Bitter Falls (Stillhouse Lake)(52)

I squeeze my eyes shut and take a deep breath before I say, “Media feeding frenzy. I understand.”

“It won’t take them long to get to Stillhouse Lake and lay siege to your house. You can bring the kids to Knoxville—”

“Yeah, bit of a problem with that. We need to talk to the cops in Norton. Lanny’s a witness to something that happened the other night, and she needs to make an identification. Can’t avoid that.” I think about it for a few seconds. J. B. waits. “Okay, we’ll go home, get what we need, go to the police station, and leave from there for your offices.” More hotels in our future . . . or maybe not. Maybe we just find a place in Knoxville and send movers back to pack us up at the house. Maybe this is just the clean break we really need. It won’t be easy for Gwen to make that move, but this does make it a more clear-cut decision. Solves our Belldene problems at the same time.

But damn, I hate to think about the reporters who are going to come hunting us. J. B. will protect our privacy as much as she can, but inevitably we’ll be found. I can already imagine the clever questions: So, as the brother of one of Melvin Royal’s victims, how does it feel to hear Gina Royal is being charged in connection with assault and abduction? Or, Do you believe, given this new accusation, that Gina Royal is still innocent of involvement in her husband’s crimes? I’ve got zero interest in answering any of those things, unless my response starts and ends with fuck off.

I finish with J. B. and click the flashers off. I pull back into the sparse traffic before I ask Connor, “Did you get all that?”

“Some of it,” he says. “Mom’s in trouble?”

“Maybe not for long,” I tell him. I don’t want the kid worrying. “We’ll see her this afternoon at the latest, okay?”

“Okay.” He’s quiet for a moment before he says, “Sam? I—I wish things could just go back to the way they used to be.”

“Oh yeah? When?” That’s bitter, and I wish I hadn’t said it. “I’m sorry, Connor. Didn’t mean that. You mean a couple of summers back, when we were building the deck?” That was when we’d gotten to really know each other, and I’d realized what amazing kids Gwen had raised. And what a good woman she was. And yes, it had been a sweetly glorious time.

“Yeah,” he says softly. “I just want things to be okay again. Not all the reporters and the people hating us and coming after us all the time.”

“Normal life,” I say, and he nods. “Okay. I promise you that we’ll try to get there. It’s never going to be boring, though. You know that, right?”

He smiles and looks out the window. “Yeah,” he says. “I mean, Mom. Not boring.”

“Nope. Me, I’m pretty boring, though. Maybe it’ll even out.”

“I don’t think you’re boring.”

“Good to hear.” I ruffle his hair, and he punches my arm, and we’re okay again. For now. But the kid’s right. We need normal. Badly. Between Connor’s horrible experience at school, Lanny’s close call at the lake, Gwen’s arrest . . . not our best of times. I’m looking forward to the relative peace of Knoxville, and I’m hoping that J. B. will take Gwen off this case and let us just deal with things.

We’re a few miles from Norton when I get another call. This one’s in my phone book, and even though it’s not legal to talk and drive, I grab the phone and lift it to my ear instead of putting it on speaker. Connor’s already on edge. I don’t want to make things worse.

“Hey,” I say. “Javi?”

Javier Esparza says, “Man, when you guys fall in the shit, you really get in there, don’t you?”

“You calling just to cheer me up or what?” Javier is a good friend, a good dude and retired marine; he calls me Chair Force, and I call him Jarhead, and we’re still brothers in arms in every sense. He runs the local gun range, which is one of my favorite places around Stillhouse Lake. We have a friendly game of center bull’s-eyes at the target range. So far, he’s up by one point out of thirtysomething matches. He’s way better than me at longer-range matches, but short range, I can give him a run. Javier is a genuinely stand-up guy who’s had our backs in several nasty situations.

Speaking of which, I owe him either a round of cleaning toilets at the range for losing that last shooting match, or letting him teach me how to scuba dive. I have no intention of scuba diving. I hate swimming. I’d rather scrub the men’s room.

“Wish I was,” he says. “Kez is worried.” Kezia is Javier’s mostly live-in girlfriend.

“What’s she worried about, exactly?”

“She’d kill me if she knew I said anything to you, so I didn’t say anything, right?”

“Absolutely.”

“She’s worried that this is going to fall wrong for Lanny. Look, Bon and Olly aren’t good people; everybody knows that. Problem is they’re telling consistent stories. And she hasn’t disclosed everything.”

“Meaning?”

“She was with somebody else at that party, man. She didn’t come alone. Some girlfriend or something. You need to get her to come clean before this goes bad. She can’t hold back if she wants them to believe her story over theirs. Hell, they turned themselves in. That earns them a listen, at least.”