Never Tell (Detective D.D. Warren #10)(33)

“What did you do?”

“I picked up the shotgun. It was on the floor in front of me. I picked it up. I don’t know why. To get it out of the way. Then I saw him. He was half hidden behind the island. But turning the corner I saw … all of him.”

Another glance toward the foyer. Footsteps, did we hear them in the distance? A tinkle of laughter. My mother flirting with Detective Phil.

“What did your mother do?”

“She screamed.”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing. He didn’t look real. Not like himself. I kept waiting for him to get up.”

“Who called the cops?”

I look at her. “We didn’t. I checked the shotgun. Made sure the chamber was empty—”

“You knew how to work it.”

“I always knew how to work it. My father wouldn’t bring a firearm into the home without teaching us basic safety.”

“What did you do, Evie?”

“Whatever my mother told me.”

“And she told you to confess to killing him? Not, ‘let’s call nine-one-one,’ ‘good God our loved one has just been shot’?”

I know how crazy it sounds. Back then. Today. All the hours in between. I don’t have the words.

The sergeant’s eyes narrow. “Are you covering for your mom, Evie? She and your father got in a fight. She shot him. You, being a minor with no criminal record, took the blame to save the parent you had left.”

“She was with me. She couldn’t have killed him.”

“Then why such a crazy story? Why not call the police?”

“There would be an investigation. So many questions. The potential for …” I couldn’t articulate the words back then, but I understand them now. “Scandal. I don’t think my mom knows who or why my father was shot. But she didn’t want to risk the answer to those questions. Not if they might tarnish his legacy. You have to realize, my father is more than just a man to her. He is … everything.”

The sergeant eyes me skeptically. “So she threw her sixteen-year-old daughter under the bus rather than seek justice in her husband’s murder?” A pause. “Or rather than a risk an investigation into his possible suicide?”

I don’t have to answer that question. The sergeant is finally starting to understand. My mother’s true fear. The real reason I did what I did. Sometimes, the danger isn’t from outside, but from inside ourselves.

“Gonna blame your mom for your husband’s death, too,” the sergeant asks at last, “or this time did you finally get it right?”

I hesitate. I don’t want to. I think of my mother as crazy and manipulative, sure, but not homicidal. And yet the closet bursting with maternity wear, the fully stocked nursery … It’s almost as if she knew about today. Has been waiting all along.

“What did you think back then?” I ask the sergeant now.

“I thought you were scared. I thought you were in shock. And I thought, based on the physical evidence alone, that you did shoot him, but you were sorry about it.”

“And now?”

The detective shrugs. “Looking at your husband’s crime scene? I think you’re the shooter again. Except this time around, you’re not sorry about it.”

“It would be stupid math,” I say.

She gives me that look.

“Having been involved in a shooting before, to repeat the same equation … Stupid math.”

“Except the equation worked for you the first time.”

“You think so? Sixteen years of murmurs and whispers and innuendos. Sixteen years of loss, and I’m not even allowed to grieve, because supposedly, I’m the one who killed him?”

The sergeant doesn’t answer that right away, just continues to study me.

“Besides.” I speak more briskly. “I wouldn’t burn down my own house. I’ve now lost everything. My baby has lost everything. No mother would do that.”

The sergeant merely shrugs, gestures to our luxurious surroundings.

She leaves me no choice but to play the only card I have left. “I’ve lied for my mother. Made excuses, enabled her bad behavior, curtailed my own hopes and dreams just to make her happy. But I would never willingly move back in with her. And I would never happily grant her this much access to her first grandchild.”

“What are you trying to say?”

I shake my head. This time, I’m the one eyeing the doorway nervously. “I don’t know. But don’t you think it’s curious, a mere twenty-four hours later, how few choices I have left?”





CHAPTER 11


    D.D.


“GET ANYTHING OUT OF HER?” Phil asked as they headed back to the car. They’d parked on the family’s driveway to get some distance from the reporters yammering on the sidewalk.

“She didn’t magically confess to killing her husband,” D.D. said as she slid into the passenger side. “But just to make things interesting, she changed her story about shooting her father sixteen years ago.”

Phil, firing the engine to life, stared at her. “What would be the point to that?”

“I don’t know. Maybe just to muddy the waters? Evie has to know one of the reasons she looks guilty in her husband’s death is that she already confessed to accidentally shooting her father. So rather than address her husband’s murder now, she’s recanting sixteen years ago.”