Chapter Twenty-Two #2
Jude looked at the bourbon that had spilled all over her hand.
She wouldn’t drink from the flask. She would just have a taste.
A tiny taste. After nearly forty years, after the brutality of her conversation with Emmy, she deserved some sort of respite.
She opened her mouth, raised her hand, but her gaze found its way back to the photograph of Cole.
Jude’s grandson.
The card Myrna had left for Celia rested below his beautiful face.
Exculpate—to free from guilt, responsibility, and blame.
Jude’s hand dropped into her lap. She thought about her mother sitting down at her desk and writing out all the cards.
Myrna had not been the sort of woman to waste time.
She took long walks for her health. She read books for their educational value.
She started conversations because she had something to say. Everything she did was for a reason.
Myrna had placed mellifluous on the windowsill behind the coffee maker. Taped insuperable to the bathroom mirror. Gallimaufry had been left on the nightstand. Taybee had gotten raconteur. Millie had gotten opprobrium. Cousin Ace, of all people, had been left with expiate.
Jude grabbed her father’s pen. The dry ballpoint skipped across the calendar when she tried to write. She opened the desk drawer to look for a replacement.
She found another card.
Verisimilitude—the seeming plausibility of truth.
Myrna Joy Clifton had been a high school English teacher for over half a century.
She’d earned a master’s in education and a PhD in American literature.
She was clever and brilliant, sometimes funny, occasionally cruel, but her puzzles had been created specifically for her children, and she had made sure to leave clues that her children would understand.
Jude wrote down the first letters of each of the words from the cards—
E-F-M-I-G-R-O-E-V
She tried different combinations, attempted different phrases. In the end, the solution left her breathless.
Forgive me.
Jude swallowed so hard that she could hear the gulp. The noxious smell of bourbon roiled her stomach. She screwed the cap back on the flask.
“Fall off the horse?”
Jude startled.
Emmy was standing in the doorway. She was wearing her duty vest. Her hand was resting above the gun on her hip.
Jude hadn’t heard her cruiser in the driveway.
She had been too entranced by the thought of drinking.
Emmy was nothing if not perceptive. Her mouth had a judgmental twist. Her eyes were trained on the flask.
“You’re thinking of wagons.” Jude felt the familiar, painful pull of the tether. “Alcoholics fall off the wagon.”
“Who falls off horses?”
“Most people. Horses are dangerous.”
Emmy nodded, eyes still on the flask. “Shane Russell robbed a gas station forty minutes ago. He knows we’re looking for him. It’s only a matter of time.”
The information skipped through Jude’s consciousness. Russell would be captured eventually. She had other things that were more pressing.
She put the flask back in her father’s desk drawer.
She looked down at her mother’s last message.
The woman who had never apologized had managed in her own circuitous, maddening way to ask for forgiveness from her grave.
Whether the request was for Emmy or for Jude was immaterial.
Myrna had expected the truth to be told, so Jude was going to tell the truth.
She stood up. She wanted to finish this where it had started forty-two years ago: at her mother’s kitchen table.
She told Emmy, “I need to tell you some things. Let’s go inside the house.”
For once, Emmy didn’t argue. She waited for Jude outside the office, then turned off the lights and locked the door.
Emmy loosened the straps on her vest as she walked across the driveway. Jude kept her gaze on the house. She didn’t need to find particular items: the trellis, the windows, the screen door. She anchored herself with plans.
The first thing she needed to do was wash the bourbon off her hand. The stickiness, the smell, the reminder of her momentary weakness, was making her feel queasy. Then, she would sit in Myrna’s chair across from Emmy at the table.
Jude would own her sins. She would answer every question.
She would absorb all the blame and the rage.
Then she would give Emmy the choice that she’d been robbed of over four decades ago.
She would reframe the ultimatum that Myrna and Gerald had laid out: Jude could stay here with her daughter and work things out, or she could leave.
Emmy walked up the porch stairs. She used her key to unlock the door. The bare light bulb made her features sharp and angular. Her jaw was clenched. She was bracing herself. So was Jude.
The door opened. The lights came on. They both stopped at the threshold. For the second time that night, a man surprised them.
This one had a gun.
Jude’s eyes zeroed in on the weapon first. Matte black Taurus G3X. Three hundred dollars new. Fifty on the street. The polymer-framed nine-millimeter pistol held fifteen rounds in the magazine, another in the chamber. There was no manual safety. You pressed the trigger and somebody could die.
