Page 41 of No Escape

“And you don’t need to worry,” she said softly. “I’m on your side, but I know you have orders to arrest me.”

“What do you need?” Joshua asked.

“When we were here earlier,” she said, “you said something that stuck in my mind. You said you felt guilty. Why?”

Joshua looked at the ground, averting his eyes.

“Joshua,” Valerie said, her voice more stern. “Your cousin Emily is dead.”

“What?” He broke into tears. “No…”

“I’m sorry,” Valerie said, looking over her shoulder, knowing that the other patrolman would be back at any moment. “If you want to protect other members of your family, you’ve got to tell me… Why did you feel guilty?”

Joshua wiped tears away. “When you chased my cousin last time, did you never figure out why he was killing his family?”

“No,” Valerie said. “No one in the family had a clue.”

“They had a clue,” Joshua said, mournfully. “They just didn’t want to admit to it. They didn’t want to admit that we might have brought some of this on us ourselves!”

Valerie heard the car alarm stop. She hoped Suzie hadn’t been caught.

“Why does John hate his family?”

“He hates us because we deserve it,” he said. “No one really knows what happened to his wife. I… I was there…”

“His wife?”

“What do you know about her?” Joshua asked.

“I know that she was found dead in a swimming pool a few years before he started killing,” Valerie answered.

“Maybe if John had kept believing that, he’d never have broken inside.” Joshua stood up and walked to a small cabinet. He pulled out a bottle of Scotch and pulled out the cork. He offered it to Valerie.

“No thank you… Please, Joshua. I’m running out of time. What is it about his wife’s death?”

“We covered the damn thing up,” he said. “It was a family get-together in the summer. We’d all had a bit too much to drink. John was always a lightweight, so he went to bed early. But Jenny, his wife, she liked to mix it with the rest of us.

“We all stayed up late and drank. The thing was about Jenny… She had a mouth on her. She was a mean drunk, and I guess we got tired of her that night. You gotta understand, she was always causing drama.

“She walked out into the yard where the pool was after causing an argument. Then we heard her scream for a second. We thought it was her usual way to make everything about her. We ignored it…”

“And she was found in the morning?” Valerie asked.

Joshua nodded and took a slug out of the bottle. “I guess we didn’t want to face what we’d done. It was an accident, and we ignored her as she died.”

“But it took John a few years to break,” Valerie said. “Did he only find out about it later?”

“Yeah,” he said. “We all agreed to never mention it. We knew John would never forgive us. He was heartbroken about losing her. If he thought we could have saved her… Well, we thought he would never speak to us again, but no one knew he’d go full-on psycho.”

“How did he find out?” Valerie asked.

“My sister, Maxine, she told him one night. It had been eating her up ever since it happened,” he said. “Maxine had been losing sleep about it, she even saw a therapist. I guess eventually she couldn’t handle keeping it in anymore, so she blabbed.”

Valerie started to process the information. “Why didn’t anyone tell us during the first investigation?”

“We were scared,” he said. “We didn’t want anyone to think worse of the family than they already did. And some of us wondered if there could even have been grounds for being sued or even charges for not helping Jenny that night. You probably think my whole family is messed up.”

Valerie shook her head. “I come from a messed up family myself. I’m in no position to judge.”

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