soon as possible.”
“Judging by this cabin, the sixty-plus acres that you bought with it, your business must have done really well.”
“It’s eighty-plus now that I bought out the only other neighbor on top of this mountain. You really did read up on me.”
“That’s part of my job.”
He shrugged and took another sip of beer.
“How long was it before you and Elly had your son, Niall?”
He stared at her a long moment before answering. “He was born seven months after we got married. Elly lied during the entire pregnancy to her parents, telling them she wasn’t as far along as she was. When he was born she swore to them that he was a preemie. She didn’t want them to know we’d slept together before marriage. Considering that Niall was eight pounds at birth, and her parents weren’t stupid, they obviously only pretended to believe her to help her save face.”
“They sound like loving parents, not wanting their daughter to be embarrassed that she didn’t follow tradition, or perhaps her religious beliefs.”
“Both, and yes, they were loving, good people. Still are.”
“Where’s your son now?”
He glanced sharply at her. “With Elly’s parents, my former in-laws.”
“Did your parents try for custody?”
His throat tightened. “No. They had me late in life and weren’t in the best of health when…all of this began. They didn’t want to start over with a young child. They left the raising of Niall to the Larsens and moved back to Ireland when I went to prison.”
Her eyes widened. “I’m so sorry. For your son, and for you.”
“Don’t be. My parents are…different. I know they care…about both of us. It’s been difficult on them and they needed help I was no longer around to provide. They’re with extended family and do what they can to keep in touch long-distance.”
“So then Niall is with the Larsens full-time.”
“Yes. The court terminated my parental rights and Elly’s parents adopted him. My lawyer sends my child support payments to their lawyer and provides basic updates on Niall’s health. But that’s it.”
“Child support. He’s not an adult yet?”
“Almost. He turned seventeen back in the spring.”
“So when your wife died, he was—”
“Five years old. I doubt he even remembers me. I hope to hell his grandparents are keeping his mother’s memory alive for him. She deserves that.” He took another swig of his beer and eyed the whiskey on the bar in the great room, longing for something stronger.
“Elly’s parents didn’t bring your son to visit you while you were incarcerated?”
“Why would they after what…what I did? I wouldn’t have wanted them to even if they’d offered. Prison is no place for a child.”
“So you’ve never seen him, not even after you got out a year ago?”
“Twelve months and ten days ago. Aside from an annual picture the Larsens’ lawyer sends my lawyer, I haven’t seen Niall since the day the Larsens took him away. My lawyer has made an open invitation that if Niall ever wants to meet me, the lawyer will arrange a supervised visit on neutral grounds. But I doubt his grandparents have ever even passed the invitation along. I can’t blame them. He’s better off without me in his life. Dredging up old memories, a painful past, wouldn’t do him any good.” He crossed his arms again.
“I’m sorry. About your son.”
“It is what it is. But…thanks.”
She leaned forward, her gaze searching his. “I know this is difficult, but could you tell me about the night of the fire?”
He winced and shoved back from the table. “Give me a minute.” He strode into the main part of the great room and stood in front of the large picture window that framed the incredible beauty of the Smoky Mountains in the distance.
When Malone joined him, quietly standing beside him as he looked out the window, he couldn’t help putting off the discussion about the fire just a little longer. Instead, he told her, “Elly loved the mountains. She wanted to spend our honeymoon in a cabin in Gatlinburg. I wanted to take a cruise, soak up the sun on a beach. We went to Gatlinburg. How could I not? It made her happy. And she was pregnant with our first…” He swallowed. “With our only child. It’s the least I could do. She was already experiencing morning sickness. It was easier on her to be pampered on the back deck of a mountain cabin than to sit out in the hot sun by the ocean.”
He could feel her staring at him and he shifted uncomfortably.
“Your voice changes when you talk about her,” she said. “You loved her, didn’t you?”
He frowned. “Of course I did. That’s why I…why I let her go.”
“Because of the fire.”
