Chapter 1
CHAPTER
Lucinda
The Present
THE KNOCK AT the door was like gunfire, disrupting the tense, too quiet night. Rhett and I stood there in the kitchen, facing each other. Sweat beaded his brow. My heart beat so hard and fast I thought it would come flying out of my chest.
Neither of us moved. A terror-fueled standoff.
They knocked again. Even louder this time.
“They’ll wake up McKenzie,” I hissed, watching my husband’s face contort from blank neutrality to bone-chilling fear.
I stared at him—this man I had been married to for so long, and saw, not the mild-mannered, quietly handsome boy of our youth, but the weak and inadequate, middle-aged man he had become. He wouldn’t meet my eyes.
“Rhett, you need to go with them. Remember, my dad said he will have a lawyer meet you at the station,” I instructed, my phone in my hand, the screen now black.
Only moments before, we had received the phone call that had changed everything.
A warning that there was no choice but to heed.
“Rhett,” Dad said my husband’s name with absolute authority, “someone’s come forward linking you to Jennifer Moore.”
At the sound of the woman’s name, everything inside me went cold. My limbs felt like lead. “What?” I demanded, though everyone ignored me.
“There’s been some credible eyewitness testimony as well as some physical evidence that’s come to light.
” My father cleared his throat, then an oddly awkward pause that was nearly deafening through the phone before he decided to drop the final grim piece of news.
“Rhett, they’re coming to your house. This evening. ”
“What?” I said again, louder this time. “What are you talking about? Jenn … she …” I cleared my throat. “That was fifteen years ago,” I said. “Who cares about all that now?”
Rhett was quiet and I made a motion for him to speak, but his face bore a familiar blankness. He wouldn’t meet my eyes and instead stared down at the phone as if it would swallow him whole.
The déjà vu was hard to stomach.
“It doesn’t matter how long ago it was, Lucinda, they have evidence linking Rhett to that girl’s murder, an eyewitness, too, and Chuck has sent two of his deputies to your house.
They’re on their way right now to take him in for questioning.
” He halted again, but only for a moment.
“From the sounds of it, they could arrest him.”
“Arrest him? Don’t be ridiculous,” I scoffed, surprised, as everyone else would be, that Charles Young, my father’s longtime friend and Fern River chief of police, would send his deputies to my house and take my husband down to the police station to question him about a crime that should have been forgotten years ago.
“Lucinda, this is serious,” my mother’s anxious voice cut in. “Where’s McKenzie?” Her first thought was always for my daughter. First and foremost.
“Asleep, of course. But I’ve got it all under control—”
“Clearly, you don’t!” My father barked, shutting me up. I turned again to Rhett, glaring at him. Why wouldn’t he speak? I needed him to say something. For once, I wished he’d be the one comforting me.
“So what should we do?” I asked, knowing my father always had the answers.
“Rhett, you need to go with Chuck’s men. Don’t say anything, no matter how many questions they ask or how they try to butter you up. I’ll have Glynn Walker meet you at the station. I’ve already called him,” Dad instructed.
“You didn’t have to do that, sir,” Rhett finally said. He sounded so small. Inconsequential.
“You’re my daughter’s husband. I’ll get this taken care of, just like I did before,” Dad said, his impatience obvious.
“Lucinda, you need to stay at the house. You can’t have McKenzie waking up and being scared.
You’re her mother, your place is in your home.
I’m going to head down to the station and see what I can find out, but you need to prepare yourself. ”
“Why is this coming up now, after all this time? Are they really taking it seriously?” Jennifer Moore had been dead for over a decade.
It had become a cold case. A forgotten case.
My father had said there was a link between my affable, mild-mannered husband and a murdered girl that people had long stopped caring about.
A wheel had been set in motion and once it was out in the open, she would be the only thing people would be talking about.
The thing about Fern River is people took rumors as seriously as the gospel. Evidence and an eyewitness meant Rhett would be tarred and feathered before lunch time..
We had purposefully left this all in the past. We had to. For our family’s sake.
For my sake.
But the thing about secrets is that they never stayed hidden. They bided their time until making their way into the light again.
I needed to be careful because I couldn’t go back to that place I was mired in fifteen years ago.
Once this hit the gossip mill, I’d have to deal with the looks and the whispers all over again.
I hadn’t handled it well before, so things would have to be different this time.
Because I wouldn’t become that woman again.
Out of control and sloppy. I had buried her down deep, and she was meant to stay there.
Covered in dirt next to a dead girl.
My dad was the family fixer. Not just for me and my sister, but for our entire extended family.
He had clawed up from the depths of poverty to now be well-connected all over the state.
He was the gooddamn Don Corleone of Fern River, Kentucky, woven into the fabric of the town like bourbon and bluegrass.
“I could have found my own attorney,” Rhett began, his voice sounding tight.
“You’re my husband, Rhett, of course he found someone for you. What would people say if Cliff Herbaugh didn’t help out his son-in-law? Everyone knows my dad does whatever he can for his family.”
“Except I’m not family. Not blood anyway.” Rhett’s eyes narrowed as he attempted to rehash an argument we’d had a hundred times before.
I took a deep breath and gave him what I hoped was a reassuring smile. “Just follow Dad’s advice, and we’ll be fine. This isn’t our first rodeo.”
Rhett nodded and swallowed. “Right.”
“No one will believe for a moment you’re involved with any of that.
” There was a catch in my voice as I spoke the bald-faced lie.
“The people of this town know you, Rhett. They know me. They know our family. Good people don’t commit murder.
You teach their kids math, for Christ’s sake!
