Roger pulled at his lower lip, just as he always did when he was turning a particularly thorny problem over in his mind. Obviously he wasn’t ready to give it all up either.
Finally, he said, “We’ll find a way out of this.”
“How?”
“You’ll think of something,” he said, nodding as if in agreement with himself. “You always do.” Then he reached for the bong and took a hit, holding his breath. When he finally exhaled in a cloud, it was in a smile, the smoke wisping between his teeth and gums in a grin that reminded her of the damned Cheshire Cat in the Disney film. He reached for his guitar again and wrapped calloused fingers around the neck. “You know that, don’t you, babe? You always find a way to get what you want.”
*
The wine had gone to Kara’s head.
Big time.
Beyond buzzed, she scrounged in the kitchen for something, anything to eat. She hated to cook, rarely had anything of significance in her refrigerator and settled for some kind of crackers—Artesian, the package claimed, and some kind of cheese with no package to give it a name as she’d tossed it into a ziplock a week or so ago.
Didn’t matter.
It would work.
After slicing off and discarding a bit that showed mold, she cut herself three wedges and took twice that many crackers on a plate into the dining area, where her laptop lay open. Now that the wine had kicked in and she’d mellowed out a bit, she googled herself and found dozens of pictures of her as a child and a handful of her as an adult. Her infamy was fading. Or had been. Until now.
She’d gone from a coltish girl of seven with teeth too big for her mouth and a halo of messy blond curls to a thinner teenager with light brown hair that she’d spent hours straightening. There were even pictures of her dressed in black, her hair dyed a dark ebony, her thick eyeliner and heavy mascara at odds with her pale complexion made more so with the ivory-colored makeup she’d so feverishly applied. Her clothes had been black rags, one layer upon another. Fortunately, she’d outgrown her whole hiding-from-the-world-in-plain-sight Goth stage.
Now, though she holed up in her small home—a cottage in the suburbs—often with the shades drawn and the blinds snapped shut, she at least blended in, her brown hair usually piled in a messy bun, her only makeup a touch of lipstick and a bit of mascara. Good enough.
She glanced over her shoulder to the windows, saw that the shades were half open and quickly crossed the living room to snap all three of them shut. Tight.
It was a phobia, she knew, the thought that someone was always watching her, observing her from the shadows, ready to pounce on her the second she turned her back. “Stupid,” she said aloud, but then shrugged, as if physically shucking off the unseen gaze. “Get it together.”
She nibbled at the cheese and crackers and placed a call to Merritt Margrove, the lawyer who had defended Jonas for the murders. At the time he’d been a famous defense attorney and he’d taken the case to bolster his already impressive career, but he’d lost and Jonas, hands cuffed behind him, had been escorted out of the courtroom and to prison and, despite all of Margrove’s promises and appeals, had remained there. The case had been a turning point for the attorney, the first of a string of losses and a downward spiral from which he’d never recovered. Married three times, scandal-riddled himself, he was a shell of the bright young lawyer with a keen mind, quick tongue and a swagger to match.
Nonetheless, Kara waited, listening to the voice message and leaving one asking Merritt to return her call.
She shouldn’t think about the tragedy; it was best to let it go. But she couldn’t. Never had been able to forget or forgive. And now that Jonas was once again a free man, she couldn’t resist looking backward.
To that night.
That horrid, deadly, and oh-so-bloody night.
She saw the photos online, even black and white photos of the crime scene, bodies draped, Christmas tree tilted, fireplace yawning, and all the bloodstains, on every surface.
The murder weapon had been located, of course, the sword that had been mounted over Jonas’s bed, a relic from the Spanish–American War, one, she knew now, had been carried by one of her relatives, a great-great-great uncle or something. She couldn’t remember the right number of greats and the wine didn’t help. At that thought, she poured herself “one last glass” and sipped it slowly as she read through the articles about the Christmas Eve her family was so mercilessly destroyed.
The sword, it now seemed, was the reason Jonas was getting out of prison. Margrove had never given up on his client, even after losing the initial case.