Page 70 of Bad Intentions

Derek Sickler was still nowhere to be found, but I knew he hadn’t left town right away. He’d had to have the final say, hit low, with a gut punch.

I was outside my house the next day, getting in my car, when I saw him drive by. His Ford slowed down as it passed my house, and I saw his smug face, staring right at me. I swear on my mother’s grave, he was smiling. Slowly, he raised his hand and waved at me.

Before I knew it, he gunned the engine and was gone.

A day later, Steve knocked on my door, two men in civilian clothes with him.

“These are the fire investigators,” he said grimly. “They say it was arson. They claim insurance fraud. Sorry, K.”

He hadn’t called before coming here, hadn’t alerted me. He would’ve, I know. He would’ve moved mountains for me. This must’ve been a surprise even to him.

In the shed behind my house, they found the slightly charred-at-the-nozzle canisters of gas. That was insurance fraud, indeed. It wouldn’t be that bad if that were how I’d done it. If I’d done it. But I hadn’t. And I never kept those things at the house. Those canisters belonged in the bar.

Derek had started this mess, ruined my family, and put me in prison for almost a year for insurance fraud. And then some.

I wish I’d run him over with a car when I met him. I wish Dougie had broken his bones the first day he’d shown up in town. At least then, Dougie would’ve been alive and so would my Alysha. Because no doubt in my mind, Derek Sickler was the cause of what she did years later.

There are so many ways we rewind the time to before the tragedies, create alternative scenarios, reworking the past, pushing the narrative in different directions, only to come back to the present and face the same scenario.

I’ve done plenty of that.

And now, here we are. In the grimmest way, I have a devastating feeling that history is repeating itself.

38

JOSIE

Newspaper clippings. Court records. Transcripts. A five-spread newspaper article about the trial.

My mind races through all the paperwork I’ve read in the folder Trevor has given me. There was no mention of Alysha or Victoria regarding the fire. They’d had a sleepover. They were never at the scene. There wasn’t enough evidence to charge my grandmother for the murder of Dougie Hartzel. There was no weapon found. She was trying to save Dougie. The crime scene was destroyed by the fire. The cameras had been disconnected prior to the accident. No motive either. Despite what many in town thought, the jury found Karen Boots not guilty. On the other hand, the bar fire was arson. The charred containers the investigators found in my grandmother’s shed were evidence. She wasn’t stupid enough to have kept those if, in fact, she had been responsible. But that wasn’t how the insurance investigators looked at it.

The result was a one-year sentence for insurance fraud with an aggravating factor, subsequently reduced by early release.

Not able to connect the dots, I stare at Rika. “What do you mean, she saved our moms?”

“My mom once told me that she and your mom were at the bar before the fire.”

“At the crime scene?”

“Uh-huh. She was drunk when she spilled the beans. Nana refused to talk about it. But I think our moms were involved.”

We sit for a while in silence, the TV humming upstairs. Mrs. Snickett’s house smells like a bachelor pad with a pinch of cinnamon, and though I usually don’t like cigarette smoke, her house is cozy. Maybe, except for the old rifle hanging on the wall. I assume it’s an antique.

“Did you grow up on the streets?” I finally ask Rika, trying to resume the conversation because she’s a lot quieter than usual, and I don’t like it.

She chuckles. “What, a wild guess? My record? Or observation?”

I shrug. “Just wondering?”

“I grew up in a fairly decent neighborhood in Miami. Next to the bad one. Trust me, there are a lot of cool things going on in bad neighborhoods besides all the bad stuff everyone talks about. More importantly, people are real there. They stick up for each other. You don’t learn to be tough by living in a golden cage.”

“I never lived in a golden cage,” I argue.

“I know that, Boots. I know a lot more about you than you think. My nana talked a lot about you and your grams.”

“Mine didn’t.”

“I know.”