Sweet Water(111)

Cash: And then when I got home, I found out that no one had ever called in Yazmin’s death. Her body lay there all night. The Ellsworths had taken the life of another one of my family members, and no one would ever pay the price.

Detective Monroe: What do you mean, another life?

Cash: We were trying to get the money they owed us because we could never file a lawsuit because it was a hit-and-run.

Detective Monroe: A lawsuit for what?

Cash: The one that should’ve been filed after my father died in his car accident.

Detective Monroe: Why would a suit have been filed?

Cash: Because . . . William Ellsworth was the one driving the car that hit my father.

It’s good that Martin and I are able to read Cash’s police report together. It makes it a lot easier to say “I want a divorce” when we get to the very last line.

Finn didn’t kill Yazmin when he defended himself with martial arts skills as innate to him as walking. And Cash didn’t kill Yazmin when he set up a kidnapping scam to try to earn enough money so that his family could get retribution for his dead father. William killed Yazmin when he left her in that car all night immersed in freezing-cold water mixed with her daddy’s blood. The chain of events that followed that accident was on him, as far as I’m concerned.

I remember William Ellsworth’s Bentley gone one day, replaced the next. Most people go to a repair shop when their car is damaged, but William had his scrapped, the whole car, and then got a new one—sans the crest on the wheel center caps.

“Vermin,” he claimed. The only rat here is him.

Martin had said it was “necessary.”

Necessary to destroy the evidence. Martin knew what his father had done. Still, he covered for his father, just like William had covered for him in college—one big, ugly circle. I relayed all the information to Monroe to try to break the chain.

“I’m sorry,” Martin whispers, but he’ll never be sorry enough.

I snatch the police report away from him. My hands brush against his watch, and I see something.

I grab his wrist and turn it in my direction. “Oh my God.”

“What? Are you late for a meeting with the lawyer?” I don’t answer Martin. He’s still trying to plot and scheme.

But all of a sudden, I know who BR is.

I know what the symbol was in the snow in big letters—BR—Bell & Ross, the family watch brand. When William knelt by the car to make sure the passengers were dead, he left the logo pressed into the snow. But it disappeared. Of course it did.





CHAPTER 31

When the Ellsworths’ involvement in covering up Yazmin’s death broke, a full investigation was conducted on William’s scrapped car, and the junkyard confirmed that his Bentley had been wrecked before he turned it in. There was no rodent infestation as he’d claimed. There’d been pictures taken beforehand, and a close analysis of the pictures showed dents consistent with a collision with another vehicle.

The car was also taken to the scrapper the day after Jimmy Veltri’s accident. With the evidence stacked against him, William’s lawyer recommended he confess and try for a plea deal—and of course that weasel took it. But the judge still gave him the maximum sentence for vehicular manslaughter, given the circumstances surrounding it and the fact that he’d left the scene of an accident in which two people were injured, one of whom died. William Ellsworth was sentenced to ten years.

William may die in prison.

His reasoning for leaving the scene of the accident—he thought Yazmin was already dead. How convenient. But when he read her essay, William claimed that he was so overcome with guilt after all the pain he’d unknowingly caused her, he’d granted Yazmin the scholarship, never anticipating she’d end up with his grandson.

That made for a nice story. But I know the Ellsworths. And I am sure that when Yazmin died, it gave William even more incentive to cover up the car accident that killed her father by taking extra measures to make sure no one ever found out about what happened with Finn in those woods.

But he failed, and the Ellsworth name is finally showing the true rot beneath the shine they tried so hard to preserve. Mary Alice, from what I’ve heard, has become a shut-in, ordering her groceries online, not going out for church or to the club, living in shame, as she should—a fate worse than death for someone of her social standing.

Bill Ellsworth Jr. lost the election for city commissioner, so Martin’s sure vote for his riverfront property flew right out the window.

An internal investigation was opened at the Sewickley Heights Police Department, and Sheriff Alton Pembroke was suspended indefinitely without pay until the investigation is complete. After I confessed our part to the cops, I asked for leniency for Cash. The Ellsworths were the ones who started this, after all. My request was somewhat granted; Cash was sentenced to a year in juvenile detention and then house arrest after that, but it still didn’t make anything right.

Alisha was thankful for my plea and didn’t push the issue any further when Martin and I weren’t charged with jail time. We were charged with a misdemeanor for leaving the scene of the crime and had to pay a nominal fine. Again, it hardly seems justified, but at least Martin finally has a criminal record . . . and so do I.



I’m living with my father in my old house now, and it does seem so small, but we’ve never been closer. Much to my pleasant surprise, Finn has decided to live with us until he leaves for Brown. He was accepted into their computer science program. I didn’t fight with Martin when he’d asked to get the best lawyer that money could buy to defend him. Yes, Finn had accidentally killed Yazmin, but it was deemed self-defense. His saving grace was that nothing on his person had touched anything on hers. There’d been a body between them—Cash’s.