21. The Moment Of The Truth
Jules
“ I ’m off boss,” Tory says, stepping outside of the boathouse.
I cover my phone with my palm, turning to look at Star Thunders chief engineer. “So the sheriff said you can leave town?”
“Yeah, my alibi officially checks out. I’m going to San Francisco to see my parents, they’ve been following the news and they’ve been worried.” She confirms.
“It’s understandable.” I commiserate.
“Just remember,” she warns. “If you want to practice, you can use the electric boat we’ve been running so far. I don’t know if we’ll be able to use the new one at Lake Ozarks, I’m having problems with the electrical system. It should be all insulated but it failed the tests. Leave it hanging, as it is, it isn’t even safe to turn the engine on in the water. I’ll have to take a really thorough look when I’m back.”
I wave Tory off and return my attention to the phone call with my lawyer.
“Sorry about that, Gordon. Yeah, no. You heard me correctly, I’m petitioning the court for joint custody of Jenna.”
Gordon reiterates his opinion on my decision. “Jules, I have to advise you against it. Under the light of the new circumstances, your chances of getting custody are slim to none. The court sides with the mother in the majority of custody disputes, unless there are serious reasons not to. But you aren’t Jenna’s biological father. We can get a DNA test to confirm it, but after what transpired last night at the hospital, that’s just a formality. Your ex wife has signed some lucrative deals as an influencer, so she’s financially stable. I don’t know any judge who would grant your request if your ex fights it.”
I close my eyes, inhaling to calm down. I remind myself that Gordon is just doing his job and it’s not his fault if the situation sucks.
That doesn’t mean I’m giving up though. “That’s bullshit,” I bite out. “Jasmine isn’t even interested in being a decent mother. She’s just fighting me to punish me.”
My lawyer must have the patience of a saint, because he doesn’t even raise his voice. “That might be so, but you aren’t Jenna’s biological father. That takes away your biggest legal advantage.”
What do I have to do to get the world to see this situation the way I see it? “It doesn’t matter, Gordon. Jenna doesn’t know any other father figure. And DNA doesn’t change the fact that I’ve loved and cared for that little girl from the second she took her first breath. Where’s the justice in taking one of her parents away from her?”
He sighs. “I don’t disagree with the merit of your position, Jules. It’s admirable that you want to step up even if you don’t have to. But my job as your attorney is to advise you against what will be a lengthy and costly legal battle with very little chance of success.”
I pinch the bridge of my nose, my head pulsing with the aggravation of this situation. “What about the fact that Jasmine has been using Jenna to extort money from me? She’s been lying to me and to my family, to the entire town for years. What does that say about her character? And she’s a terrible parent. She’s pregnant and yesterday she was drinking alcohol all day at the club. The entire fucking town saw her. I can get a number of people vouching to that. Does that mean nothing?”
Gordon repeats what he already said before Tory interrupted us. “You can sue her for damages. For all the money you paid her in child support since you separated. Maybe even for what you paid during your marriage since you married her under duplicitous circumstances. We can argue that the marriage would have never happened, had you not been told that Jasmine was pregnant with your baby. That definitely attests to your ex-wife’s character, but there’s a real chance it won’t help you get custody. Winning damages? Sure. If you press charges, we might have a case in criminal court for fraud. But the family court will still probably side with Jasmine since the two lawsuits will be separate.”
I can’t fucking believe this. “So they would rather leave my daughter with a fraudster who doesn’t care about her children's safety? Not even her unborn child?”
Gordon explains it like I’m Jenna. “First of all, the custody hearing will be happening faster than any civil or criminal suit. It’s usually urgent for the welfare of a minor, so those hearings happen fast. If you sue your ex for damages and press charges, those cases could wait for years since the court’s dockets are always on a backlog. Even if we presented our complaints to the family court, that might still not give you the result you want. If Jasmine is found unfit to be a mother, the court might appoint another guardian or put Jenna in foster care. You don’t have any rights to her. Had you known she wasn’t your daughter, you could have adopted her while you were still married to her mother, but you had no reason to do that. One thing you could do is try to see if your ex is amenable to leaving the status quo unchanged and not remove you from Jenna’s birth certificate.”
I sigh. “I already tried. I called her first thing this morning to see if now that Jenna is doing better and the emergency is over, Jasmine could reconsider. She said no. She was actually driving to meet with her lawyer to get the ball rolling.”
Gordon’s final words are the nail in the coffin of any hope that there’s a way to fight Jasmine on this. “Then I’m afraid, my advice is unchanged.”
I don’t back down. “I still want to petition for custody.”
“You’ll lose, Jules.”
“I don’t care. Just do it.” I disconnect the call, swallowing the bitter taste this conversation has left in my mouth.
As usual Jasmine is thinking about what she wants and not what’s best for our daughter. Yes, our daughter . Learning that Jenna isn’t biologically mine doesn’t change how I feel for my little girl.
I refuse to think about what could have been if Jasmine hadn’t lied to me about her paternity. My life would have probably been simpler and I would have been at Harvard right now, possibly entering the draft. There’s no way to know how my life would have turned out if I hadn’t married Jasmine.
I don’t regret one thing though. Not even the loveless marriage to my ex and certainly not my daughter.
The saying that everything happens for a reason in itself is complete bullshit, if you ask me. But there’s a nugget of truth in the fact that you can learn a lesson from most things in life.
I learned unconditional love from the moment I held Jenna in my arms. I learned not to take important things for granted and to fight for them with all I have.
In the end I believe you end up where you’re supposed to be.
Lula was always my destiny and maybe if I hadn’t been through what I have with Jaz, I would have never had the courage to follow my heart.
The fact that Stefan and Crew are involved just as deeply as I am is something that will take some work. Surprisingly they aren’t a deal breaker for me. What matters is that we make Lula happy.
As if summoned by my own thoughts, I see them walking down the dock toward the boathouse.
Stefan has his arm around her shoulders and Crew is flanking her other side. Napoleon is nestled in Lula’s arms.
A smile breaks on my face. This thought would have been crazy a week ago, but I’m glad they’re with her. Nothing bad can happen to her as long as we’re by her side, we would do anything to protect our girl.
Lula
They say that a killer always comes back to the scene of the crime.
I didn’t kill anyone last night, but I sure wish I had ended Evan’s miserable existence.
Now I have to come back to the boathouse where he almost raped me because I lost my phone.
I remember having it while I was looking for Jenna and using the flashlight to guide me as the club had turned off a lot of the lights to allow people to better enjoy the fireworks.
My phone was gone when I found Jenna and I needed to call an ambulance. The only reasonable explanation is that I must have dropped it when I was struggling with Evan.
Jules is right outside the boathouse. He looks engrossed in a phone call that ends a moment before we reach him.
By the way he shakes his head, clearly frustrated, I’m sure it has to do with Jasmine.
I pass Napoleon to Crew and close the distance between me and Jules, stopping just short of touching him. “Hey,” I murmur. “Are you ok?”
He lowers his head to place a soft, shallow kiss on my lips. “I am now. Morning beautiful.”
His arms close around me and I inhale his clean, slightly spicy scent.
I sigh when Jules relays the conversation he’s just had with his lawyer. “I hope the judge will consider the evidence that Jasmine isn’t a good mom and that they’ll see that you’re the only choice for a guardian. Why place Jenna with strangers when she has a father who loves her and wants her?”
Jules squeezes me tightly before releasing me. “It’s what I said to Gordon. But apparently things aren’t as straightforward as we think. Anyway, what are you guys doing here? I thought we were going to have a BBQ at home? Tom bought shrimps, burgers and dogs, and some tomahawk steaks.”
I explain that I realized I didn’t have my phone this morning. “This is the last place I saw it.”
“Hmm,” Jules muses. “I haven’t seen it. But Tory and a few of her engineers were here this morning to test the electric system on the new boat and they might have cleaned up. Let’s see, if they found it, there aren’t many places they could have put it.”
Jules walks toward the same cubby where he looked for a towel yesterday afternoon.
That was less than twenty-four hours ago and yet so much has happened, that it feels like a lifetime.
“Bingo,” Jules says, the second he looks inside the cubby. “They must have found it and put it in here. I’m sorry though, it isn’t in great shape.”
I look into the cubby and sure enough, my phone is sitting on top of that old, ratty gym bag that was in here yesterday and a spiderweb of cracks on the black screen tells me I might need to shop for a new one. “That asshole owes me a new phone too,” I seethe. “I hope his balls are still sore after Naps bit him and I kicked him.”
Woof.
Napoleon perks up when he hears his name, scurrying out of Crew’s arms and into mine. “Look at what that bad guy did, Naps.” I tell the pooch, picking up my damaged phone to examine it better.
