The Familiar Dark(49)

“She didn’t even know Junie,” I shot back. “Someone hurting Junie wouldn’t matter to my mama.”

Jenny stopped fidgeting, hand grasping hard around her coffee mug. “We both know that’s not true. There’s two basic facts about your mama that are never in dispute: She runs with a rough crowd, and you don’t mess with her family. Any of her family. If someone wanted to teach her a lesson, I imagine that’s where they’d start.”

My heart thundered in my chest. I wanted to lash out with self-righteousness, scoff at her claims and force an apology. But not a single false word had left her lips. Hadn’t I known, deep down, that this was always going to come back to me, to my family? I’d tried to pretend like Izzy might be the key, but I knew she wasn’t. It was Junie. It was me.

But I couldn’t roll over and take it. Because admitting it out loud was a step too far. It was one thing for me to know; it was another to lay myself bare to Jenny Logan. “What about Izzy and the older guy she was seeing?” I heard myself ask, hating how easily the question left my mouth. Jenny’s head snapped back like I’d slapped her, her eyes wide with surprise. But not shock. She’d known about Izzy, I realized, but not that I was in on the secret, too. “When did you find out?” I asked.

“When Land told me. A few days ago.” She shook her head. “Not before that.”

“You’d never seen her with Matt?”

“No. I would have put a stop to it if I’d known.” Spoken like a woman who couldn’t imagine a defiant, sneaky daughter. Who knew nothing of the myriad ways girls will find to circumvent their parents’ rules: broken window screens and bedsheet ladders, secret notes and messages passed from friends, yes ma’ams followed just as quickly by a rolled eye and a hidden smirk.

“I would have liked to hear what Matt had to say about it. See his face while I asked him some questions.”

Jenny’s mouth twisted, her eyes going distant and hard. “Yeah, well, he’s dead. He won’t be saying much of anything anymore.”

I stared at her across the table, and she stared back. She didn’t look like polished, polite Jenny Logan anymore. She looked like a mother whose daughter had been wronged—the scariest creature in the world. After the murders, I’d made the easy assumption that her tears meant weakness, but I was learning that nothing about Jenny Logan was weak. I heard again the eerie, whooshing silence the moment before Matt’s trailer exploded. Heat and light and sound slamming in to me, bowling me over like a runaway truck. Did Jenny Logan have it in her to light that match, flip that switch? Looking at her face right now, I didn’t doubt it for a second. For the first time, I felt a kinship with her. Suffering the same loss hadn’t bonded us, but maybe fury would.

I opened my mouth to say something, some acknowledgment of what I read in her eyes, but as I began to speak, her face cleared, rearranging itself back into bland, agreeable Jenny Logan. “There you are,” she said, looking at something over my shoulder. “Coffee?”

I turned in my chair, already knowing who I would see and dreading it. Zach stood in the doorway, his plaid shirt half unbuttoned, white T-shirt peeking out. He wore jeans and his feet were bare, hair still damp from the shower. My stomach slid downward at the sight of him, remembering the feel of his skin against mine. His eyes shifted from his wife to me, lingered until I wanted to cross the room and slap him, force him to turn his head in a different direction. I shifted away instead, turned my gaze back to my own coffee cup.

“Hey there,” Zach said, his voice moving closer. “What did I miss down here?”

Jenny was bustling away at the counter, pouring coffee and adding a splash of milk, the well-practiced movements of a wife who no longer has to think about what her husband might like. His wants as ingrained as her own. “Nothing,” she said. “Eve wanted to see how I’m doing.” She turned, held out the mug to Zach.

I slid my chair back, and it screeched against the floor. “I should get out of your hair. Thanks for the coffee.”

“I’ll walk you out,” Zach said.

“No, finish your coffee, I’m fine.” I cut across the kitchen toward the front hall, and Zach drifted along in my wake. “What are you doing?” I whispered to him, jerking my arm away when he put a hand on my elbow.

“You didn’t come here to see Jenny,” he said, voice pitched as low as mine.

I laughed, short and sharp, turned to face him. “Yeah, I did, actually.”

His hand found my collarbone, smoothed hair back over my shoulder, fingers skimming my bruises. His brow furrowed. “What happened here?”

“Nothing. I’m fine.”

His fingers lingered, raising goose bumps on my skin. “I think about you. All the time.”

I slapped at his hand. “Are you insane? We’ve gone more than a decade without saying ten words to each other, and suddenly I’m all you think about? How stupid do you think I am?”

“Not stupid at all,” Zach said, face serious. “And it’s not sudden.” That’s what made it almost impossible to stay mad at him, to even be mad at him. His earnestness, his absolute belief in whatever it was he was telling you. You might know it was bullshit, but Zach never did. Which in some ways made him even worse than Jimmy Ray. At least with Jimmy Ray what you saw was always what you got.