Chapter Ten #2
Emmy shook her head, but more at herself than to answer the question. She hadn’t put it together that Allison would need a nice camera with a telephoto lens to do her PI work. “So, the killer was looking for a memory card and just took the camera?”
“That’s one theory.” Jude didn’t sound persuaded. “Why did the killer shoot Mandy?”
“Maybe she saw his face?” Emmy guessed. “But the big question is, why did he stick around? You, Cole, and I were all still two streets over in the cruiser when we heard the first three gunshots. I was in front of the house reaching for my shotgun when we heard the fourth shot. You ran around the side of the house. I posted at the front. All that time, he could’ve just run out the back door. Why didn’t he?”
“You’re right,” Jude said. “Tap the weak spots.”
Another phrase from their father. Emmy had to swallow again before she could respond.
“Shooting you was reckless. With me right downstairs? And no idea which staircase I’d come up?
Or whether there were other cops with me?
That’s not a professional killer. Plus, he missed Allison twice before he actually managed to shoot her in the chest. That means he was panicked.
Maybe feeling shaky. And the medical director at the trauma center told me Mandy’s head wound is shallow, which isn’t exactly a kill shot.
Another few inches and he would’ve missed. And he only managed to graze you.”
“What did you hear when I was shot upstairs in the hallway?” She shook her head and shrugged, because every second had felt like the world was collapsing around her. Emmy usually felt an eerie sense of calm when she was in dangerous situations.
The sound of a gun firing had electrified her with panic.
She told Jude, “I was focused on identifying the perpetrator.”
“Okay.”
Emmy struggled against another unwelcome swell of emotion.
The okay was all Gerald, too. Sometimes he’d said it in agreement, sometimes he’d said it to acknowledge that words had been spoken and they’d been heard.
By the time of her father’s death, Emmy had mastered his okays, but Jude’s okays were an entirely new language.
Okay—if that’s the lie you want to tell yourself.
Okay—I know there’s more to the story.
She looked at her sister again, but there was no deciphering her meaning.
Jude had gone silent. The fine lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth stood out in the low light from the dashboard.
She looked less like the teenage girl standing with her brothers at the river basin and more like Myrna.
Emmy felt that weird shaking inside of her chest again.
It was like sitting beside her mother and listening to her father.
She had to clear her throat before she continued. “A witness was told by Allison that Mandy had bruises on her back like she’d been beaten.”
“Bill?”
Emmy shrugged, because everything was speculation. There was no hard evidence pointing to anyone she could actually arrest. “The unknown older man? Reggie? Woody?”
“Lots of arrows. Lots of different directions. What are we missing?”
Yet another Gerald phrase. Emmy blinked, and in the split second of her eyes closing, she could almost see her heart trembling against her ribcage.
Her hands gripped the wheel so hard that the stitching dug into her fingers.
She had to change the subject before a panic attack, or whatever the hell kept happening, happened again.
“I found a flask in Dad’s desk drawer.”
Emmy could feel the heat of Jude’s gaze on the side of her face.
“It was full. Smelled like bourbon.”
Jude let out a heavy breath. “I’ve got an unopened bottle of Jack Daniel’s in my underwear drawer back in San Francisco. It reminds me that I’m in control. That my sobriety is a choice.”
Emmy wanted so desperately to believe her, but between Myrna’s illness and his own health problems, Gerald had been under a tremendous amount of stress before he’d died.
Had he sneaked a mouthful of Old Rip every now and then?
Was he secretly getting drunk all those late nights in his office?
Even Emmy had cracked a few times, finishing a bottle of wine when she’d normally stop after one or two glasses.
“Gilchrist,” Jude said. She was reading the sign pointing toward the Evelyn Gilchrist Trauma Center. “I see they still love putting their name on everything.”
Cliftons hardly had room to talk. “Aunt Millie was annoyed they weren’t at Myrna’s funeral.”
“Aunt Millie is annoyed about everything.”
Emmy coasted down the exit and followed the glowing lights toward the trauma center built onto the north side of the main hospital building. The parking lot was almost packed. She took out her phone to text Sherry as they got out of the car. The dots bounced. Sherry texted back—
In the cafeteria. Find me when you’re finished.