Napoleon sniffs at it, his tiny brown nose twitching with diffidence.
Woof, woof, woof.
He starts barking furiously at it, squirming to get out of my arms.
“What’s gotten into you?” I squeal as the chihuahua leaps out of my arms, landing on top of the gym bag.
Grrr.
Napoleon’s deep growl is downright threatening as he bites the bottom of one of the bag’s handles. He shakes the black material, growling at it as if it was some kind of prey.
“What?” Crew chuckles. “Are you trying to tell me that we need to work out more?”
Woof.
“I think he wants the bag,” Stefan observes, amused by the way Napoleon is pulling furiously at the bag handle.
“Yuck. What could you ever want in there?” I laugh. “I can’t imagine finding anything other than some dirty socks or sweaty underwear in there.”
“Maybe there’s a protein bar inside,” Crew says. “Naps has the sense of smell of a shark. He’d find the smallest speck of food in an ocean, or even an empty protein bar wrapper tucked in the pocket of a gym bag.”
Jules shakes his head. “You act as if you’d never been fed in your entire life, Naps. Forget about that old, smelly bag. Remember last night I promised you filet mignon after you found Jenna? Tom picked you up some and he’s going to grill it for you.”
Grrr.
“Nope,” I laugh. “He really wants whatever’s in that bag. At this point, I’m quite curious to see if it’s a protein bar or if Napoleon has some kind of socks or underwear fetish.”
I pull the bag out of the cubby. “Jules, can you close the lid? I’ll put the bag on top so we can all take a look.”
The two handles of the bag are still tied together by Velcro. When I separate them and start opening the zipper, Napoleon starts barking furiously at the bag.
“Dude, chill.” Crew tries to soothe him. “I promise that if there’s a protein bar and it isn’t too old, I’ll give you some.”
“If there’s a protein bar,” I say, rummaging through a bunch of old clothes. “It must be buried at the bottom of the bag or inside a pocket. These look like someone’s old clothes. They really smell weird too, not exactly sweaty but… is that blood?”
I pull out a dark gray hoodie that’s also stained, but what attracted my attention is a camouflage green t-shirt that has a dark brown stain all over the collar.
There’s also another green hoodie with brown stains that look like they have been sprayed or splattered onto the fabric.
“What kind of sport did the owner practice?” Stefan muses. “These clothes are all bloody. Who could they belong to? Hold on, I know that hat.”
Stefan pulls out a black baseball cap with the logo “SC Military Academy” stitched on the front in white letters.
There are brown stains on the white letters too.
“Is that yours, Stef?” Jules asks. “Wasn’t that the military Academy they sent you to after you ran away to go to New York?”
Stefan nods. “That was my school, yeah. But this isn’t my cap. Mine is somewhere in my room. I gave one to Mom when I came back after graduation. She was so proud of me for being valedictorian, she even has a ‘SC Military Academy Mom’ sticker on her bumper. But this can’t be hers, right? What would it do in an old gym bag and why would it be stained with blood?”
Crew looks inside the bag too. “It looks like all these clothes are bloody.”
We sift through the bag to find two pairs of black leather gloves.
“What the fuck?” Jules grimaces. “Is this a serial killer’s bag?”
Crew’s eyes darken as he keeps looking inside the bag. “That’s exactly what I thought.”
I don’t get it. “But what is it doing here?”
Stefan looks like he’s about to be sick. “What do you think, Jumps? We just witnessed a multiple murder a couple of weeks ago. And most of the people present on the islands after the press was turned away were either employed by Mr. Andrews, or they lived in or near Star Cove.”
Jules agrees. “True, with the exception of a few people from Texas and from New York. But aren’t we jumping to conclusions? There’s no way to tell if these belonged to whoever killed Eddie, aside from…”
“The hat I gave Mom.” Stefan finishes for him.
They both shake their heads. “No, it’s impossible. There must be another explanation.” Jules is adamant.
Stefan however voices the thought I just had. “Is it though? Look, I don’t want to believe it either, but after what Eddie put Mom through, she would have a motive for wanting him dead. The sheriff thinks it was a drug deal gone wrong, but what if Eddie was the real target?”
Jules insists. “Stef, we’re talking about Mom here. The same woman who put BandAids on our cuts and who would cry if we stomped on a spider and taught us to catch and release any bug outside.”
“Maybe this can give us some more information.” Crew says, extracting an old cell phone from the bottom of the bag.
