21
Lucy couldn’t remember the last time she’d enjoyed herself quite so much. After Chet left and they were alone again, she and
Ford spent a lazy morning together before Ford suggested they go out to a late lunch. She tried to decline, said they shouldn’t
be seen in public since word could get back to his family or the Clarks and upset them. But he shrugged that off, saying they’d
be in the wrong for letting something like that upset them, and she didn’t have much to say against that argument. After all,
she also believed that what they said or did wasn’t anyone else’s business.
They showered together. Then she dried her hair and left it down, which meant it was also curly—the humidity on this side
of the country made it even more so—and donned a white sundress and sandals with a straw bucket hat. Ford chose a pair of
chinos and a short-sleeved, button-down shirt with a blue and white shark pattern that made her laugh when she saw him.
He scowled as he asked what was wrong with his clothes, and she teased him, saying he looked like a model for Tommy Bahama, at which point he laughed, too. He seemed more relaxed and happy than she’d seen him so far this summer as he hooked his arm around her neck and drew her in for a kiss before saying she looked perfect, so perfect he was torn as to whether he really wanted to leave the house.
Pretending that getting naked again wouldn’t be an option right now—she knew he was joking, anyway—she caught his face in
her hands and stared into his green eyes.
He sobered, probably because she was wearing such an intense expression. “What is it?” he murmured.
The words lodged in her throat. She was afraid to reveal how she was feeling for fear it would only hasten the end of this
fairy-tale interlude. She knew what was coming. He’d already sort of indicated that he’d return to his estranged wife for
the sake of the baby, and she couldn’t fault him for that. She admired his commitment and the fact that he wanted to be a
good father. “Nothing,” she said.
He lifted his hands to cradle her face, too. “Last night was one of the best nights of my life, Lucy. No matter what happens,
I want you to know that.”
She wanted to tell him basically the same thing. But she still couldn’t bring herself to do it. She was convinced it would
jinx everything. So, with a single nod, she dropped her hands and stepped away from him, but he pulled her in for a final
kiss before they drove to the restaurant.
“I feel self-conscious,” she whispered, after the hostess seated them.
“Why?” He seemed totally unconcerned about being seen together in public.
She rolled her eyes. “You know why. Going out together makes a statement—creates anger in this place. Who knows what people
will say, what they’ll do.”
“They’d better not say or do anything,” he responded. “We have every right to be here.”
“Maybe, but we’re already drawing attention.”
“If someone has a problem with us having lunch together...”
“What?” she said when he didn’t finish.
A wicked grin slanted his mouth. “Fuck ’em.”
His attitude was contagious. If he didn’t care, why should she?
Finally, she relaxed, and they enjoyed a delicious meal—she got a teriyaki salmon salad and he ordered oysters on the half
shell, which he insisted she try.
When she made a face because she could barely get the slimy thing down, he couldn’t stop laughing. “No?” he said. “You don’t
like it?”
She guzzled half her water to get the taste out of her mouth. “Absolutely not.”
“Maybe you didn’t get enough Tabasco sauce.”
“No amount of sauce could make that taste good,” she insisted.
He was still laughing when she glanced toward the street and spotted an orange truck like the one she’d seen at her place
the other day.
Shifting right and then left, she tried to get a better look at it. She wanted to catch a glimpse of the driver, but all she
could make out was a dark-headed individual at the wheel before a building obstructed her view.
“What is it?” Ford peered in the same direction.
Lucy couldn’t say it was anything. Nothing had happened the day she’d heard those footsteps. It just felt like someone had
been lurking around the Smoot cottage, which made her uneasy.
Could whoever was in that truck be responsible for the break-in last night and the message on her mirror?
“Lucy?” Ford prompted.
“Do you know anyone who owns an old orange truck?” she asked.
“No, why?”
She sat back, once again relaxing into her seat. “Never mind. It’s probably just a coincidence.”
