“He’s the one. It’s not me.”
Chelsey pursed her lips in thought. The back of her hand grazed the butt of the gun on the armchair. “While I was waiting for you, I got a strange phone call.”
“From who?”
“Maggie Bei of the Duluth Police.”
“What did she want?”
“She wants to talk to me tomorrow. They’re looking into the hit-and-run again. Jonah’s death.”
“Jonah?” Gavin asked. “What does he have to do with anything?”
“Ms. Bei didn’t say, but I could read between the lines. They’re wondering if you had something to do with the accident that killed him.”
“Me? Why the hell would I—?”
“For the money.”
“Kill Jonah?” Gavin felt the walls begin to close around him, the ceiling to come down on his head. “Murder my own sister’s husband over money? And then wait for her to die? That’s the sickest thing I ever heard. No one will believe that.”
Chelsey shook her head slowly back and forth. He followed it like the swinging of a pendulum. “You’re wrong, darling. Everyone will believe that. You know they will. Just like everyone will believe you wanted me dead.”
His eyelids narrowed until they were practically closed. His teeth clamped together. His face flushed. He could feel the heat of his skin burning like the summer sun. He took a step toward Chelsey, but her fingers covered the gun.
Gavin stopped where he was.
They stared at each other. Husband and wife. The air crackled with violence. In his head, he measured the distance to the gun and the time it would take to get to it. She saw him making his calculations. Her body coiled like a taut spring, as if she knew exactly what he was planning. As if she were daring him to try.
“What now, Gavin?” Chelsey asked calmly. “What happens next?”
Serena drove through the open gate into the self-storage facility in Proctor. Delaney sat next to her in anxious silence. The facility wasn’t large, just a long warehouse next to the trees, with a row of white metal doors marking individual storage units. The area around the warehouse was unpaved. Serena drove down the length of the building and stopped outside the unit number that Delaney had given her.
She looked at the teenager. “Are you up for this?”
Delaney shrugged. “I guess I had to come here sooner or later. I’ve had the key for a long time, but I never used it. Gramps arranged for Mom’s stuff to be moved over here. If it had been up to me, I would have just given it all away. But he thought someday I might want to see it again.”
“I can go in there by myself if you prefer.”
“No, I’ll come, too.”
They got out of the Mustang. The location of the facility wasn’t far from the interstate, and they could hear the roar of traffic on I-35 to the south. The night sky overhead was clear. Delaney took a small key ring from her pocket and fumbled with the keys in the darkness. Serena used her flashlight to make it easier. When the girl had isolated the correct key, she unlocked the unit, and Serena bent down and opened the door. Inside, she located a light switch, which illuminated a single LED bulb overhead.
The unit had a musty, shut-up smell. Cobwebs dangled from the corners of the ceiling. It was crowded with furniture, chairs balanced on top of sofas, mattresses and box springs propped against the walls, and boxes of clothes and kitchenware stacked high in precarious towers. There was almost no room to move among the remnants of a lost life.
Delaney hesitated in the doorway. She took one tentative step, then ran a hand across the dusty surface of an oak dresser. “I can still feel her here,” she murmured. “Like time was standing still, you know?”
“Possessions have a life force,” Serena said. “It’s like the memories inside them are frozen, and suddenly they thaw out.”
“Yeah.” The girl sniffled and wiped her nose. “I really miss her.”
“I know you do.”
“Do you miss your mom, too? Despite what she did?”
Serena put an arm around Delaney. “Actually, I do. It feels strange to say that, but I do. She was abusive to me in horrible ways. But I wish she was still alive, even if it just meant I could scream at her again.”
“I yelled at my mom once,” Delaney said. “I put her in a cold shower when she was drunk. I told her she had to quit, she had to get help, she was killing herself, she was killing me. I told her I... I told her that I hated her. I felt awful saying that. But she got sober for a few months after that. Then it all came back. It always came back sooner or later.”
“I know.”
“This man you talked about,” Delaney said. “Gavin Webster. Can you show me his picture again?”
Serena took her phone and found the best photograph she had of Gavin. She enlarged it to zoom in on his face. Delaney took the phone and stared at the man long and hard. Then she shook her head.
“I don’t remember him. He’s not one of the ones I found in her bed.”
“And your mom never mentioned his name? She didn’t talk about him?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Did you meet most of the men your mom dated?” Serena asked.
“No, there were a lot of nights when she didn’t come home.”
“She left you alone?”
“Yeah, but that was okay. I knew how to take care of myself.”
“How old were you when that started?”
“I’m not sure. Nine, ten.”
Serena shook her head. She wanted to say: No, that was not okay.
“I get what you’re trying to do,” Delaney went on, “but I think you’re wrong. I don’t see how the accident could have been anything other than what it was. It was our truck. Mom got drunk and hit somebody.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” Serena insisted.
“But why?”
“Because I think there was a connection between Gavin and your mom, even if you don’t remember him. That’s why I want to find the records that Nikki kept from the Fallon wedding. Maybe there’s something in there to tie the two of them together.”
“Well, we can look,” Delaney agreed, but she didn’t sound hopeful.
They squeezed their way through the storage unit. With her flashlight, Serena spotted dead bugs and mouse droppings on the concrete floor. Their footsteps disturbed the dust, and she had to cover her mouth as she coughed. They reached the back wall without finding any business records, and Serena was beginning to wonder if Delaney’s grandfather had jettisoned his daughter’s files when emptying the house. Then Delaney tugged on her sleeve and said, “There.”
Several bankers boxes were stacked like children’s blocks on a wooden kitchen table in a far corner of the unit. They were labeled in neat square letters with black marker. Serena illuminated each of the boxes until she found one labeled Susan & Jonah Fallon. She had to shift several other boxes to retrieve it.
“I remember that wedding,” Delaney commented.
“You were there?”
“Yeah, I was at the reception helping my mom. I told you, that was one of her first big jobs. She was really stressed about getting everything right. Mrs. Fallon rented out this beautiful private estate in Cloquet for the event. I think it belonged to an old lumber baron years ago. It was super elegant and old-fashioned. Mom did different themes for the food in each room. The whole thing was great. I was so proud of her.”
“Did you meet the bride and groom?”
“Sure. I liked Mrs. Fallon. Some of the women Mom did events for, they were pretty stuck-up. But Mrs. Fallon was sweet, easy to like. She said it was her wedding, but my mom was the food expert, and she wanted her to run the show. I thought that was cool.”