Page 21 of Too Old for This
To avoid getting knocked down with him, I jumped out.
That was it. One minute, Gary was standing. The next, hewas lying on the shower floor with blood dripping from the back of his head. I leaned down to check if he had a pulse, put my hand in front of his mouth to see if he was breathing. No to both.
I thought about calling for an ambulance. Really, I did. But I barely knew this man. I was a little drunk and a little high, and Gary had drugs in his place. It wasn’t entirely my fault he had slipped and ended up dead. I only pushed a little.
The decision turned out to be a simple one from a simpler time, when there were no gadgets, no internet, no traffic cams. No DNA testing.
I got dressed, washed our glasses, and made his bed, making it look like Gary had come home alone. I even left the water running in the shower.
The next time I saw Gary, his picture was in the paper. Accidental death.
I kept waiting and waiting to feel some remorse, but it never came. Instead, I felt better. For a while, anyway. I didn’t realize how much anger I had until it was gone.
Eight years later, when Detective Burke asked who my son’s father was, I couldn’t tell him any of that.
CHAPTER 12
When my final stuffed chicken roll is in the oven, I pull out Plum’s file again. Beyond the synopsis of her show and that infamous photo of me, I find quite a few maps. Of the city, and where the bodies were found.
Nothing interesting there. As I move on to the next section, my phone rings. The toll-free number is not one I recognize.
“Hello?”
“Hello. I’m calling on behalf of Fairhaven Bank. How are you today?”
“I missed your name,” I say.
“My name is Jax.”
“Did you say Jack?”
“Actually, it’s Jaxon. J-A-X-O-N. But everybody calls me Jax.”
“Fascinating,” I say. “And you are calling onbehalfof Fairhaven Bank. What does that mean?”
“It means I am a representative authorized to speak on behalf of the bank.”
“I see. Go on.” I take a sip of my coffee and scan through what the police categorized as evidence.
“Are you feeling a little pinched for cash?” Jax says. “Always trying to stretch your monthly check to make ends meet?”
“Let’s pretend I say yes. To both.”
Silence.
“Are you saying yes?” he asks. “Or are you pretending?”
“Doesn’t matter. Please continue.”
“Fairhaven Bank has developed a solution to your cash crunch. We’re offering a line of credit that will allow you to…”
As he talks, I skim down the list of evidence. Someone claimed to see me with Paul Norris on the night he died. Another witness saw me coming out of the woods near where Marilyn Dobbs was buried, on the night after she died. Beyond the witnesses, there’s a partial fingerprint on a car, a ticket stub from the movies on the same night Walter Simmons was there, and a parking ticket from that same night.
I remember it all, everything about Paul, Marilyn, and Walter. How they looked, what they said, when and where it happened.
Burke had been so close.
He knew that six months before Marilyn Dobbs died, she had been a substitute teacher at Archie’s school.
