“Do you know about Beth?” she asked.
“Yes, Kate,” he said, the smile completely gone. The moment rocked her. The horror of Beth’s death hit her again, seeing the grief in her father’s eyes.
“Murdered,” she said. “Just like Mom.”
“Who did it?” her father asked. “Her husband? I want to kill him, Kate. If he gets caught and winds up here, I will.”
“Your mind goes straight to that?” she asked. “That’s not how most people think.”
“It’s how fathers think,” he said.
She took that in and imagined how he must feel, trapped in here, unable to be with the family, to have protected any of them—to have put them in such danger. She had loved him so much. She wondered how he had lived through the last twenty-three years, knowing what he’d done to his daughters, to his wife.
“Tell me—do they think it’s Pete?” he asked.
“No one has been arrested.”
“I know, but you two were so close, and you have the best instincts. I don’t believe you don’t know—whether it’s been proven or not, you know in your gut. No one knew Beth better than you.”
“Actually, I think you knew her better.”
Her father sat back. She’d shocked him. “That’s not true,” he said.
“We weren’t close anymore. We haven’t been since the day Mom died.”
“Don’t say that.”
“It changed everything between us. We were never the same after that,” Kate said. She delivered the words like blows. She saw the pain in his face and didn’t care that she was being cruel.
“She talked about you every time she came here,” he said. “She told me about your job, all the famous people you flew, the places you visited. You always brought her presents. She told me about dinners you two had and what a great aunt you are to Samantha. How you and Lulu are still best friends. No, Katy, you’re wrong in what you’re telling me. She adored you as much as ever.”
Kate looked down. She hadn’t said that she and Beth didn’t love each other deeply. In fact, she thought they’d loved each other even more as time went on. But they’d been blocked by the trauma, a force field created by the violence of that day, impermeable to words. Each of them occupied her own dark solitude; feelings could break through, but language couldn’t.
“I don’t know if it was Pete,” Kate said, thinking of what Lulu had said.
“Then who?”
“Who is Jed Hilliard?”
“Jed?” her father asked, looking confused. “The kid who was here?”
“Kid?” Kate asked.
“Well, to me. Thirty, thirty-one, something like that last time I saw him. The artist.”
“Yes, an artist.”
“Why? What does he have to do with Beth?”
“She met him here.”
“Yes, but they barely knew each other. He’s a good artist; he has a fine eye. I told him if I still had the gallery, I’d give him a show.”
“Is that why you introduced them? So she could exhibit his work?”
Her father paused. His gaze sharpened, a terrifying look entered his eyes, and for the first time she saw the deep change in him—not just age, but the darkness of life in prison.
“No. Definitely not. But I was proud of her,” he said. “I was being a big shot, letting him know I used to be someone, that my daughter was a star in the art world. Are you sayinghekilled her?”
