You Can't Catch Me(85)

“What are you talking about?”

“Shhh. Listen.”

He settles against the pillows, and I reach down and take his hand again. This time, I’m the one making slow circles with my thumb.

“Covington’s right. Todd didn’t die a natural death. My mother killed him.”

Liam grips my hand tightly. “That’s not funny, Jess.”

“I’m not joking. I should’ve told you this forever ago, when I learned about it, but I didn’t know how. But I want to tell you now, okay? Will you let me?”

He squeezes my hand in answer.

“But not a cross-examination, all right? Let me tell it my way.”

“No questions, got it.”

“Are you mad?”

“Just tell me about Todd, Jessica.”

So I do.





Chapter 39

A Note to Follow So

This is what my mother told me in the cornfield. She’d been having doubts about Todd for years. Things he said, preached, and commanded that she didn’t agree with and didn’t see the point of. Then there were other things that she closed her eyes to. How he favored some children, especially Aaron. The eighteenth birthdays and his “special” celebrations with certain girls. Too many things to name. She’d thought about leaving, but everything they had was with Todd. They had never held jobs, had no money, and their families had disowned them. They had no idea how to live outside the LOT. And when she tried to talk to my father about it, which was almost impossible to do given the strictures they lived under, he’d always have some rationale to stay. He had access to the real world because of the work he did for Todd, and he’d tell her enough—about the war in Kosovo, for example, or all the Iraqi children who died in the bombing during the Iraq War, some famine in Africa, whatever news horror of the day—and then she’d look around her, and everything seemed so much better in comparison.

“He never showed you the good parts,” I said. “He wanted to stay. Your families would have taken you back.”

“I guess I didn’t want to leave either. All the things that drove me there, that drove both of us, they were so ingrained that I thought there was a good possibility that I’d die if I left.”

A large black crow landed next to one of the cornstalks and started picking at it. They needed a scarecrow or they were going to lose their crop. These people were hopeless.

“That’s ridiculous.”

“I know that now, but then . . . You didn’t hear the things that Todd said in his sermons, not most of them. You blame me for letting him take you up the hill, but you were protected from the worst of it up there. As Todd got deeper and deeper into his paranoia, I’d guess you’d call it, his sermons got longer and darker. And then people would leave, and he’d tell us he had spies out there in the world, and those people would be dead within a year. And then we’d hear that they were dead.”

“He was lying to you.”

“Yes. But again, I didn’t know that then. Not for sure.”

“You could’ve asked him to look them up on the internet.”

“Honey, I didn’t even know what the internet was. Your father had to go take special computer classes just to do what he did for Todd. And because of it, Todd monitored us much more than the others. There were cameras and microphones in our house. We were with him all the time. There was barely any time where the two of us were alone, and never a time where we felt safe expressing our thoughts. And this is me saying this now, with the benefit of hindsight. Then, it was all looks between us, I guess, at night, in bed, when at least Todd couldn’t see us.”

“Are you trying to make me feel sorry for you?”

“No. I’m only trying to explain.”

“How you killed Todd?”

“Yes.”

“Seems like you waited a bit too long.”

She held her hands out in front of her, flat, as if telling some invisible someone to stop. Was she seeing things? Was she completely unhinged? She couldn’t have killed Todd, could she?

“I kept him away from you,” she said. “When Liam took you . . . that was me.”

“You know Liam?”

“No, but I’d heard of him, like we all had. I was able to get a message to his family after they left with Aaron.”

“You’re shitting me.”

She frowned. “What does that mean?”

“You were the one who told Liam to come get me?”

“Did you think I was going to let Todd . . .”

“That’s exactly what I thought. What had you ever done to make me think anything different?”

She lowered her hands and rested them on her thighs. “I couldn’t do that to you, Jessica. No. Your father told me one night that he’d received an email from Aaron’s parents, offering help if we needed it. He’d deleted it before Todd could see it, but he memorized the address just in case. When the time came, he told them about your birthday coming up. They knew what it meant.”

“And you arranged for me to go to the farmers’ market that day?”

“Yes. I saw Liam approach you. I was worried you weren’t going to keep your cool.”

“Keep my . . . what? What?”