Chapter 19
Caroline sat back, swallowing hard. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You should know,” Kate reminded her. “I mean, we know a lot. Obviously we don’t know everything because I can’t really get inside the mind of some people.”
“Sarah’s freaking crazy,” Caroline cried out. “I mean, look at the damn woman. She’s nuts.”
Kate nodded slowly. “I suspect she will use that excuse, or her lawyer will, at least.” Then she turned, stared directly at Caroline, and asked, “But what is yours?”
Caroline paled immediately. “No,” she muttered, shaking her head. “I didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“Really? So, it was all the crazy lady?” Kate asked, with a note of irony. “Absolutely nothing to do with you? And you have no idea what I’m talking about, right?”
Caroline, her eyes wild, suddenly broke and started bawling. “I didn’t want to. I didn’t want anything to do with it,” she cried out. “Nothing. It’s all just too godawful.”
“Yeah, it’s godawful all right,” Kate agreed. “So, what the hell is it you think you’ve been doing?”
“I haven’t been doing anything,” Caroline muttered, but she sobbed and sobbed.
Rodney looked at Kate, then over at Caroline, and the confusion and frustration on his face was evident. Finally he got up, stepped outside, and then came back with a box of Kleenex and put it on the table for her.
Caroline sobbed as she picked up the tissues and tried to dry her eyes. She looked over at Kate and asked, “How did you figure it out?”
“It wasn’t easy,” she began, “but the killing of Father McCain was pretty evident.”
Rodney just stared at her, but she didn’t look at him. She felt his gaze boring into her face.
Caroline stared at her. “Why she did that, I don’t know.”
“I’m not sure Sarah particularly understands it either,” Kate noted, “but I’m more concerned about the other three murders right now.”
At that, Caroline’s face fell, and she sobbed into her tissues. When she finally went quiet, Kate just sat back and said, “Anytime you’re ready.”
Caroline bit her lip, then looked at Rodney, back at Kate. “I don’t even know how it started.”
“How about the fight in the church?”
Her eyes widened. “You heard about that?”
“Of course,” Kate declared. “It’s amazing how many people find out about shit and either don’t want to talk or can’t wait to talk. So it’s a really good time for you to start with the truth. And maybe, if you’re lucky and if you cooperate, things will go a little easier on you.”
Caroline stared down at her tissues and slowly shredded them, as if trying to get up the guts to tell Kate what happened.
“Start with the fight,” Kate suggested.
Caroline sighed. “It was stupid,” Caroline began. “I mean, it was really stupid. I didn’t even know what to say, but it was … Look. My husband divorced me after I paid for his college, replacing me with a younger version.”
“That you have already told me, so maybe skip to the parts that I need to know, and stick to the facts, please.”
Caroline winced. “Okay, okay, so we’re at this church counseling thing, and I had been a good girl up until then.
I don’t even know how it all started, but we got into this massive fight when I found out about Sarah …
and her fiancé. I used to go out with him a long time ago, and I didn’t really, … I didn’t really get over him.”
“Go on.”
“I was still really hung up on him, but I didn’t want to have kids. That wasn’t something I was interested in, but he really wanted a family. Yet I also knew that Sarah was infertile. It had been brought up somewhere else, and she’d been having a really bad time with it.
“We used to work at the same company but different divisions. Anyway I heard about her failure to conceive quite a few years ago. So, during this church thing, I realized who she was talking about, … who she was marrying. I was angry. God, I was angry because the reason he broke up with me was because I didn’t want to have kids, and here he was now, marrying somebody who wanted kids but couldn’t have any.
And then I found out that she hadn’t told him yet. She lied to Kurt.”
“How did that come up?”
“We talked. Before all this, … we were still talking. She hadn’t told him, and I was unbelievably livid, thinking how are you supposed to start a marriage if you’re doing it under such false pretenses?” She turned to look at Rodney, who just nodded as if he understood perfectly.
Kate waited, her face a mask.
“Anyway, it was kind of ugly. It was bad of me. I was so pissed off, and honestly I was really hurt. It just really hurt.”
“And?”
“At this point, I’m not sure what to say.
What can I say?” she asked no one and then shook her head.
