Chapter 24
I had a directed verdict motion to get through. I knew I would lose it. But I had to try. As expected, Judge Castor found there were enough questions of fact to submit to the jury. Starting first thing Monday morning, I would have to present my defense.
Katy was already gone by the time we finished oral arguments. I’d sent Jeanie back to the office. Before I could go home, there was one thing I had left to do.
Joe didn’t answer the door. His truck was in the driveway, so I let myself in. My siblings and I always had no-knock privileges at each of our houses.
“Joe!”
No answer. I walked down his short hallway, looking into each room until I got to his bedroom.
The place was a pigsty. When he was married to Katy, she cleaned up after him.
Emma took on that role for a while until she moved out.
But my brother found no point in making a bed; he was just going to turn around and sleep in it again.
It was more than that though. As I walked back into the kitchen, he had dishes piled in the sink. Every garbage can in the house was filled to the brim. I counted eight empty beer bottles on his kitchen counter.
“What the actual hell is going on?” I muttered.
He couldn’t be far. His house wasn’t much. Just two bedrooms and one bath. But it sat on ten wooded acres. Knowing Joe, he was out there somewhere checking food plots or chopping wood to clear his head.
I looked through the sliding door at the back of the house.
Joe had just finished building an impressive deck overlooking the pristine landscape.
He’d built a stone fire pit a little further out.
He’d been promising to start hosting some of the family get-togethers so I didn’t always have to. Though I never minded.
I opened the door. “Joe!” I called out, hearing my own voice echo back to me. Either he couldn’t hear me or wouldn’t listen. I got no reply. With his air conditioning on full blast, I quickly slid the door shut.
I wanted to do something. Though Joe was older than me, we were Irish twins.
I still had plenty of big sister energy where he was concerned.
I was that way with all my siblings. I found an empty yard bag in the garage and walked back inside.
I’d start at the back of the house and work my way forward.
I went into his second bedroom. Lately, he’d used it as an office for his fledgling construction company. Addison Quick implied Joe was underwater. My brother had never told me any such thing.
I couldn’t see the surface of his oak desk. He had so many papers strewn over it, several layers deep.
“Don’t you have a file cabinet?” I asked no one. He had a corkboard on one wall with a tri-county map. He’d placed push pins in the areas he had jobs. Seventeen of them, I counted. To me, that seemed like a thriving business. Had he over-extended himself?
I knew I shouldn’t look. I knew it was a violation of his privacy. But it wasn’t like I had to dig very far. Just by moving a few of the papers around on his desk, a bleak picture began to emerge.
Past due notices. It appeared he owed at least five different suppliers. One of the accounts had already gone into collections. I gasped at the number. On this one alone, Joe owed almost ten thousand dollars. I found a few other unpaid invoices crumpled on the ground.
This wasn’t like him. I wouldn’t call my brother organized in a traditional sense.
But he had a system that always worked for him in the past. He also had a better head for numbers than I did.
He could calculate amortization schedules in his head.
Though he barely made it through high school, I knew Joe had an IQ well into the hundreds.
How had it happened? How had he let everything snowball? I found a credit card bill and my stomach churned. He was maxed out on his twenty-thousand dollar limit. He’d taken several large cash advances. The interest alone on this would eat into whatever profit he’d made.
I sank into the chair at his desk. “Oh, Joe,” I whispered. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
But I knew why. My older brother was the most stubborn of us all.
He hated asking me for help. He hated ever needing it.
More than anything, he hated me saying I told you so.
And I had. When he started this venture, I’d advised my brother not to put up his own house to secure funding for the business.
My stomach churned as I pulled out my phone and brought up the county register of deeds site.
It took all of two clicks for me to find it.
Six months ago, Joe had taken out a second mortgage on this place. I knew if I dug deep enough, I might find a delinquent mortgage bill. I clicked over to the township treasurer’s office. I let out a small sigh of relief. Whatever else was going on, he wasn’t in foreclosure. Yet.
I shuffled a few more papers around on his desk. I don’t know why one of them caught my eye. Looking back, I wished it hadn’t. So many things might have turned out differently if I’d just minded my own business and walked away when Joe didn’t answer the door.
But I didn’t. My hands trembling, I read the notice from the Northville building inspector.
My eyes blurred. I had to blink and take a breath to refocus.
Then I reread the date. It seemed to hit me straight in the solar plexus.
I looked back at his pushpin map. He only had one job pinned in Wayne County.
The road on the map corresponded with the notice. Maybe I was still wrong.
“What are you doing?”
Joe’s sharp voice startled me. I let out a small yip and dropped the bag, spilling garbage onto his floor.
“I said, what are you doing here?”
Slowly, I got to my feet, still holding the building inspector’s notice. If he had realized what I had in my hand, he ignored it. I wished I could.
“I was looking for you,” I said, my voice shaking at first. Then my shock gave way to anger. “The better question is, what are you doing here?” I gestured to the mess on his desk.
“That is literally my business, Cass. You need to leave. We said we were going to avoid each other until this trial was over.”
“I never once said that. I never wanted that. I said we wouldn’t discuss the case. I made you promise not to ask me about Katy.”
“And I haven’t,” he said.
I crumpled the paper in my hand. Anger gave way to pure rage. I threw the paper ball into his chest, wishing it had the physical weight to match its true impact.
“I told you,” I said. “I asked one thing of you. I said if you told me one lie, I was out.”
Joe didn’t pick the paper up off the ground. Of course he didn’t have to. He knew what it was. So I picked it up. I smoothed it out and thrust it at him.
