What Happened to the Bennetts(20)

“Look at her little face.” Lucinda tapped the photo with her fingernail, and it made a sound. “She looks confused, doesn’t she?”

Ethan nodded. “She looks pissed.”

They both chuckled, but I swallowed hard. I knew that everyone grieved differently, but somehow I hadn’t expected to grieve so differently from them. “Guess what, we have new laptops and phones.”

“Really?” Ethan shifted upward, instantly distracted.

“There are rules, though, and you can’t communicate with anyone. No texting, no WhatsApp, no Snapchat, no social media, no nothing.”

“What about videogames?”

“No online ones, otherwise fine. I’ll play with you.”

“No Facebook?” Lucinda interjected, and her resigned expression told me she knew the answer.

“No, nothing where people can see you’re online.”

“I wonder what people are saying about us. They must be starting to talk.” Her troubled gaze strayed back to the photo, and so did Ethan’s, then I gave in.

“Where did you get the album?”

“From her room. It was on the bed, I remembered she’d asked me for it. She was taking pictures of some of the older photos. She wanted to post them on Insta.”

I remembered when Lucinda had told her we used to send prints to be developed.

Mom, did you have a horse and buggy, too?

“Dad, you should see this other picture. It’s funny.”

“Oh?” I braced myself. “Show me.”

“Let’s see.” Lucinda started paging back through the photographs, passing Allison at three years old, laughing as she held our gray tabby cat Max in one of Ethan’s baby blankets. Her eyes sparkled, her grin spread ear-to-ear, and I could almost hear her giggle.

My heart ached as Lucinda turned the pages. It was too soon for me to do this. I struggled to even accept that Allison was gone. That Milo murdered her. That lawyers like Hart had enabled him. She should be alive, flesh and blood, not encased in a photo album, flattened behind plastic.

“This is the one we like the best, so far,” Lucinda said softly. Her fingers grazed Allison’s face in the photo, which she had taken. “It was Easter, remember? She was trying to find the eggs.”

Ethan nodded. “Those plastic ones. You guys would put, like, a jelly bean inside, or a dollar.”

“Yes,” I said, suppressing my sorrow. The photo was of Allison at maybe six years old, racing across our backyard, her hair blowing behind her. She had on a yellow dress and shiny black shoes, like a baby chick at speed.

Ethan pointed. “I like this picture the best. She looks like herself in it. She’s always mad when I find more eggs than her.”

“I know.” I forced a smile. My daughter was born wanting to win, and as she grew into a teenager, I used to tease her about it, especially where Ethan was concerned.

Al, why do you have to be so competitive? Let him win for once.

Hell to the no.

Lucinda sniffled. “This picture makes the cut.”

I looked over. “What do you mean?”

“I’m making a video for the funeral.”

My heart wrenched. I dreaded telling her we weren’t going to the funeral, but I wanted to wait until we were alone. Or maybe I wanted to stall.

Ethan pointed at another photo. “Dad, what do you think of this one?”

I looked over to see Allison at about ten, licking rainbow sprinkles off a vanilla ice cream cone. Nobody loved ice cream more than my daughter. Her favorites were vanilla, butterscotch, and mint chocolate chip, but not the green color, nothing artificial. I never minded going to Wawa to pick up a pint of H?agen-Dazs while she studied for finals.

Ice cream has superpowers, Dad.

Her words echoed, but I was doubting the very concept of superpowers. Maybe there was no such thing. Unless you were a lawyer named Paul Hart.

I wondered how he would tell his wife she couldn’t go to the funeral of her own daughter.



* * *



—

I told Lucinda in the living room, while Ethan was upstairs getting dressed.

“What?” Her eyes filled with outraged tears. “We can’t go? The FBI pretends to be mourners? They fake-cry while we watch on TV? You have to be kidding me! Did you say we don’t accept it?”

“Yes, absolutely, I pushed back—”

“Did you?” Lucinda shot me a resentful look. “Or did you go along to get along? You should have raised holy hell.”

I didn’t reply, I let her vent. We’d had this argument before. She claimed I was conflict-avoidant, though I considered myself easygoing, like my father. Plus in my profession, I watched lawyers fight all day, arguing for the sake of arguing. What I knew from being a court reporter was that court wasn’t the answer.

“Why didn’t they tell us that before we came here, huh?” Lucinda’s eyes narrowed, her anger curdling to suspicion. “They wanted us to take the deal, that’s why. They knew we wouldn’t if we weren’t able to go to the funeral. It’s bait-and-switch!”

“I don’t think they intentionally deceived us.” I thought of Dom. “I trust him.”

“Why?”

“I think he cares about us—”