“Anyway, I contacted him, and I told him that Sarah was infertile. We got into a big fight because he didn’t believe me.
Then I told him how Sarah and I were just in the same church group counseling session, where I found out that they planned to marry.
I couldn’t believe that he would marry somebody who couldn’t even have kids.
Not even someone like me, who at least he could maybe persuade to change my mind later, but this was literally a flat-out fact that Sarah cannot have kids.
He called me a liar. It got pretty ugly, and I mean, it got ugly, ugly. ”
“What happened next?” Kate asked.
“I don’t know what happened next, but he eventually came over to my place, and we had a bit of a row. I think he saw her afterward, and they had a bigger row. Then he went home, and, as far as I know, he ended up overdosing on drugs.”
“So, that was Kurt? Kurt Conner?”
“Yes, and he did do drugs. He absolutely did do them. I just didn’t think he would do them while he was with Sarah because she was a goody-two-shoes in that regard. So, as far as I was concerned, it was horrifying, and it was terrible. And it’s not my fault. It was an accident.”
Caroline looked to Kate, back to Rodney, who gave her a sympathetic look. Kate, on the other hand, tried hard to control her features, to not give any indication of what she felt.
“At least I assumed it was an accident.” Caroline continued.
“I was more than willing, wanting to believe it was an accident, and then, sure enough, Sarah ran down my boyfriend, told him about my relationship with Kurt, even though it was not new. Kurt and I had a thing, but it was years ago. She made it sound as if I was cheating on my boyfriend with Kurt now, which meant my cheating broke up Sarah’s engagement. ”
Caroline sobbed. “I hadn’t cheated on my boyfriend, but she lied and made it sound as if I had. Of course my relationship got very ugly, and we started having issues.”
“What did you do about it?” Kate asked.
“I tried to fix what Sarah broke, but it was a difficult time. And, when things didn’t improve at home, … well, I have needs. So I went and met John,” she admitted, closing her eyes.
“Now, Sarah didn’t know about John, but it made me feel a hell of a lot better,” she shared.
“I know that’s no excuse, but I was still smarting from an extremely difficult set of emotions because of Sarah, over what she had told my boyfriend.
She had lied to Kurt, her own fiancé, and now she was lying to my boyfriend.
He believed her, so much so that it just finished us, but I was seeing John at that point. And somehow Sarah found out about it.”
“Did you confront her?” Kate asked.
“She followed me to his place, and we had a fight at his place, and I left. Absolutely no way I would stick around, but then he died, and apparently you guys called it murder. I knew it had to be Sarah. I called her and told her that I knew what she did and that no way in hell she would get away with it. Then she twisted everything around. She apparently told John that I was pregnant, and he was so upset afterward. John’s big thing was to never get serious, no getting pregnant.
That she told him about me being pregnant,” she pointed out.
“Apparently that’s what she told John, which was John’s big thing.
He was adamantly opposed to any pregnancies. So, he ghosted me.”
“How do you know that he was told all this?” Kate asked her.
“John and I had quite an argument. I ran into him downtown accidentally. He ripped into me something awful, and I told him that I wasn’t pregnant.”
Kate was trying to take notes and listen at the same time.
“I didn’t have any clue what the hell was going on, then I found out Sarah had told him that.
In the end, he didn’t believe me. So, I contacted Sarah and told her to stay the hell out of my life, and that my relationship with him was none of her business.
She told me that it wouldn’t matter because he would be dead soon.
I asked her what she was talking about, and she told me how they had just had a hell of a fight.
They had a bottle of wine together at a café, and she took him home.
I went over to his apartment to try to talk to him, but he was already passed out drunk, so I left. ”
She raised her gaze, looked at Kate in tears. “Sarah supposedly went over afterward, and apparently he was already dead.”
“John was dead?”
“Yes, she left the wine there but sent me a picture with the wine bottle and then the bow. She wrapped him up with this bloody bow,” she whispered. “I couldn’t even breathe when I saw the picture.” She pulled out her phone and held up the photo.
Kate took the phone from her, studied the picture, and asked, “What about the card? Why does it say Believe? What’s that all about?”