Color Blind (24 page)

“You turn into a pumpkin at seven or something? Can’t be vampire, because the sun already came up.”

“Oh, I forgot I need to take you home!” Jenna blurted out.

“No worries. I’ve got nowhere to be for a while. Oboe sleeps like a log until at least nine on a normal day, and that’s when I
don’t
take him out at four a.m. I can tag along wherever,” Yancy replied.

“No, no. I’ll take you home. I just forgot.” Still, Jenna couldn’t help the way her eyes slipped toward the clock again. The hours ticked down to Claudia’s release, and she hadn’t done a thing. Distracting herself from doing something stupid in the middle of the night was one thing, but ignoring that the person who’d tried to kill her father and brother would be released was a different story in daylight.

“Oh, come on. Where do you have to be?”

What was it about this guy inspiring confidences?

“Claudia. I was planning to go by the DA’s and see if I can do anything about her,” Jenna whispered.

“Ah,” he replied. “I
better
go with you then. I hear murdering the DA comes with heavy time.”

A stiff smile stretched her lips. Coming from anyone else, she might’ve thought that joke in poor taste, given the circumstances, but Yancy had no filter.

“You gonna keep the engine running just in case?” she asked.

“Engine running, trunk popped. You’ll have to get over the border somehow.”

T
he sun peeked through the bathroom window, and the stem of Lyra’s wineglass slipped from her fingers. The shatter sounded far away. Her eyes trailed downward over her naked breasts, her legs under the water where all of the bubbles had long melted into nothing.

Blood? No. Red wine mingled with the suds. How many glasses had she had? Lyra blinked and tried to focus, but all she saw were the tiny shards of glass that sparkled throughout like little stars in a watery sky. This feeling never would get easier, no matter how many times she had it. Never
.

Oh, dear brother.

She glanced at the biggest piece of glass. It would be effortless to slide it into her flesh, rip open her arteries. Lie here forever, no one to stop it. Isaac didn’t care. He’d done this. Left her. Knew she’d find out at some point he hadn’t told her everything.

Lyra flipped the glass over with her right hand into her left, closed her palm over it. For her, it could all end right here.

No! That’s why she couldn’t. They’d never understand him without her.

Isaac didn’t know better. It was the only explanation. He did everything he’d done because he believed he had to. Without her, he’d have no one to explain for him, help him. He’d be stuck.

When Lyra was five, Isaac had walked her through the church’s tiny graveyard at the end of the road. Lyra had been scared, wanted to go back home, but Isaac took her by the hand. His hand had been so warm, bigger than hers. Safe.

“You see that, Lye?” he asked when they reached a smooth, black stone in the back corner of the resting place.

She looked down at where her brother held her fingers between them, then back up at the stone. She knew they were letters on the stone, but she didn’t know them well enough yet to tell what they spelled out.

“That’s where Mom is,” Isaac said.

The stone didn’t look like Mom. Just a rock. “How?”

“Under the rock. She’s buried here. It’s what they do with dead people. Bury them.”

Now Lyra shifted in the tub, and the water sluiced up the sides and splashed onto the bare tile. She’d known what dead meant even then. Not breathing anymore. Not alive. She’d been told about it ever since she could remember, after all. Her mother died giving birth to her. How could someone forget
that?

Isaac squeezed her hand. “Don’t worry, Lye. No matter what anyone else thinks, I know it wasn’t your fault. No one should make you feel different. I’ll always make sure you feel safe.”

Lyra stared down at the rock. Earlier in the day, Isaac had told her that Daddy was getting married again because he was lonely, that he wanted a girl in the house who didn’t kill Mom.

Tears surged to her eyes. Daddy hated her for what she’d done. She hadn’t meant to, but she had anyway.

Isaac moved in front of the stone and kneeled in front of Lyra, his eyes burning into hers. “You have to promise me you know I think it wasn’t your fault, Lye. Promise promise?”

She sniffed, wiped her nose. “Promise promise.”

The travel dates matched, of course. She’d read back in her journal to find the times Isaac was on business trips, compared them with the dates of the Gemini killings. It was all real.

Somehow, deep down, she’d always known it would be.

She kicked the gold faucet hard. For once, why couldn’t he make
her
life easier?

Her toe started to swell instantly, but the alcohol had numbed her so much she barely felt it. Maybe she wished she did.

Everything was so blurry. So exhausting. Fixing things for him, making sure he wasn’t in trouble. Was she that ungrateful? Wasn’t that what he’d always done for her? Wasn’t this how all the ways she took care of him started?

At age eight, Lyra trudged up the road alone, save the plastic grocery sacks she carried. The creepy fence to the graveyard squeaked. If only Isaac was with her . . .

She couldn’t worry about that now. Too much work to be done, all for her brother’s sake. Lyra knelt beside the black gravestone and began to paw at the ground with her hands. Don’t think about what you might see.

Still, the entire time she scooped earth away from where Mom was buried, she shook. At any second, she was sure she’d see a skeleton like the ones in the haunted house at Halloween.

At last she managed a big enough hole. She held her breath as she untied the grocery bags. If only she could’ve dug a bigger hole, she’d have just put them in, too, but she couldn’t go any farther.

