Chapter Eight #2
“Livvy didn’t force me to have sex with her,” Ethan snapped.
That stopped Vernice in her tracks, literally. The woman sort of stumbled to a stop. For just a second or two, shock widened her eyes before the fury returned.
“How dare you,” Vernice snarled, her tone as menacing as the glare she was aiming at him.
Livvy lifted her hands in a calm down gesture, and she was no doubt on the verge of trying to placate Vernice.
Ethan realized he didn’t want any placating.
Yeah, Vernice had lost her daughter, but he’d lost his wife, and while that would stay with him forever, he couldn’t climb into Isabel’s grave with her.
“How dare you,” Ethan fired back. Not with venom, but an icy coldness that he hoped conveyed he wasn’t going to let Vernice run roughshod over Livvy. “Are you here for a reason other than just to spew more of your rage?”
Vernice had already opened her mouth, but no sound came out. She just stood there, gaping at him. Good. At least she wasn’t ranting. But he figured this was just the calm before the storm.
“I’m here,” Vernice finally said, speaking through clenched teeth, “to tell you that I heard Livvy had left the station with you. I thought you might bring her here, to my daughter’s home, and I wanted you to know that I don’t approve. I don’t want her in my daughter’s bed.”
“She’s not,” Ethan quickly replied. “No one is. Because I got rid of that bed shortly after Isabel died.”
Vernice looked as if he’d struck her. But again, it didn’t cool that anger, and she flung her pointing finger at Livvy. “She could be a killer. Have you thought of that? A killer in my daughter’s house.”
He heard Livvy make a small sound—part groan, part gasp. Vernice had hit a nerve. Damn her.
“It’s time for you to leave,” he told Vernice, and Ethan, too, had to speak through clenched teeth.
But Vernice didn’t budge, and her eyes narrowed to slits when she looked at Livvy’s badge. “You call yourself a cop,” she spat out. “You should be locked away. I know all about those nightmares you have.”
Livvy muttered something he didn’t catch, and Ethan moved in front of her.
“Isabel told me all about them,” Vernice went on. “Nightmares that you have of a dead woman in a bathtub.”
“Isabel told you that?” Livvy asked.
Ethan’s gaze fired to her, ready to tell her that he hadn’t spilled anything about that to Isabel, but she added, “Yes, I did tell her about the nightmares. I didn’t think she’d say anything about them to you.”
“My daughter and I had no secrets from each other.” Vernice hiked up her chin as if that was something to be proud of.
Well, Ethan wasn’t proud. That felt like a betrayal for Isabel to have given those sort of details to her mother.
“No secrets,” he repeated like the accusation that it was. “Such as knowing she was going to a place like New Hope and not stopping her?”
“How was I supposed to stop her?” Vernice snapped. “She had already made up her mind.”
“But you approved of her going,” Ethan said.
Vernice flinched like he’d slapped her. Her mouth fell open, and for a heartbeat, she just stared at him, stunned. “No,” she muttered. “I—I didn’t approve. I was trying to be supportive.”
She looked away, jaw tightening, and when she spoke again, her voice was lower.
Raw. “I thought if I gave her my blessing to go to New Hope, Isabel might come back to me. Whole. Safe.” A bitter laugh escaped her.
“Fat lot of good that did.” Her eyes narrowed.
“And if you’d gone with her, if you’d better monitored what she was doing, she’d still be alive.
As far as I’m concerned, you’re responsible for her death. ”
That comment didn’t surprise Ethan one bit. It was the first time Vernice had out-and-out voiced it, but he had always felt that she blamed him.
And he blamed himself.
But he couldn’t let that guilt take over now, not when it was obvious that Vernice wasn’t finished returning verbal fire.
“Both of you are killers,” she went on, shooting glares at both of them.
“Ethan murdered my Isabel, and you probably killed someone when you were a kid. Murdered her and then pretended you didn’t remember.
Just like you killed the woman you ‘found’ this morning.
