“Oh piss off, Connie, with your perfect marriage and your perfect kids and your charitable foundation. You make me sick. Always judging everything.”
Josie and Gretchen stood, brushing the mud from their jeans, positioning themselves closer to Connie in case she tried to knock Marisol into the water again. Josie tried to ignore the pain in her thigh.
Hysterical laughter bubbled up from Connie’s throat. “Me? Judging you? You gave your kid up. You covered up her murder! You slept with Silas.”
“You slept with Silas too.”
Connie shook her head as if to shake off the accusation. “You did all this and then you used my foundation to keep up the lie. That could ruin our lives if it gets out!”
Marisol heaved herself to her feet. “You’re the one talking about going to the police. Well, here we are! With the police.”
“You’re a criminal, Mar. You could have left Kurt decades ago. Instead, you let him take advantage of girl after girl. You let him beat you. You let him sleep with your own daughter!”
“I didn’t let him beat me. Jeez, Connie. Here you go again, judging the rest of us through the lens of your perfect, easy life. You think it’s a simple thing to divorce someone who has nearly killed you on more than one occasion? And for your information, I didn’t let Kurt sleep with Beverly!” Marisol shouted. “It just happened, and I confronted him. I never told him who she was or how I even knew her. I just said I’d seen them together and that I’d followed her and found out she was a high school student. We had the fight to end all fights. He broke my wrist. I knew he wasn’t going to stop seeing her and the whole thing was just too gross—”
Connie said, “So you drank until you forgot about it?”
“No, I asked Vera to intervene, to talk to Beverly.”
“But Beverly was already furious with Vera, resentful,” Josie cut in. “She thought Vera was hiding her father’s identity from her.”
“Well, she was,” Marisol said. “But yeah, Beverly wasn’t about to listen. Then she got pregnant. Vera and I were trying to figure out what to do. I knew that Kurt would not want that baby. He never wanted children. I knew it would end in disaster. We didn’t know what to do and then he killed her. Vera ran off. She came to me. She was terrified and upset. A complete mess. She wanted to go to the police.”
“But you convinced her not to.”
“I couldn’t risk it. What if my secret came out?”
“Vera had brought Beverly up as her own daughter,” Josie said. “She just went along with it?”
“Not at first,” Marisol said. “It took a lot of convincing to get her to go along with my plan, but she did. I told her that Kurt would kill us both if we tried going to the police—or if she went to the police without me, he’d bury her, literally and figuratively. I offered her a life of luxury. All she had to do was shut up, take my money, sit on her ass with her cat, and watch TV.”
“Until Beverly’s body was found.”
Marisol said, “We never knew what he did with it. When Vera saw it on the news, she came back. She took an Uber or something. Showed up on my doorstep. I don’t know what she was thinking.”
“She was thinking that it was time to do the right thing.”
“And Kurt killed her for it,” Marisol said.
“No,” Josie said. “He didn’t. He had no idea she was even still alive. He never even knew she’d witnessed the murder. She didn’t come to him and tell him she would finally come clean. She came to you, and she said she was going to talk. Tell the police everything. Every last detail.”
Connie whimpered. “You killed Vera?”
Marisol turned back to her friend and stared at her for a long beat. From the corner of her eye, Josie saw Marisol’s hands disappear into her jacket pockets again.
“Marisol, stop!” Gretchen cried, but it was too late.
Her right hand pulled a pistol from her pocket. Before she even pointed it at Connie, Josie had her own weapon unholstered and aimed at Marisol’s chest. Gretchen stepped up beside Josie. She, too, had her weapon trained on Marisol.
“Stop,” Josie told her. “Don’t move.”
Marisol took a single half-step toward Connie and pressed the barrel of the gun into Connie’s forehead. Connie’s voice was high and squeaky, almost incredulous, as if