Chapter 24
CHAPTER
Lucinda
The Present
I PULLED THE THREE silver bracelets out of the box and held them up. The memory of them glinting wildly in flashes of lightning slammed into me.
Her tear stained face, a mixture of sadness and resolve.
I picked at a rust-colored stain on the metal, flaking it off with my fingernail.
I didn’t understand how they came to be in this box hidden away in my little sister’s room.
“What are you doing in here?” my father demanded from the doorway, startling me. I hadn’t heard him and my mother come home. I had been too lost in the memories of that night and the implications of what I held in my hand.
I looked at him as I held up a dead girl’s jewelry.
“Why does Bailey have Jennifer Moore’s bracelets?”
My father strode across the room and snatched the silver bangles from my hand.
“What are you doing in here?” he demanded again, his voice thick.
“Um, I think the more important question is why my sister has a murdered girl’s jewelry,” I threw back at him.
Dad looked down at the bracelets like they might bite him. “I’m sure these are Bailey’s. She was always buying things. She never could budget her allowance.” He cleared his throat. “I don’t know why you thought these were that girl’s—”
“There’s blood on them,” I cut him off, grabbing one of the bracelets and holding it up to his face. I pointed to the flaking dried blood. “That isn’t paint, Dad.”
“Who knows how she got them. You know your sister.” My father seemed ready to dismiss it, but I could sense something else in him. It was fear.
“No, Dad, Jenn was wearing these the night she died. I remember because I saw her.”
Dad’s eyes widened only slightly. The only indication that I had surprised him. “That doesn’t mean—”
“Dad, I’m an adult. Treat me like one, please. I can tell by your face you know something about this.” My father wasn’t the only one adept at reading people. I had learned the skill well.
Dad looked like he was going to blow me off again, but then our eyes met and something changed. His shoulders drooped and for the first time in my life, my father looked old. And tired.
His face twisted as if in pain. “You’re being irrational, Lucinda. Why would she take these?” His voice was a broken, agonized whisper.
“Because that’s what she’s always done, Dad. She was always taking things that didn’t belong to her. How many times did I tell you about her stealing my diary, or my clothes …” I thought about Rhett’s class ring, a sickening realization setting in.
Where had she taken Jennifer’s bangles from?
Who had she taken them from?
“Unless she didn’t take them.” I let the implication hang heavy in the air between us.
I knew my father was capable of horrible things if he—or his family—were threatened.
I felt my palms start to sweat. My insides were a coiled spring. I waited for my father to admit the truth, yet I was terrified of it.
Dad closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them again, his strength seemed to have returned.
That momentary weakness was gone, as if I had imagined it.
His clear blue eyes blazed with a fierceness that made me want to sink to the floor.
This was the man who was both feared and beloved by the entire county.
A man who lost both of his parents as a child and had to raise himself.
A man who put himself through law school and went on to become one of the most well-respected judges in the state.
This was a man not to be messed with.
This was a man that would burn the world down to protect his family and his good name.
This was a man who, if pushed, could commit murder.
But when he began to speak, the story he told stunned me into silence.
From how he was acting I expected a confession.
What I got was something else entirely.
“Your sister was hysterical when she called me,” Dad said. “Your mom and I drove out to Jagged Point. Bailey was already at the overlook. She was in shock. The other girl was on the ground.”
“What do you mean she was on the ground?” I asked, trying to make sense of what he was saying.
“There was nothing to be done. She was already dead. Bailey had hit her with a rock.” His voice broke and he had to clear his throat. Dad stared at the bracelets like they were grenades about to go off in his hands. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
“But Jenn was found on the side of the road, not at the cliffs,” I said, trying to make sense of everything.
“Your mom and I moved her.” He cleared his throat, his brow furrowed.
“We wanted it to look like a hit and run. Her injuries were similar to those I’ve seen on victims of vehicular manslaughter.
I knew it would be the cleanest and easiest explanation for the investigators.
How was I supposed to know the new medical examiner wouldn’t listen to Chuck?
Or me? He went behind our backs and ruled it a homicide with death consistent with blunt force trauma.
Wouldn’t even contemplate the idea that maybe a car had hit her and driven off.
Chuck almost lost the election that year because he couldn’t solve the case.
And for over a decade your mom and I have made sure to keep you girls out of it.
” I must have looked appalled because Dad became defensive.
“It was the right thing to do. For your sister.”
I struggled to make sense of what he was saying.
My father’s words floated around in my head but I couldn’t quite grasp their meaning.
I thought I knew what happened that night.
I was so very wrong.
I had never suspected my sister had been carrying around such a horrific secret all these years. I would never think to look her way at all.
“And what about Jenn?” I heard myself asking. For a moment it felt like I was outside my body. As if I were above the scene, watching it happen, not connected to it.
“She made her bed. Carrying on with someone else’s fiancé. Embarrassing you—embarrassing my family—it wasn’t right.” He glowered his disapproval. “We do what we have to do to protect our family, Lucinda. I thought I raised you to understand that.”