” She put the word found in air quotes. “You’re a bad seed, Livvy Walsh—”
“Get the hell out of here, now,” Ethan growled. “If you say another word, I’ll arrest you for trespassing. Leave and don’t come back, Vernice. You’re no longer welcome here.”
Vernice looked more than ready to argue with him about that, but she must have realized this was a fight she wouldn’t win against two cops who she’d thoroughly riled to the core. She turned on her heels, and with her arms pumping and curse words flying from her mouth, she went back to her car.
Ethan didn’t wait for Vernice to be out of sight before he pulled Livvy back into his arms. “I’m sorry,” he said, brushing a kiss on the top of her head.
“I’m sorry, too,” Livvy returned.
When she looked up at him, he didn’t see the hurt he’d expected. Just the opposite. She looked like a cop.
“Vernice seemed to know a lot about me, my nightmares and New Hope,” Livvy said. “She also connected Zadie’s murder to one that may have happened when I was a kid.”
“Yeah. I caught all of that.” He glanced in the direction of Vernice’s car as it sped away. “I think I’d like to find out what else Vernice knows. I’ll text Grace to see if she’s willing to bring her in for questioning.”
“Good idea,” Livvy remarked as he took out his phone and sent the text. He got a reply in under a minute and relayed it to Livvy. “Grace will contact her and arrange a meeting.”
“I wonder if there are any other connections that Vernice didn’t mention,” she said as they started toward the house.
He nodded. Livvy and he were on the same page. “Let’s do some digging on the computer,” he suggested.
And despite the hellish experience they’d been through, well, pretty much all day, it felt good to aim all those emotions and frustrations into something that might give them insights as to what was going on.
Of course, a lot of those emotions were because of that kiss. That scalding-hot moment they’d shared before Vernice had arrived. No way was his body going to let him forget about that, but his brain was pushing him in the right direction.
Find the killer before this spilled over even more onto Livvy.
They went inside, and Ethan got some milk for Livvy and a Pepsi for himself while she booted up the laptop. Dropping down in the chairs in his breakfast nook, they got started. Livvy pulled up everything in the database on Vernice.
Because Vernice had once been a social worker, there were plenty of background details on her. She was fifty-eight, which he recalled was the same age as Chloe. That probably wasn’t relevant, but he kept it in mind anyway.
“Born and raised near Renegade Canyon,” Livvy read aloud. “The only time she left was for college at UT Austin.”
Ethan was scanning the info when his attention landed on something. Hell. Now, that could be relevant. “Look at the address where she was born and raised.”
Livvy leaned in closer and made a sound of surprise. “Coyote Creek Road.” She turned to him. “That’s near the house where we found Zadie’s body.”
“A stone’s throw away,” he muttered, thinking of the area.
There were some houses there that had long since collapsed and been reclaimed by the woods, and Vernice had lived in one of them. He hadn’t known that.
“Vernice moved back there after college,” Ethan went on as he continued to read. “And when her mom passed away when she was twenty-two, Vernice moved into town. She got married, and a couple of years later, she had Isabel.”
“So, Vernice would have still been living in that house when I was six,” Livvy remarked.
“Yeah.” But that might not be connected either. Still, they could try to find out if it was. “I’m sure Grace or someone is running a check on whoever owns the house where we found Zadie’s body, but let’s do some looking of our own.”
Livvy immediately shifted over from Vernice’s background info to the county land records’ database. Since they had Vernice’s maiden name, Sullivan, they were able to get a quick hit.
“Vernice’s family owned the land for nearly fifty years,” Livvy read. “And thirty-six years ago when she moved into town, Vernice sold it to a developer, who went belly up.”
After that, it’d changed ownership a couple of times and now belonged to yet another developer, who was apparently doing squat with it.
“Now for info on Vernice’s neighbor,” Livvy said, shifting the search to the other property.
It currently belonged to the same developer, and the house hadn’t had a resident in over a decade when the owner had died. Ethan followed the ownership trail, working his way back to twenty-eight years ago, when Livvy would have been six.
“Hell,” he said when he saw it.
Livvy cursed, too. Because the owner back then was none other than New Hope.