Chapter 20 Nicola #2
“The night before he…” I can’t bring myself to say the word. “Zach accused you of lying. He was drunk at the time, and depressed, so I didn’t think much of it, but I was wondering if you knew what he was talking about.”
“He accused me of lying?”
“Yeah.”
“You know I’m a lawyer, right? Lying literally pays my bills.”
“I’m serious.”
She cups the end of the handle with both palms, leans against it.
Her eyes have a faraway look, like she’s mentally running through the past few years, trying to figure out what he could’ve meant.
I can tell the moment she comes up with nothing, her gaze clearing, snapping back to the present. “No idea.”
“Yeah, thought it was probably nothing.” A few more shovelfuls of dirt, though, and I still can’t let it go. “It’s just… Steffani suggested something similar.”
She hesitates—only for a single heartbeat, but I notice. “You talked to Steffani?”
“She claimed you knew all along that your dad was a murderer.”
“Please.”
Not a denial. It’d be unsettling if both of them concluded the same thing, on the same night, only to disappear immediately after.
She digs in once more, except this time, the blade knocks against a rock lodged in the ground.
“There you go,” she says, reaching for the pickaxe.
“That’s what happens when you get down into the subsoil, all kinds of obstructions.
Move back.” The pickaxe glistens above her head, then crashes down—again and again, until the rock’s nothing but dust and debris.
I have to ask: “Did you know?”
“What, about my dad?”
I nod.
“No, I didn’t. Did you?”
“Did I what?”
“Know your dad was a murderer?”
“No!” I’m so dumbstruck by the question, I can’t help stumbling over my answer. “No, god, fuck, of course not. You were there. If I’d known what he was, why would I have agreed to help with the show?”
She wipes the sweat off her forehead with her T-shirt. “Why do you think he did?”
“What?”
“Your dad. Why do you think he agreed to be on the show? Why invite me over for dinner? He knew what was buried in the walls, and yet he let me use that upstairs bathroom every time I visited. You’d think a man with something to hide would lock that shit down, but not your dad. He welcomed me in.”
I’ve asked myself that same question time and time again, and have never come up with a satisfactory answer.
I offer her the only one that makes any sense.
“The case had gone unsolved for twenty years. The police never even brought him in for questioning. I don’t think it ever occurred to him that he might actually get caught. ”
“So, what? He let me loose in your house to prove he was unstoppable?”
That suggestion, that my father risked everything just so he could prove how clever he was, feels like a slap across the face.
He knew what would happen if he were caught—that my job might be ripped away, and that with our house mortgaged to the hilt, there was no safety net waiting to catch me.
He never would’ve gambled with my life like that.
“I think he was trying not to look suspicious. If he invited you over, then that meant he had nothing to hide. And because you always talked about new developments in the case, he felt like he could stay one step ahead.”
Felt being the key word. We were both blindsided the night the police banged down our door. Greer had managed to gather all the evidence they’d need for an arrest without us even realizing.
“What made you suspect him?” I ask.
She stoops down, measures the wall using her forearm. “Just a feeling.” The way she refuses to look at me, I’ve never been more certain there’s something she’s not saying. She chucks the tools over the edge and crawls out. “That’s deep enough.”
I glance over at Zach’s blanket-covered body.
“We don’t need to take it off him,” she reassures me. “All we need to do is roll him in.”
She takes his head; I take his feet. We only need half a roll to tip him into the grave. He pitches in face-first with a thud that makes me wince.
“Do you want to say something? I noticed you didn’t during the funeral.”
She regards the shadowy grave. “Okay,” she finally says.
“Okay. Zach was a good guy. He was quick to laugh, even though life kept repeatedly nailing him in the balls. The first time I met him, he told me I looked better in TV interviews, which cracked me up and is probably true. He was brutally honest. I liked that about him.”
She clears her throat, then blinks a few times, as if to dry up the tears.
“Okay, I think that’s enough.” She picks up her shovel.
“Wait.”
I rummage around in my pocket and pull out the paper umbrella.
If she thinks it’s strange, she doesn’t say anything. I crouch down, setting it on the blanket, then whisper, low enough so she can’t listen in, “Thanks for being such a good friend.” He’ll never know how lost I felt when he found me on that airplane, how much his kindness meant to me.
I’m about to withdraw when I notice something. It’s the gash splitting the back of his scalp—or rather, not the gash, but something inside it.
“Everything okay?” she asks.
Even though my stomach protests, I prod my fingertips into the wound. The squelching and slickness almost make me heave. I latch onto the object and tug it free. A shard of ceramic. Glazed. Painted. Where did this come from? How the hell did it get inside him?
“Greer?” I call over my shoulder, voice unsteady.
“Yeah?”
I hold up the shard. “Any idea what this could be?”
She snatches it out of my hand, stares at it.
“Fuck me,” she whispers.
There’ve been moments in my life when I’ve wanted nothing more than to be wrong.
At the moment, I can think of two of them.
This will be the third. That shard broke off from whatever caused the wound.
Someone bludgeoned him with—a vase maybe?
A plate? Then dumped him in the lake. A familiar numbness sinks into my limbs.
I should’ve trusted myself to recognize when something wasn’t right.
I should’ve listened to my instincts and insisted on calling the police.
Because I knew from the beginning this wasn’t an accident, wasn’t a tragic suicide.
Zach was murdered.