10. A Scratch Is All We Have
CHAPTER 10
A Scratch Is All We Have
Henry
“Yeah.” She nodded. “Maybe tonight wasn’t a complete bust. We did learn something.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Someone other than me believes in Lisa’s innocence.” She smiled, placing a hand over her heart. “That means that somewhere out there, there’s proof Lisa didn’t kill your dad.”
My mind churned with flashes of that day. I hadn’t come back to Paradise Creek to stir up old memories. I came back to set things right. But if Lisa was innocent, every minute she spent in jail was a huge injustice, one that Mom at some point had tried to fix. I owed this much to Nikki, Mom, and Lisa. The time to face the past had come. It still hurt to think of Dad, but I had to try. I pushed my feelings aside and went to the wall plastered with my worst nightmare.
“What did we see that day? Do you remember?” I shot a glance toward Nikki.
“Sometimes I feel like I saw something. But I don’t know what. You know? Like when you can’t think of a word and it’s right there at the edge of your mind, but you can’t quite reach it. And other words you know are not right jump in its place.” She drank from her beer.
“Fuck. Nikki. I know exactly what you mean.” I ran my fingers through my hair.
“So what did we see? How do we know what’s real?”
“Or what’s part of a waking nightmare?” I finished her thought.
She nodded in agreement and took my hand in hers, her gaze full of pity. “I felt something tug at my brain when I put these pictures up. Maybe if we go through it together, we might come up with something.”
“How does a man as big as me get beaten this bad?” I stared at the images in front of me, not recognizing the face of the man in them. What a brutal crime. So much hate. So much blood.
I vaguely remembered going to court. The details of the trial were a blur. All I remembered was spending most of my days wondering where they had Dad, if he was really dead.
The story I read later on the internet said Lisa Morrow had been convicted of murder in the first degree. The defense attorney had argued that it’d been a crime of passion. Lisa had been eighteen at the time, almost twenty years younger than Dad. How the fuck had the lawyer come up with that? In the end, the attorney’s argument had been what saved Lisa from life in prison. Temporary insanity—the same insanity that had made her strong enough to beat a grown man to death.
“Whoever did this was strong enough to move the body.” Nikki squeezed my fingers.
“What?” I frowned at her. “What do you mean?”
“You remember Dom?”
“Yeah, your non-client.” I rolled my eyes and crossed my arms. Why did it matter if he was a client or not? Nikki wasn’t mine. She never was .
“That’s the one.” She pointed a finger at me. “He found a mark on…the body. According to his expert friend, based on coloration and whatever else, his friend thinks it was postmortem.”
“He thinks someone moved Dad and scratched his arm in the process?”
“He’s working that angle. He thinks that it might create enough reasonable doubt to call for a retrial.” She looked down at her hands, biting her lip.
“But?”
“But that’s not what Lisa wants. She doesn’t want to be free. She wants to come home. Do you understand?”
I rubbed my eyes and exhaled. I might not remember the details of the trial, but I remembered how Lisa and Nikki had been treated during the entire ordeal. This town had turned all the love they had for my dad and my family into hate for the Morrow girls. At school, Nikki had been placed in a special classroom because she was jumped in the hallway by a group of kids. I’d tried to help her and ended up with a busted lip.
That had been my last day of school. My uncle had thought it would be prudent to send me to a boarding school in Tucson. Nikki stayed behind, and God only knew what else she had to put up with. All I knew was that when I came back five years later, she had decided to run away from foster care.
“She wants a fucking apology,” I said. “We’ll figure this out. I promise you.”
“But how?” She plopped herself down on the edge of the bed. “A scratch is all we have.”
“And Mom’s letter.”
“Neither of which can help Lisa.”
The air conditioner was on full blast in the room, while a spray of rain and a warm breeze blew in through the open balcony door. Finishing the last of her beer, she strolled to the terrace, her gaze on the starless night. I wanted to hold her. I wanted to fix this for her, erase all the bad in her life.
I turned to the murder board and zeroed in on the details. Why would anyone move Dad to the foyer? What had the killer been trying to hide? The tunnels? The family, especially Granddad, had always been very protective of that secret. I never understood if it had been out of pride because he didn’t want people to know the family fortune had come from bootlegging or because he wanted to make the manor a fun place for me. Was the killer really protecting the family’s secret?
“What are the odds that after all this time, evidence Dad was killed in the tunnels was still there?” I ran my hand over Dad’s photo.
Nikki turned to me, leaning on the iron rail, her cotton bathrobe clinging to her body. “That would make sense, right? I mean. There probably isn’t anything there anymore, but that has to be where your dad was when it happened. Why else move him?”