He nodded.
“Tell me what happened. Please.”
He drew a shaky breath, then motioned toward one of the couches. “I need to sit down for this.”
Once they were seated, to his surprise, she helped him ease into the conversation about that awful night by talking about more mundane things that really didn’t matter. She asked about his business, things he and Elly did, the first few years of life as young parents with a rambunctious son running them ragged.
“Earlier you mentioned your parents try to keep in touch, even from Ireland. What about your grandparents? Or are they all gone now?”
“If by gone you mean have they passed away, no. They’re all remarkably healthy for their ages, doing really well. But after I…confessed…they cut me out of their lives. I’m an only child, no siblings. The only family who speaks to me these days is my parents, and then, only rarely. As I said, they aren’t in the best of health.”
“I’m sorry.”
He glanced at her, surprised to hear the empathy in her voice, see the sorrow in her eyes. He gave her a curt nod of thanks and looked away again, staring toward the mountains, which were beginning to mist over, giving them the smoky look for which they’d been named.
“We’d only been in the house for a few weeks,” he finally began. “The business had taken off. I was making millions, investing the profits and making millions on top of that. I never expected the high-end custom furniture market to be that lucrative and successful. But it was. I took it international and it really exploded. I had over a hundred people working for me at the time, far more now in several locations around the world. In spite of that, all Elly wanted was a slightly bigger house than our starter home so we’d have room for more children. But I wanted a statement home, something grand that reinforced the image of success.”
He shook his head in disgust. “My ego and pride had me overrule her desires that one time and insist on getting a mansion in the foothills outside of Nashville in one of the upper-crust neighborhoods. It was huge, beautiful, but old. The inspection pointed out dozens of things that needed to be upgraded. One of those was the electrical system. It was original to the house and the inspector warned it wasn’t capable of handling all the modern smart appliances and technological toys that people have these days. We could have waited, had the electrical completely redone before we moved in. But I didn’t take the inspector’s warnings seriously enough. I thought we had time, that we could do the renovations after we were settled.”
He shook his head in self-disgust. “Obviously, I was wrong. I was working late one night at my company, meeting with my more senior craftsmen about new equipment and tools they felt we needed. Once all of that was wrapped up, it was past the dinner hour and dark outside. I could see the flames lighting up the night sky before I even turned down our street. Firefighters and police officers were everywhere, lights flashing, hoses pouring water onto the second story of our home. I jumped out of my car and tried to run inside, but they held me back. I screamed at them that my wife and son were in there. One of the policemen told me they’d been rescued, that my son was fine and with a neighbor, but that my wife was at the hospital.”
He squeezed his hands into fists. “ Rescued . That word scared the hell out of me. What did it mean? I was afraid to ask. I checked on Niall, then sped to the hospital. Once there I…” He closed his eyes, reliving the nightmare yet again as the horrible images bombarded his mind.
“Elly,” he whispered, his eyes still closed. “My God. Elly.”
She was in the burn unit, soot and burns over large swaths of her body. But it was her silence that was more terrifying than screams of pain would have been.
“Aidan?”
He opened his eyes, glad that the agent had brought him back from the darkness. Not that he’d thank her for it. “I told you to call me Mr. O’Brien.”
“And I told you to call me Grace.”
He couldn’t help but smile at that. Then he blew out a shaky breath and gave her a sanitized version of what Elly had suffered.
“The fire started upstairs. An electrical short. Elly was downstairs and heard Niall screaming. She ran and didn’t realize there was a fire until she reached the landing. Flames were between her and our son’s room. She ran right through them to get him. She…she grabbed the comforter off his bed and soaked it in the shower, then covered both of them as she ran through the flames again to the stairs. They’d just reached the bottom when a beam fell on her. Niall was able to scramble out from under her and run outside. The firefighters had to pull the beam off her and take her out.”
Malone gave him another one of those empathetic smiles he didn’t begin to deserve. “She was paralyzed, correct?”