Shane Russell already had his finger resting on the trigger. He was covered in sweat, just as nasty as he’d looked on Mitch Bellingham’s tape. Jude felt his danger in every part of her being. She should have been terrified, but she was furious. The pistol was pointed directly at Emmy’s chest.
He said, “Get in the house.”
Emmy kept her body square to Russell as she slowly walked in.
She knew the ballistic panels in her vest would slow down a bullet.
Jude could almost feel her silently screaming at Jude to run, but Jude had already made the calculation: If she ran, Russell would fire the pistol.
The vest was bullet resistant, not bullet-proof. Jude would not take the risk.
“Russell.” Jude raised her hands in the air. “Take your finger off the trigger. You don’t want to make a mistake.”
“I said get in the fucking house.” He motioned with the pistol, his finger tight on the trigger. “Move.”
Jude tried to put herself in front of Emmy, but Emmy blocked her. She told Russell, “We know you didn’t murder Allison.”
“No shit I didn’t murder Allison. I needed her to give me the video—there’s no way Gilchrist is gonna pay up without it. Stop.”
The last word hadn’t been directed at Jude. Emmy had tried to take advantage of the distraction. She’d been reaching for her Glock.
Russell said, “Put it on the floor. Slide it over.”
Emmy used her thumb and forefinger to carefully extract the Glock from her holster. Her duty vest bunched up. The straps hung loose. She was laser-focused on Russell as she crouched to the floor. She was making calculations, too.
Jude said, “Mandy asked for you at the hospital. She needs her father.”
“Her father needs to get the hell outa town.” Emmy said, “You can still walk away from this.”
“Like the last time?” Russell sneered. “You goddam bitch. I lost ten years of my life because of you.”
Jude heard a ring of certainty in his tone. She had talked to enough killers to know he’d decided that there would be no witnesses once he walked out the door.
Jude asked, “How did you know about the video?”
“Allison told me I could have it if I let her leave with Mandy. Then the bitch got herself killed.” He waved his pistol at Emmy. “Send it over.”
Emmy placed the Glock on the linoleum, pushed it toward Russell.
“I know you got it.” Russell tucked the gun down the front of his jeans. “I seen you at the library. Same place as Allison. I’m not an idiot. I know what you’ve been up to.”
Jude mentally inventoried the kitchen for weapons. There were none. Myrna had been too unpredictable. All the knives had been packed away. The glasses were plastic. Even the stove had been disconnected. She had to get Russell to another location.
“Put your goddam hands up.” Russell brandished the pistol. “You got five seconds to start talking or one of you’s taking a bullet.”
Emmy said, “It’s—”
“Outside.” Jude cut her off. She was thinking about the shotgun over Gerald’s door. “It’s in the office. The video is in a secret compartment inside the desk. I’ll take you to it.”
Russell kept his beady eyes trained on Emmy. “What were you gonna say?”
She shook her head. “It’s in my father’s office outside.”
“Bullshit.” Russell moved around the kitchen table, the pistol still trained on Emmy. “I saw that safe upstairs. Get going before I start shooting.”
Emmy moved first. Slow, reluctant. Jude followed her pace. She was pretending like she was scared, helpless, as if she didn’t know that the safe in Myrna’s room contained Gerald’s 357 Magnum.
Jude made a show of struggling with her knee on the stairs, gripping the banister to pull herself up, putting some space between her and Emmy.
She could feel Russell close behind her.
His breath hot on the back of her neck. She tried to think through options.
Gerald’s revolver in the safe. The heavy lamp beside her mother’s bed.
The wooden jewelry box that her father had carved from a tree that he’d felled on the property.
“Hurry.” Russell gave Jude a violent shove into Emmy. “Get up them stairs.”
They kept going, taking a left into the hallway, hands still raised. Jude tightened the space between them. She tried to formulate a plan, but the only thought in her mind was that she couldn’t lose Emmy again. She wouldn’t lose her again.
“Russell.” Jude didn’t have to think too hard to come up with a lie. She had worked with enough predators to know one of the things they hated most was their victims getting the last word. “Allison wrote a letter about you. We know everything you did to her.”
Jude couldn’t see Russell’s response, but she could feel it.
“She called you a thug. She said you were the stupidest man she’d ever met.”
Jude glanced back at Russell. She could see the blow had landed.