Chapter 29
Chapter
Twenty-Nine
This wasn’t how she’d pictured the evening.
She hadn’t thought it would go well, but she’d never dreamed she’d be behind a Chevy Suburban in a parking lot, watching her brother beg for his life at gunpoint.
Ben had put her there, telling her to stay put, but a parked SUV was only safe if the person with the gun didn't decide to start shooting in her direction.
Through the gap between the Suburban and the sedan next to it, she had a clear view. The floodlight mounted on the metal pole turned everything beneath it stark white and shadowless, like a stage under a single spotlight. But this was no play on Broadway, this was real life.
Ben stood about ten feet behind Ethan, his body still, waiting for the right moment.
Ethan's arm was extended, the gun trained on Rob's chest.
Rob was on his knees.
Kelly had never seen her brother on his knees.
Not literally, not figuratively, not once in thirty years of knowing him.
Rob Bateman did not kneel. Rob Bateman stood at the front of every room he entered.
He sat at the head of every table. He planted his feet and delivered his opinions from a position of unassailable authority, and the world either agreed with him or got a lecture about why it should.
But here he was. Knees on the asphalt. Suit rumpled.
Face wet. Hands raised in that halfway position that wasn't quite surrender and wasn't quite pleading but was somehow both.
His mouth was moving, and the words came out in a high, thin stream that bore no resemblance to the confident baritone she'd grown up hearing at dinner tables and holiday gatherings.
He looked small. That was the thing that struck her first. Rob, who took up every room, who filled every conversation, who crowded out every other voice with the sheer volume of his certainty. He looked small and ordinary and terrified.
What on earth had her brother done?
Ethan's voice cut through the parking lot air, raw and scraped hollow with genuine pain.
"Tell me what you did. Say it out loud. Say what you did to her."
Rob shook his head, a frantic, desperate motion.
"Say it, you fucker. Say it, or I’ll kill you now.”
The gun didn't waver.
Rob started talking.
It came out in pieces at first. Broken sentences that didn't quite connect.
He'd only wanted to help. He'd been looking out for Ethan's future.
Ethan had so much potential, and this girl, this girl, who was nobody and nothing, was going to ruin everything.
Didn't Ethan see that? Couldn't he understand?
Kelly pressed closer to the cold metal of the Suburban's fender as Rob told his story, trying to get Ethan to see it had all been for his own good. If anything, Ethan should be grateful.
Everything had narrowed to the circle of white light and the sound of her brother's voice cracking apart.
"I met her at the bus stop,” Rob said. The words came faster now, tumbling over each other like they'd been dammed up for a decade and the wall had finally given way.
“I offered her a ride to the mall, and she accepted.
I thought if I could just talk to her. Make her see reason.
She was seventeen. She didn't know what she was doing. Neither of you did."
His voice pitched higher. Tighter.
"I told her that the pregnancy was a mistake. That she needed to take care of it. That you had a future, a real future, and she was going to destroy it. I told her she could get an abortion or give the baby up for adoption, and everybody could move on. I could help her. I knew a doctor. Nobody had to know.”
Kelly's hand found her mouth, and a sob caught in her throat. More tears burned the back of her eyes, and she had to blink several times to keep her vision from blurring too much.
"She kept crying and saying that you two loved each other.
" Rob was looking away from Ethan now, his eyes wide and glassy, his face contorted into something she had never seen on him before.
Something broken. And scared. “I kept trying to tell her that it didn't matter.
You were kids, and it wouldn't last. I told her that you'd end up hating each other and that you'd end up resenting her for ruining your future. "
His voice cracked on the word "future," and he sucked in a breath that sounded strangled and dull.
"She got angry with me. She tried to jump out of the car, but I grabbed her arm.
She fought me, calling me names." Rob's hands lowered from their raised position and came together in front of his chest, fingers twisting around each other as if they had their own memory of what they'd done.
"I don't know what came over me, but I needed her to shut up. I couldn’t take the sound of her voice anymore. She needed to be quiet and listen to what I was saying. I don’t know what happened.
