Chapter Forty-Two

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

Back at Rose’s, I pulled my small suitcase from the corner of the bedroom and opened it. I picked up clothes and started folding and packing them.

Outside in the kitchen, I could hear Eddie and Rose. Eddie was trying to pay Rose for our stay; Rose was arguing that we could mail her a check when we got home, after we “got our feet under us” as she put it. As I folded one of my bras and tucked it into the suitcase, I had no illusions—if it had been me negotiating our bill instead of Eddie, she would have given me one of her looks and demanded her money. I could at least give Rose credit for having good taste in men.

Their conversation continued, never quite blowing over into an argument. Eddie reluctantly gave in to the check-mailing solution, but he insisted on hauling the last of the debris from Rose’s backyard before we left.

We had no choice but to leave. Detective Quentin had shut us out, and we couldn’t afford to stay in Coldlake Falls forever, looking for answers. We had Shannon Haller’s name and the photo of her with Eddie. We knew who his mother was now, who his grandfather was. We didn’t have justice, but we were just two people with no connections and almost no money. I might not have my job at the bowling alley anymore, and we couldn’t afford for Eddie to lose his job, too.

Stories don’t always end the way they’re supposed to. They don’t always end at all.

I snapped my suitcase shut and walked out of the bedroom to see Rose folding her grocery store apron into her bag. “I’m going to work. I guess I’ll see you,” she said, not making eye contact and pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose.

“Bye, Rose,” I said. “Thank you.”

She gave me a narrow-eyed look and made a disapproving sound in her throat. Then she left, and Eddie and I were alone.

I crossed my arms and leaned against the bedroom doorframe, looking at my husband. He was wearing the only pair of clean jeans he had left on this trip, and a gray tee with a brown plaid flannel shirt unbuttoned over it. He’d brought the shirt, I knew, in case the nights on our honeymoon got cool. His short hair was tousled and he had two days’ scruff on his jaw. He looked exhausted, and the whole effect should have looked disreputable, but somehow Eddie never truly looked disreputable. Even in the depths of chaos, while his life was falling apart, he looked like a man who would hold the door for you and ask if you were okay. It was just how he was.

He was looking at me, too, and I wondered what he saw. I wasn’t that girl in the blue bra anymore, drifting aimlessly through life. I wasn’t even the same April who had gotten married in a secondhand dress. I wasn’t sure what I was anymore. What I was going to be.

“I’m sorry my mother stole all of my money,” I said.

“I wouldn’t have wanted it anyway,” he replied.

Of course he wouldn’t. “It was a lot of money.”

“Too bad.”

I cleared my throat. I’d never told him I was sorry—I had never said the words. There was only one person that I was capable of apologizing to, and he was standing in front of me. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about my mother. It was the wrong thing to do. I should have told you.”

“Well.” He scratched his jaw, his gaze wandering up to the ceiling. “Considering I broke into my grandfather’s house and my grandfather murdered my mother, I guess I’ve dragged you into a few problems of my own.”

His tone was so casual I had to bite my lips to keep in a laugh.

“April, don’t laugh.”

“It’s uncomfortable laughter. Like at a funeral.”

“I know, but still.”

I put a hand over my mouth, trying to keep the amusement in. The urge was uncontrolled, and I felt my stomach squeeze. I lifted my hand long enough to wheeze, “Eddie, don’t ever take me to a funeral. I mean it.”

“April, this is very serious.”

Those words made me want to laugh even more, and my eyes watered. I kept my hand over my mouth. Eddie didn’t crack a smile, but I caught the ghost of a twinkle in his eyes as he turned away.

“I’m going to the backyard,” he said. “We’ll leave in twenty minutes.”

I nodded mutely, still trying not to giggle. I took a deep breath and turned back toward the bedroom. That was when I saw the man.

He was fiftyish, stocky. He wore a red plaid shirt tucked neatly into a pair of light-blue jeans. I could see him so clearly that I could make out the gray at his temples and the wrinkles in the dark skin at the corners of his eyes. He was standing by the bedroom window. A breeze blew outside, and I watched the leaves on the tree outside the window move behind him, as if the man was made from transparent film.

His mouth moved, mute. Then I heard it.