“Say it,” I said. “Tell me I’m wrong.”
I pressed the paper against his chest and shoved him as hard as I could. Joe took a small step backward, but of course I was no physical match for him. It was like trying to push down a concrete wall with my hand.
“This is none of your business,” he repeated.
“1253 Bettony Road. Your big job. Even before all this with Katy, I remember now how excited you were about it. How if it went well, you’d get more Northville jobs. That’s where the money was. You said that.”
“Cass, stop.”
“That’s a work stoppage,” I said. “Effective March 11th. That’s three days before Tom Loomis died. Do I have to say it?”
Nothing. Stony silence.
“You told Detective DePaul that you weren’t in town the morning Tom Loomis died. Three hours ago, you sat in front of a jury. In front of me. And you said you were there. 1253 Bettony Road. You stayed overnight. You weren’t in town. You lied, Joe. My God. You lied about your alibi.”
“I didn’t say I was at Bettony Road.” His nostrils flared. “Cass, I was …”
“Stop! Don’t. Do not tell me another lie. You weren’t there that morning, were you? Or the night before. What you told the police wasn’t true.”
“No. It wasn’t true. But this isn’t what you think.”
Of all the things he could have said, that might have been the worst. “What I think? Joe, it doesn’t matter what I think. You just committed perjury, didn’t you?”
He didn’t answer.
It got hard to breathe. The room started to spin. In my mind’s eye, I saw Tom Loomis’s dead body. His blood. The murder weapon.
“A hunting knife.” I choked out the words. I’d seen dozens of them. Eric had one. My father. My brothers. Then, something came over me. I felt possessed.
“Where is it?” I shrieked. I pushed past my brother and ran out into the garage.
He kept a workbench there. I went to it, scanning the shelves.
He had at least ten different screwdrivers on the table.
Rage took hold again. I swept my arm over the table and smashed every tool on the bench to the ground.
“Cass!” Joe yelled.
No, not the tool bench. The pole barn out back.
That’s where Joe kept all his hunting and fishing equipment.
In the back of my mind, I knew this was ridiculous.
Was I expecting to find an empty sheath matching the murder weapon?
He probably had a dozen hunting knives. But logic had left my brain.
Emotion ruled. I ran out the side door of the garage and over to the barn.
I yanked the knob on the service door but it didn’t budge. The barn was locked.
“Cass!”
Joe got a hold of me. He grabbed me by the shoulders and spun me around. “What are you doing?”
“Where is it?” I said. “It’s not in there, is it?”
“What?”
“Your knife!”
Joe’s face drained of all color. His pupils shrank to pinpoints. “My knife? Cass. What do you think I …”
“Did you do it? Did you kill Tom? She could have let you in. It would explain …”
My brother had never so much as laid a hand on me.
But an instant after I said it, he shook me once, hard enough that my teeth rattled.
He didn’t hurt me. It wasn’t truly violent.
But it unleashed something in me. I lunged at him.
If he hadn’t caught me by the wrists, I don’t know if I would have scratched his eyes out. I certainly thought about it.
“Stop it,” he said.
“What happened?” I asked him. I knew this was the wrong question to ask. I couldn’t know it if Joe truly did have something to do with Tom Loomis’s murder. But I wasn’t a lawyer anymore at that moment. I didn’t even feel like a sister.
“I didn’t kill Tom Loomis,” he said.
Would he lie to me about that, too? I couldn’t fathom it. Joe and I never lied to each other. Not once. We may have withheld things from each other, but never an outright lie.
I trusted Joe. He had been my person for almost our whole lives.
We’d gone through the worst moments of each of our lives together.
The death of our mother when we were adolescents.
We both had to grow up that very day and protect Matty and Vangie who were both barely more than toddlers.
Through the chaotic abuse of our father at the height of his alcoholism.
Together, we’d fought off a system that threatened to take our little brother and sister away forever.
I could count on him no matter what. And he could count on me.
His words echoed through me. I didn’t kill Tom Loomis. It wasn’t enough.
“Where were you?” I asked. “Why did you lie about it?”
A muscle jumped in Joe’s jaw. “I’m sorry. I just panicked. That’s all I’m going to tell you.” He let go of me. Oh God, I thought. I knew that look. We had the ability to have whole conversations with each other without saying a word.
He wasn’t going to explain. He didn’t say he couldn’t tell me. He said he won’t. He had something to hide. Something that made him panic. Something he didn’t want anyone to know. Not even me. Especially me. It could only mean one thing.
The ground didn’t feel real beneath my feet. I staggered backward. My stomach roiled again. This time, I doubled over and threw up in the grass.
“Cass, don’t.”
When he came to me this time, I pushed him away. I couldn’t stand to have him touch me. I couldn’t even stand to hear his voice. I got a hold of myself, stood upright, then turned to face him.
“I don’t know what to do,” I said, but it wasn’t really to him. With a single breath, I was a lawyer again. My entire body began to tingle as the full weight of that settled back in.
I was Katy’s lawyer.
“Cass …”
I put a hand up and took a step back.
“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t say another word.”
He lied about his alibi. He refused to tell me the truth about where he was when Tom Loomis was murdered. He gave the police false information. If they found out. If anyone found out …
The words pounded in my head like a drumbeat. I was Katy’s lawyer.
“Cass.”
“Do you even understand the position you’ve put me in?”
Maisy Carmichael wasn’t the only lead Detective DePaul had neglected to chase down.
I turned my back on Joe. I had no idea what to do and I was running out of time in which to do it. So was Katy. I only knew that I had to get as far away from my own brother as I could.