Sinful Desire (Sinful Nights, #2)(45)
Luke nodded. “I am aware of that. I met him, too. Winston. Seems sharp.”
“Yeah,” Ryan said, simply to say something. “What does he know? Did you tell him how you knew my mom?”
“I told him we were in love, yes. And that it had been a mistake, since she was married,” Luke said, clasping his hands together. “I still ask God every day for forgiveness for having fallen in love with a married woman.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Ryan said, because he wasn’t here to talk about contrition for cheating. “I’m talking about her drug problem. The cocaine. That she got it from Stefano. Do they know?”
This was the first time he’d said those words aloud in nearly twenty years—drugs. Cocaine. That Stefano was her dealer. When he was in seventh grade, a year before the shooting, Ryan came home early from school on a half-day that his mom had forgotten about. He found her cutting lines at her sewing table. With a rolled-up dollar bill, she’d leaned in and inhaled a line of white powder off her Singer machine.
He stood in the door, his jaw hanging open. “Mom?”
She raised her chin. Her green eyes were glassy, but the stunned look in them said she hadn’t expected him home.
“Please don’t tell anyone,” she said and started crying. She stood up and clasped her arms around him. “Please, this is my last time. I’m trying to stop. I swear I’m going to stop. I promise.”
At that age, you believed your parents. You believed your mom even if she had powder up her nose. What else was he supposed to think? He was barely thirteen then, and all he knew was that his parents had been fighting, they barely had any money, and they lived in a shitty neighborhood.
She’d clutched him as if her life depended on it and begged him to never breathe a word.
In the months that had followed, she’d seemed determined to prove herself to him. She’d told him she was getting help, that she was going to Narcotics Anonymous, and that she had a sponsor for counseling and guidance. “Please, Ry. I’m trying so hard, baby. I’m trying so hard to fight these demons,” she’d say to him at night as he got under the gray cover in his twin bed. “Don’t tell your daddy please. He’d just worry. And don’t tell your brothers and sister. I’m so ashamed, and I want to get well again. I’ve got a sponsor and I’m going to meetings, and I swear I’m going to kick this habit. I owe some money to the guy I used to buy from, and I’m working extra for the local gymnastics team to earn enough to pay him back. Once I do, I swear I’ll be free of this.”
“I won’t tell anyone,” Ryan had said, battening down the hatches, locking up his brain, some sort of self-preservation kicking in. It was all he’d been able to do. Zip it up, keep it quiet, and never speak of what he saw.
He never said a word.
Even when she met Luke at those meetings. Even when she fell for another recovered addict. Even when she was first questioned by police, and it all came to light that she’d not only been having an affair with that former addict at the time of the murder, but that she’d made a string of phone calls for two months to a man named Jerry Stefano. Why was she talking to him so much, the cops wanted to know?
She’d begged Ryan again to stay quiet. She’d shut the door to his room, planted her hands on his shoulders, and given him instructions. “They haven’t found the person who shot your daddy. And they’re asking me all kinds of questions, and I’m petrified they’re going to try to frame me for his murder. You know what we talked about?”
Ryan had nodded as fear rippled through him.
“If the police know I used drugs, if they know I bought them from Jerry Stefano, it will look so much worse for me. They know I’ve been on the phone with Jerry for months. I’m going to have to tell a lie about all those phone calls. He’s been calling to collect money, and if they know I was buying from him, they’ll paint me as a druggie, murderer wife.”
“But wouldn’t they see you’re innocent if you tell them about the drugs? Won’t it be better to have them know you bought drugs than to have them think you planned a murder?” he’d asked, trying desperately to understand why she didn’t confess her secret.
She shook her head. Vehemently. “No. Never. Trust me. It will look worse, and I have to beat this rap. So I have no choice but to lie about Jerry. Luke is the only other one who knows the truth about those phone calls.”
Luke and Ryan.
That was all.
Now, years later as an adult, Ryan was asking the only other person who knew if he’d broken their silence. “Did you tell the detective that Stefano was her dealer?”
Luke shook his head, rose, and turned up the air conditioning in his piano room. The sound of the whirring grew louder, as if Luke was using it as a buffer to cover up this conversation. Ryan bristled inside, because he so often did the same thing. He’d cranked up tunes in his car when he’d told Shannon details of the case.
Luke held up his palm, as if he were swearing in court. “I did not say a word. Her last wish before she went away was for me to keep that secret,” he said, his voice trembling. “She was terrified of Stefano. You never met him, Ryan, and I pray you never do. You bump into a guy like Stefano on the street and you run the other way.” There was rabid fear in his eyes as he offered this strange piece of advice.