“The fuck?” Stefan snorts. “Is that a museum piece? I haven’t seen an old flip phone since my bike had training wheels. You need to press on the same key multiple times to even type certain letters or symbols. Remember? Texting someone took forever.”
Crew flips the phone open. “Maybe you did. Eddie had a cell phone because he traveled, but we couldn’t afford stuff like that. I didn’t get a cellphone until we came to Star Cove and Mom opened the bakery.”
“Regardless,” Jules observes. “We might need to charge it before we can look inside. If it’s been in that bag for a couple of weeks…”
The screen lights up immediately when Crew presses on the ‘on button.’
“You were saying?” he chuckles. “I used to sneak Eddie’s phone when he was home to play ‘Snake’ and that sucker’s battery lasted for days. If this has been turned off the entire time, it’s no surprise it still has juice. I think the best way to tell who this belongs to, is to look at the texts.”
It’s immediately obvious that the phone must belong to Eddie.
The names of the recipients of his texts are mostly Trevor, Tory, Chanelle—Eddie’s last girlfriend—and a non-specified M. contact that sent him stuff that doesn’t make any sense.
“What are those numbers in those texts?” Jules wonders.
“Those look like coordinates. I think that is some kind of burner phone that Eddie must have used to communicate with his contact in the Morelli family.” Stefan elaborates.
I cross my arms over my chest, suddenly feeling cold. “I thought that was mostly Trevor’s job, but after what we learned about Star Thunders being involved in money laundering and smuggling, it makes sense that Eddie was just as involved.”
Crew’s expression gets darker and darker with every passing second as he scrolls through Eddie’s text messages. “We need to accept that the bloody clothes and Eddie’s burner phone can only mean that this bag belongs to whoever killed Eddie. Maybe one of the Morellis? Or someone connected to them? It would be important to know who put this here. Very few people have access to this boathouse. Did Tory say that she was officially cleared by the sheriff?”
Jules and I look at each other and come to the same conclusion.
“Fuck.” We say in unison.
“What?”
I start shaking my head, unwilling to accept the evidence. “Yesterday when Jules and I came here to be alone, we saw Dad coming from here.”
Jules nods. “When we asked him what he was doing in here, he waffled something about the alarm going off in the boathouse. Yesterday I didn’t think it was weird but now that I think about it, Tom looked stressed.”
Stefan scowls. “Like someone who came here to hide evidence from a murder scene?”
Exactly like that, is the thought that comes to my mind but I don’t want to say it out loud.
“Do you think Dad did it?” I ask Jules.
The answer comes from Crew. “I don’t know, baby. The hat in there belonged to Arianna if Stefan is right. And I just found Arianna’s name in Eddie’s phone. And my mom’s. There are a few messages to both of them.” He reads through them. “It looks like Eddie was flirting with both of his ex-wives. He’s pretty insistent, asking them to meet up alone and I’m glad the sexting our late father did was just verbal, because if I find a dick pic, I swear I’m gonna be sick.”
I crane my neck to read the screen. “Shit. He gets pretty graphic about what he wants to do with them. Arianna seems to be shutting him down more firmly.”
Crew’s jaw ticks when he scrolls through the messages between Eddie and Tilly. “Yeah. The last message here is to my mom and the time stamp is from the night before the murder.”
Eddie:
I miss you, Tilly. Meet me tomorrow morning while everyone is at that quail hunt. We should talk.
The last message is another set of numbers like the one Stefan said was coordinates that indicate a place.
“I bet those numbers lead to the stables on the second island.” Stefan checks on his phone. “Yup. Fuck. It’s right there.”
We all look at each other. “This can’t mean—do you guys think our parents are involved in what happened at Twinberry Cove?” I don’t know what to think.
Jules pulls me into a hug, his mouth skimming the crown of my head. “There’s only one way to find out. We need to confront our parents and show them the contents of this bag. I don’t want to believe it, but unless they have one hell of an explanation, it seems that way.”
Crew shoves everything back in the bag. “Do you think we need to call the sheriff? Or, I don’t know, get a gun or something? If one of them did this and they find out we know, would they hurt us?”
I don’t want to believe that. “Do you really think your mom, Arianna or my dad would hurt us?”
Stefan exhales slowly, running a hand through his blond hair. “I don’t know. I don’t think so, but what’s the point in getting a gun? Even if one of them became violent, would you shoot one of our parents?”
We all know we wouldn’t. At least not Dad, Arianna or Tilly. Tiffany is a different story.