Chapter 38 #2
It’s a good question. What have I gotten us into? But her glare rankles me. Classic Jess—try to support her and make her happy, only for her to seize on the one thing that might indicate I’m making everything worse.
“You’re not telling me something,” she says.
“No,” I say fast, fetching the bucket of water I’ve been using simply so I can turn away from her.
I wonder if I sound like I’m lying, but at least I seem 100 percent sure.
She’s spot-on that I’m not telling her things.
It’s cliché to say someone will never talk to you again, but with Jess, I wonder.
She already seems so on the edge. I can’t disappoint her further by telling her that I played a critical role in taking away what she saw as a path to her own healing, talking to Coleman and offering him forgiveness as a direct line to her full recovery.
That I helped Railes get away with taking that from her, even if it was in an indirect way.
All of it feels like it’s rushing up like acid in my throat, choking me, keeping me from speaking.
“Cough it up, Cros.”
I swallow. “Nothing to tell.”
“You’ve been strange lately. You know it. I know. But never mind.” She turns from me. “I have to go.”
“Wait,” I say, dropping the bucket as I follow her inside. She stomps in and heads to the kitchen, where she grabs her purse and looks inside to make sure she has her keys. “You want to talk about strange? Do you want to tell me why you have Ryan Petronis’s file in your office?”
She looks up at me. There’s a dawning in her eyes.
“What? You were snooping around my office?”
“I was looking for some Advil. I didn’t realize you had things you needed to hide.”
“There’s absolutely nothing I need to hide.” Her voice is cold and hard. Almost detached. It surprises me. I have a flash of wonder if there really could be an inky pool of darkness, a hole in her soul, developed from what Coleman did to her.
Lord knows one developed in me.
But no. No way. Jess would never be involved in these murders.
There has to be an explanation. “Then why do you have so much personal information—information that you haven’t bothered to share with me or Alderson and Greene—on a boy whose coach was the target of a serial killer who is now stalking me? ”
She sighs loudly. “Okay, look, I met his sister, Vivian, at FVCC in the late winter,” she says.
“I gave a presentation on DNA analysis to one of her biology classes. After the class, she came up to me to tell me she was a fan of my podcast. We got to chatting, and she started telling me about what happened to her brother.”
“And so?” I fold my arms across my chest.
“Initially,” Jess says, “Vivian didn’t tell anyone about what happened to Ryan because he’d asked her not to, but eventually she shared it with her family, thinking they might hold the school accountable.
But the parents decided not to do anything because they didn’t want to create a scandal and to tarnish Ryan’s name even more when they were already in deep grief over his suicide.
Months later, Vivian decided she no longer wanted to keep it a secret, that she wanted to expose it all.
She wondered if I’d do a show or a series on hazing that’s not really hazing, but physical abuse and sexual assault.
She wanted to shed light on it all, even though she knows her parents don’t want to drag Ryan’s name through the mud. ”
I knew there had to be an explanation. And it makes sense, but still, it’s all too crazily coincidental and too close for comfort.
“What did you tell her?”
“That I’d look into it. And I did. Those were my notes.”
“Why haven’t you told me about this connection to the case? Why haven’t you told anyone about it?”
Her face is pained, like she might cry, but she quickly shuts it off. She lifts her chin and stands taller. “I’m sorry. I don’t have time for this right now. I need to get Sam.”
“Jess,” I say as calmly as I can muster. “My life is at stake here. Why didn’t you tell me about this?”
“Vivian is fragile,” she says. “She’s a kid who’s lost her brother and she feels responsible. I didn’t want to sic the cops on her. I don’t think she could handle it. I called her to ask her if she was okay with me telling law enforcement and she said she’d think about it.”
I stare at Jess in disbelief. In some ways, she’s echoing the very thing I thought about her—that she couldn’t handle Alderson and Greene breathing down her neck. And yet, still, it’s unconscionable that she’d keep this from me. “But what if she’s the one? The one you and I are hunting down?”
“That’s exactly it.” She says this with venom. “She’s not. There’s no frickin’ way she has anything to do with these crazy killings. It’s coincidental and there’s no way I’m unleashing the cops on her without her permission. You don’t understand, Crosbie.”
“Don’t understand what?”
“You don’t get it, being on the other side of things. Being in law enforcement.”
“And that’s supposed to mean I can’t understand someone’s pain? That I’m a bully?”
“Forget it. Look, she promised me she’d let me know by the end of today. And I don’t want you to tell them, either, until I hear back from her, okay?”
“I’m not promising that.”
She stares at me with loathing, her chest heaving. “I have to go.” She rushes past me to her car, hops in, and backs out without glancing my way.
I’m reeling. The seething in Jess’s eyes rocks me to my core. I stay on the curb, my feet frozen in place as I watch her drive off. Is it just anger? Or is it hatred, too? Does my own sister hate me? And why now? Does it boil down to the stress of this crazy situation?
Ever since Mark Coleman, it’s like something has crawled in and rotted in the crawlspace under a floor Jess and I share.
I decide she’s not talking about my job.
I decide my own guilt is making me so crazy I can’t even read her clearly anymore.
What she probably wants to say is that I can’t understand because it wasn’t me who was raped, that I can’t possibly get it.
She has a point that I can’t fully comprehend, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have empathy.
Who does she think I am?
Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe she’s simply picking up on what I’ve been doing with myself all these months . . . Soaking up and mimicking my own self-hatred, not so unlike Sam when he gets whiny and needy, sodden with his mother’s anxiety.
But it makes me wonder what my own sister actually thinks of me.
All this time, I’ve been trying to protect her.
Help her. Be a sort of big-sister shield for some of the worst, unexpected moments the world throws down.
And Lord knows we’ve had a boatload of those, from Dad’s illness and passing to Mom’s sudden crash, to Coleman.
But maybe she resents me. Maybe she hates me for it.
I put the bucket back in Jess’s garage and my mind turns to her office.
I wasn’t snooping before, but now that’s exactly what I plan to do.
Part of me is terrified I’ll find something on Vonda Loman, too, but the other part of me believes Randal Askens is a coincidence.
All sorts of correlations crop up when you live in smaller communities.
There’s a saying I’ve heard applied to both Montana and Wyoming, that each state is a small town with very long streets.
I’m relieved when I don’t find any notes on Loman.
I’m also calmed when I go through a bin full of her latest artwork—most colorful watercolors.
The sketches in the bin are all of fishing boats or canoes out on still lake water, red and orange kayaks stacked by docks, people fly-fishing on rocky riverbanks with sunsets blazing over the distant hills or through background trees.
There’s not one single sketch or portrait.
I walk out of her office reassured but confused. And deeply bothered. It especially stings, given how I’m always putting her first, that Jess didn’t think my life being at stake outweighed her need to protect Vivian.