“Get down,” the man said.

His hands rose. I didn’t see him move, but I felt two hands shove my shoulders, so hard I lost my balance. The hands pushed me to the floor.

“Get down,” said the voice in my ear.

I opened my mouth to scream.

There was a crack outside, and the bedroom window broke, shards of glass falling to the floor.

A second crack. A third. My ears hurt. Something hit the wall, and plaster exploded, sending decorative knickknacks falling to the floor. I stared at the hole in the wall and realized that someone was shooting through the window.

“Eddie!” I screamed.

There were footsteps outside the window. “I can hear you in there,” a man’s voice said, harsh and angry. “Stand up.”

The back door banged; Eddie had been in the backyard. His shout was hoarse. “April!”

“Get down!” I screamed as the gun went off again. The footsteps outside receded, running for the back of the house, and I cried out, “Lock the back door!”

I crawled on my hands and knees across the bedroom floor toward the doorway. Eddie was crouched in the corner of the kitchen, his hands on his knees. The back door was closed. His gaze crawled over me. “Are you all right?”

I nodded. Eddie opened his mouth to say something else just as a blast hit the back door, making me jump.

“Come out, you two!” the man’s voice shouted. “You think I couldn’t track you down? You parked your car in front of my goddamned house while you broke in! I know exactly who you are!”

John Haller. My mind went blank with shock. Instead of calling the police on us, John Haller was here, right now, shooting at us. He’d come around the side of the house to fire through the window at me while Eddie was in the backyard. How close had he come? If he had walked a few more feet and looked into the yard, Eddie would have been an open target, defenseless. He would have died right where Robbie had.

Another shot hit the back door, but the door didn’t break. I watched Eddie’s gaze move to the front window, the front door. His eyes were blank, calculating. He had gone somewhere in his head that his training had taken him, somewhere he’d gone during his months in Iraq. He didn’t even look afraid. My hands were shaking.

A hot breeze blew through the broken bedroom window like a breath, lifting the fussy curtains. I heard the footsteps coming back, and I forced one of my trembling hands up to signal to Eddie. He gestured for me to get out of the bedroom, outside the door.

“It was Shannon’s film you took, wasn’t it?” John Haller shouted. I crawled outside the bedroom door and put my back to the wall. I wondered if the neighbors would call the police, how long it would take the police to come. “Took me a minute to figure it out. I bet you think you’re smart. I bet you thought I’d crawl in my hole and not say anything, didn’t you? Get out here.”

This was insane. We were under siege, right here in Rose’s house in the middle of a summer morning. The police had to be coming—but how many? Two cops? Three? I had seen the size of the Coldlake Falls PD. I pointed to the phone in the phone nook on the other side of the living room, but Eddie shook his head. “No time,” he said.

I heard an intake of breath outside as Haller heard Eddie’s voice. “This isn’t going to end how you think it is,” Haller said, his tone calmer. “I knew from the second that cop knocked on my door that it was over, and I’m ready. Are you? Because I’m not waiting around.”

The footsteps moved away again, this time toward the front door.

I heard a scraping sound. Eddie had taken a kitchen knife from the counter and slid it across the floor toward me. I stopped it with my foot and grabbed it by the handle. “He’s coming in,” he said calmly. “We can’t stop him. You have one chance, and then I’ll take him.”

I looked to the front of the house. Eddie was right—there were both the front door and the front windows that looked out over the street. The door would be hard, but the windows would be easy. A couple of shots to the glass, and Haller could get inside, where Eddie and I were sitting here, waiting, unarmed.

“Should we go out the back?” I asked. My voice was weirdly normal, like it had been that first night, when I realized that Rhonda Jean was bleeding to death. I was still shaking, but it didn’t matter. My thoughts had stopped scattering like a flock of startled birds. Twelve-year-old April—born as Crystal Cross in Los Angeles, California—had taken over.

“He’ll just follow,” Eddie said. “Someone else could get hurt. I’d rather take him here.”

I was already on my feet, running in a low crouch toward the front of the living room, keeping clear of the picture window. Eddie moved behind the sofa, out of sight. For a big man, he moved with absolutely no sound.

