Page 67 of The Life She Had

Blood. Opossums are like raccoons. They’ll eat anything, including scavenging kills. That’s what I’ve stumbled on. A feeding opossum.

I take one step back. Then I see the shoe. A white sneaker, glowing in the evening gloom.

My heart thuds anew, and I freeze, swallowing. I square my shoulders and lunge at the opossum, making enough noise that it tears off up a tree, chittering in fury.

I take a step toward the shoe. Two more steps and... My heart rate slows. It’s just a shoe. Mud stained and grimy and left in the wetlands.

I start to turn away... and see what looks like a second shoe. I squint and... my breath catches.

Not a shoe.

I hurry toward the pale thing lying on the dark ground. With every step, its shape becomes clearer, erasing doubt until I am there, standing over an outstretched hand. A hand attached to a body. A body with one white sneaker and a robin’s-egg-blue shirt stained with blood where the opossum had been feasting. Most of the blood is on the face, though. Or what’s left of the face. A crater where the left eye should have been, a bloody hole now crawling with insects.

I see that shirt, and I see Liam last night wearing a shirt that brought out his eyes, and I’d imagined some cute salesclerk telling him exactly that. He’d been wearing jeans, pressed and new. His white sneakers had been spotless, and I’d inwardly rolled my eyes at that, too. Middle-aged guy trying to dress down in pressed jeans and sneakers that he probably replaced if they got a speck of dirt on them.

I look at that one shoe, as muddy as the discarded one. I look at the jeans and the shirt, and still I tell myself I am not seeing what I’m seeing. Not seeing who I’m seeing.

Because those shoes are filthy. Liam would not allow them to get filthy.

Then I remember us the night before, me walking into a stand of trees behind the house, and Liam hesitating at the edge.

“Yes, you’re going to get your shoes dirty,” I’d said. “But I’m not taking the chance of your girlfriend looking out and seeing us.” I’d waved at her dark bedroom window and kept walking... and he’d followed.

My gaze moves to that ruined face. I want to tell myself it’s not Liam. Classic movie twist, right? So tried-and-true that the moment an audience sees someone shot in the face, they know it’s a trick.

This is too clean of a setup. First, no one is answering his phone. Then I find that phone in my room. Next, I find his abandoned vehicle, and as I’m running to get help, I stumble over a body that I’m supposed to think is his. Shot in the face so I can only ID him based on his clothing.

Except this isn’t a movie. And it’s not a shotgun blast obliterating Liam’s features. Only one eye is destroyed, the rest intact and leaving no doubt of whom I am looking at.

I sway, and my stomach lurches, but before I can follow through on that classic move—dropping to my knees and retching beside the remains—another emotion seizes me. Terror. Blind and absolute terror, caught in a cyclone of panic.

Liam is dead.

Holy shit, Liam is dead, and I found his SUV, and I found his body, and I have his cell phone, hidden in my room, and he is dead. Murdered.

I run. I don’t even realize I’m moving until vines catch my feet and my shoes slide and slosh in mud, and somehow, I don’t fall flat on my face. I’m running blind, shoving aside anything in my path as panic tightens around my heart, as my brain shuts down in the grip of cold fear.

I thought I was clever. So damned clever. I would not take a chance on Celeste escaping. If she murdered my grandmother, she would pay, with no opportunity to slide into the shadows and disappear unscathed. I bided my time and got mixed up in something bigger than my own personal drama.

Now my footprints are all around her murdered boyfriend, who I had a confrontation with last night. He’s been shot in the head, and I legally own a gun, a gun someone took from the shed.

My prints are all around his body. My footprints circle his abandoned vehicle. My fingerprints are on the door handle.

I think I am running to the house. To Celeste and a phone and oh my God, I just found... just found... We need to call the police. Now.

That makes sense. Get help now, while those prints are fresh, proving my story. Get help from Celeste, who will see my panic and tell the police how freaked out I was, exactly like a woman who just stumbled over a corpse. Not like a killer who pretended to find her victim.

I run, and I run, and when I see where I end up, there is only a flicker of “What the hell?” before I realize I was running here all along. May even have been running in this direction before I found Liam’s SUV.

I’m in an open field. Ahead, there’s a crossroads, and on the nearest corner squats a building, as ugly as they come, but in this moment, it is as beautiful as an oasis.

I race to the back door and grab the knob as if it will open, forgetting that only two days ago, I made sure it would not. I run around, stumbling through gravel until I reach the store at the front. It’s closed. Of course it’s closed. It doesn’t stay open past six, even on Saturday nights.

I step back and stare at the building. There’s a door to the store and a big garage door to the shop and then the one around back I just tried. I had a glimpse at Tom’s loft apartment as we passed through to the roof, so I know he lives here, but I have no idea how to summon him. There’s no bell on any of the doors. I don’t have a phone—or know his number. There aren’t any second-floor windows, which is a code violation, but no one out here cares. The only window I find is the store one, and it’s barred.

I remember the makeshift patio and Tom saying he likes to lie out there as the sun sets. I spin and see the sky, almost dark, only a hint of red to the west.

I tear around the back. “Tom! Tom, are you up there?”

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