Ford couldn’t help thinking that this was exactly the kind of summer he needed—one that was cathartic and restorative, one spent with the beautiful girl he’d been so excited about fifteen years ago, one with the kind of laugher and warmth that left him feeling whole again. He knew it couldn’t last. All his problems would be waiting for him when it was over. But he wasn’t going to think about that. Not yet. Not after the kind of night he’d shared with Lucy. It’d been so long since they’d been together, and yet it felt as if all those years had just melted away. They were carrying on exactly as they once had—completely caught up in each other, fulfilled and satisfied.
Fulfilled. That was the word right there, he realized. He still had responsibilities and worries. Nothing had changed. But being with
Lucy somehow made everything better.
He was tempted to start worrying again—about how it would all end, how he would put the life he’d already established in DC
back together when the time came, how he could, for the sake of his child, fulfill his responsibility as a husband to someone
he no longer even liked—but shoved it all away. He still had more than two months before he had to face his old life.
He hoped it would be enough. That he’d be able to do what he needed to do, so that he could respect himself. He was coming
to believe, despite how young he and Lucy had been before, that if they’d continued seeing each other, they’d be married and
probably in a much better situation—maybe raising a family by now. So it was hard not to resent his parents for insisting
they knew what was best for him.
Fortunately, no one bothered them at lunch. Although he saw a few people he recognized out on the street while they were sitting on the patio, eating, and those people did a double take when they saw him with Lucy, no one approached. He and Lucy were left in their own little world as they talked about his brother and how frustrated he was with Houston, how well Wagner Business Solutions was running, despite the loss of his father and his unexpected and early ascendency to the company’s leadership, a job he thoroughly enjoyed—which was the silver lining, and how needy his mother had become after the divorce. They even talked about the good old days—their summer together before the murders and what they’d thought and felt as they first started getting to know each other.
As they drove home, Ford was trying to get Lucy to tell him what she did for a living. She was playing coy, still keeping
it a secret, but it’d turned into a game in which he’d make a guess and she’d shoot it down.
She laughed as he suggested everything from a principal’s receptionist to a janitor. He’d heard her tell Claxton she “read
faces for a living,” but that could mean a lot of things. And he was stuck on school-related vocations because he knew she
was off for the summer. “You’ll never figure it out,” she said, supremely confident.
“What could it be?” He wondered how she’d managed to survive, let alone succeed, after what she’d been through. “You’re really
not going to tell me?”
When she opened her mouth to respond, he thought she was finally about to, but that was when they pulled into Coastal Comfort
and found Patti Clark standing on the front porch. They both must’ve spotted her at the same time because he turned his head
to gape at her in the same instant she turned her head to gape at him.
“Here we go,” Lucy murmured with a wary expression.
Ford squeezed her hand. “Everything’s going to be okay.”
“Of course it is. Why would I ever think otherwise?”
He could hear the sarcasm in her voice, but there was no time to react to it. She was already getting out.
Patti’s expression hardened as they approached. Feeling Lucy withdrawing from him—essentially putting on her emotional armor—he
took her hand, which surprised her enough that she seemed slightly discombobulated.
“Mrs. Clark,” he said, dipping his head in greeting. “What can I do for you?”
“Is it true?” she demanded.
“Is what true?” he responded.
She stared down her nose at Lucy, which made Ford angry. Even though he knew he should feel pity for this person, he wouldn’t
allow her to mistreat someone he cared so much about.
“Chief Claxton called me. He said my own son is claiming that Mick McBride did not kill Aurora.”
“He’s saying Mick couldn’t have killed Aurora, which is more to the point,” Ford said. “I spoke to him about it myself, heard those words with my own
ears.”
“He tried to say that fifteen years ago, too, but he’s wrong about the timing,” she said. “He has to be. He’s just angry.
He feels as though all I’ve ever cared about is Aurora, and he’s striking back, trying to hurt me in return.”
Lucy spoke up, but her voice was surprisingly gentle. “I don’t think so, Mrs. Clark. He truly believes what he told me. He
made that clear. The reason it’s taken him this long to try to make his voice heard is because he’s torn in two. He doesn’t want to hurt you, yet he feels an obligation to his sister. You’re not the only one who’s suffered a terrible loss. Maybe
he and Aurora didn’t get along very well, but it could be that the rocky relationship they had only made her death harder
on him. He may have to live with regrets you don’t have.”