But my hands were around her neck, and then she was finally quiet. "
The parking lot tilted, and she had to grab onto the vehicle next to her to keep her balance. The world simply could not stay level under the weight of what she was hearing.
“She was finally quiet.” His words had dropped to something barely above a whisper, but in the stillness of the parking lot, they carried with terrible clarity. "She just wouldn't be quiet. I couldn't take it."
Kelly's body began to shake. Not the controlled trembling from earlier under the willow tree.
This was something else entirely. This was her bones trying to leave her body.
This was every cell she had rejecting what her ears had just received because the information was too large, too wrong, too impossible to fit inside a human being without breaking something.
Her brother. Her brother had killed Lori.
Rob.
Who criticized her career choices, her life, her boyfriends, her clothes, her taste in books, movies, and music.
Who told her she was making bad decisions.
Who held himself up as the model of maturity and responsibility.
Who looked at everyone around him and found them wanting.
Who had stood at his own wedding and given a speech about the importance of family and integrity and doing the right thing even when it was hard.
Rob had strangled a seventeen-year-old girl because she wouldn't stop crying about the boy she loved.
Because he couldn’t stand to hear another voice other than his own.
Tears spilled down Kelly's cheeks. She didn't wipe them.
She couldn't move her hands. One was pressed against the SUV, and the other was sealed over her mouth, holding in a sound that wanted to come out.
A scream? A sob? None of those sounds were primal and painful enough for when the story they've been told about their own life turns out to be wrong in every way that matters.
All those years. All those family dinners where Rob had lectured and pontificated and judged. All those moments when her parents had held Rob up as the standard she failed to meet. The successful one. The responsible one. The one who had his life together.
And underneath all of it, underneath the suits and the spreadsheets and the unsolicited opinions, was this.
A dead girl in a ditch by a cornfield.
Lori. So young and so full of love and life.
A secret kept for over a decade by the man who sat at the Bateman family table and told everyone else how to live.
The irony would have been funny if it weren't the worst thing Kelly had ever experienced.
From her position behind the Suburban, she could see Ethan's face in the floodlight.
He was crying. The gun was still up, still pointed, but his face had collapsed into something unrecognizable.
The calm and composed candidate for town mayor was gone.
What remained was the boy from the porch swing.
The boy who had loved a girl and lost her and spent almost eleven years not knowing why.
Now he knew.
Kelly pressed her forehead against the cold metal of the car and closed her eyes. Sirens were building in the distance, faint but growing. Had someone seen what was going on and called the police?
Her attention was caught by Ben moving behind Ethan, not fast or sudden. It was all deliberate, as if he confronted men with guns on a regular basis.
Kelly watched him from behind the Suburban and thought about the man she'd met in their apartment building in New York.
The polished businessman with the expensive shoes and the easy smile.
The guy who ate Cheetos and watched reality dating shows.
The man who had kissed her in a hotel room and admitted he was a workaholic who forgot to call.
That man was walking toward a gun.
Her heart squeezed painfully in her chest at the thought of anything happening to this man. This amazing, wonderful man that she’d found and now didn’t want to let out of her life.
I’m in love. It’s actually pretty wonderful.
Ben stopped. He was close now. Maybe six feet from Ethan.
Close enough that Kelly could see both of their faces in profile from her angle behind the car.
Ben's expression was calm. She had never seen anything quite like this.
Ben Reilly, standing in a parking lot in his rumpled dress shirt, looked like a man who had been doing this his entire life.
His father's son. Whether he wanted to admit it or not.
"Ethan," Ben said. His voice carried across the lot, clear and steady. "Put the gun down."
Ethan's arm was still extended. Still shaking with that fine tremor Kelly had noticed before.
The gun's muzzle drifted in tiny circles, never quite leaving Rob's direction.
Rob was still on his knees. He'd stopped talking.
His mouth was open, but no sound came out, which was probably the first time in Rob Bateman's life that he'd run out of words.
Kelly supposed that confessing to murder had a way of depleting a person's vocabulary.