Page 121 of Nobody's Fool

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

“Give me the keys,” I tell Marty.

“What?”

“Just give them to me, please.”

“But you’re a terrible driver. And you’re recovering from a bullet wound.”

My hand is out, palm up. He reluctantly drops the keys into it. I get in the driver’s side. He takes the passenger seat.

“What happened?” Marty asks. “What did she say?”

I shake him off. Not now. It’s not time to talk it out yet.

I can’t drive away from Farnwood fast enough. It is almost as though the ghosts are chasing me away. I am trying to process what I learned. Judith could be lying, of course. She is manipulative and vindictive, but the thing is, she is also highly self-interested. There is a method to her madness usually, and making up this story just to… I don’t know… make it harder for me to figure out the case or to toy with me doesn’t seem enough. She is cruel enough, of course, but for her, cruelty serves a purpose.

Her accusation also has the ring of truth.

I don’t bother calling ahead. I just find myself reaching another stupid rich-people’s gate in front of the driveway. I give my name to the guard. It’s someone who wasn’t here last time I was, so he’s looking at me and my crappy car like I just dropped dog feces on their lawn.That infuriates me. Bad enough when the rich look down upon you, but why are the people they hire—people no wealthier than you—even worse? Like they’re snobby by proxy. That infuriates me too. Everything infuriates me. The stupid gate, as I wait for the guard to call up to the house, infuriates me. I want to hit the accelerator and crash through it.

“Marty?”

“What?”

“Do you mind staying down here?”

“Seriously?”

I look at him. He sighs and gets out as the guard finally opens the stupid gate. I drive up to the house, but as I do, as I get closer, I slow my roll.

Their daughter is dead.

It might even be my fault.

Probably was. No matter how you sliced it. If the bullet was meant for me, well, that’s the obvious way. But if it wasn’t, if my investigation had somehow awakened the past, then it is still on me.

Perhaps that explains my fury. I’m redirecting it. I’m not furious with the gate. I am furious with myself. As I see the house rise before me, I flash back to when I first trudged through those woods in search of Anna Marigold, the old ghost from my past, and since that first day, I’ve had so many theories swirling in my head, so many attempts at trying to figure out the truth, that I’ve come to realize that the only thing I know is that I can’t trust anyone or anything. I am not a paranoid sort, and that’s not what I’m feeling now, but this is akin to paranoia, I guess, a feeling that reality is perhaps conspiring against clarity.

Archie and Talia are both at the door when I arrive, standing side by side. When I park, Archie steps in front of his wife as though offering protection and says, “I told you this was over.”

“I know,” I say, as I move toward them, pointing my chin toward Talia, “but she told me to stay on it.”

Archie turns to his wife with surprise. “Talia?”

“Someone took her from us,” she says.

“The police are investigating—”

“I’m not talking about now. I’m talking about then. It changed the course of her life. Don’t you see? If she wasn’t kidnapped, her life would have been completely different. She would have never met Kierce. She wouldn’t have been in the park with him. She’d be alive.”

“Talia—”

“I don’t want to let this go,” she pleads. “I want to know what happened to our daughter that night when she left the party. Don’t you? Archie? Please, don’t we need to know? Both of us?”

He opens his mouth, but for a few moments no words come out. “I thought we put it behind us,” he says, “the day she came home.”

She shakes her head. “You put it behind you.”

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