I took in the window, trying to calculate my best position. I had to be where Haller wouldn’t see me before it was too late. I had just tucked myself against the wall under the left corner, behind a side table, when a shadow moved across the window.

I only had a split second to think before a gunshot smashed the glass, and I ducked so I wouldn’t get hit with the shards. The sound must have been heard through the entire neighborhood. Did he think he was going to walk away from this, whether Eddie and I died or not? He’s insane, I thought. He must be.

“I reloaded,” Haller’s voice said. “Here I come.”

I could hear sirens in the distance. Someone in the street was shouting. I pressed myself against the wall, going still as I heard the scrape of something on the windowsill. Then John Haller’s legs swung over and his feet hit the ground. He had a rifle in his hand, and his gaze was on the sofa, where he’d caught sight of Eddie. He hadn’t seen me. He raised the gun.

I pivoted and jammed the knife into the back of his thigh as hard as I could.

Haller roared and dropped to one knee. He kicked hard, catching me in the chin, and I dropped onto my ass, scrambling back against the wall. Haller turned to aim the gun at me.

But Eddie was already there. He knocked the rifle from Haller’s grip and picked it up, aiming it at him. Haller barely paused. In one quick motion he drew a handgun from the shoulder holster he was wearing and aimed it at Eddie, thumbing off the safety.

The three of us froze, Eddie standing and aiming the rifle, Haller aiming the handgun back at him from his position on one knee, and me against the wall, my jaw throbbing.

Eddie and Haller locked gazes, both of them breathing hard. Grandfather and grandson.

“Don’t move,” Eddie said, and whether he meant me or Haller or both of us, it didn’t matter. I stayed still. What if a movement from me made one of them pull the trigger?

The men didn’t move with gazes locked. Both of them had steady hands, used to holding guns. There wasn’t a tremble in either of them.

“Why did you do it?” Eddie’s voice was hoarse, but his gaze didn’t waver, and neither did his aim.

“It was an accident,” Haller replied. “She called me to come get her because she’d run out of money, couldn’t afford a bus ticket. When I got there, I found her hitching on Atticus Line. I pulled over and she told me to go home because she’d changed her mind.”

“So you killed her?” Eddie’s voice threatened to crack.

“Like I said, it was an accident. I tried to force her into the car. She fought me. I was goddamned mad. She’d been a problem her whole life, running wild, getting into trouble, just like her mother. She got high and got pregnant and stole my money. So what if she said she was turning her life around? She was probably lying. So I grabbed her, held her down, even though she was screaming. I was so goddamned mad. I’d had enough. Everything went wrong, and then she was dead. I took her things and I got out of there.”

He’d left her—left his own daughter, dead by the side of the road. But first he’d taken off her jacket and thrown it away, then ripped the tag out of her shirt. I’d written my name on my clothing tags plenty of times as I traveled. When you used communal laundry facilities in hostels or split the cost of a laundromat with someone else, it was the easiest way to determine whose clothes were whose.

John Haller had stripped his daughter of her identity, then left her there. She hadn’t been found for weeks.

“You’re Jeremy, aren’t you?” Haller said. Police lights flashed through the front window, and I could hear voices in the summer breeze blowing in. Someone was shouting that we should come out. “You’re her boy. I can see it in your eyes, in your face. You look just like her. She sent you for me, because she never left. She was never gone, all these years. Part of me knew it. I’ve been waiting. I thought she’d come for me herself, but she sent you instead.”

“I should shoot you,” Eddie said in a voice so cold it made fear go up my spine.

“You could,” Haller agreed, the gun never trembling in his grip. “But you might not kill me with one shot. And then I’d shoot her.” He meant me. “Are you going to take that risk? You think I care, Jeremy? I got terminal cancer. You shoot me now, you’ll save me some hospital bills. That’s all you’ll do.”

“Why?” Eddie said. “She was my mother. Why did you throw her away like she was trash?”

“Because she was trash,” John Haller said. “So am I. What do you think that makes you?”

The front door banged open and Officer Kal Syed came in, his gun drawn. “Drop your weapons,” he said calmly. “Both of you. Now.”

Neither man moved. Their gazes never wavered.

“Your move, son,” John Haller said softly.

Eddie’s hands were steady on the rifle.

Then John Haller pulled the trigger.