Beneath Devil's Bridge(82)

Johnny stares after us, slack jawed, as his father marshals me through the bustling crowd. I see Rex at the bar, watching, frowning. I see Johnny going up to the bar to talk to his father-in-law.

We exit into bracing air. Drizzle comes down, fine as mist.

“Get in,” he says as we reach my truck.

I beep the lock, climb in behind the wheel. I’m vibrating. I’m going to have this out with him come hell or high water.

Once Granger is in the cab and the passenger door has been slammed shut, I start the engine so I can run the heater. Windows start fogging quickly.

“Tell me what in the hell you’re talking about,” he says. “What do you mean Clay is dead?”

“You know he is.”

“Rachel, for God’s sake. I don’t. Bear with me.”

“Clay Pelley was stabbed to death at the prison earlier today. It happened shortly before I got there.”

He stares at me for a moment. His gaze shifts slowly to the club. He stares at the line of bikes parked outside. He looks afraid. I’ve never seen him like this. As he’s watching the pub doors, Johnny busts through them and comes running past my truck.

Granger powers down the window. “What’s going on?” he calls. “Where are you going?”

“Got a call from Darren,” Johnny yells. He hesitates briefly. “I—I’ll talk to you later.” He vanishes behind my truck. My panic—my fight-or-flight response—is so focused on Granger, and the fact that Johnny is Granger’s son, and that Johnny was at the Ullr bonfire that night, that the logic center of my brain barely even registers Johnny’s words.

“You lied to me, Granger. I asked you outright if you were treating Clay. You implied you didn’t, but Clay outed you. You haven’t listened to the last episode, have you? Clay told Trinity and the rest of the world that he sought help for his addictions from you. And he noted on air that you were Johnny Forbes’s father. I called Dirk Rigg, because I remembered him saying Merle was getting hypnotherapy for her smoking addiction. He told me Merle was your patient. He also said he’d shared all the details of the case with Merle, and it had upset her.”

Granger is silent for a long while. He swears softly and rubs his face hard with his hands.

“You did it, didn’t you? You seeded those details into Clay’s unconscious. Something we said to Clay during the interrogation triggered him, and suddenly he started talking in this distant sort of monotone, reciting how he killed Leena. You put it there. I want to know why.”

He swears again, sits back, drags both hands over his hair.

“Tell me, Granger. Everything. Don’t even think of lying to me now, because you know what? I’ve been lied to enough. My own daughter was being assaulted by Clay.” I swipe tears away with a shaking hand. “My fourteen-year-old child, with her teacher.” My voice cracks. I tighten my mouth, struggling to bottle down my emotions, to marshal my wits. “Maddy lied. The rest of the kids lied, or tried to, to varying degrees. Lacey Pelley lied. You are lying.”

He sits silent. Resigned.

I shift in the seat to face him more fully. “Look, I know I made mistakes myself, Granger. Clearly my failings as a parent are far bigger than I ever realized. I refused to see things back then, or to follow them through, and yes, I stopped thinking about any loose ends in the case after Clay confessed, because it was easier than pursuing the alternative avenues of thought. But the time for hiding is long past. It’s out there. It’s all unraveling, and there can be no more running from the truth. Not for me, or you, or Maddy, or any of us.”

“Whatever you did back then, Rache, it’s what a mother does. Protects her children. It’s what a father does—what parents do.”

“Is that what happened?” I ask quietly. “Johnny. You did it for him? You screwed with your client’s head to protect your son?”

His eyes and cheeks gleam. I realize Granger is crying. His face is wet with tears. I’ve never seen Granger cry.

“Granger,” I say more gently, no less desperately, “please, tell me. It’s all coming out now. You can’t stuff this genie back in the bottle. If Johnny did something . . . What happened? What are you protecting him from?”

He inhales deeply. “When Johnny came home from school after the bonfire weekend, I found him in the laundry room. He was trying to wash a military surplus jacket. It was covered in mud, and what looked like blood. He’d tried to soak it first, and the water was red.”

“Clay’s jacket? The one Leena was wearing?”

“That’s what it looked like. Lettering and numbers on the breast pocket. I asked him what he was doing, and he said he was washing it for a friend because the friend’s machine was broken. He said his friend had slipped in mud and gotten cut, which is why there was blood. But I’d heard the description on the radio of the missing girl, and what she was wearing. And . . . I just got a real bad feeling.” He blows out a heavy breath of air. “Johnny had been having a rough time since his mom died, and I was working on our relationship, and I . . . I didn’t press him. I didn’t corner him. He’d already threatened to run away the last time I did, and I knew if he did run, I would not get him back. We were on a cusp back in those days. The jacket came out of the machine, went into the dryer, then vanished from our house. And I didn’t think about it for days. Until news broke that the girl’s body had been found in the Wuyakan River, and that the jacket was still missing.”