Chapter 54
ONE MONTH LATER
“I saw Tim today.”
Josh drops that little nugget on me at the dinner table. I’m in the middle of chewing a bite of macaroni and cheese. And I’m not talking about gourmet macaroni and cheese made with four different varieties of cheese, with a layer of crispy, buttery breadcrumbs on top like Margie （sorry, I mean, Pamela Nelson） used to make. I’m talking about macaroni and cheese from the box. It came in a six-pack that cost three dollars. It’s flavored with powdered cheese that is labeled cheese number forty-two.
I don’t know what happened to the other forty-one cheeses. I don’t want to know.
“You did?” I ask, wanting desperately to hear the story but not really wanting to hear it at all.
“Yep.” Josh smacks his lips on the “p,” which has become an annoying habit of his. “When I went to the corner to mail that letter for you. He was also mailing a letter.”
A million questions are running through my head. How did he look? Is he okay? Did he mention me? Does he hate my guts? “Did he say anything?”
“He said hi.”
“And what did you say?”
“I said hi back.”
This could be the most uninteresting story Josh has ever told me, yet I’m hanging onto his every word. “And then what?
Josh lifts a skinny shoulder. “I went back home.”
The suspenseful story of Josh running into Tim for the first time since he got home from jail appears to now be over, and Josh goes back to shoving macaroni in his mouth. I saw the Oldsmobile in the driveway of the Reese house a few days ago, and I deduced that Tim’s parents had returned to Raker to pick him up and help him put his life back together after all the murder charges ended up being dropped.
As it turned out, Pamela Nelson survived the gunshot wound, and it was a good thing she did. She ended up confessing to everything, which is more than Shane was ever willing to do. After she found out her son was dead, she didn’t really care anymore. She told the police everything—the whole shocking story.
For example, she told them how she helped cover up Tracy Gifford’s murder eleven years ago, when Shane had come to her in a panic, Tracy’s blood on his hands, and told her what he had done. But getting away with Tracy’s murder made them cocky. She told the police how she and Shane planned to kill me that night at the farmhouse to get revenge on my father for not leaving his wife and daughter for her. She even told the police how she had lured Kelli Underwood to Tim’s house one night when she knew he was spending the night with me, sending her a text message supposedly from Tim. Then once Kelli was inside, Pamela Nelson pretended to be Tim’s housekeeper, and offered her a drink laced with sedatives, saying Tim would be home “any minute.” After the drink knocked her out, Pamela rolled her body down the stairs into the basement–the fall broke her neck, but it was Pamela slitting her throat that killed her.
The big mistake I made? Social media. My parents always warned me to keep my likeness off the internet, but I had no idea that the family Christmas party thrown by the company I worked for in Queens had plastered pictures of the event all over their Facebook page. That’s how Pamela Nelson found out about Josh. And that’s why she murdered my parents—to punish them for keeping the secret from her… and also, to get me to come back to Raker. She even ensured I would end up working at the prison by calling every medical practice in the area to complain about my shoddy medical care.
And of course, Shane did his part too. He got rid of my predecessor Elise by ratting her out for distributing drugs to prisoners. Not that she was really doing it—she was exonerated as well.
Once DNA evidence confirmed that Shane and Pamela Nelson had been the mastermind behind all of these murders, the DA dropped all the charges against Tim. But justice is slow, and he only got out of jail a few days earlier.