The Lies I Told(96)

“On your knees, Dutton and Welbourne. Now!”

Jack shook his head. “She’s sick, Richards. She’s had a breakdown. We were trying to help her.”

“He’s right,” David parroted. “We’re here to help.”

“No!” I shouted.

“On your fucking knees!” Richards yelled.

Jack seemed to consider his options and then raised his hands and knelt. David’s grip slackened. I jerked my arm free and staggered away. He knelt and put his arms behind his head.

Uniformed officers approached the lobby as lights flashed in the parking lot and Richards reached for the handcuffs hooked on his belt.

“How did you know?” I asked.

He clinked the handcuffs on Jack’s left and right wrists. “Jo-Jo called me. She was worried about David hurting Jack.”

I stumbled back, my head spiraling. “Jo-Jo called you?”

“That’s right,” Richards said. “That little lady was worried about your safety and her husband’s. She was really worried David would hurt you both.”

Crashing adrenaline and the booze sent my head spinning. I leaned against the wall. The muscles in my legs turned slack, and I lowered to the floor. My vision blurred and went black.





51


MARISA

Monday, March 21, 2022

4:05 a.m.

When I woke up in the hospital emergency room, my head was pounding, all the muscles in my body ached, and my mouth was as dry as cotton. A nurse stood by my bed, taking notes as she checked monitors.

“I want to get out of here,” I said.

The nurse looked down at me and smiled. “Good, you’re awake. We were worried about you, given your recent head injury.”

“I’m fine.” I didn’t know that, but it was more important to me to get out of here. In a hospital, I was vulnerable to David.

“The doctors ordered an MRI and a full exam, and they didn’t find any trauma.”

“Terrific.” I tried to sit up, but my head spun. “I need to go home.”

“Detective Richards is outside. He wants to talk to you.”

“Richards?”

“He’s been sitting outside your room since you arrived. Stay put so I can get him. I can’t have you falling.”

I sank back into the pillows and closed my eyes. “Fine.”

The nurse moved around the curtain and out a door. Seconds later footsteps approached my bed. The smell of Richards’s brand of cigarettes reached me before he did. Oddly, the damn scent was comforting.

“Marisa,” he said. A chair slid across the floor to my bed.

I opened my eyes, blinked to clear my vision, and stared into a face etched with fatigue. “Richards. Where are David and Jack?”

“We arrested them both. David and Jack are lawyering up, and both are insisting that you got drunk and went crazy.”

“I’m not crazy. David spiked my drink in January and caused my car accident. And Jack made me drink. I didn’t want it.”

“I know. I know. I had a conversation with Jo-Jo. She’s been guarded but she said enough. She’s got a few legal challenges of her own to handle.”

I shook my head, not caring right now about Jo-Jo’s lies of omission. “Jack said David killed Clare because she didn’t want him.” Tears I’d been unable to shed for thirteen years burned in my eyes, welling until they spilled down my cheeks. “He strangled her, and Jack dumped her body like trash.”

Richards laid a calloused hand over mine. “We’re digging into it all.”

“David worked at Jack’s juvenile facility.” I had to tell him everything I knew.

“Let us do our job,” he said. “I’ll see it through this time.”

More tears welled in my eyes. “You never gave up on Clare. Everyone else did, but not you.”

“And neither did you.”

Brit entered the room, her eyes red-rimmed and her hair tangled. She had the look of a woman who’d not slept last night. “Marisa.”

I swiped away a tear and turned slowly. All I could think about were the little blue pills that she’d fed Clare and me.

All the times I’d been so ill. She’d learned from my mother how to control me, but both had pushed me on the path of substance abuse. Staying on that trail was my own damn fault, but maybe, just maybe, I’d never have gone down that road but for them.

“Brit.”

“I’m so sorry.” She moved toward me as Richards stood, though he didn’t step away from the bed. “I had no idea.”

I shifted away from her. “I can’t do this right now.”

She looked stricken. “The police told me what Jack and David did to you. If I’d had any idea . . .”

“Leave me alone, Brit.”

“Marisa, let me take care of you, like I always have.”

I stared at her stricken face. “Why do I always end up feeling worse when you’re close?”

“What are you talking about?” Brit asked.

“I didn’t really feel good until you left for college. That fall you were gone was the first time in my life I felt great.”

Brit didn’t respond.

“Is that what Clare figured out?” I challenged. “Did she realize the pills she’d found were the ones making us either zombies or sick?”