“What happened with Nathan?” Daphne asked.
“Nothing.”
“JJ—”
“Nothing happened with Nathan,” JJ repeated, forcing herself to look Daphne in the eye.
“What time did you leave the house?” Daphne asked.
“I don’t know. Eight thirty, maybe,” JJ said.
“Well, hopefully he died well after that,” Daphne noted, and JJ stared at her.
“How are you so calm?” she asked.
“Panicking wouldn’t do us much good, would it?” Daphne asked. “So let’s assume you didn’t kill Nathan.”
“Yeah. Let’s assume that,” JJ said, sounding strangled.
“Well, someone did.”
“Why would anyone kill him, though? No one in this town even knows him,” JJ said. He’d seemed like such a normal guy. Certainly not someone to inspire a murderous vendetta in only a few days.
Daphne took a deep breath. “The thing is, the gun wasn’t the only thing in the carriage house.”
37
EMMA
Now
Emma sent Chris everything she and Gabriel had put together, and got a tired response telling her not to jump to conclusions. Looking through all the articles, Emma had been running on adrenaline, gripped with the certainty that they had found something vitally important—but with Chris’s message came the crashing realization that they didn’t really have anything. Nothing solid, at least. Whatever had been going on with Kenneth Mahoney and her father, they were both long gone.
Emma paced. Gabriel was sitting in a chair next to a small desk in the corner, slouched so far he was practically horizontal. “You need to take a break,” he told her. “Take a breath.”
“I need to figure out what I’m missing,” she said.
“Emma—”
“The phone call,” she said, remembering. “Nathan. He called someone.”
“Right after he found the flash drive and took a look at it. Is there any way to get your phone records, do you think? Call the company or something?”
She gave a wry chuckle. “Trust me, I know how to get them,” she said. Gabriel’s laptop was still at the desk. He stood up and shuffled out of the way to give her space, and she took his place in the chair. It was simple to pull up the account, and it was one of the passwords she knew by heart.
“Here it is,” she said. The most recent phone call was to a number she recognized immediately.
“Addison,” Emma said, stone-faced. She wished she hadn’t memorized it. She hadn’t meant to. She’d seen it on his phone one day, ringing on the bedside table, and the numbers had seared themselves into her memory. “The woman he was sleeping with.”
“Shit. I’m sorry,” Gabriel said, not saying what they were both thinking. That if he was still calling her, maybe things weren’t as over as Detective Mehta had thought.
Addison, who had nothing to do with truck robberies and murders. Addison, who might stoop to sleeping with married men but probably wasn’t a killer. Emma’s shoulders dropped, her whole body feeling on the verge of collapse.
Gabriel put a hand on her shoulder. “Look. This is the part where you give that to your lawyer and the cops and let them do their work,” he said.
“Right,” Emma agreed. She felt drained. She wasn’t a detective, wasn’t a cop. She was a freelance web developer with a dead husband and no idea what to do next.
Gabriel glanced at his watch, looking troubled. “I’ve got to pick Nana up from her appointment. If I leave you here, are you going to be okay on your own for a while?”
“I’ll be fine,” Emma said. “Go.”
“Promise me you’re going to be all right?”
“Cross my heart.”
His presence had been a comfort as she’d gone through the footage, but she knew she couldn’t ask him to stay, and wasn’t sure she wanted to. There were things she didn’t want him to see. Grief was an ugly animal, and hers was a complicated grief. She needed time to tend it in solitude.
When he had gone, she sat for a while with nothing but that sorrow, that anger. She had loved her husband. Hadn’t she? Maybe she hadn’t fallen in love with him. But she had chosen him, and wasn’t that the same thing?
She had to remember how he’d made her laugh, not the way she had crept around the house during his foul moods, afraid of setting him off. She’d been good at it, hadn’t she? They hadn’t fought.
He’d been so good to her after the accident. She’d been bed-bound at first, drugged to the gills to help relieve the pain, her pelvis fractured in multiple places. He’d been attentive, patient, kind. He’d brought her books, watched movies with her, helped her to the bathroom during those humiliating times when she couldn’t manage it herself. He’d organized all her medical records, chased down prescriptions, sponged her down so she didn’t have to sit in the stink of her own sour sweat.