Never Tell (Detective D.D. Warren #10) - Lisa Gardner Page 0,127

a huddle of students, leaping over a bench.

I land wrong, my right foot sliding out on the slushy ground. My shoulder hits hard, and briefly, I lose my breath.

“Are you okay?” someone asks.

Another: “What happened?”

I just shake my head, stagger to my feet, and take off again. Except I no longer see my target. Maybe there, around that corner. Wait, that coffee shop. That entrance to the subway.

I rattle down the steps as fast as I can, but belowground, on the waiting platform, I encounter a sheer wall of people. Heavy coats, obscuring hats, strangling scarfs.

I look all around, but it doesn’t matter.

I’ve lost him.

Chapter 37

EVIE

WHEN I FIRST ARRIVE AT my mother’s house and discover the media gone, I’m nearly disoriented. Where are the flashing bulbs, the screaming questions? Three days later, the silence is almost disturbing. What did I do to deserve this?

Then I remember the fire trucks in Harvard Square. Of course, a local fire. The media have moved on to bigger news. How kind of them.

I walked home from my meeting with Katarina. Only a mile and a half, and the kind of brisk trek I needed to put my thoughts in order. Still, when I reach the side door of the kitchen, place my hand on the knob, I can see my gloved hand is shaking.

All these years. All these years I considered my parents a great love story. And now this? My father had been cheating on my mom. Worse, she had known about it, and probably taken extreme measures to secure her own future.

Is that how she’s lived in this house all these years? Because coming home that day to my father’s body wasn’t some terrible, shocking tragedy? Just a well-executed plan? That she then conned her own daughter to take the blame for?

I feel like such a fool. I’ve spent most of my life as nothing but a pawn for my mother. I was never strong or clever enough to have helped my father. Then I went on to marry a man who also kept me entirely in the dark.

All these years, I thought I was the one carrying around secrets. Instead, it’s the people I love who’ve never trusted me with the truth. Who’ve manipulated me, over and over again.

I open the door and march right in.

My mother isn’t in the kitchen. The vodka bottle is out, though, a fresh lemon peeled on the cutting board, meaning she couldn’t have gone far. I pull off my gloves, hang up my coat, begin the search.

The sitting room with the impeccably decorated mantel: nothing. The ridiculous parlor with all its silk sofas: not there either.

Then I know.

I walk to my father’s office. My mother is sitting, quiet and still, behind his desk. To judge by the empty state of her martini glass, she’s been there a bit.

And she looks, at this moment, so small, so lost, so alone in the world, I lose my head of steam, just like that.

“This is where I feel him the most,” she says quietly, not looking at me, but clearly knowing I’m in the doorway. “It’s why I could never bring myself to change it. The kitchen was mine. But this room … Sometimes, I swear I can still smell him, his aftershave, the whiff of chalk from his fingers, the shampoo I bought him from Italy because it really did help thicken his hair. He swore only I cared about things like that, yet he smiled every time I got him a new bottle. Silly, all the ways we knew each other. Awful, to still miss him so much after all these years.”

“You had him killed.”

She finally glances up. Her expression is unfathomably sad. Again, not my mother at all. “What are you talking about?”

“Stop lying to me! I spoke to Katarina Ivanova.”

Just like that, she deflates. “I was stupid,” she mutters at last. “Vain and silly and upset. Your father knew that about me. He understood.”

“Understood what? That given a choice between him leaving you and him dead, you wanted him dead?”

“I didn’t want him dead. I loved him! It was her. She was the problem. She needed to go!”

I’m so confused it takes me a moment. Then I get it. The whole if I can’t have him, no one will didn’t necessarily mean my mom had gone after my father, but after Katarina, the other woman. Who, being dead, still wouldn’t have him.

“You hired someone to kill Katarina Ivanova? You tried to take out Dad’s