CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE
Twenty years. Twenty years had passed since that October night when his world had collapsed in a single phone call from the Richmond Police Department.
Twenty years since he had driven to the hospital, still believing that Brandon might only be injured…
only to learn that his seventeen-year-old son was already gone.
The memory of that night played in Robert's mind with the clarity that trauma sometimes preserved, every detail sharp and painful despite the passage of time.
The police officer had been professional but gentle, explaining how Brandon had been found on Riverside Drive around eleven o'clock, approximately three hours after the estimated time of the accident. A jogger had discovered him lying in the grass beside the road, having apparently crawled nearly fifty feet from where the initial impact had occurred. By that time, he’d already lost so much blood…
"It looks like he tried to make it to that house there," the officer had said, pointing to a modest home with a porch light that would have been visible from where Brandon lay dying. "He was trying to get help."
That detail had haunted Robert more than any other aspect of his son's death.
Brandon had survived the initial impact, had been conscious and determined enough to drag himself across rough ground toward the promise of assistance that never came.
He had died alone in the darkness, within sight of safety, while the person who struck him fled without calling for help or checking on his condition.
The investigation had yielded frustratingly little evidence.
Fragments of headlight glass, tire marks that were too common to trace, no witnesses who had seen the actual collision.
The investigating officers had assured Robert that they would pursue every lead, but as weeks turned to months without progress, it became clear that Brandon's killer would never be identified through conventional police work.
Robert had tried to move forward with his life, tried to honor Brandon's memory by continuing the routines and relationships that had defined their family before the accident.
But grief had a way of changing everything it touched, and Robert found himself unable to maintain the emotional connections that had once sustained him.
His marriage to Tanya had been the first casualty.
She had wanted to process their loss together, to attend support groups and counseling sessions where they could work through their grief as a united front.
But Robert had found himself unable to share his pain with anyone, even the woman he had loved for eighteen years.
The anger that consumed him felt too dangerous to express, too volatile to risk exposing Tanya to its full intensity.
The fights had started small, disagreements about practical matters like whether to keep Brandon's bedroom exactly as he had left it or whether to attend his high school graduation ceremony six months after his death.
But those surface conflicts had been symptoms of a deeper incompatibility in how they processed trauma.
Tanya had needed connection and communication to heal, while Robert required solitude and silence to contain the rage that threatened to overwhelm him.
The divorce had been finalized two years after Brandon's death, another loss that Robert blamed directly on the unknown driver who had destroyed his family and fled into the night.
His job performance had suffered next. Robert worked as a maintenance supervisor for the city's parks department, a position that had always provided him with satisfaction and stability.
But after Brandon's death, he found himself unable to concentrate on routine tasks, missing meetings, and snapping at coworkers who made innocent comments about their own children's activities and achievements.
The first formal reprimand had come eight months after the accident, when Robert had failed to complete a required safety inspection of playground equipment in three different parks.
The second had followed six months later, after Robert had gotten into a heated argument with a parent who complained about the condition of a baseball field where his son's team practiced.
Robert had managed to avoid termination, but his career advancement had effectively ended.
He had remained in the same position for twenty years, watching younger colleagues receive promotions and opportunities that should have been his.
Another aspect of his life that had been stolen by the person who killed Brandon and drove away.
But somehow, over the course of years that felt simultaneously endless and brief, Robert had found a way to function.
Not to heal, exactly, but to create a routine that allowed him to get through each day without being consumed by the anger that still burned in his chest. He had developed hobbies that kept his hands busy and his mind occupied.
He had learned to avoid situations and conversations that might trigger the grief that never truly went away.
Until six months ago. That was when Eleanor Whitman had appeared at his front door and shattered the fragile equilibrium he had managed to build.
Robert could still see her standing on his porch that evening in late spring, wringing her hands and struggling to find words for what she had come to say.
She had looked older than her years, worn down by whatever burden she had been carrying, but there had been a determination in her expression that suggested she had been preparing for this conversation for a long time.
One moment, it looked like she might pass out, and the next, she was a ball of nervous energy.
"Mr. Fisher? My name is Eleanor Whitman. I need to speak with you about your son... "
The sound of his son's name spoken by a stranger had hit Robert like a physical blow.
Twenty years of carefully managed grief had threatened to overwhelm him in that single moment, but he had invited Eleanor inside because he needed to understand why this woman knew Brandon's name and what she might have to tell him.
What she had told him changed everything.
Eleanor had sat in his living room, tears streaming down her face, and confessed to the crime that had destroyed his life two decades earlier.
She and three friends had been drinking wine at a local restaurant, celebrating something Robert couldn't remember now.
They had decided to drive home despite being intoxicated, and Eleanor had been behind the wheel when she struck Brandon on Riverside Drive.
"We panicked," Eleanor had said, her voice barely audible. "We knew we had hit someone, but we were drunk and scared, and we just kept driving. We agreed that night to never talk about it again, and we never did. Until now."
Robert had sat in stunned silence as Eleanor explained how guilt had eaten away at her for twenty years, how she had been unable to enjoy any aspect of her life, knowing that she had killed an innocent boy and left his family without answers.
She had mentioned that one of her friends had recently received a cancer diagnosis, and the reality of mortality had finally pushed her to seek some kind of redemption.
"I can't undo what we did," Eleanor had said. "But I can at least give you the truth. And that I have all lived with the knowledge of what we did every day since it happened."
She had been careful with names, Robert remembered. She had mentioned being part of a book club and had accidentally revealed Janet Klein's name before catching herself and providing no other identities. But she had given him enough information to begin his own investigation.
Robert had thanked Eleanor for her honesty and told her that he would need time to process what she had told him.
Good Lord, they’d even wept together as if they were close friends.
He had even suggested that he might be able to work toward forgiveness, given enough time and reflection.
Eleanor had left his house believing that her confession might lead to some kind of reconciliation or healing.
But Robert had been planning their deaths from the moment she walked out his door.
The research had taken months. Identifying the other members of Eleanor's book club, learning their schedules and routines, understanding their reading habits via Goodreads and their profiles.
He'd learned enough about them to plan the elaborate crime scenes that would confuse investigators and buy him time to complete his work.
He had been methodical and patient, just as he had learned to be during his years of managing grief.
Margaret Carlisle had been first because she was the most vulnerable, isolated in her library with a husband who worked predictable evening hours.
She was also among the newest of the members, so he didn’t think her death would instantly make people think the murders were connected to the book club.
Jennifer Haynes had been next because her nightly tea ritual provided an opportunity for poisoning that would initially appear to be natural causes. Eleanor had been third because Robert had wanted her to understand that her confession had not brought her the peace she had sought.
And now Janet Klein sat at the top of his remaining list, the woman whose name Eleanor had accidentally revealed during her confession.
She had been in the car… the car that had killed his son.
Janet lived alone, had no close family nearby, and followed routines that Robert had been observing for weeks.
He reached into the backseat of his car and retrieved the canvas bag that contained the tools he would need for Janet's death. A coil of rope, work gloves, a flashlight, and the spare key to Janet's house that he had obtained weeks earlier when she had been away for an overnight trip.
Janet Klein had been there that night twenty years ago. She had been in the car when Eleanor struck Brandon, had participated in the decision to flee the scene. She had kept the secret that denied Robert any sense of justice or closure for two decades.
Robert stepped out of his car and began walking toward 1247 Maple Lane, carrying the bag that contained everything he needed to cross another name off the list of people who had destroyed his life and escaped punishment for twenty years.