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“If you want, I can go ask the neighbor if he can spare a bottle for you,” Jacob offered in a trembling voice.
“Uh-huh, you do that, son,” their father replied, staring at Kathy and licking his lips, his eyes bloodshot and lustful. “I bet this young thing won’t say no to me,” he said, his clumsy fingers struggling to get his belt buckle undone. “Kathy, pretty Kathy, my sweet Kathy, Daddy really loves you,” he said in a singsong voice ending in a coughing spell. “Come on over here, Kathy, love your daddy back.”
Kathy stared at him with wide eyes, not sure where to run. Pearl moaned but managed to stand again, holding on to Kathy for support, then shielding her daughter with her weakened, aching body.
“It’s your own daughter, Gavin, your own flesh and blood,” she pleaded. “Don’t you touch her.”
Gavin unzipped his pants, his mind seemingly made up, and took two steps toward Kathy, but Pearl pushed the girl out of the way and stood in front of him, trembling.
“Here, take me,” she offered, undoing the top button of her shirt with hesitant fingers.
He shoved her to the side and reached for his child, mumbling words that Kathy didn’t understand. Letting out a short scream, Kathy bolted and found refuge on the other side of the room, by the dresser, where she desperately looked for something to use as a weapon, fear rendering her fingers weak, quivering, useless.
Kathy turned her eyes briefly away from him, going through the drawers as quickly as she could when she heard a commotion. In the corner of her eye, she saw her mother hit her father in the head with a frying pan.
He barely flinched.
He let out a raspy roar of laughter, and then, as if incited by Pearl’s actions, he lunged toward the kitchen where she’d taken refuge by the counter and hit her hard, sending her tumbling to the ground. Then he turned and grabbed the largest knife from the block and raised his arm, ready to deliver a fatal blow.
“I will end you, scum of this earth,” he bellowed.
“No,” Kathy shouted, her hands going through the top drawer in a trembling rush and finding the pistol she knew he kept there.
She fired just as Jacob had charged with his baseball bat, the bullet barely missing her little brother. Horrified, she screamed but then saw Jacob backing away from the line of fire, the bat clattering as it fell from his hands. He was still standing, unharmed.
Her father groaned, the knife still in his hand, coming down forcefully toward Pearl’s chest.
She pulled the trigger again.
Reliving the moment, Kay gasped as if the gunshot tore through flesh and bone instead of memory, startling her.
She leaned against the counter, staring at the floor where her father’s body had fallen that day. Her mind was playing tricks on her, overlapping memories over reality, the old bloodstains on the linoleum covered in drywall dust and drops of paint primer.
Gavin Sharp was dead.
Yet his name was back to haunt her, to bring back the memory of her drunken, abusive father in the minds of local law enforcement after it had taken them so many years to forget. How would she survive their questions, their legitimate curiosity? How would she keep on lying to Elliot?
The secret she’d been guarding for years was threatening to come out and ruin hers and Jacob’s lives, in a wicked twist of fate she couldn’t explain.
And somewhere out there lurked a fifty-six-year-old predator named Gavin Sharp who had met with Jenna days before she was killed.
NINETEEN
ARGUMENT
After spending Wednesday night on the Winter Lodge restaurant patio curled up in a ball on one of the lounge chairs with his teeth clattering, Richard had earned himself a stuffy nose and a cough. With the Jeep’s hardtop back at the house, and the seats that didn’t recline more than a couple of inches, he didn’t have any choice but to seek shelter on the restaurant’s covered patio.
His clothes smelled of something acrid mixed in with his sweat. It was strange he’d broken a sweat despite feeling so cold overnight; it must’ve been the sniffles. He didn’t believe spending any amount of time in the cold gave people colds. No. The cold gave them exposure if the temperature was below freezing. He must’ve come close to someone who was sick in the past few days. That someone and his shitty luck were to blame for the crappy way he was feeling.
At first light, when he was forced to hightail it out of there before the restaurant staff showed up, he was tempted to drive by his house for a hot shower and some fresh clothes. But the thought of running into that bitch and enduring through her screams seemed more than he was willing to put up with after a night spent in the cold and on an empty stomach. He didn’t trust himself in her presence. Not anymore.
Instead, he’d parked his butt on an old tree stump at the base of the chairlift, where the early sun touched the ground, and lit up a cigarette, then a second one. The craze with electronic cigarettes and cinnamon-flavored nicotine vaping hadn’t taken with him. There was no substitute for the fine smell of tobacco when the lighter’s flame hits it for the first time. Vaping was to smoking what masturbation was to sex. It got you there, but not really.
In the weak rays of the early morning sun, he’d debated whether to go to school or take the day off. He’d quickly fall asleep on that grassy meadow, as soon as it got a little warmer. The thought of that was tempting, but he was a rational and controlled person who liked to think before he acted. He’d sleep there, then what? He needed money, food, and a place to lay down his head at night. He wasn’t ready to be homeless any more than he was willing to forfeit his future paycheck as a lawyer for California’s richest scum just because his father was spineless, and his mother a vindictive bitch.
He’d showed up on time for class, dirty and disheveled, with bits of straw hanging from his clothes and hair. His Jeep needed gas, and his stomach was growling. His wallet was empty, except for a couple of dollar bills that couldn’t buy him much. Rennie turned his packed lunch into Richard’s breakfast and watched it being gobbled quickly with large gulps when the first-period teacher wasn’t looking.
Richard wasn’t thirty minutes into the first period when his mother started texting him.