Emmy tapped a thumbs up. She headed toward the trauma center.
Jude asked, “Tell me about your relationship with Allison. What did you like about her? What did you not like?”
Emmy didn’t know that the question mattered. Right now, she needed to think about Mandy. “I didn’t like that her husband was beating the hell out of her.”
She walked into the building. The antiseptic smell bit into the back of her nose.
She felt her throat wanting to close when she spotted the map of the medical complex.
The trauma center was only one part of the campus, which had three wings and six doctors’ buildings spoking out from the main hospital.
Myrna’s neurologist was in the North Wing.
Her physical therapist was in the South Wing.
Cardiologist. Pulmonologist. Rheumatologist. Nephrologist. There wasn’t one specialty in this place that hadn’t gotten a piece of her.
Emmy looked away from the map, swallowed down the glass that kept sticking in her throat.
The nurse behind the counter saw the sheriff’s uniform and buzzed them through.
Emmy could hear the thick rubber soles of Jude’s boots thudding against the tiles behind her as they walked through to the back.
The trauma center was always packed, but weekends were particularly rough.
Patients were parked on gurneys and slouched in wheelchairs out in the hall.
Emmy let her gaze travel over the beds, taking in open doorways and curtained areas with patients hooked up to machinery.
She pressed the button for the elevator that would take them up to the hospital’s ICU.
Jude stood beside her, arms crossed, staring straight ahead, as they waited.
The tension was back between them, a suffocating miasma of words unsaid, thoughts unexpressed.
Emmy wasn’t sure why her sister hadn’t already left town.
Jude kept pushing Emmy to talk about things, but she never talked about the fact that she had an entire life back in San Francisco that she’d just dropped to come back to North Falls.
Gerald was dead. Myrna was finally gone and buried.
Had Jude even booked a return flight home?
How long was she going to sleep on the couch?
What was she doing flying off to Quantico and why in the hell was she so invested in this case?
Emmy was saved pondering the answers when the elevator doors opened. They both got on. Emmy hit the button. The doors closed. The backs had a brushed silver finish that showed a scattered version of their reflections.
Emmy said, “Allison used to joke that she was Reggie’s work wife. Before it all started—the affair with him, I mean.”
Jude turned toward Emmy as the elevator traveled to the top floor.
“A few years ago, I told her that Reggie was useless and she should be the chief of police, and she told me she was happy where she was—supporting Reggie so that he could do his job.” Emmy watched her shoulders shrug.
“I don’t know why that made me lose respect for her when the stuff with Bill was a hell of a lot worse. ”
Jude didn’t speak, but she was clearly waiting for Emmy to connect the dots.
“Our friendship. You asked what I didn’t like about her.
She always made herself small around men.
” Emmy felt a familiar tightness in her throat, her body’s way of reminding her that she’d disliked herself for the same reason during her marriage to Jonah.
“The thing I liked about Allison was she was smart. She loved working an investigation. The puzzle part of it, figuring out how everything fit together. And she was a cop, a single mother raising a kid, and we talked about that.”
Jude nodded.
“Reggie told me that he and Allison got into a fight a couple weeks ago. That’s why she wouldn’t let him park his car in her driveway anymore so he could meet up with his affair.”
“Did he tell you what the fight was about?”
Emmy recalled he hadn’t given one explanation, but two. “Something about Allison filing for divorce, then trying to back out of going through with it. And then something else about Reggie teasing Allison because Bill got the clap off a sex worker and passed the infection on to her.”
“She certainly had a type,” Jude said. “You think Allison was fed up with her real-life husband and her work husband, and that’s why she was blowing up her life and leaving town?”
Emmy shrugged again, but she remembered what it had felt like when she’d finally decided to leave Jonah. She’d gone from thinking she couldn’t live without him one day to wishing he was violently murdered the next.
“When I talked to Bill at the ballpark, he implied that he and Allison hooked up at his motel the night before she was killed. And when I talked to Reggie, it seemed like he believed their relationship would recover from the fight. The cop in me wonders if they’re lying.
The person who was Allison’s friend knows that they were both probably right. She always went back.”
“The case of contradictions continues.”