What Have You Done(14)

Liam placed a careful foot on the edge of the dock and then stepped onto the back of the Bayliner. He clung to the boat’s railing so tightly he could feel it in his shoulders. The black water nipped at the heels of his shoes, trying to grab him from the swimming platform and pull him under. He threw one leg over the side, then slid his body over the railing and brought the other leg around. The rain pelted his face as he balanced himself.

“Sean!”

The door to the interior cabin opened, and Sean appeared, carrying a life jacket. He tossed it to his brother. “Hey. I didn’t hear you come on board.”

Liam shuffled toward the doorway and fell into it, grabbing the life jacket and throwing it over his neck. “Can’t we ever just meet at a bar? Why do you put me through this?”

“Getting on the boat is one step toward your recovery.”

“I’m never going to recover.”

“Not with that attitude you won’t.”

The interior cabin was simple. A couch that converted to a bed, a small table that could fold away, a stand-up shower, and the smallest galley kitchen on earth. Sean used it mostly for blue fishing and sometimes slept on board when he took it down toward Virginia or up to Cape Cod. Liam made his way into the cabin and took off his raincoat. He put his arms through the life jacket and fastened the clips. The rain pounded the roof, drowning out the radio, which was broadcasting classic rock.

“Seeing Kerri like that today,” Sean said. “It scared me. Someone knows something. They know we knew Kerri. And they know about Mom.”

Liam walked farther into the cabin. “The only people who knew about all that is me, you, Kerri, and Don. Unless you told someone else.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Me either.”

“What about Kerri? She could’ve told her friends.”

“Maybe. I never met any of them, so I can’t be sure.”

Sean sipped his beer.

“The paper flowers Mom made for us that day wasn’t public domain,” Liam said as he sat down on the couch. “It was kept out of the news at the time. How would someone know about that?”

“They wouldn’t. But whoever killed Kerri knows it all. You, me, the flowers, the affair.”

A heavy silence hung in the cabin.

“Any memories come back from last night?” Sean asked.

“Nothing. I’m going to have my blood run for a tox screen. See if I was drugged somehow.”

“You think that’s a good idea? I mean, aren’t people going to want to know why you’re testing your blood?”

“I’ll run it through Gerri Cain’s office at Jefferson. My team won’t know.”

Sean put his beer down. “I don’t see that sweatshirt you came here to get last night. I assume you picked it up. Did you see it at home this morning?”

“I didn’t even remember I was coming here to get a sweatshirt until you told me. Hell, I don’t even know which sweatshirt I was talking about.”

“What’s going on here, Liam?”

Liam shrugged. “I have no idea.”





10

With the storm now receding into a light drizzle, Liam sat in his car, staring up at his house as thoughts and emotions compounded, one upon the next. There were several lights on in the windows, but everything else was dark.

It was a simple house in the South Jersey suburbs—a quaint white colonial with black shutters that sat on a quarter-acre lot—and from his vantage point in the driveway, he could see part of the stone wishing well he’d put in last summer. Plants hung in baskets on the front porch, the breeze rocking them ever so gently. Inside the silence of his car, he looked upon all of this as if he were staring at a picture. It felt distant, not part of this reality. Not after what he’d seen today.

He and Vanessa had been happy once and were in the midst of trying to find that happiness again. But so much had happened in between. They’d met in college through a mutual friend. She was in nursing school, and he was studying forensic science. The attraction had been there from the start, but their true bond came from their mutual loss of their fathers when they were young. Vanessa had lost her father to a fatal heart attack when she was ten, and she’d been the first person Liam had known, other than Sean, who’d had any idea what it was like to lose a parent when you were still a kid. Vanessa could relate to the struggles Liam had had growing up without parents in the traditional sense of the term. She still had her mother, but that sense of having lost her dad was always there. Soon, understanding and empathy had grown into love, and he knew he’d found the woman he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. He’d found his soul mate.

They’d married shortly after graduating college. She’d gotten a job at an area hospital, and he’d been accepted into the academy. Their friends saw them as the ultimate couple, but like anything observed superficially from the outside, there were hidden cracks beneath the surface of their blissful existence, and these cracks became deeper and wider as the years went by. Their first test came when Vanessa discovered she was unable to have children. They had talked about adoption, but neither of them really set out to make that happen. The loss that was always there became deeper and more personal as they came to realize they would never have the family both of them had envisioned. The final test had come when Vanessa’s mother was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer.