Chapter 12 June #2
Lucy crossed to the bed and gently touched Judy’s arm.
“Judy,” Lucy murmured. “June is here.”
Judy’s eyes opened slowly.
They were glazed with effort and medication, the focus in them coming and going like a signal through poor weather. Her gaze moved across the ceiling before it found June, and when it did, June pulled the chair close to the bed and sat down so that Judy didn’t have to work to look up at her.
Judy’s hand moved across the blanket in a slow, reaching motion.
June took it.
Judy’s fingers were cool and dry. June held them carefully, the way you hold something fragile that still has weight to it.
“Hello,” June told her quietly. “I’m not going to ask you something as pointless as how you’re feeling.”
A sound came from Judy that was unmistakably a laugh, even as weak and brief as it was. It arrived and departed in the same breath.
“Like I was hit over the head,” Judy managed, her voice barely above a whisper, “and then rolled down a hill.”
June’s brows lifted involuntarily. She glanced at Lucy, who gave a small nod, confirming that Judy still had her memories.
June turned back to Judy.
“Judy,” she began gently. “Do you remember the accident or what happened to you?”
“I remember.” Judy’s voice was thin. Each word arrived separately, as though she was carrying them one at a time across a significant distance. “Everything. I remember… everything.”
June kept her expression steady. She kept her hand around Judy’s and didn’t move.
“June.” Judy’s eyes, still glazed but holding, found hers directly. “You must… get… Victoria.”
June felt the air in the room change.
“Did she do this to you?” June asked carefully.
Judy’s lips pressed together with the effort of what she was trying to do. Lucy moved quietly to the other side of the bed, her eyes on the monitors, her attention divided between her patient and the conversation.
“She’s very weak, June,” Lucy reminded her in a low voice. “Her brain is working hard just to keep her present right now.”
June nodded. She kept her eyes on Judy and waited.
Judy’s grip on her hand tightened very slightly. “Victoria,” Judy breathed. Her eyes were fighting to stay open. “Get her.” There was a pause that lasted long enough for June to worry. Then: “Find her.” Another pause. “Look.” Her voice dropped further. “In… Miami.”
Then her eyes closed, and her head lolled to the side, alarming June at its lifelessness.
“Judy?” June’s voice was sharper than she intended as her heart thudded in her chest.
Lucy was already moving, her hands professional and quick, checking the monitors, checking Judy’s pulse, running through the swift, practiced assessment of someone who knew exactly what she was looking at.
“She’s all right,” Lucy told her after a moment.
“She’s just gone back under.” Lucy straightened and looked at June across the bed.
“I wasn’t going to call you, but Judy was getting herself worked up, insisting she had to speak to you.
She fought to stay conscious long enough to say what she needed to say.
” She glanced at the monitors. “That took everything she had.”
June looked at Judy’s still face against the pillow for a moment longer.
Then she stood up, set Judy’s hand down gently on the blanket, and followed Lucy out of the room.
The corridor outside was quiet. A nurse passed them at the far end without looking up from the chart in her hands. Somewhere further along the hall, a phone rang twice and stopped.
June stood with her back against the wall and looked at Lucy.
“You heard what she said,” June stated.
“I heard it,” Lucy confirmed. “She wants you to get Victoria.” She shook her head slowly.
“You know, I knew Victoria was capable of cruelty. I’ve had a lifetime of watching her be cruel to people who didn’t deserve it.
” Her voice was measured. “But setting fires. Attacking people like she did Judy, Lacey, and Margo…” She looked at June directly.
“Do you think she also had something to do with what happened ten years ago?”
“I honestly don’t know yet,” June admitted. “But it’s looking like we have her for Judy. We have her on several other serious charges as well.” She paused. “If only Lacey could remember.”
Lucy’s expression shifted into something apologetic. “She still has nothing. Not a fragment.” She straightened slightly. “I know you need it, June. But I can’t have anyone pushing Lacey to remember something her brain has decided to protect her from. That’s not a line I’ll cross for any case.”
“I wouldn’t ask you to,” June told her.
“I’ll call the moment anything changes. With either of them.” Lucy reached out and squeezed her arm briefly.
June thanked her and walked back toward the elevator.
She pushed the button and stood waiting, turning it all over in her mind as the floors ticked down on the display above the doors.
Judy had confirmed it. Victoria’s name, spoken with the last conscious effort Judy had been able to summon.
Miami, repeated like the most important thing she could give them.
It felt like confirmation. It felt like the case clicking into the alignment it had been resisting for weeks.
And yet.
The feeling that wouldn’t settle was still there.
June got into the elevator, pressed the ground floor button, and stood looking at the closing doors, and tried, as she had tried every day for weeks, to put her finger on the thing that wouldn’t stop nagging at her.
It stayed just out of reach.
Holt was in the corridor outside Tom’s room at the Sandpiper Inn when June arrived back. He came toward her the moment he saw her.
“What did Judy say?” he asked.
June told him. All of it, exactly as it had happened, including the effort it had clearly cost Judy to stay conscious long enough to say it.
Holt listened without interrupting.
“She seems to think Victoria is in Miami,” June finished. “That’s all I could get from her before she went under again. But Lucy was there. She heard every word.”
“Then it’s official,” Holt replied. He looked at the wall for a moment before looking back at June. “We have to assume it was Victoria who figured out that Judy, Margo, and Lacey were getting close to uncovering what happened ten years ago.”
“She knew about the Hidden Truths channel,” June reasoned. “She must have.”
“She had access to the police station through Tom,” Holt pointed out. “She’d have known exactly who was asking questions and when. And because she’s Victoria, getting information out of people who didn’t even realize they were giving it would’ve been effortless.”
“She turned up everywhere,” June agreed. “Every gathering, every event. Always in the right place to hear the right thing.” She looked at Holt. “If she really is a cat burglar, she’d have contacts and resources that most people wouldn’t even think to look for.”
“A cat burglar covering their tracks wouldn’t leave loose ends,” Holt replied. “Especially not ones that could connect them to something that happened ten years ago.”
They fell quiet for a moment.
June frowned at the middle distance.
“It takes a particular kind of person to lock five people inside a cabin and set it on fire,” she said.
Her voice was careful. “Victoria is cold. She’s calculating.
She’s been capable of genuine cruelty.” June shook her head slightly.
“But that?” She looked at Holt. “Something still doesn’t sit right with me. ”
“Maybe we never knew the real Victoria,” Holt replied.
June nodded slowly. He was right. She knew he was right. Everyone kept secrets. Everyone had parts of themselves they never let anyone see. She knew that better than most.
The thought arrived with the force of something that had been waiting for exactly the right moment, and with it came a wave of guilt so sudden and so complete that June had to work to keep it off her face.
She glanced at Holt standing beside her in the corridor of the Sandpiper Inn, and the voice at the very back of her mind was quiet and clear and entirely relentless.
Yes, it told her. Just like you. It was in that moment that June realized she was falling in love with Holt all over again. It was also in that moment that she knew it was time that a secret she’d been carrying for a long, long time had to come out.
June swallowed as she realized the repercussions of it.