“Yeah, thought it was probably nothing.” A few more shovelfuls of dirt, though, and I still can’t let it go. “It’s just… Steffani suggested something similar.”
She hesitates—only for a single heartbeat, but I notice. “You talked to Steffani?”
“She claimed you knew all along that your dad was a murderer.”
“Please.”
Not a denial. It’d be unsettling if both of them concluded the same thing, on the same night, only to disappear immediately after.
She digs in once more, except this time, the blade knocks against a rock lodged in the ground. “There you go,” she says, reaching for the pickaxe. “That’s what happens when you get down into the subsoil, all kinds of obstructions. Move back.” The pickaxe glistens above her head, then crashes down—again and again, until the rock’s nothing but dust and debris.
I have to ask: “Didyou know?”
“What, about my dad?”
I nod.
“No, I didn’t. Didyou?”
“Did I what?”
“Know your dad was a murderer?”
“No!” I’m so dumbstruck by the question, I can’t help stumbling over my answer. “No, god, fuck, of course not. You were there. If I’d known what he was, why would I have agreed to help with the show?”
She wipes the sweat off her forehead with her T-shirt. “Why do you thinkhedid?”
“What?”
“Your dad. Why do you think he agreed to be on the show? Why invite me over for dinner? He knew what was buried in the walls, and yet he let me use that upstairs bathroom every time I visited. You’d think a man with something to hide would lock that shit down, but not your dad. He welcomed me in.”
I’ve asked myself that same question time and time again, and have never come up with a satisfactory answer. I offer her the only one that makes any sense. “The case had gone unsolved for twenty years. The police never even brought him in for questioning. I don’t think it ever occurred to him that he might actually get caught.”
“So, what? He let me loose in your house to prove he was unstoppable?”
That suggestion, that my father risked everything just so he could prove how clever he was, feels like a slap across the face. He knew what would happen if he were caught—that my job might be ripped away, and that with our house mortgaged to the hilt, there was no safety net waiting to catch me. He never would’ve gambled with my life like that.
“I think he was trying not to look suspicious. If he invited you over, then that meant he had nothing to hide. And because you always talked about new developments in the case, he felt like he could stay one step ahead.”
Feltbeing the key word. We were both blindsided the night the police banged down our door. Greer had managed to gather all the evidence they’d need for an arrest without us even realizing.
“What made you suspect him?” I ask.
She stoops down, measures the wall using her forearm. “Just a feeling.” The way she refuses to look at me, I’ve never been more certain there’s something she’s not saying. She chucks the tools over the edge and crawls out. “That’s deep enough.”
I glance over at Zach’s blanket-covered body.
“We don’t need to take it off him,” she reassures me. “All we need to do is roll him in.”
She takes his head; I take his feet. We only need half a roll to tip him into the grave. He pitches in face-first with a thud that makes me wince.
“Do you want to say something? I noticed you didn’t during the funeral.”
She regards the shadowy grave. “Okay,” she finally says. “Okay. Zach was a good guy. He was quick to laugh, even though life kept repeatedly nailing him in the balls. The first time I met him, he told me I looked better in TV interviews, which cracked me up and is probably true. He was brutally honest. I liked that about him.”
She clears her throat, then blinks a few times, as if to dry up the tears.
“Okay, I think that’s enough.” She picks up her shovel.