The white kitten lay limp in the bottom of the bags in the exact position in which she’d found him. Lyra reached under the bag, lifted him, and dumped him into the hole.

“I’m sorry, Snoogles,” Lyra whispered. Then she covered him with dirt.

Lyra plunged her hand into the water, pulled the drain plug, and watched the liquid swirl away. She didn’t bother to move. There was nothing she could do. Not yet.

When she arrived home that day so many years ago, her father looked at the dirt under her nails in disapproval, asked what she’d been doing. She’d fibbed about making mud burritos. He told her to take a bath, which she did gratefully. Anything to wash the kitten from her hands.

Lyra had known when she’d found the kitten that Isaac had done it, though she never was sure how she knew. She’d never told him what she’d done, and he’d never asked. Dad had looked for Snoogles for a few days, but in the end everyone agreed he’d run away. She’d cried, and Dad had thought it was because she missed Snoogles.

Now she leaned her head back onto the edge of the bathtub and closed her eyes. Maybe she’d sleep here awhile. Only a nap, until she knew how to fix things this time.

V
isiting the DA’s home in Winport might be the craziest thing Jenna had ever allowed herself to do, and on a Saturday morning no less. She knew better than anyone that if you wanted sympathy from authority figures involved in criminal cases, the last place you should show up is their home. And yet here she was on the front stoop, banging on Tad Ulschafer’s door.

Tad opened his porch door in gym shorts. His T-shirt with cutoff sleeves and lengthy hair parted down the middle made him look like a strange cross between an art gallery manager and a personal trainer rather than a district attorney.

“Jenna?” he said through the screen.

“Yeah, I’m sorry to bother you,” she stammered.

Tad’s eyes cut to the Blazer, where Yancy waited in the passenger’s seat, then back to her. He shook his head.

The look on his face mingled with the violet pity Jenna’s mind conjured made her stomach sink. He knew why she was here.

“I can’t do anything, Jenna. We’ve been friends a long time. I know how awful this must be for you, but it is what it is. I filed everything I could, called every judge I knew. It’s not possible.”

Jenna could hear her voice shake as she laughed an odd, foreign laugh. “She killed four people!”

Tad opened the screen and stepped outside.

“The state only charged her with
one
murder, Jenna. You know that, and you know why,” he said calmly.

“Well, charge her with the others!”

Jenna wasn’t making a case, and she knew it. Still, falling off a cliff had this funny way of making you flail as you fell, even if it helped nothing.

“You know I would if I thought
anything
would stick, Jenna. We didn’t charge her with the others because we couldn’t. Not enough evidence. We couldn’t exhume one of the bodies because the injunctions held it up, and another was cremated. You know good and well trace evidence of arsenic poisoning can’t come from ashes!”

“What about Lowman?” Jenna asked.

Tad shook his long, greasy hair out of his face. “Neil Lowman was first. Claudia hadn’t figured out her game then. We have
nothing
to tie her to Lowman’s death other than our Spidey sense.”

“That, and a bottle of nitroglycerin pills.”

“Jenna, the man had a heart condition. The nitroglycerin makes our case
worse
.”

Charley’s face flashed in.

So white. She had to run for help, but leaving him meant she might never see him again . . .

Jenna glared back at Tad, pleading with him to see her terror, how much she needed him to
do
something.

“Charge her with something else, then. Anything,” Jenna said.

“Go home, Jenna. Get some rest,” he whispered.

The sympathy in his voice made her want to run into the street and pray a semi happened along this humble suburban road. How in the hell had she gotten here?

“Yeah. Home.”

•   •   •

“Y
ou’re quiet.” Yancy’s voice pinged Jenna from the fog that was her head. She hadn’t even realized they were on his street.

She eased the Blazer into park. “Long night.”

“Long forty-eight hours is more like it, right?”

“Something like that,” she conceded. Seventy-two hours? She couldn’t remember anymore.

Yancy hopped out, but he kept the door open. “Come in. I know they say it’s five o’clock somewhere, but even nonalcoholics have a Bloody Mary at breakfast, yeah?”

She shook her head. So much to do, so many things to figure out. She needed to check on her family, somehow decipher Isaac Keaton’s Dreamland bull, and find a magical link from Isaac Keaton to Thadius Grogan. No time for a cozy breakfast break.

Yancy climbed back in, turned the keys, and took them out of the ignition. “Come on. Even rock stars need breakfast. I make killer pancakes.”

Jenna groaned and climbed out of the Blazer. “That’s the second bad murderer joke you’ve cracked today, you know.”

“What can I say? Mad social skills.”

Oboe’s nails scratched the door from the inside. So much for that whole sleeping until nine thing.

“Back, back, back, back,” Yancy said, shoveling the dachshund away from the door with his metal foot as he entered.

Jenna followed him inside into the kitchen, where she leaned against the counter and watched him retrieve glasses, tomato juice, and Worcestershire sauce. He plucked ingredients from cabinets, finally pulling down the vodka from the cabinet above the refrigerator.

They didn’t say much while he made the drinks. Despite all the information crammed in her mind, Jenna couldn’t help but be impressed with his mixing knowledge.

“You used to be a bartender?” she asked.