Chapter Thirteen
Livvy felt the dread and guilt slam through her. So much of it that it might have brought her to her knees.
Ethan made sure that didn’t happen though.
He kept hold of her, and he got her moving away from the interview room. Grace followed along, and none of them said anything else until they were in her office and the door was shut.
“Sit down,” Grace ordered, and she went to the mini fridge in the corner of her office to get a bottle of water. She opened it and had Livvy drink some before she sat behind her desk.
Ethan took the chair next to Livvy, and he continued to keep his arm around her. Steadying her. Once again, he was there for her.
“What makes you think you killed this woman?” Grace asked.
Livvy took in another long breath. Maybe it was Ethan or the exhaustion, but she felt an odd sort of peace come over her.
She had remembered something.
Something real, something from her actual past. Despite what she had recalled, it felt like, well, progress. The trouble was this was no doubt the tip of the proverbial iceberg, and the next thing she remembered might not be sitting in a stairwell at New Hope.
It might be plunging a knife into someone.
“I obviously knew her,” Livvy said as she tried to answer Grace’s question. “She was on the stairs with me. We were sort of cowering there, I suppose.” She stopped and glanced at the way Ethan’s arm was looped around her. “Sort of like this.”
“With the woman comforting you?” Grace suggested.
Livvy considered that, and then she had to shake her head. “I can’t be certain, but in that flash of an image, I’m holding a knife. And I think it was the one that Vernice brought in.”
Ethan and Grace stayed quiet a moment. “Were you afraid of the woman? Did you think she was going to harm you?” he asked.
Livvy knew where he was going with this. If she had stabbed her, he wanted it to be self-defense. And maybe it had been.
“I’m not sure if I was scared of her or just the situation we were in,” she had to admit again. “I think we were hiding from something or someone, but why would I have had the knife? As an adult, why didn’t she have it?”
“Plenty of reasons,” Ethan was quick to say, and he proceeded to name some possibilities.
“You’d found it. Or grabbed it because you were terrified.
The woman could have given it to you to hold because she had a different kind of weapon, maybe even a gun.
There’s also the possibility that it might not have even been a real knife or the one that Vernice brought us. ”
“All of that could be true,” Livvy admitted. But even if she hadn’t used the knife to attack someone or defend herself, there were still other questions. She voiced two of them. “Who was the woman, and why were the two of us at New Hope?”
“Franklin might be able to answer that,” Grace remarked.
Livvy nodded. “Yes, he possibly could, but only if it doesn’t incriminate him in some way.”
“There’s that,” Grace grumbled. “And his legal watchdog is keeping a tight leash on him. He’ll probably go in the deny, deny, deny mode.” She sighed and got to her feet. “Still, he wanted to have a chat with his lawyer about that sketch that I showed him, so he might be ready to spill something.”
That was a huge might. Because even if it didn’t directly incriminate him, Livvy figured that Franklin would do pretty much anything to keep New Hope from coming under any more scrutiny.
“All right, I’ll finish up the interview with Franklin,” Grace said, starting for the door. “Just an FYI—unless he confesses, I’ll have to let him go. I don’t have enough evidence to make an arrest.”
Livvy knew that. Heck, they didn’t have enough to hold Anthony on murder charges even though Grace could charge him with obstruction and a few other crimes. Since Anthony didn’t have a record, he’d likely be out on bail within an hour or two.
Grace walked out, closing the door behind herself. Livvy looked at Ethan, ready to assure him that she was all right so he wouldn’t worry. But he stopped anything she was about to say by brushing his mouth over hers.
It was barely a kiss. Or rather it would have been had it come from anyone else, but coming from Ethan, it was still amazing. Still hot enough to push aside some of that dread that had taken over her body.
“You’re a good person,” he said, his voice a low, soothing murmur.
“And you were a good person when you were a kid. I want you to remember that because I know bone deep that whatever happened with that knife, you did what you had to do. Not out of maliciousness or evil but out of survival. Or because you were protecting someone,” he added.
That last part hadn’t occurred to Livvy. But yes, it could be that. Had she been trying to protect the woman with her on the stairs? Maybe. If so, how had she ended up dead in that bathtub?
“I need to know why I was at New Hope,” Livvy said on a sigh.
