Chapter Twenty-Three
She ripped another stack of papers free from her father’s nightstand.
None of it had anything to do with the Lila Mercer investigation.
Nor did it make the pressure in her chest unwind.
He’d known. Adrial had known what her father had done all these years, and he’d lied about it by keeping it to himself, by convincing himself he’d done it for the right reasons.
But that didn’t fix the newest hole in her heart or suddenly give her the ability to breathe.
He’d held her together knowing how quickly she was on the verge of unraveling.
He’d kissed her, touched her, brought her out of debilitating panic and helped rebuild that need for acceptance that’d been missing all these years.
She could still feel him inside her, and her lower belly contracted at the memory.
But had any of it been real? Or had he simply been trying to distract her from his part in burying all these frozen secrets?
Winnie emptied the bottom drawer and dragged the wood from the frame, searching inside the cavern left behind. Empty.
She tossed the drawer on the bed and moved on to the other nightstand, tearing at the top drawer.
And her anger—at her dad, at Adrial, at Dan, at everyone else who’d steamrolled her from every angel in her life—drained.
Fingers shaking, she reached into the drawer to pull the framed photo of her mom from the depths.
She looked just as she remembered, with that bright red hair matching hers, but her eyes had more brown than Winnie’s.
The green had come from her dad. The freckles, too, but she liked to think she’d looked more like her mom, for obvious reasons.
No one wanted to be related to a killer.
Brushing her thumb through the layer of dust on the glass, she sat back on her rear and crossed her legs. “Did you know?”
She couldn’t even hear her mom’s voice in her head after all these years.
Somewhere along the way, she’d forgotten what it’d sounded like, the patience imbued into every word, especially when Winnie had gotten into something she wasn’t supposed to.
She couldn’t help but laugh with tears in her eyes the longer she stared at the framed picture.
It’d been taken before Winnie had been born, a brightness in her mom’s eyes that wasn’t there for as long as she could remember.
Newborn sleep schedules, fights at school, sneaking out of the house to meet Adrial waiting in his car down the street.
She’d put her mom through the wringer, and yet her mother had still somehow managed to put up with it all.
Winnie leaned against the waterbed frame.
“Do you remember the time you found me in the attic eating the salt dough Christmas ornaments? You hung them high enough I couldn’t get to them on the tree that year, but I showed you.
Dad screamed at me for hours. He was so mad I got into all those boxes to look for the ornaments, but you didn’t yell at me.
You just laughed then held the garbage can under my head since I couldn’t stop throwing up all night. ”
One of the tears fell. “You were the only person I was never too much for. You loved all the songs I made up and stopped whatever you were doing to hear the latest one. You let me switch from ballet to tumbling, then back again. I wish you would’ve talked to me about my period before you died.
Dad tried. That was awkward.” Her heart thudded hard once against her rib cage.
“I don’t know how you didn’t lose your mind.
You understood me when nobody else did, and I’ll never be able to thank you for that. For believing I belonged.”
Adrial did. At least, she thought he had.
But now… Winnie pressed a kiss to her first two fingers then transferred it to the glass before setting the frame upright on the nightstand.
She turned back to her dad’s bedroom. It was a mess, but this was possibly the only room Arthur Hutton hadn’t stored boxes and boxes…
She sat up straight. “He screamed at me for getting into the boxes in the attic.”
Scrambling to her feet, Winnie winced against the soreness along her right side and other places she couldn’t think about without picturing Adrial right there with her, too.
And she wasn’t ever going to think about that.
Not about him or the shower or the pizza.
Not about how he’d saved her life or read her articles.
And certainly not about how, for the first time since leaving for Seattle, she’d felt whole these past few days.
He’d lived in her gray matter for almost a decade without paying rent, and she wasn’t going to give him a minute more.
She stumbled into the hallway, eyes cast upward to the attic entrance.
She tugged on the string, then held her breath and turned her head away from the cascade of dust and whatever else lived in an attic as the stairs descended and locked into place.
If she was being honest, she’d avoided this area of the house because of that day her father had screamed at her.
Well, that, and the high potential she’d find rats living in the beams. Winnie didn’t give herself a chance to back down as she climbed the stairs.
Old wood protested under her weight but held as her head crested the rafters.
It was dark, eerily so, without so much as a window to help her navigate the insulation and beams. She grabbed for the drawstring attached to the bare bulb above her head.
Instant blindness caught her off guard but fled all too quickly to reveal the true state of the space.
Webs everywhere. Droppings everywhere. Was that a freaking bird carcass?
Nausea churned acidic rage in her gut, and Winnie buried her nose and mouth into the crook of her arm.
Didn’t help. She’d probably need a rabies shot after this.
Forcing herself higher up the stairs, she evened out her weight on one of the main support beams.
The Christmas tree box stood like a sentinel to her right and had been thoroughly taped several times around.
Her dad hadn’t bothered with it all these years.
Decorating the tree had always been her mother’s thing.
