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“What family?” Hallie spat. “You, me, and Jana. Even though she was gone, we were still a family. You and me. We raised a child together, Mathias. We were all we had. Just us. Against the world.”
“What are you even talking about?” Mathias cried. “We were kids, Hallie. Foster kids. We did what we had to do to get by. It was never meant to be a permanent situation.”
Hallie’s fists clenched at her sides. “For you! You made it abundantly clear that it wasn’t meant to be permanent for you. As soon as Jana died, and you went and threw it all away. You broke up our family, Mathias. The only family any of us had ever known. Did you think I would just let that stand? I had to do something! I lost Jana and then you. I couldn’t—I couldn’t just pretend that it was all okay. I tried to get you back, but you drifted and pushed me away and then you met Piper. She didn’t even know you. Not really. She wasn’t right for you. I went over to your house to try to talk some sense into her, to let you go. She was a bitch, Mathias. She said horrible, ugly things to me. She got her gun out and told me to get out. Me! The only person who has always been there for you, no matter what. Your real family. Piper wanted you to be permanent inherlife, but what about me?” She pounded a fist into her own chest. “What about me?”
Josie was nearest the countertop. Mathias was between her and Hallie. Edging slowly toward the direction of the open cabinet, she positioned herself so that she was almost directly behind him. She could still see Hallie’s face, but Hallie couldn’t see her hands. Trying not to make any big movements, and moving as fast as her body would allow, she slid her cell phone from her pocket. She only needed a thumb to punch in her passcode and dial Noah’s number. As it began to ring, she turned the volume all the way down. She thought she heard him say hello as she slipped the phone back into her pocket. It was the same trick Anya had used.
Josie hoped it would work.
“Oh my God.” Mathias staggered backward, bumping against Josie’s body. She moved aside so he could lean against the counter. “You let me take the fall for that. You killed the woman I loved—my wife—and let me go to prison for it! Do you know what happened to me in prison?”
Hallie’s face morphed into an expression that was appropriately apologetic. “I’m sorry. I never intended for that to happen, but I worked hard every single day you were in there to try to find a firm that would help you get out. Then you did it yourself! It was fine. Everything turned out fine. Except for Keri. You had to start with her. Moving on. Trying to start a family. Afamily?”
Again, she slammed her fist into her own chest. “Iam your family, Mathias! But even after you got out of prison, you still didn’t get it, did you? So I knew I needed to do more. I tried to figure out where everything went wrong and I saw that the problems started when Jana was killed, and everyone thought that you did it. I had to make it right. I knew if I was able to solve her case and clear your name once and for all, you’d come home to me. I got in touch with Trinity Payne. She was going to do an episode. Everything was fine. Then Piper had to go and die. You know even though she died years after the shooting, the police could still say she died from her injuries, which would make it a homicide. I was worried the police would look at you again.”
Josie looked around the kitchen for anything she could use as a weapon, if it came to that. There was a full knife block only feet away but even angling her body toward it sent little pinpricks of pain pulsing through her. She cleared her throat. “But Hallie, Mathias was exonerated.”
Hallie rolled her eyes. “By Vance Hadlee. I don’t think a single person in this place ever believed that he was telling the truth. Besides, it wasn’t even the police suspecting you of murder that worried me. It was that this whole town would still believe you were a killer. No matter what. You would never come home to me if these things, these vicious rumors, were still out there. I had to make things the way they were before. When we were happy together.”
Mathias said, “So you killed an innocent girl?”
“Sharon Eddy,” Josie said, inching closer to the butcher’s block at the speed of molasses.
“Maybe she was innocent, Mathias, but her mother wasn’t! I knew it! I knew Carolina was lying all these years. I just never knew what she was lying about, or how to prove it. She deserved what she got.”
Mathias sagged against the countertop. “You killed Sharon Eddy to get back at her mom because you thought she was lying about what she saw the night Jana was killed?”
Hallie waved both fists in the air in time with her words. “Shewaslying! But that’s not the only reason I killed Sharon. She was exactly the same age as Jana was when she died. It’s like it was fate.”
“Hallie,” Mathias croaked. “My God. You sound crazy.”
Hallie took a step toward him, and he recoiled. Anger flared in her eyes. “No,” she said. “Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare look at me like that. Every single thing I’ve done has been for this family. For you!”
“No,” Mathias said.
Flynn emerged from the cabinet, sprinting over to Hallie, her little bell jangling. She rubbed her body against Hallie’s shins. “Yes!” Hallie said. “Mathias, I had to do something. Every day that went by you were slipping farther away from me. With Sharon Eddy, I could kill two birds with one stone—no pun intended.”
At her flip tone, Mathias and Josie flinched simultaneously.
She went on. “I got a job in records at the police department. It was the only way for me to access Jana’s file. To see what was there, to try to put together some kind of plan to win you back. You know what other case came in right around the time Jana was killed? The one with that doctor. Vance’s wife. He’dbrandedher. Like she was a cow or something. The photos were right there in the file. All I had to do was find a brand just like that, convince the girls to come here with me. That wasn’t hard. No one ever sees me as a threat.”
Hallie paused and gave a half-shrug. “Not until it’s too late, anyway. I had to make up a story to get them into the car. It was harder with Sharon. I used her mother, that druggie Carolina, as my excuse, except that Sharon didn’t care that much about Carolina. It took some convincing: Carolina on her deathbed, staying at my place, wanting to say goodbye and apologize for being a shitty mother. Keri was much easier. I told her you were hurt. She got right in. Getting them to turn off their phones was tricky. Sharon was dumb enough to believe her phone was messing with my car’s instrumentation.”
She laughed and shook her head. “Kids these days. So dumb. Keri turned hers off when I told her that you were at a location you didn’t want traced. She knew you were paranoid after everything you’d been through, so eventually she went along with it. Once they were here, I hit them over the head. If that didn’t work, I dropped a little Benadryl into their coffee. Then I used the fireplace to make the mark. Sharon was easy. Keri gave me a very hard time.” Her face darkened. “She really wasn’t right for you.”
Mathias looked as though he might collapse. “Hallie, this is—how could you—”
Josie kept her eyes locked on Hallie’s face while she reached behind her and slowly pulled a knife from the block. Hallie never even noticed. Her attention was fully focused on Mathias.
She took another step closer to him. Flynn scuttled behind her legs. “It was easy, Mathias. Literally no one ever suspected me. I just had to make sure they were really dead. I lost the most sleep over Garrick. I was really afraid he might make it, or you might be there and catch me, but he was the easiest of them all. I drove up the north side of that mountain. I was going to park near his property and walk, and then the road was closed anyway. It’s like it was meant to be! No one would ever see my car there because no one would be using that road. I was sneaking back past his mailbox when I saw headlights coming from the south. He didn’t even put up a fight. Just a sad old drunk.”
“But why?” Mathias said. “Why Garrick? He didn’t do anything.”
Josie kept the knife clutched in her hand, behind her back, and started to inch back toward Mathias.
Hallie’s nostrils flared. “You stayed with him instead of me! You chose him over me! Even with Keri gone, you went to him. Before she died, Keri told me about him. How he was your father and you’d been staying with him—not just with her. When the police weren’t able to find you—and I knew they couldn’t find you because they kept asking me if I knew where you might be—I was certain that’s where you had gone. Once again, you chose someone else over me. Over us!”
Josie was close enough to Mathias now that their arms were nearly touching. She wondered if there was a way to quietly slip him the knife. She wasn’t sure she could defend him against a physical attack in her current state. She wondered if Noah was hearing all of this, if he’d had someone else call Cyrus, if the Bly police were on their way.