“From the chest down. She had to be on a ventilator to breathe. After months of treatment in the burn center, she was well enough to go home. But the vent was permanent. She’d die without it. She had partial use of her right arm, and she could turn her head, blink her eyes. Little else. In some ways the paralysis was a blessing because she didn’t suffer as much as she would have during burn treatments. But she’d have traded the pain to be able to walk again, to breathe on her own, to hold her son.”
“How do you know that?”
“She told me.”
“I thought she had a ventilator. Doesn’t that prevent you from speaking?”
“Her ventilator was connected to her trachea. Her mouth wasn’t covered. And it had this…valve, a…Passy Muir Valve. That’s what it was called. It helped her speak. She could write a little, too, with her right hand. But it was really difficult. She preferred the valve.”
“I didn’t read about that in the reports in your file.”
He shrugged. “I don’t know that it matters either way. Why do you keep asking these—”
“Let’s skip to the last day of her life, seven months after the accident.”
“Surely those details are in the police reports.”
“Not as much as I’d expect. The investigative file is surprisingly sparse. Even though it was several months after her death before you were brought to court, there doesn’t seem to have been much of an investigation.”
“Why would there be? I told the police what happened. When the day nurse who watched over Elly whenever I was at work left, I unplugged my wife’s ventilator. I let her go.” He swallowed, his throat tight as he struggled to keep his composure.
Rather than accept his confession, Malone frowned as if she was weighing it for the truth. “From what I’ve read, there are alarms on the machine that was keeping your wife alive. If you unplugged it, the backup battery—as long as it was charged and working correctly—would have kicked in to keep the machine going until it was plugged in again or the battery died. The particular model your wife used has ten minutes of battery life. Alarms would have been going off that whole time.”
He hesitated. “Right. They were. I knew all about the alarms. I was trained to use her equipment, to suction, clean, keep it going if any alarms went off during the night while there weren’t any nurses there watching over her. Again, why do you feel you need to—”
“Aidan. You ran into the woods this morning with no way to defend yourself against a man with a lethal weapon. You risked your life because you didn’t want him to shoot an arrow near strangers, people who weren’t your loved ones. Do you honestly expect me to believe that you unplugged your wife’s machine, your son’s mother, and sat there for the ten minutes for the battery to run down with all those alarms going off, then several more minutes watching her struggle until she died, before finally calling 911?”
His face flushed with heat. His pulse raced and he could feel a bead of sweat running down his back.
“Aidan?”
“I don’t expect you to believe anything. And I don’t care whether you do or not. I confessed to my crime, went to prison. Why does it even matter at this point?”
“Your son was in the house at the time?”
Good grief, she was tenacious. And getting far too close to the truth. He needed her to stop digging. That was the only reason he hung on, continued answering her questions as he desperately tried to assuage her curiosity and convince her, somehow, to let it go. To move on to something else, to someone else, in her investigation.
“Yes,” he finally said. “He was in his room, playing.”
“Did he come into his mother’s room when he heard the alarms?”
Another bead of sweat raced down his back. “He… No, he stayed in his room.” At her look of disbelief, he quickly added, “He’d gone on a field trip that day with his kindergarten class, to the zoo. He was worn-out, fell asleep as soon as I got him home. His door was shut, and…Elly’s door was shut.”
“I see. How far away was your son’s room from Elly’s?”
His throat ached with the urge to shout at her. Stop. Please. Just, stop.
“Far enough that he didn’t hear anything. And I… Right, I silenced the machine. I forgot about that. I turned off the alarms.”
“You just said the alarms were going off. Now you’re saying you turned them off.”
He stood. “I’ve answered your questions, far more than I should have to, given that none of this even remotely touches on your investigation into the serial killer you’re looking for. It’s time for you to go.”
She stood and looked up at him. “I know this has been difficult. But I appreciate your cooperation. There is one more thing, though. It’s not about your wife. Earlier today, you told me that you use a bow and arrows to hunt. Can you show them to me?”