Her mom had spent days getting everything just right and adding to the Christmas spirit, a tradition Winnie had tried to re-create in her own marriage, but Dan had about as much interest in the holidays as her father had.
If it didn’t make him money, it wasn’t worth his time.
There was a hard lesson somewhere in there she didn’t want to look at too closely.
She moved past the tree and the stack of decorations.
Halloween, Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, the Fourth of July.
She’d forgotten how much her mom had loved celebrating the little things, how she’d liked to hold on to everything to one day pass down to Winnie.
Her heart hurt for a different reason then, as she recognized the slim chance she’d get to do the same for her kids one day.
She’d always wanted a family, but Dan hadn’t admitted until two years into their marriage that he’d had a vasectomy without telling her.
Probably to lower the risk she’d find out about the affairs.
She wanted to smack herself for not recognizing the red flags, but gaslighting herself into believing she had everything she’d ever wanted—that she was in love—had been easy when she just wanted to belong to someone. The signs were clear now, though.
A separate stack of boxes, once stored next to the decorations, had been moved across the attic into the corner.
She navigated the beams—harder than she remembered—and avoided as much of the stains and whatever that hunk of fur was over there as she moved toward them.
These hadn’t been labeled in her father’s familiar handwriting like the ones downstairs.
As though their owner had simply gone out of his way to pretend they didn’t exist.
Bracing both legs on two separate beams, Winnie cracked the lid on the first box.
Another full of files. Though these seemed to belong to a number of different cases.
Maybe even the ones her father had worked before he’d become chief of police.
“The department is going to lose their minds knowing you kept these here all these years.”
If she was right about what her father might be hiding, they’d lose more than their minds.
The town may very well fall apart right alongside the Black Hollow PD.
But she couldn’t think about the ramifications of what she and Adrial had discovered.
Because until she had proof, they had nothing.
She sifted through the case files in the first box, moving on to the second, then the third, and found one of her father’s old handguns stuffed inside.
Not loaded. And more case files, spanning thirty years of Arthur Hutton’s career.
Cracking the lid on the fourth box, she was assaulted by the built-up odor of something dying.
No. Most definitely dead. Her eyes watered as her entire body revolted against the smell.
An animal had gotten inside this box. She could see the hole eaten straight through one corner of the box and the droppings piled along the bottom.
A dozen stretched-out pieces of plastic littered one corner with what remained of multiple evidence bags.
And her heart stopped. There was no reason for a law enforcement officer to hold on to evidence in their personal residence.
All evidence pertaining to cases was logged and stored in official evidence lockups.
Her father had taught her that. Winnie pulled the top bag free, the details written on the outside of the bag torn through by tiny claws.
She could still read some of the words. Case number.
Description of enclosed evidence. “Blood sample, unknown source.”
No names. No way to tell if the swab inside belonged the Lila Mercer case or the home invasion Adrial had told her about.
Did it matter? This…shouldn’t be here. None of this should be here.
Because that meant her father had been corrupt.
That he may have had something to do with Lila Mercer’s death.
That the years he’d spent trying to solve the case were a lie.
For nothing. He’d worked that case every day she could remember and left her to sit in her own grief and raise herself and ignored her for nothing.
Her next inhale trembled as she set aside the top bag. And found a sealed bag of underwear. She couldn’t touch the evidence. Couldn’t make it real in her mind. “What did you do?”
A creak registered from behind. “I knew he’d hidden it somewhere, but this house is a mess.”
Winnie turned…too fast. The box tipped to one side, spilling decades of compromised evidence and spraying animal droppings as her balance wavered.
“I just had to be patient enough for you to get desperate to move or destroy it.” The killer—her features hidden behind that all-too-familiar ski mask—maneuvered across the attic, seemingly taking in all the little nooks and crannies of a house well-lived in with the grace of a cat.
“If you’re not aware, that’s not one of my strong suits. Something you and I have in common.”
She grabbed for the overhead rafter, careful not to step down onto the insulated space between the beams. They were over the garage.
Any misstep could be fatal from this height.
Her heart pounded so loud, she could barely hear her inhale.
Winnie slipped her hand into the third box stacked beside her, moving slower than she’d moved in her entire life, and wrapped her hand around her father’s first service weapon.
He’d taught her to shoot with this gun. She remembered every lesson. “We don’t have anything in common.”
The masked attacker took another step forward.
“Come on now, Winnie. There are lots of things we have in common. For starters, we both lost our mothers. We agree Arthur Hutton is the human equivalent of garbage, and oh, yeah.” The killer tugged off her mask, revealing her face.
“The freckles. We get that from our dad.”
Our dad. Winnie blinked to bring her brain back online.
No. That wasn’t possible. She wasn’t… Her breath left her chest in a rush.
Adrial had been right. Lighter hair, a slightly brighter shade of green in her eyes, same face shape.
Winnie dragged the weapon from the box. It hadn’t been cleaned in years.
Boxed up and forgotten. Just like her. But firing it was a risk she was willing to take. “You’re lying.”
“Surprise.” The killer lunged for her, and Winnie pulled the trigger.
But the gun never fired.