Trace blinked. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“A Job—as in ‘The Book of Job.’ The guy with the sores and boils. Then there were the ten letters to Jude Thaddeus, the patron saint of lost causes, begging him to get Jesus to give her a new mama. Five to Lucifer himself, asking that he send Lilith on a three-day trip to hell.”
Trace shook his head. “You’re outta your damn mind.”
“Think so? Well, this next tidbit will make you a believer. There were over sixty entries where she poured her heart out about you. How she couldn’t let her mama touch you the way she did her other young men. How you’re the only person in the world who cared about her. Dozens of pages were filled with rage over how her mama was trying to steal your affections. Hell, she even wrote that she wished Lilith would go away so you could live at Cheltenham Manor! Then there was the nonsense about Paris, and much, much more.”
Somewhere in the tumult, I heard the words I’d uttered during the hypnosis session. The diary. I’d written my frustrations in the diary. I’d drawn pictures too. My fingers had given voice to what my mouth didn’t dare utter.
I couldn’t breathe. Shock reverberated like the cell phone vibration against my hip. The phone I’d ignored all day.
“I don’t recall any of that,” I said in a shaky voice.
“That’s ‘cause I made sure you wouldn’t,” Uncle Jackson retorted. “Your diary told every bitter thought you ever had. That’s how you purged yourself.”
I narrowed my eyes on him. “I don’t believe you.”
“Sweetheart,” Uncle Jackson said. “Your mama was killed an hour after you left for what everyone had presumed was school. Only you didn’t go to school. You went to the carriage house. That’s why I told you to say you were sick. That you’d planned to stay home all along.” He paused. “You drew pictures, disturbing pictures. Of a knight slaying a dragon, stabbing it in the heart. On one picture, you even wrote names for who they were supposed to be. The knight was Trace. The dragon with the dagger in its chest was Lilith. And that’s how she died.”
I surged to my feet and the chair tipped over. Backing away, I shook my head. “It was just a p-picture I drew about Sleeping Beauty! The movie!”
“That doesn’t explain the names you wrote,” Uncle Jackson said. “Look, we didn’t know what else to do. We figured if we got rid of everything, then influenced you….” He scowled at Trace. “We couldn’t let him use you as a scapegoat.”
“You thought she put me up to it?” Trace asked, stunned and breathless.
“Either that, or she did it herself. At least that’s what Sears thought. Him being a lawyer and all, he was playing devil’s advocate—tryin’ to out-think your scumbag ambulance chaser.”
I backed into a wall.
Trace stood over Uncle Jackson’s bed, barking out words. “Nobody would’ve believed that girl was capable of murder!”
“She’d been physically and mentally abused. When we found her, she was sitting in a pool of her mother’s blood. The spade had both your prints on it. So we had to fix stuff.”
“We? Who the fuck is we?” Trace demanded.
I surfaced from my crestfallen daze. My eyes settled on my godfather. “All this time you thought I killed…that I had Trace kill—” I thrust my bangs off my face, my hand cupping my forehead. “Dear God. Whatever I wrote on those pages…I-I didn’t mean—I didn’t mean it the way you’re implying. I just wanted somebody to make her stop! I never wanted her dead! I loved my mother!”
Fear and outrage pulsed hot. Trace moved to touch me, but I warded him off with a flash of both palms.
No touch, not even his could comfort me now.
“Who else was in on this?” I demanded.
Uncle Jackson pleaded, “You gotta believe, I tried to broach the subject plenty of times with you under hypnosis, but you damn near went berserk. I had to back off. I had to let you be. Hesta accused me of abusing you all over again. Sears did too, so we were never really sure….” He stared at Trace, his furious eyes like switchblades. “I always knew you were guilty, boy. Still do. But I wasn’t about to let that fancy lawyer of yours drag her through the mud. When a man’s drowning, he’ll grab anything to stay afloat.”
I crossed my arms and approached the bed with slow steps. It was all I could do to hold myself together. “I didn’t kill my mother, but neither did Trace. What you did is despicable.”
The sheriff’s bony face twisted with rage. “Why you ungrateful—can’t you see you had a great childhood thanks to me? No bad memories haunting you. A clean slate. Something most only dream about. I gave you your life back! Be happy you don’t remember everything that bitch did! Hope you never do.”
“They were my memories, damn you.” I slapped a hand to my chest for emphasis. “Mine! You had no right to take them.”
“Don’t you realize what I sacrificed to help you?” Jackson hollered.
“Help? What about Trace? You threw him to the wolves!”
“It was either him or you! Harrison made me promise to protect you. I didn’t do the best job, but I came through when it mattered. Greased some itching palms. Dug up dirt on those who needed to keep their traps shut. I did what I had to do.” He flicked a dismissive glance at Trace. “That lawyer of yours—Gartner—was hungry. Would’ve eaten his firstborn to advance his flashy-ass career. Why you think he took you on pro bono? He was a publicity whore.”
“I would never have let him go after Shannon,” Trace spat.
“Nobody knew what y’all were plannin’. We figured you’d sell her out to save your sorry hide.”
A horrific thought hit me. I was almost too afraid to ask, but the question gnawed its way out. “Did Darien know?”
“Are you kiddin’? He’d’ve turned us all in if he had.” The old man inclined a brow. “A lawyer who actually respects the rule of law. Montgomery’s a rare one.” He lifted his hardened face, and his angry eyes narrowed to slits. “Damn it,” he rasped. “You should’ve let this alone. Why couldn’t you have let this alone?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Two Paths
SHANNON
____________________________
Trace and I pulled outside Fontana Exxon half an hour later. We’d driven in silence the whole way back, neither of us looking at the other for too long. I parked next to a line of pay phones.
Behind us, customers crowded the gas pumps and a noisy Mack truck idled by the diesel pump. The truck driver, a thirtyish biker type dressed in a bomber jacket and corduroys, leaned against the truck’s rear and waited on his tank to fill. From the looks of it, the town’s so-called boycott had finally petered out.
I rested my head against the window and slammed my eyes shut. Shock and anger swirled like a firestorm. Had my family actually believed I was capable of murder? Well, of course. Why else had they hatched such a convoluted plan?
“You didn’t do it.” Trace’s earthy voice rescued me from the brink of despair. “You hear me?”
Tears threatened, but I tamped them down. I was too mad to cry. “I can count my memories of her on one hand,” I said, my reedy voice sounding strange to my own ears. “Everything else is gone.”
“Maybe that’s a good thing,” he murmured.
I flashed a look at him. “He burned my diaries. Destroyed my pictures. Screwed with my thoughts. All I have is the nonsense he stuffed into my head. How is that a ‘good thing’? Even bad memories are better than nothing.”