Murder Takes the High Road(27)

“No. The blow didn’t kill him, but he was unconscious. She...left him facedown in a shallow stream. He drowned.”

There was a long silence punctuated by the rain washing down two-hundred-year-old walls.

“Why did she do it?” John asked.

I shook my head, then remembered he couldn’t see me. “No one knows. It was probably a combination of things. Kresley had recently won an award in a creative writing competition that Vanessa felt should have been hers.”

“Jesus.”

“I know. Creative temperament? But also, Kresley had supposedly broken off their relationship. Again. The idea was that Claire was trying to talk him into getting back together. I mean, Claire was fifteen. Kresley was sixteen, so they really were just kids. Kids take this stuff so much to heart.”

“She was old enough to know better. Old enough to know murder is wrong.”

“Sure. Which is why Vanessa or Claire, whatever you want to call her, went to prison.”

“Why the hell would they ever let her out?”

“She served her time. In fact, she was a model prisoner.”

I could feel him thinking it over, feel his resistance.

“Obviously there’s no defense for what she did. Even if she did kill Kresley in self-defense—”

“Self-defense?”

I rolled onto my back, staring up at the pale blur of the ceiling. “That was one argument put forth during the trial. That Kresley assaulted her. There really wasn’t any evidence to support it, and it didn’t go anywhere. No one but Vanessa really knows what happened in the woods that day. The only thing for sure is that Kresley died—and they were both very young.”

“She’s evil. Pure and simple.”

Evil. I was a little startled to hear the word. My initial impression of John was that he was an easygoing, pragmatic kind of guy. A don’t-sweat-the-small-stuff guy. The word evil sounded so...straitlaced. Biblical.

I said, “The act was evil. No question. It was an evil act. But was Claire herself—remember, this was a fifteen-year-old kid—evil?”

“Yes,” John said with absolute certainty. “She sure as hell was.”

“It probably wasn’t premeditated. She didn’t bring a weapon. She...improvised.”

“Is that supposed to make it better?”

It made a difference to me. The fact that she had not set out to commit murder. But a lot of people didn’t see it as lack of premeditation so much as lousy planning. “There’s a lot of neuroscience on the adolescent brain—”

“I work for an insurance company,” John interrupted. “I know all about the adolescent brain and suboptimal choice behavior. There’s a hell of a difference between poor impulse control and deliberate, calculated cruelty.”

“Again, not arguing with you.”

“But you want to meet this woman?” He sounded incredulous.

“Well, yeah. I do,” I admitted. “Her books have given me hours and hours of pleasure. And also—you don’t read her, so you won’t know this—the stories are morally unequivocal. For every action there is a reaction. Nobody gets off easy. And also, she doesn’t glorify murder. She doesn’t fetishize it. She writes a lot about acting on impulse—and living with the consequences.”

“I bet. Seeing that she murdered her boyfriend.”

“And went to prison for it,” I repeated patiently. “She served her court-appointed sentence. In the eyes of the law, she paid for her crime.”

“I bet the parents of the boy she murdered don’t feel like she paid for her crime.”

“No. Probably not.”

“Not only did she get out of prison, she went on to fame and fortune too.”

Yes, she did. And I really didn’t want to fight with him over it. Even Vanessa’s fans were divided on the topic of Donald Kresley. I had mixed feelings myself. How could I not?

I offered by way of compromise, “Hate the sin and not the sinner?”

“Easier said than done,” said John.

We left it there, and not long afterward, I could tell by John’s breathing that he was asleep.

I was tired, but sleep didn’t come so easily to me. It had been a long and eventful day. I’d nearly ended up as a traffic fatality before lunch. That evening someone had broken into my room and shoved me down a staircase. My temporary roomie was clearly a man of many secrets. And then there was Trevor.

John was wrong. I knew I no longer loved Trevor. I did wish—or had, before this trip—I could have back the comfortable predictability of our life together. And after the number of close calls I’d had that day, I should have been scrambling toward the safety of my old life faster than ever. And yet, strangely, as I lay there listening to the two-hundred-year-old creaks of antique floorboards, the clang of nearly as old plumbing, and John’s soft, steady breathing in my ear, I didn’t miss the comfortable humdrumness of my life back home, and I sure as hell didn’t miss Trevor. No, as I thought of the day ahead, I felt something I hadn’t felt in a very long time.

Happy.





Chapter Nine

I must have fallen asleep somewhere in the middle of my thoughts because the next time I opened my eyes, I could hear someone moving furtively around our room.