“Exactly.” I met her gaze from across the room, and the temperature went up a few degrees.
“Do you have any more beers?” She smiled at the ground.
“I have a cooler full.”
She wasn’t ready to talk about us. I had to respect that. To be honest, other than this all-consuming desire I felt for her, my feelings for Nikki were conflicted at best. One minute I wanted answers from her. Why had she moved on? Why hadn’t she come looking for me? The next I wanted to forget about everything and just make up for lost time.
“Let’s go downstairs and have a drink.” I gestured toward the door.
Not that the lack of a bed would deter me from having sex with her. God, I wanted to be with her. The only thing stopping me right now was her request to take it slow .
She didn’t bother to put on clothes, just followed me downstairs and made herself comfortable on the sofa. I brought her another beer and sat next to her.
“Thank you.” She took a long sip. With her gaze fixed on the bottle, she ran the tip of her tongue over her upper lip. That was her thinking hard tell. She smelled of fancy oils and soap. “I know he’s your uncle, and we both know he’s capable of pretty bad shit. But could he, you know? To his own brother?”
I hadn’t gone there. Yeah, my uncle was a greedy asshole, but was he a killer? “I have no idea. He’s had my mom for fifteen years. If he’s capable of killing, why is she still alive?”
“Good point.” She sat back. “Plus, if that was him back at the manor, why didn’t he send his men into the tunnel after us? Does he even know about the tunnels? I mean, how could he not?”
“You’re right. Do you think he let us go?” I met her gaze.
The same question bounced around in my head. Had Jonathan killed his own brother? Was that what I’d seen that day? A man leaving us in the dark, closing the faux panel that hid the access to the tunnel? The only thing clear in my mind was holding Nikki’s hand in mine so hard I was sure I had felt it crack. My chest tightened.
I took a long swig of beer and braced both arms on my legs. “We were playing in the tunnel that day. Do you remember?”
“Yeah. We came out, and we saw your dad in the foyer near the stairs. There was no blood, but then there was so much blood. And Lisa. She was screaming, trying to wake him up.”
“Do you remember seeing a light at the end of the tunnel, a man?”
She shook her head. “No. It was like it was tonight. Pitch black.”
I set my bottle on the coffee table and reached for her. She slid over and rested her head on my shoulder. Squeezing her tight, I kissed the top of her head. Nikki and I had so much that was still unresolved. All my family bullshit aside, we had to figure out where we stood after all this time. But I had no idea where to begin.
“We need to find Tessa.” She snuggled closer to me. “If she wrote that letter to Lisa, I’m sure it was because she knew something. She took us in, never treated us like maids. If she didn’t help Lisa, it had to be because someone stopped her. Your mom’s the key. I know it.”
Of course Nikki was right. We could stare at the wall in her room all night, but unless we recalled something new from that night, Mom was the only one who could help us.
“Okay. But where do we even start looking for her?” I grabbed my beer and downed the rest of it. “Another one?”
“Yeah, thanks.” She nodded then furrowed her brows. “A Different Point of View. That was your mom’s favorite restaurant in Phoenix. Why was your uncle there?”
I came back with two fresh bottles. “It’s a good place. Maybe he likes it too.”
“Maybe. Or maybe he took your mom there. He has taken care of her all this time. Maybe he truly cares about her. I mean, he’s still a complete asshole for what he did to you, but he’s had your mom for fifteen years.”
As much as I’d liked to demonize my uncle, Nikki was right. Mom’s garden was as beautiful as when I lived at the manor. She wasn’t in hospice. She was at home, surrounded by her flowers. She seemed content until I showed up. No, I couldn’t buy that.
“Now you’re telling me she’s happy to be there. That she doesn’t want me. Which one is it, Nikki?”
Nikki placed her hand on my chest. Her scent diffused the anger burning in my stomach.
“We just have to consider all angles. Right? Henry, that asshole will pay for what he did to you. To us.” Her voice quavered, and she ducked her gaze.
Who knew what she’d had to go through on her own? A fifteen-year-old girl alone in New York. I cradled her cheek. She closed her eyes and leaned against my hand for a moment before she removed it.
“Where your mom is concerned, he seems quite capable of finding a bit of decency. There’s an easy way to find out if he took your mom to that restaurant.”
“Is this more Nikki Swift stuff?” I teased. All this bullshit sucked, but at least I had Nikki to share it with.
“You bet. Let me make a phone call. And if necessary, you and I are going to check out the restaurant in the morning.” She flashed me a smile.
We had a new plan.