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I shivered, despite the humid summer night and the emergency blanket wrapped around me.
My father was dead, and I had no idea how to feel about that. It wasn’t real yet, even though I’d glimpsed a flash of his broken body as Hoyt had carried me out of the house. Hector would never lift a hand to me again. Never berate me for being something other than what he wanted. He could never hurt any of us physically again.
But emotionally? The aftershocks of finding out he’d murdered our mother were going to be ongoing for a good long while. He’d not only taken her from us, he’d taken her good memories as well, twisting what we believed with all his lies. My siblings were still reeling from that, and I regretted blurting it out the way that I had. But it wasn’t like there was a gentle way to share that kind of news and, in the moment, it had seemed vital that they not go on another moment believing the worst of her.
A few feet away, Hoyt was giving his statement to Chief Carson.
He looked terrible. His lip was split, and his face was a mass of swelling and bruises. I knew exactly how that felt, and I wished he’d let the EMTs check him out, too. But he’d insisted I had to come first, and he’d wanted to be as transparent as possible with the police, given his actions had resulted in Hector’s death.
He’d killed my abuser. Maybe not on purpose, but he’d done it. And I had no idea what kind of impact that would have on him. On us. If there even was still an us.
He strode over to me as Pete gave further discharge instructions for the rest of my injuries. “You should follow up at the clinic, but I don’t think there’s a need to go to the mainland.”
Small mercies. I’d take what I could get.
Hoyt took my hand. “Are you up to some questions?”
My head ached, but I knew this was a necessary part of closing this nightmare out, so I nodded.
Carson materialized beside us, looking less antagonistic than usual. “Tell me what happened.”
So, I took him through it, telling him everything that I knew. “He admitted he set the fires at both the beach house and the tavern, as well as Hoyt’s truck.”
Carson’s bushy brows drew together. “Why?”
“It was all about controlling me. He was trying to take away my ability to escape him, just like he did to our mother.”
His gaze sharpened. “Your mother?”
I was still processing all of this. “She didn’t run away like everyone thought. He killed her. She was making some kind of arrangements to get us all away from him, but he caught her and killed her rather than let her go. Then he dumped her body in the ocean.”
No one had ever even looked because everybody had been so convinced she’d run. I’d be feeling the guilt of that for a long time to come.
The police chief still looked skeptical. “He told you that?”
“He was planning to kill me. He’s always hated me because I look the most like her. That’s why I was the one who was the most targeted by the abuse that you did nothing about.”
His eyes dropped for just a moment, as if he was embarrassed by his own lack of action. Or maybe that was just wishful thinking on my part.
“There’s no way to prove for sure what he said. It’s possible that he could have been making all of it up as another means of torturing me before he killed me himself. But it fits. It never made sense to me that our mother, who was well aware of his predilections and terrified of him, wouldn’t try to take us, too. That she’d never even try to contact us in all these years. The idea that she was selfish enough to do that was something that he planted after she was gone.”
And all along, she’d been a victim, too.
Shoving down the guilt and the grief, I took him through the rest of it.
“You were unconscious during the altercation between Hoyt and your father?”
“Yes.”
“So you didn’t see exactly how Hector went over the railing?”
“No. But I’ve been on the receiving end of his fists myself. I have every faith that whatever actions Hoyt took were entirely self-defense.”
Carson was silent for a long moment. “That’s all I’ve got for now. My department will be in touch if it turns out we need anything else.”
As he strode away, one of the firefighters stepped up. “We’re done with the house. Fire’s out. That room’s a damned mess, both from the flames and our suppression measures. But structurally, it’s probably fine. The fire didn’t have time to eat into the beams and studs. Everything’s gonna smell like smoke and gasoline, and there’ll be a lot of cleanup needed, but it could have been a lot worse.”
Hoyt stepped forward and took the other man’s hand, pulling him in for a back-thumping hug. “Thanks, Jamal. I appreciate y’all getting here so fast.”
