Never Tell (Detective D.D. Warren #10) - Lisa Gardner Page 0,39

articulate the words back then, but I understand them now. “Scandal. I don’t think my mom knows who or why my father was shot. But she didn’t want to risk the answer to those questions. Not if they might tarnish his legacy. You have to realize, my father is more than just a man to her. He is … everything.”

The sergeant eyes me skeptically. “So she threw her sixteen-year-old daughter under the bus rather than seek justice in her husband’s murder?” A pause. “Or rather than a risk an investigation into his possible suicide?”

I don’t have to answer that question. The sergeant is finally starting to understand. My mother’s true fear. The real reason I did what I did. Sometimes, the danger isn’t from outside, but from inside ourselves.

“Gonna blame your mom for your husband’s death, too,” the sergeant asks at last, “or this time did you finally get it right?”

I hesitate. I don’t want to. I think of my mother as crazy and manipulative, sure, but not homicidal. And yet the closet bursting with maternity wear, the fully stocked nursery … It’s almost as if she knew about today. Has been waiting all along.

“What did you think back then?” I ask the sergeant now.

“I thought you were scared. I thought you were in shock. And I thought, based on the physical evidence alone, that you did shoot him, but you were sorry about it.”

“And now?”

The detective shrugs. “Looking at your husband’s crime scene? I think you’re the shooter again. Except this time around, you’re not sorry about it.”

“It would be stupid math,” I say.

She gives me that look.

“Having been involved in a shooting before, to repeat the same equation … Stupid math.”

“Except the equation worked for you the first time.”

“You think so? Sixteen years of murmurs and whispers and innuendos. Sixteen years of loss, and I’m not even allowed to grieve, because supposedly, I’m the one who killed him?”

The sergeant doesn’t answer that right away, just continues to study me.

“Besides.” I speak more briskly. “I wouldn’t burn down my own house. I’ve now lost everything. My baby has lost everything. No mother would do that.”

The sergeant merely shrugs, gestures to our luxurious surroundings.

She leaves me no choice but to play the only card I have left. “I’ve lied for my mother. Made excuses, enabled her bad behavior, curtailed my own hopes and dreams just to make her happy. But I would never willingly move back in with her. And I would never happily grant her this much access to her first grandchild.”

“What are you trying to say?”

I shake my head. This time, I’m the one eyeing the doorway nervously. “I don’t know. But don’t you think it’s curious, a mere twenty-four hours later, how few choices I have left?”

Chapter 11

D.D.

“GET ANYTHING OUT OF HER?” Phil asked as they headed back to the car. They’d parked on the family’s driveway to get some distance from the reporters yammering on the sidewalk.

“She didn’t magically confess to killing her husband,” D.D. said as she slid into the passenger side. “But just to make things interesting, she changed her story about shooting her father sixteen years ago.”

Phil, firing the engine to life, stared at her. “What would be the point to that?”

“I don’t know. Maybe just to muddy the waters? Evie has to know one of the reasons she looks guilty in her husband’s death is that she already confessed to accidentally shooting her father. So rather than address her husband’s murder now, she’s recanting sixteen years ago.”

“No statute of limitations on murder,” Phil murmured. He twisted around, got to the business of backing down the driveway into the street without taking out any overly aggressive newspeople.

The days were short this time of year; the sun had set while they were inside the house, interviewing the family. Fortunately, the huge spotlights and the blaze of flashing media cameras helped light their way.

“So who shot her father?” Phil asked.

“Evie claims she doesn’t know. She and her mother walked into the scene. Her mother convinced her to take the blame, rather than risk an investigation that might tarnish the man’s ‘legacy.’ Still sounds fishy to me. Who discovers their loved one’s body and doesn’t immediately call nine-one-one? Opts for let’s play make-believe instead?”

“The mother’s scary,” Phil stated. He shuddered slightly.

“Really, because she seemed quite taken with you. A wealthy widow, and a rather well-preserved model at that.”

Phil gave her a look. D.D. already knew the score. Phil was madly in love with his childhood sweetheart