“Making it look like an accident.”
“Or setting you up to take the fall.” Vero picked up the envelope and slid it into the waistband of her yoga pants—my yoga pants—as if she were afraid I might suddenly decide to give it back. She yelped as I yanked it free, but there was nothing to be done about it now. I had already claimed the money. Regardless of who’d shut Harris inside the garage, I was the one who’d accepted payment for the hit job. And if anyone ever found Harris’s body, we were the ones who’d go down for it.
* * *
When the kids went down for their afternoon naps, I retreated to my office and closed the door. Patricia’s envelope rested on top of my desk. It was noticeably lighter since Vero had counted out her forty percent of the cash, but that didn’t make it any easier to look at, and I tucked it inside my desk drawer.
The money from Patricia was no different from my book advance, just one more unearned payment for a job I hadn’t done. Just one more thing to feel guilty about. As many problems as Patricia’s money could solve, it had come tied to even bigger ones. Scarier ones. The kinds of problems that meant losing my kids. The kinds of problems that meant spending the rest of my life behind bars. And the only way I’d ever have a leg to stand on if Harris’s disappearance came back to bite me was to know for certain what had really happened in my garage. To be able to prove, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that I hadn’t been the one to murder him.
I flipped on the old PC, waiting as it coughed and sputtered to life. I opened a blank Word document and titled it, typing the first words that came to mind, the one thing Sylvia and my editor were expecting of me—THE HIT by Finlay Donovan. The screen was blindingly white. The cursor stared back at me with an indifferent, slow blink as my calloused fingers hovered over the keys. It had been months since I’d been able to climb out of my own mire of self-defeating thoughts. Since Steven left, I hadn’t been able to cobble more than a few words together on a page. Every plotline seemed hopeless, every romance fell flat, and every story I dreamed up felt like a complete waste of time.
When I’d missed my first deadline after Steven moved out, Sylvia had called to lecture me. I’d told her I had writer’s block, but she’d insisted I push through it. Sometimes, she’d said, you can’t see the whole story until it’s laid out on the page, and the only way to figure out what happens next is to write your way through it, one scene after the next, until it’s done. Sylvia was all about tough love and finding your own answers. Mostly, Sylvia was all about earning a paycheck. Maybe I should’ve been, too.
I touched the keyboard, trying to figure out exactly where to start my contracted novel, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Harris’s story. Probably because, through my own stupidity, I’d managed to put myself in the middle of it. If the police managed to trace Harris from The Lush to my garage, I’d become their prime suspect. And Vero and I would go to prison unless we could prove the murder had been committed by someone else.
I knew the opening scene. Harris Mickler had been murdered right under my nose. All I had to do was uncover the backstory to figure out the rest of the plot. I just had to put myself in the heads of the characters—to figure out who they were, what they wanted, and what they stood to lose. It all boiled down to means, motive, and opportunity. How hard could it be to solve my own crime?
I started typing, beginning with the note Patricia had slipped on my tray during lunch, recalling as many details as I could: the call I placed from my van, my trip to The Lush, sneaking Harris to the parking lot, then finding him dead in my garage. As I wrote, I lost myself in the story, letting my memory fill in the gaps. The names—Harris’s, Patricia’s, Julian’s, mine, even the name of the bar—I changed, letting the rest of the events of the night spill unfiltered onto the screen.
The keys clicked with increasing speed. Paragraphs became pages, and I typed until the sun pulled its tired pink fingers from the slats between the blinds. Until the clatter of dishes quieted in the kitchen, and the kids fussed in their beds before finally drifting off to sleep. I wrote through the long hours of silence that followed, until the light from my screen was the only light in the house.
CHAPTER 17
The house was quiet, the kids already down for their afternoon naps when I woke the next day. Vero had fallen asleep on the couch, her blistered hands curled around the throw pillow under her head and her face slack with exhaustion. I didn’t see any sense in waking her when I left. A local news channel was playing softly on the TV in the background. She’d probably been up all night watching the headlines, listening for the police, waiting for them to show up at our front door. The only way either of us would ever sleep peacefully again was if we knew who had really killed Harris Mickler.