I stared at my dad, hardly recognizing him. This was the same man who used to preside over a courtroom, adjudicating the fate of people’s lives with a strong sense of right and wrong. Had his moral compass become so skewed that he would cover up a murder for Bailey and not feel any guilt about it?
But I already knew the answer. Of course he would. He had been providing his own brand of protection for us our whole lives.
“How did Bailey get all the way up there? It’s not like she would ever ride her bike that far,” I said, still having a hard time believing what he was saying.
I had spent the last fifteen years thinking Rhett was a killer.
Now, to find out my sister, of all people, was the murderer, was too much to wrap my mind around.
“She stole the keys to my Cadillac. The old gray one I had. She used to do it all the time. I would have to hide them in a box in my office. I forgot that night.”
Another piece fell into place. “You mean the one you sold two weeks after Jenn’s body was found? That gray Cadillac?”
Dad didn’t bother to answer because he didn’t need to. He sold that car in case someone could connect it to the murder. In case there was a witness that saw it out driving that night. My father was the only person in Fern River who had such a fancy car. It would have been instantly recognizable.
“Your sister was just a little misguided. She always had a habit of getting her head turned around—”
“She killed someone, Dad. She didn’t steal a tube of lip gloss, she bludgeoned Jenn to death with a damn rock!” I exclaimed, my voice rising.
“Lower your voice, young lady,” he commanded as if I were still a teenager.
“Your sister has always struggled to control her temper, and that husband of yours has been tying her into knots for years. Have you ever wondered why she followed after him like some kind of lovelorn puppy? He had been carefully grooming her for years to feed his narcissistic ego,” Dad stated in disgust. “Have you never wondered why she hasn’t met someone and gotten married? ”
I opened my mouth to argue, but hesitated as my mind went back over two decades’ worth of interactions and conversations.
I thought of all the times Rhett had shown a special interest in Bailey.
I didn’t believe there was anything sexual going on, but Dad was right, my bastard of a husband had a pathological need to feel loved and wanted, no matter the cost to anyone else.
And my sister, with her twisted ideas of right and wrong, as well as her fiery temper, had fallen prey to his betrayal as much as I had.
But …
“So you cleared Rhett’s name to keep Bailey off the police’s radar.
Because Rhett is connected to our family and if Chuck looked at him, he might look at you, or me, or Bailey.
You were covering all bases. You didn’t protect Rhett for me, you protected him for Bailey.
And yourself,” I surmised, putting it all together.
“But now that Marty’s come forward, you’re willing to let Rhett go down to keep Bailey safe.
You have no loyalty towards him. You never have. He’s only useful as your patsy.”
Dad’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t tell me you care what happens to him. We both know your marriage has been a sham for years.”
I drew myself up straight. “But Dad, he didn’t kill Jenn.”
Dad held out the bracelets and I took them from him, their weight heavy in my hand.
“But he did almost ruin your life—and Bailey’s.
He lied to you. He used you, and that poor girl who lost her life.
That’s the kind of man he is. He’s not a good person, no matter how much he likes to think he is.
I’ve seen men like him a thousand times in my courtroom.
While he may not have murdered Jenn, he killed her all the same, by being a deceiver and a manipulator. It’s his actions that led to all this.”
The remnants of the love I felt for Rhett still lingered there below the surface even after everything he’d done.
I thought about our argument earlier. I could still feel his hands around my throat squeezing the air from my lungs. There had been no love for me in his eyes, only hate. He would have killed me, of that I was sure. It was pure luck I had gotten away.
He was dangerous.
He had made that clear.
He wanted to take my child from me, and I believed he would if given the opportunity. I couldn’t trust him with McKenzie. He had shown what kind of person he really was beneath the likable man he portrayed to the rest of the world.
My life meant nothing to him.
That realization was terrifying.
My resentment—and his discontented bitterness—had made contentious bedfellows, and it was only a matter of time until they turned on each other in the most explosive way.
I had stupidly thought that once McKenzie came along, maybe we’d be okay.
We’d been trying for so long to have a child.
It was the next expected step for us. But my inability to become a mother added yet another failure to the long list I had accumulated.
And as the years went by without a baby, our tenuous bond, forged by our shared deceptions, wasn’t going to hold.
I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep him and he knew he wouldn’t stay.
But then, like some kind of miracle, I got pregnant and Rhett was so happy. It felt like we had turned a corner in our frigid, acrimonious union.
But the lies were larger than any love that ever existed between us.
Then the lies had turned rotten, and violent loathing took their place.
“Family is the only thing that matters, Lucinda. We have to protect Bailey. Rhett is not worth destroying our family over. Because when he’s no longer around, we’re all you have.
We’re all you need.” My father was so certain he was right.
That every immoral thing he had done, every breach of his lauded ethics, was in the name of protecting us.
My mind was turning in a million different directions, but only one thing mattered: Rhett didn’t kill Jenn Moore.
Bailey did.