Patti blinked several times, obviously astonished by what Lucy had said. But then she gathered herself and returned to her
usual rhetoric. “You don’t know that. You don’t know a thing about our family or Darren. How dare you try to instruct me on
what’s going on with my own son!”
“You have one child left.” Lucy’s voice grew firmer. “You don’t have to listen to me. I get that I’m the enemy. But I believe this to be true. If you don’t let go of the past and focus on your husband and son, you could lose them, too. It might be in a different way, but having them give up on you and move on—for their own sakes—is a very real possibility.”
Patti had come looking for a fight. As soon as Lucy had begun to speak, she’d put her hands on her hips and jutted her face
forward, prepared to rebut whatever she said. But Lucy’s heartfelt words took the fire out of her. Her mouth fell open, and
she blinked as tears filled her eyes. Then, instead of continuing to insist on anything, she ran past them to her car.
Ford drew a deep breath and faced Lucy as Patti’s engine flared to life. “I think maybe she heard you.”
“I hope so,” she said. “For her own sake, I hope so.”
He couldn’t help comparing how the same situation would’ve gone had he been with Christina instead of Lucy. Their emotional
maturity was miles apart. Christina was cunning—it wasn’t as if she was stupid. She just had no self-control and very little
empathy for her friends, let alone her enemies.
Could he really go back to her?
If he wanted a relationship with his child, one in which Christina didn’t villainize him and use their son or daughter as
a weapon against him, he had no choice.
But that wouldn’t happen until the end of summer, he reminded himself. Lifting the hand that held Lucy’s to his mouth, he
kissed her knuckles. “I hope so, too,” he said, but before they could go in, another car pulled up.
Half expecting it to be Patti coming back, Ford turned just before they walked into the house to see someone he didn’t recognize.
The man looked as though he felt awkward as he approached, especially when he offered an apologetic smile. “I’m Reggie’s brother-in-law,”
he announced, “and I need to talk to you.”
“I can’t believe it,” Lucy said after Anna’s husband left. Joel had stayed only a few minutes, but the confirmation he’d offered
meant so much. “Did that really just happen?”
Ford shook his head as if he couldn’t believe it, either. “You’re busting this thing wide-open, Luce.”
Something seemed to be happening—a change to the old power paradigm. When she came back to North Hampton Beach, she hadn’t been truly
convinced it was possible, so even such a small win stunned her.
Too amped up to sit, she put her purse on the counter and continued to walk through the house to the glass doors fronting
the deck and the ocean beyond.
“Want to go for a walk?” Ford asked.
She opened the door to step outside. “A short one. Just long enough to be able to soak in what Joel Stover told us. Then we
need to call the investigator.”
“And Chief Claxton,” he added.
Her father had been right all along. Mick would know that, of course. But now they knew it, as well. Reggie did lie when he claimed Mick had confessed to Aurora’s murder. Anna’s husband had told them Reggie admitted to Anna, when she
was just sixteen, that he’d lied on the stand, and she was willing to sign an affidavit stating as much. Throughout, Joel
had been protective of his wife, said she’d been afraid to come forward because it could cost her the only family she had
before him and the kids.
Still, he made it clear that she wanted to do the right thing at last.
Ford had thanked him, the two men had clasped hands, then Joel had left. When it came to her father, it’d been a very long
time since anything had gone her way. “It’s the Ford effect,” she joked, kicking off her flip-flops as they arrived at the
beach.
“The what ?” Ford said, confused because she hadn’t offered any context.
She grinned at him before running toward the wet sand, which would be much cooler on her feet. “Nothing.”
He ran after her. Then they walked for a few minutes, sometimes pausing just to stare out to sea. “Who do you think killed Aurora?” he asked at length, finally breaking the companionable silence.
It wasn’t her father, despite what everyone believed. The thought alone was startling—or not the thought so much as the sudden
conviction she could now put behind the thought. Lucy felt almost drunk with relief. “Has to be someone she ran into at the
party, doesn’t it? But that doesn’t make it easy to figure out. There were a lot of people there.”
