“Is this yours?” Darrell asked.
“Yeah.”
“Why did you buy it?”
“I heard stories about the beast hanging out in the woods around here. I was curious.”
“Did you read it?”
“I did. Gory stuff.”
“The circumstances in which we found your father’s body were very similar to what’s described in the book.”
“So what? You think I killed Gordon and used the book to make it look like the Ursulina did it?” When Darrell’s face didn’t move, Jay’s mouth dropped open with a shiver of fear. “Are you kidding? That’s what you think?”
“You need to be straight with us, Jay. Did you kill your father?”
“No! No way. I didn’t do that.”
“Your mother didn’t want Erica to tell us about the fight. She was afraid we’d think you murdered your father. Why would she be afraid of that?”
“Mom overreacts sometimes. She knows what Gordon was like to me.”
“What was he like to you?”
Jay stuttered. He began to flounder. “I mean, she knows we don’t get along. Didn’t get along.”
“You and your father argued all the time.”
“Yeah. I already told you that.”
“Gordon yelled at you? He verbally abused you?”
“Sure he did.”
“Did the arguments get physical?”
“What do you mean?”
“Did your father hit you?”
Jay frowned. “Yeah. Sometimes.”
“How often?”
“Well, all the time, in fact. Pretty much every day. He was a violent son of a bitch.”
“Did you ever hit back?”
“No.”
“But you wanted to.”
Jay’s hand curled into a tight fist. “Yeah, sure. I wanted to.”
“You hated him,” Darrell said, stating it matter-of-factly, like it wasn’t even a question.
I watched Jay’s eyes flash with anger. “Yeah, I did. So what? He was a pig.”
“There were days when you wanted him dead.”
“You want me to say it? Fine. Okay. I’ll say it. Sometimes I wished he was dead. You bet.”
Darrell was good at what he did. Admitting you wanted your father dead was a terrible thing, and even if you didn’t kill him, nobody was going to believe your denials after that. Norm obviously thought the same thing.
“We’re done, Darrell,” he interjected firmly. “No more questions.”
Jay continued, still not realizing the danger he’d put himself in. “You don’t know what Gordon was like. I told you he was a monster, and you wouldn’t listen.”
“Jay, not another word,” Norm murmured. “That’s enough.”
The boy slammed both fists down on the schoolroom desk. “No, I’m done pretending about him. Yes, I hated that son of a bitch. He beat the shit out of me whenever he wanted. He told me I was nothing. He called me—”
“Stop,” Norm insisted.
“But it wasn’t me!” Jay shouted at us. “I didn’t kill him!”
He sounded like a kid with chocolaty hands telling his mom he had no idea who ate the Hershey bar.
I had to do something. I couldn’t watch this kid incriminate himself any further, so I threw Jay a lifeline. No matter what the sheriff wanted, no matter what Darrell thought his duty was, I needed to give Jay a chance to tell us the truth.
“Jay, where were you on Sunday night?” I asked sharply.
The boy stared at me, and I thought his eyes were going to pop out of his head. “What?”
“Where were you?”
“At the house. I told you that.”
“Yes, but I think you were lying. Where were you?”
“I was in my room the whole night. I didn’t hear anything.”
“You didn’t hear anything, because you weren’t there,” I insisted.
“Rebecca,” Darrell hissed at me. “What the hell are you doing?”
I ignored him and grabbed Jay’s wrist. “If you have an alibi, you need to tell us what it is. If you weren’t home on Sunday night, you couldn’t have killed him. Do you understand that? Nothing else you said or did to your father means anything if you were somewhere else on Sunday night. Where were you, Jay?”
Our eyes met.
He knew I wasn’t playing a game with him. No tricks. For just a moment, the classroom felt empty, as if Darrell and Norm were gone, and I was alone with Jay. I could feel his desperation in wanting to open up to me, his secret clawing to get out. His eyes looked into mine and said: You know, don’t you?
Because I did.
I knew what he was hiding. I can’t even tell you how I knew, or what it was that gave it away. But knowing that, I also realized there was no way Jay was ever going to admit it. It was never going to happen.
“I’m telling the truth,” he told me again. “I was in my room all night.”
And then he added pointedly, “Alone.”
Chapter Fifteen
That night, I sat on the floor of my house in complete darkness, no lights on at all. I wanted it to look like I wasn’t home. The fireplace was cold, a whistle of icy wind coming down the chimney and making me shiver. I smoked, but I couldn’t even see the gray cloud when I exhaled. Every now and then, I got up and looked out the window, but there was no moon, no starlight, just the thick clouds that would be burying us in snow by morning.
I knew he was out there somewhere. Ricky.
I’d changed the locks since I threw him out, so his key wouldn’t work. When I got home, the first thing I did was check the windows to make sure he hadn’t broken in. I’d heard he was sleeping on the couch of one of his mine worker friends, but I knew he would come after me sooner or later. He was out for blood. Darrell continued to push me to stay with him and his family for a while — a gallant thing to do, since he was furious at me for interfering in his interrogation of Jay — but I told him no. For every night I spent safely, there was another night after that. Ricky would get to me eventually, and I had to be ready.
He’d left messages on my answering machine. First he was sweet, apologetic, trying to get me to change my mind. Hey, baby, we can work this out. Come on, you know I love you. And then, the more he drank, the more the belligerent side of him came out. The profanity. The abuse. The names. The threats. He called me things I wouldn’t repeat to anyone, sweetheart, least of all you.
I could have had him arrested, but what would that have done? Soon enough, he’d be back on the street, madder than he was before. No, our day was coming. I didn’t know when, but that was why I was sitting alone in the darkness, my gun within reach.
My father had left me a message, too. He was on the road somewhere, drunk and feeling bad. He promised me he’d call more, which was the same promise he made every year, but it never worked out that way. I understood. We loved each other, but we led separate lives. For a long time, I’d thought it was because we were all loners, me, him, and my brother. But that was never really true. It was losing my mom that split us apart. We each went off into our separate caves to grieve, and we never came back out.
There was also something in his voice on the answering machine. It was in his tone, not what he actually said, like he was regretting things in his life that he should have changed and never had. It made me wonder if he was ill. Another few months would prove me right about that.
I was half a pack of cigarettes into my night when I saw headlights in the driveway. Just like that, I was on my feet, my gun cocked and in my hand. I knew the engine rumble of Ricky’s truck, and this wasn’t it, but he’d be sly enough to borrow someone else’s vehicle when he came to get me. The headlights went off before I could see who it was. I heard footsteps approaching the front door, and then somebody called my name in a kind of hush.