” I started biting my nails in a nervous gesture I hadn’t done since I was a kid. Rhett’s knowing eyes observed my tell.
I dropped my hands to my sides, curling them into fists.
“Except they believed it once before, don’t forget.
This town was all too quick to suspect me, even if they never said it to my face.
” Before I could say anything, he continued, not letting me go through the hassle of disputing the obvious fact.
“Anyway, I don’t know what evidence there is.
It was over a decade ago. Anything tying me to Jenn should be long gone.
” I hated how his voice faltered as he spoke her name.
It was always the same. The hitch in breathing, the naked longing.
The way he hurled the name at me, seeking ultimate damage.
He knew what he was doing when he said it—each and every time.
Many people would take him at his word. Such was the man he presented to the world. Trustworthy. Honest. Dependable. He had worked hard to polish the image he now exuded.
But I knew him better than he knew himself.
There had been so many lies between us, I wasn’t sure he even knew what the truth was anymore.
“Dad will get to the bottom of this. Maybe someone has a grudge against you or something. I’m sure it’s nothing.” I waved it away as if we were talking about small-town gossip. My confidence had gotten me far in life, and I relied on it now to sell a story I wasn’t exactly buying.
The knocking on the door came again. Harder this time.
“Mr. Rhett Clark, this is the Fern River Police. You need to open the door immediately.”
Each knock on the door was like a nail in our marriage’s coffin, and a door being pushed open to a past I had forced myself not to think about.
Rhett gripped his head in his hands, closing his eyes. I watched as his whole body began to sag and he let out a keening moan that was more akin to grief than fear.
I felt the girl I used to be clawing her way up from the abyss. The girl whose heart had been chipped away only to be replaced with rage and violence.
It was so easy to lose rational thought when your whole life was on the line.
But my father had raised me well. And I would rise to the challenge now just as I had done before.
“Don’t you dare go out there acting defeated,” I told him with a forced smile. “You’re my husband. Because of that, you’re also a Herbaugh. And we don’t roll over and play ’possum. Remember, everyone is watching.”
“Right. Of course.” He still wouldn’t quite look at me, as if he wasn’t listening to a word I was saying. He had the expression of a man preparing for the firing squad, and I felt myself soften. Ever so slightly.
The love I had for this man was there, quietly waiting below the surface. Drifting along in the ebb and flow of our mistakes and secrets. All the years of forced normalcy had worked hard to dull the intense affection I once held for him.
But it was still there.
Which is what made all this so much harder.
There were still flashes of the loving, quiet man I had fallen for. The man who had put my needs before his each and every time. The man who put me first.
Until he didn’t.
Until I was replaced and then spent the next fifteen years trying to maneuver my way back into position, despising how the effort eroded away at my pride.
I grabbed his hands, squeezing hard enough to make him wince. “You are Rhett Clark, and I am Lucinda Herbaugh. We are good people. Everyone knows that.” I wasn’t sure my words reassured him.
“Everyone knows that,” my husband parroted as blue flashing lights danced through the windows, casting shadows across our faces.
I pulled the curtain back to see the police cruiser parked in front of our house. “Oh god, I’m surprised Gloria from across the street doesn’t have her face plastered to our window.”
I gave him a not-so-gentle shove. “Answer the door, Rhett.”
I watched him swallow thickly, giving me a curt nod.
I followed him down the hallway. I could see the shadows of two people on the other side of the door glass.
His hand stilled on the doorknob as he turned back to me. “I should’ve known we’d end up back here, Lucinda. Because I’ll always love—” He stopped suddenly, as if his thoughts were severed at the source. Of course he waited until the worst possible moment to say this. He had no shame sometimes.
Then his eyes darkened ever so slightly. Just a hint of malevolence as if seeing something in me he didn’t like.
“We’ve never talked about what happened that night because you didn’t want to, and I guess I didn’t either.
But now, I think that was a mistake.” He looked at me and waited for a single heartbeat.
Then another. I noticed the way his hands shook.
“We said we wouldn’t keep secrets from each other again.
And I haven’t—” He caught himself before vocalizing his dishonesty.
His hesitation said more than any words ever could. “But you …”
He never got the chance to finish what he was about to say.
The third knock at the door was accompanied by a deep voice.
“Mr. Clark, this is Fern River Police, we need you to open the door. I won’t ask again.”
“Rhett …” His name drifted off into nothing. I didn’t know what else to say. So we stood there in those last few seconds—him scared and desperate, me filled with grief for everything we were about to lose, and a simmering rage that could easily consume me if I let it.
Who were these two people we had become?
I barely recognized them.
At one time we were an unstoppable team.
Now, we weren’t sure how much to trust one another. Or if we could afford not to.
Finally, Rhett opened the door.
The officer, Deputy George Anderson, stepped over the threshold without waiting for permission.
The man, only a few years older than me, had attended my childhood birthday parties and sat beside me in Sunday school every week until we turned thirteen.
We were anything but strangers. And yet, the way he was looking at Rhett and me, you would think we were.
“We need you to come down to the station with us.” George put his hand on the handcuffs dangling from his belt. Was he going to walk Rhett out in cuffs?
“Come on George, is all this necessary?” I asked. “Can’t we chat here? I’ll go get us all some coffee.” I cast a nervous glance to the street, finding our neighbors already congregated outside their homes, drawn to the flashing lights like a beacon.
George ignored me. His eyes rested on my husband with a steely determination.
I wasn’t their target.
I wasn’t their prey.
“Rhett Clark, we need you to answer some questions about the murder of Jennifer Moore.”