He swore beneath his breath. “I always keep a bow and quiver of arrows in my truck. You can look at those on your way out. It’s parked beside the cabin. My other equipment is in here.” He headed to the first bedroom under the stairs. He flung open the door and headed into the closet to grab his bow and one of the quivers of arrows to give her. But when he turned around, she was standing in the closet doorway.
“I need to verify for myself,” she said unapologetically.
He tossed the bow and arrows down and left the room.
A few minutes later, she joined him by the front door. “I don’t see anything remotely resembling a crossbow anywhere. And as you said earlier, your arrows are longer, without any white feathers for fletching. Oh, wait, that was another question I had, about the fletching.”
He opened the door and leaned against the frame. “Make it quick. My patience is at an end.”
“It’s what you were saying at the station during our earlier interview, before Dawson cut it short. I was talking about the arrows from the incident at this morning’s festival. I said the fletching was both plastic and feathers. You corrected me, said that the arrows you saw… What? What were you going to add to that?”
He frowned, trying to remember, then nodded. “Right. I think I was making the point that the plastic on the arrows was the fletching, for the aerodynamics. That’s a crucial part of the arrow to make it fly straight and true. The feather isn’t fletching, not the one dangling from the arrow. That wouldn’t help stabilize the shot. It would wreak havoc on the aerodynamics. Anyone shooting a bow and arrow using a large feather off the end like that isn’t concerned with accuracy.”
Her eyes widened. “Meaning whoever he shoots just happens to be in the way of the arrow. He’s not really aiming.”
“Exactly.”
She swore. “We’ve been focusing too much on victimology, trying to dig into the backgrounds of our victims and figure out what links them together. The answer to that is—”
“Nothing,” he said. “Wrong time. Wrong place. The victims are random. Unless he attaches the feathers after he shoots someone. I suppose that’s possible, too. Then you’re back to looking at victimology.”
Some of her excitement drained out of her. “True. Well, it’s another angle to look into, regardless. Thank you, Aidan. You’ve been extremely helpful.” She held out her hand.
He sighed heavily. Her use of his first name was a technique to build a connection with him so he’d answer questions. He knew it. But dang if it wasn’t working to some extent. Feeling spiteful at this point if he again refused to shake her hand, he shook it. And immediately felt his anger draining away. Her soft, warm touch was like a soothing balm over the wounds in his soul that had been reopened during the interrogation. That simple human contact that he normally avoided sparked a stirring in his heart that he’d thought had died years ago. He quickly broke the contact out of desperation and self-preservation. He didn’t want the man he used to be to wake up, to feel everything so deeply and painfully again. He needed to lock away that part of himself just to survive.
She gave him a sad smile as if she understood what he was thinking. And that scared the hell out of him.
“Aidan, I know there’s more to what happened the night your wife died than you’ve ever admitted. Whatever it is that you’re holding back, remember that the law can’t punish you a second time for the same crime. You’ve served your time. Have you considered that telling the truth will unburden your conscience, lift a terrible weight off your shoulders and allow you to finally begin the healing process?”
He motioned toward the open door. “Goodbye, Special Agent Malone.”
She sighed and headed outside.
The sound of another car engine and wheels crunching on gravel had him stepping onto the porch to see what was going on. As Malone was walking toward her car, one of the police station’s Jeeps was heading toward her.
“How did I get so lucky today?” Aidan muttered.
The unmistakable sound of an arrow whistling through the air had him shouting a warning.
“Hit the deck!”
Malone dived to the ground a split second after the arrow embedded itself in the back of her SUV, with a large white feather dangling from the end. If the arrow had been a little to the left, it would have driven deep into her back.
Aidan whirled around just in time to see someone disappearing into the woods on the far side of the cabin. He immediately took off after them.
“Freeze, or I’ll shoot!” Dawson’s voice rang out.
Aidan slid to a halt and slowly raised his hands.