Ford’s voice was contemplative as he said, “The Zampinos’ son?”
She grimaced. “I don’t think so. Lance was playing poker with his friends long after Aurora went missing.”
“What if her brother picked her up, they got into a fight that went too far, and Darren dumped her in the river?”
“If he’d done that, he wouldn’t have come over to tell me that it couldn’t have been my father. He even admitted he was afraid
he’d get blamed, which was why he hadn’t tried harder to be heard fifteen years ago. Those things don’t seem like the actions
of someone who’s guilty of murder.”
“I don’t know about that. Sometimes people are so guilt ridden there’s a part of them that wants to be caught.”
“I hope it’s not him. I like Darren.”
“What about Reggie?”
She didn’t like Reggie. “I guess it could be him. But he comes off more as an opportunist in this situation—someone who simply figured
out a way to benefit from everyone else’s pain.”
Ford bent to pick up a beautiful bluish green piece of sea glass he handed to her, and she admired it before slipping it into
her pocket. “If we can get Chief Claxton to believe it wasn’t my father and actually reopen the investigation, maybe we’ll
find out.”
“He needs to see if Reggie has an alibi for that night. He needs to talk to everyone who attended that party again, too. Maybe
someone will remember something that takes the investigation in a different direction.”
“We know Darren doesn’t have an alibi.”
“If what he says is true, my father could give him one. Except he was so drunk he doesn’t remember much about that night.”
“How are you feeling toward your father?” he asked, picking up a broken shell this time and throwing it into the ocean.
“Conflicted,” she admitted. “I feel guilty for ever believing he killed Aurora. I remind myself that he did kill the Matteos. But then the little girl in me who still wants to believe in her daddy suggests that maybe he didn’t do
even that.” Suddenly feeling more pensive than euphoric, she stopped and turned toward the houses lining the beach, staring
down the row of mansions she’d once admired so much. They’d seemed as far out of her reach as the stars, and so did Ford after
her father was picked up by the police. She could hardly believe she was spending so much of her time in North Hampton Beach
with him. “He couldn’t be innocent of all of it, could he, Ford?” she asked. “It would be so unfair to suffer such an injustice.”
“Sadly, if he is innocent, he wouldn’t be the first innocent man to go to prison.”
But what were the chances? Her “poker brain” was always asking that question—about everything. “I can’t imagine how I’ll feel
if that’s the case. If he was needlessly reviled, tried and imprisoned. He’s lost fifteen years of his life! I’ll regret that I didn’t do a better job of standing by him.”
“I’m sure it was all you could do just to be there for yourself.”
Ford was right. She’d almost folded, almost destroyed herself with drugs and alcohol. She could easily have become just another
statistic.
“How’d you get by?” he asked.
For once, she couldn’t brush off this question. It’d been asked too earnestly. “I don’t know, to be honest,” she told him. “I got so lost for a while—doing drugs, hanging out with the wrong people. I never stayed in one place for too long, but it wasn’t hard to find a dealer. Eventually, once I could see what was happening to those around me, even to my boyfriend at the time, who rambled around with me, I decided that wasn’t the life I wanted to live.”
“So you got out of it.”
“It wasn’t that quick or easy but... eventually.”
“And now you’re here to fight for the truth, whatever that may be.”
“I’m just playing the cards I’ve been dealt—and hoping, at last, that I’m holding a winning hand.” She knitted her fingers
together under her chin and grinned at him, watching to see if he’d catch on.
“What?” he said when he noticed the expectation on her face.
“I just told you what I do for a living.”
He looked confused. “You did?”
“Playing the cards I’ve been dealt? Hoping I’m holding a winning hand?”
The light dawned in his eyes. “Vegas. Cards. You gamble for a living?”
She could tell he could barely believe it. “I’m a professional poker player.”
“No way!” he said. “You must be good at it to be able to make a living.”
“I do okay.” But that wasn’t always the case. She knew what it felt like to lose—and she was gambling on much more than a
game right now.