Page 64 of Bad Intentions

Silence burns between us. There are too many but’s and or’s. And we are already pulling onto a familiar street several blocks away from my grandmother’s.

Rika turns off the headlights as she drives.

“Why?” I ask.

“Not to attract attention, Boots.”

“Where are we going?”

“Patience. Almost there.”

She pulls into one of the back streets, between two rows of houses. I know this street, though I’m not sure which house it is. It’s hard to tell in the dark.

She stops the car by a shed, then turns off the interior lights so they don’t come on when we open our doors. We get out of the car in silence, walk to the trunk, and wait.

Only seconds later, a shadow detaches from the house.

I squint in the dark, trying to see who it is. Rika’s grandmother? How did I not know that she had a grandmother in Burnville?

The woman turns on the flashlight in her hand. When she gets close and stops in front of us, my jaw drops.

“Hey, Nana,” Rika says.

I can’t help staring. It’s Mrs. Snickett.

35

KAREN

The two girls sat in Alysha’s bedroom, curled up on the bed as I stood in the doorway, catching their glances from under their eyebrows.

It was too late to scold them. Too late to preach. It was time to correct the mistakes, if that was still possible. I needed to get rid of the hammer, of their bloodied clothes. The body at my bar was the priority, and that was another crime about to happen. But these were our children, and we had to protect them.

I still didn’t have the answers I needed. Maybe I had to give the girls time to think it over.

I’d taken their mobiles away, checked the messages. Identical messages on both their phones at 2:20 a.m.

Dougie: your boy derek is in trouble. come to shirley’s right now. or i tell the police what he did with his wife

Nothing made sense. The girls said Dougie was dead when they’d gotten to the bar. Had Derek been at the bar with Dougie? Maybe. Had Dougie been blackmailing him? Possibly. Had he wanted to run Derek out of town? Definitely. He’d already had a bad run-in with Derek when Derek had pulled a gun on him, threatened him. This was clearly Derek’s doing, and the girls were innocent. But that wasn’t how it looked, how it would look to the police.

I needed to get rid of the body, move it, point the clues in a different direction.

The sound of the front door screeching made me stir. I closed the door to Alysha’s room and went to the kitchen, where Donna stood waiting for me.

“What happened?” she asked.

When I told her, she sank into the kitchen chair. “Can’t be.”

I stared blankly at her. “His body is on the floor of Ma Shirley’s. It needs to be moved.”

“They couldn’t…” She raised her horrified eyes at me. “Could they?”

We were talking about our girls. Of course they weren’t monsters. They weren’t criminals. They weren’t capable. But here’s a thing about crime—sometimes it’s not a matter of being capable but making a wrong move at the wrong time, and suddenly your life was spinning out of control.

“It’s him,” Donna said. “It’s Derek. You know it, K. It’s his doing.”

“But he was home. We saw him get home.”