Ethan nodded and took the laptop from Grace’s desk. He froze for a second when his attention landed on something. On the sketch, she realized.
Livvy looked at the drawing again now, trying to study it with an objective eye. Hard to do since there was so much emotion involved in this, but she compared it to the memory flash she’d had.
“Yes, I’m certain this is the woman who was on the stairs with me,” she managed to say.
“And maybe that woman will be on the list Eden put together,” Ethan reminded her. He sat back down beside her, opening the master list.
Obviously, some research had already been done since there were now notes by some of the names. The first one, Heather Donnelly, for instance had died from cancer a year earlier. Another one, who’d been a nurse at New Hope, was in her eighties and had dementia.
“Look through the list,” Ethan instructed, “and see if anything rings a bell.”
She did. Livvy looked at every name, hoping there would be some sliver of recognition. But there wasn’t, and her frustrated sigh must have conveyed that to Ethan.
“It’s all right,” he assured her. “It was a long shot. There are no doubt plenty of other surrogates, clients and employees who aren’t even on this list.” He paused a moment. “There’s also the possibility that the woman used an alias.”
That was true, and it brought on another wave of frustration. Frustration that Ethan obviously picked up on.
“This list is just a start,” he insisted. “More names will be added as the interviews are conducted.”
Again, he was right. “Thank you,” she said, making the mistake of looking at him again.
Whenever emotions were running this high, defenses were down, which meant she didn’t hide her feelings for him. She thought it would cause him to take a mental step back.
It didn’t.
Ethan leaned in and kissed her again. And he made this one count even more than the last one. His mouth moved over hers as he knew exactly how to fire up every inch of her body.
Part of Livvy, the part that was guarding her heart, warned her not to dive right in. To hold back and protect herself.
That didn’t happen.
Livvy slid her hand around the back of his neck, pulling him even closer to her and deepening the kiss.
Ethan made a rough sound that came from deep within his throat, and without breaking the mouth-to-mouth contact, he put the laptop back on Grace’s desk. In the same motion, he snapped Livvy to him until her breasts were pressed against his chest.
It was an amazing feeling, as if all her senses had been heightened, and she suddenly wanted him even more than that night when they’d landed in bed.
Not good.
For one thing, they were in Grace’s office, not at his house. And for another, this heat was a delicious distraction. One that she wanted to slip right into and never come out. But she couldn’t do that. Not with so many things undecided between Ethan and her.
Not when they were looking for a killer.
With tons of regret, Livvy eased back from him, and she had no trouble seeing both the heat and the regret in his eyes, too. He sighed and scrubbed his hand over his face.
“When this is done,” he said, “when we have the answers we need, then we can work this out between us.”
Livvy liked the sound of that. Things had been uncertain between them for too long now. But that uncertainty would have to wait because she wanted to do some work on the list. The sooner they found out what was going on, then Sunny and others, including them, would be a whole lot safer.
She used her phone to access info on one of the names from their portion of the list, but Livvy had barely gotten started when there was a knock at the door. The visitor didn’t wait for a response though. The door opened, and Livvy turned to see the woman standing there.
Vernice.
Great. Livvy hadn’t steeled herself up nearly enough for this, but she quickly did so. And judging from the scowl Vernice shot them, steeling up would be required.
The woman slid glances at them, especially at the way they were seated. Their arms were still touching, and there wasn’t much distance between them. It was also possible that Ethan and she still had the flush of arousal on their faces from that scorching kiss.
“You put Grace up to dragging me in here for questioning,” Vernice insisted.
Sighing, Ethan got to his feet. “I didn’t have to. All persons of interest are being questioned.”
Vernice’s mouth opened, and the woman seemed genuinely shocked, no doubt because “person of interest” was the same as “suspect” in her mind.
“What have you told Grace about me?” she demanded as she stepped into the office and shut the door. She volleyed glares at both of them.
Livvy went with the truth. “Grace knows that you were at New Hope earlier today, right before Chloe was gunned down. And she also knows that wasn’t your first visit there.”
Ethan picked up the explanation. “It’s possible you’re the last person to see Chloe alive.” But he held up his hand to stop Vernice when she started to speak. “Let me go ahead and Mirandize you, and that way whatever you say will become part of your official statement.”
