“O.J.? Ma’am, listen to me—”
“Were you sleeping with my husband, too? Is that why you won’t leave this alone?”
“Ma’am, I wouldn’t do that. What happened to your husband was a tragedy—but your role in it . . .” Nola took a breath. “I don’t think you meant to kill him.”
Tessa froze, tears pushing out from behind her eyes. “You don’t know anything about us.”
“I know he and Rashida—”
“I told you don’t say her name in this house! What that woman did to us . . . what she cost us—I loved that man for over two decades!”
“That’s why you hired Zion, isn’t it? To get that man back.”
“It was a robbery! Didn’t you see the police report!?”
“You paid Zion to hide in your house—to put the scare in Colonel Mint when he came home from the steak house—”
“Now you’re just inventing theories. Look at the police report!”
Tessa kept raising her voice, still holding the gun, still pointing it at Nola’s chest. But the words she was saying . . . they sounded stilted, like they were memorized or scripted. Right there, Nola’s eyes narrowed.
“Ma’am, I need you to answer this: After Colonel Mint was killed—why’d you log back into Black House for that meeting with Zion? You’re a smart woman. You had to know people might be watching.”
Tessa stood there a moment, digesting the question. Between her eyebrows, a tiny microwrinkle appeared, then was gone just as quick. To the untrained eye, it looked like anger. It wasn’t. It was confusion.
“Do you even know what meeting I’m talking about?” Nola asked.
“And do you have any idea what my family’s been through . . . what you’re putting us through?” Tessa challenged.
“You weren’t at that meeting, were you, ma’am? That wasn’t you I saw in Black House,” Nola said, glancing over at Mint’s workbench, at the piles of boxes, at the discarded bicycles, all of it chaos. It made no sense. Back when Nola logged into Mint’s Black House account, there were two people there. According to Zion’s computer, one was definitely Zion.
So who was the other? On the ride here, Nola had been convinced it was Tessa. She certainly had the most to gain. By hiring Zion to hide in the house and put some fear into her husband, she’d scare Mint away from Rashida and send him running back to his family. A desperate plan for sure, but isn’t that what people do when they’re about to see the core of their family torn in half? Still, if Tessa wasn’t in Black House . . . if she wasn’t the one who did this, who else would possibly benefit from—？
“Mom, you all right . . . ?” The door in the corner flew open, revealing a lanky seventeen-year-old with a long curved neck and cropped blond hair, just like his dad. “Vi said there was some woman asking questions abou—” Huck froze, spotting Nola.
“Huck, don’t say a word!” Tessa warned.
“Mom, what’s going on? Is she—？”
“Don’t say a word!” Tessa roared.
“Of course,” Nola muttered, not even realizing she said the words out loud. She just stood there, staring at Mint’s son.
101
Zig had no trouble finding her.
“Reagan, it’s over.”
She didn’t hear him. The churn of the fan was deafening. Vmm vmm vmm.
There was no missing her, though, at the far end of the aisle, in the corner of the freezer. She was down on the floor, shivering, hugging the maze of blue pipes along the back wall, like they were the only thing holding her up. From the wound in her neck, a thin stream of blood ran down her arm, dripping from her elbow, dotting the white floor.