Chapter Sixty-Two Her

Chapter Sixty-Two Her

Present Day

“You can’t be right... that’s not... You got this all wrong.” Wyatt hesitated over every word. His voice, anguished

and thick with emotion, shook. He stumbled backward as if the weight of the truth proved too much to bear.

Seeing Wyatt reeling stirred up a violent mixture of doubt and guilt. Thoughts and memories battled in my mind. Why didn’t you wait? Give the kid a break. I’d been thrown into a fire of family secrets. The scorching pain never subsided.

The dose of reality might be necessary but that didn’t make the delivery satisfying. I mentally seesawed between shame and

determination, landing on the justification that now was better than later. He had privacy in my house. The public didn’t

need a front row seat to his pain.

Soon, everyone who ever supported Richmond or cheered him on, those who didn’t, and the few who never heard his heroic story

would learn what really happened. The facts behind the shooting would seep out. Making that happen fell on me. Surviving the

revelation fell on Wyatt.

He leaned against the bookshelves and seemed to regain his balance. His physical balance. His emotional balance... no. “Dad killed them? His family and that other guy?”

The other guy deserved more than a footnote in Richmond’s story. It would be nice if someone in the Dougherty family remembered that. “Zach

Bryant.”

Kathryn rushed to her son’s side. She comforted him with touches and soothing words. “Of course he didn’t. Your dad would

never.”

“You’re so keen on exposing Wyatt to this conversation. You attacked me in my home. Then there’s whatever the hell you did

to my mom.”

Wyatt frowned. “Wait. Where’s your mom?”

“You don’t know anything.” Kathryn snapped at me but her efforts to calm Wyatt didn’t stop. She fawned over him, hovered.

Suffocated.

Wyatt didn’t move.

“Richmond loved to hear himself talk. His ego demanded constant feeding. That was your job as his girlfriend, then his wife.”

He’d told her. He would have needed to tell her. Keeping the secret of his brilliant plan would have chipped away at him and

denied him the curtain call he craved. And he wouldn’t have waited.

“No. That’s not true. I had my own life. I was a student and I... I...”

“You forfeited every ounce of decency to stand by your demented husband’s side for decades.” It was a guess but an educated

one, and I grabbed on to it whenever sympathy flooded me. “You’re in photos and mentioned in articles. Your job was to hang

on his arm and help paint the picture of the grieving but stable all-American boy.”

“Why would she do that?” Wyatt’s flat voice barely rose above a whisper.

“Greed. Your grandparents’ big pot of money.” The obsession with hoarding money didn’t register with me. I never had any and

never dreamed of a life rolling around in it. “Now I have their money, and she hates that.”

Kathryn visibly pulled herself together. She stood a little straighter and lifted her chin as if to say she would not be beaten.

“That was a mistake that will be fixed.”

Unbelievable... but not really. Even as the foundation crumbled beneath her, Kathryn’s first allegiance was to recouping

all she’d lost.

I refused to be derailed until I played my theory out to the end. “You and Richmond dated during college. You were always

around him. In his circle. You knew what he did back then and you lived with it all these years.”

“Wait a minute.” Wyatt held up both hands. He looked like he wanted to stop the conversation zipping around him. Catch the

horrible facts and pull them back for examination.

“She’s vile.” Old Kathryn had returned.

Forget the blood on her dress and my mother lying in the other room. Kathryn held court in the middle of Richmond’s office.

I tucked the bat closer to my leg just in case. “When I confronted Richmond with the evidence of what he did to his family,

he ran to you. You both risked exposure if I wasn’t handled.”

“Mom?”

I vowed to talk until Wyatt believed me. “That’s why you agreed to the quick divorce and settlement. You knew the evidence

I had could implicate you. You couldn’t afford that.”

Kathryn rubbed Wyatt’s shoulder probably the same way she’d been doing since he fell down as a toddler. “I was appalled by the affair and insisted on a divorce. I never dreamed Richmond would fail to get the life insurance he promised and put me in financial peril.”

This woman held on to the fantasy of a happy marriage despite the barrage of evidence to the contrary. She was the only one

in the room who believed in her vision. “He betrayed you. Over and over again and you never left him.”

“Richmond humiliated me. He should never have done that.”

The truth. Finally. “Because you had a deal, and that deal was held together by a secret so devastating it would destroy everything.

You never thought he’d back out. You had leverage because you were the one person who could unmask him. Until I came along.”

“Unlike yours, my marriage was real.”

She had some fight left in her. Impressive, but her need to be the victim poked at me. She was not innocent in all of this.

Richmond would have cut her loose long ago if she had been. She stayed by his side because he needed to have her there to

watch over her and control what she said.

“You thought his fear of you squealing would bind him to you. Through the lies and the affairs, you had him caught and he

could not leave you.” Nothing else made sense. That had to be what happened.

Kathryn stood there with her hands fisted at her sides. Her gaze traveled to the bat then around the room before landing on

me again. Her mouth pulled tight in the silence. “I should have waited and used that bat you kept beside the bed on you.”

The whoosh of relief hit me that time. The truth. Sick and twisted and right in front of me all along. “But you did use it.”

“Yes.”

The last stubborn piece solved. The force of it stole my breath.

Kathryn was at the bottom of all of this. “You’re the one who killed Richmond.”