Vernice dropped back a step and she reached for the doorknob, but she didn’t leave. “Isabel is turning over in her grave because of what you’re doing.”
Ethan ignored her, though Livvy figured that had to sting, and he turned on the record function on his phone before he recited the Miranda warning. “Do you understand your rights?” he asked when he was finished.
“I understand that you never deserved my daughter,” Vernice spat out. “You are despicable. Both of you.”
Ethan kept his hard stare on the woman. “Do you understand your legal rights? And FYI, I’ll keep asking that until I get a straight answer.”
Vernice’s eyes went to slits. “I understand my rights.” Her voice was low and menacing, a nasty tangle of grief and hatred. Hatred now aimed at Ethan and Livvy.
She didn’t care much to be on someone’s hate list, but in this case, she figured there was no way around it. As far as Vernice was concerned, Ethan should stay faithful to his late wife forever.
“The sheriff will ask you this in your interview,” Ethan went on a moment later, “but tell us why you were at New Hope this morning.”
With the way Vernice’s lips stayed pinched together, Livvy figured the woman would just clam up. But she didn’t. “I’ve known Chloe for a while now. She’s helped several friends of mine with their infertility issues.”
Livvy considered that. “So, why visit Chloe this morning?” she pressed when Vernice didn’t continue.
“Because obviously someone is trying to drag me into…well, whatever the heck is going on,” she ranted.
“I mean, why leave the knife on my doorstep? Why pull me into something that clearly isn’t my business?
” Vernice stopped, and the short tirade seemed to have sapped some of her fury.
“I wanted to talk with Chloe and find out if she knew what was going on.”
“And did she?” Ethan was quick to ask.
Vernice sighed and shook her head. “She said she didn’t. But I don’t know Chloe well enough to tell if she was lying.”
“Where did you talk with her?” Livvy pressed.
“In one of the front rooms,” she replied without hesitation. “I think she called it the parlor.”
Ethan continued to stare at her. “Not her office?”
Vernice shook her head and groaned softly. “We talked for about five minutes, and I didn’t go anywhere else in the house. I left. And then when I got back to town, I heard about the shooting.”
Livvy thought of what Vernice had just said about not knowing Chloe well enough to detect if she was lying. Well, she felt the same way about Vernice. The woman might not be telling the truth about anything. Hopefully, Grace would be able to determine that once she had her in an interview room.
“I didn’t kill Chloe,” Vernice said as she started pacing in the short space between the side of Grace’s desk and the door. “I have no reason to do…” She stopped when her attention landed on something.
Livvy shifted and saw that Vernice was staring at the sketch that Grace had printed out. And not just staring at it either. It was as if Vernice couldn’t take her eyes off of it.
“Do you recognize her?” Livvy had to ask.
Vernice didn’t respond for a long time before finally tearing her attention from it. “No,” she insisted.
But Livvy wasn’t convinced. Apparently, neither was Ethan. “You’re sure? Because you look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”
She did, and that stark shock continued in Vernice’s eyes as she looked at Livvy. “I don’t know her,” the woman muttered, and this time she did head to the door. She threw it open with far more force than necessary.
“I’ll wait for Grace out here,” she muttered, slamming the door shut behind herself.
Livvy considered going after the woman, to press her for what she knew. And Vernice obviously knew something, or she wouldn’t have reacted that way.
“I need to let Grace know about this,” Ethan said, jotting down some notes that he would no doubt pass along to her before she took Vernice into the interview.
He had just finished writing when there was another knock at the door. At first Livvy thought that Vernice had returned, but when she opened it, Rory was standing there. One look at his face, and she knew something was wrong.
“What happened?” she asked.
But Rory didn’t respond until he was in the office and had closed the door. “I just got off the phone with the lab. They got the results back on the knife that was left at Vernice’s. Results on the traces of blood,” he clarified.
Livvy’s heart started to tighten into a knot. “I’m guessing they got a match?” she managed to say.
Rory nodded but then shrugged. “Not exactly, but there’s a familial match in the system.”
Her head was suddenly whirling, making it hard to think, and her blank expression was probably why he spelled it all out.
“A familial match points to a close biological relative of the unknown DNA,” Rory said, the sympathy practically seeping off him. “A match to you, Livvy. The lab techs believe the blood on that knife belongs to your mother.”