“Yeah?”
“I’m sorry if I offended you. It’s just a theory.”
His face softened. “I understand,” he said. “I just know Sky better than you do.”
“That’s right,” I said. “You do.”
He got out of the car, moved to the tank. My phone rang. I looked at the screen.Dad. I answered it.
“I remembered!” he said.
“What?”
“You told me to call when I remembered what Maurice Dupree took from the evidence locker. The thing that got him kicked off the force.”
“Right,” I said quietly, my eyes on Maurice at the tank, sticking his card in the slot, then removing it. Plucking his phone out of his pocket and putting it to his ear. “What was it?”
“You’re never going to believe this, because…Man, he’s a good guy. But what a dumb thing to do.”
Maurice ended whatever short call he’d made and dropped the phone back in his pocket. Then he began filling the tank.
“What was it, Dad?”
“It was a compact,” he said. “A ladies’ compact made from Bakelite, I think. It was some relic from the forties. But the thing about it was, it was monogrammed. Same initials as his mistress.SF.I even remember her name. Seraphina Farley.Reminded me of a Dickens character. No one else would have taken it but Maurice. No one else had a girlfriend or a wife with those initials.”
My mouth went dry. I stared at Maurice, leaning against the car.
“Of course, he got bumped off the force for that. But a lot of the guys were sad. They kept in touch with him. Last I’d heard, he’d gotten the mistress pregnant. He was offered a job in security at one of those casinos in Connecticut, so he relocated his family there. But sometimes he’d tell his wife he was going to a conference in Massachusetts, just so he could visit the mistress and the baby. Sweet guy. Tried to do right by people. But, boy, what a messy life.” He chuckled. “I don’t think his wife ever found out.”
My heart pounded. I said, “Call Lee Farrell, Dad. The Dunes. Marblehead.”
“Wait, what, Sunny?” he said.
But I couldn’t answer. I could only stare at Maurice, who had opened the passenger-side door. He was holding a gun. I wasn’t positive, but it looked a lot like the gun Dylan had held on me back in July. Dylan’s gun, taken from his apartment by Elspeth. Picked up by either Sky or Maurice, used to kill Trevor and shoot Sky. Maurice looked so much more comfortable holding it than Dylan had looked.
Maurice, Sky’s father.
I could hear my dad asking what was going on as I ended the call, but all I could think of were those two pictures on Sky’s desk—the old one of her pregnant mother, and the one ofher work friends in the Common.She framed that photo because of Maurice. Those were framed pictures of her parents.I put my hands up. Maurice grabbed my phone, turned off the power, and tossed it into the trash can that stood between the pumps. It came to me then—that last question, answered.
“She trusted you. You knew where to aim,” I whispered. “You’re the one who shot Sky.”
Maurice raised the gun, pressing the cold barrel against my forehead. “Get out of the car,” he said.
Forty-Three
Maurice told me I would be driving the rest of the way there. I complied. It occurred to me that this was the first time during the whole ride that Maurice had told me what to do. From the initial plan to come here together to the bottle of water I’d been drinking from, he’d made me feel as though everything we did had been my idea. It was masterly, really. Manipulation skills clearly ran in that family.
My heart thudded against my ribs. I wanted to listen to Willie Nelson again, just to calm my jangling nerves, but I didn’t want to anger Maurice with a request. He didn’t seem to want the music on. He preferred talking instead.
“Sky was the one who looked me up. You know that?” he said. “I hadn’t seen her since her mother died, and she was justa little kid then. I get this call from her, at the casino where I was working. About three years ago. She remembered this one day when I took her here. Well, not here. But Marblehead. She remembered walking along the beach with me. How I bought her a vanilla soft-serve ice cream with rainbow sprinkles, and I told her she was the brightest and toughest little girl in the world—bright and tough like a diamond. See, I don’t remember that at all. But she did. Sky remembered it. She said she’s aimed to be a diamond ever since.”
He jabbed the gun into my ribs. “Make a left,” he said.
I did as I was told. “You were a good father to her,” I said. “She remembered.”
“No, I wasn’t,” he said. “That isn’t the point of the story at all. The point is, she’s a gooddaughter. She’s grateful and kind, and when she had a chance to call me, she did—even though I’m still married and my wife and other kids don’t know about her, other than her being my boss. She worked around my life to bring me into hers, just because I gave her that one nice day a million years ago.”
I nodded. Thinking about it, I was sure there were other, shrewder reasons—leverage, for instance. I was willing to bet that even if he hadn’t bought an ice cream for his little diamond of a daughter, Sky knew that Maurice would do anything for her now—so long as she didn’t tell his wife about their family ties. “My other kids, they’re nowhere near as grateful as she is,” Maurice said. He told me to take a right, and I did. We drove down a desolate beach road to The Dunes,which was just as Maurice had described it—a crumbling mess of a motel that almost looked abandoned, save for three beat-up cars in the lot. A light on in one of the dirty windows.A pit.
