people. It’s very important, Mom. You have to get her to click on the link, but don’t look at what she sees.”
Helen was obviously scared, but she didn’t say anything else but, “Claire.”
“Don’t trust Huckleberry. He lied to you about Julia.”
“I saw what was on the tape.” Helen paused before continuing. “That’s why I never wanted you to see it, because I saw it myself.”
Claire didn’t think she was capable of feeling any more pain. “How?”
“I was the one who found your father.” She stopped for a moment. The memory was clearly difficult. “He was in his chair. The TV was on. The remote control was in his hand. I wanted to see what he’d been looking at and—”
She stopped again.
They both knew the last images that Sam Carroll had seen. Only Claire guessed that her husband had been the one to show it to him. Had that been the last straw that led her father to take his own life? Or had Paul helped him with that, too?
Helen said, “It was a long time ago, and the man who did it is dead.”
Claire opened her mouth to say otherwise, but her mother would know everything when she opened the email. “Does it help? Knowing he’s dead?”
Helen didn’t answer. She had always been against the death penalty, but something told Claire her mother had no problem with someone other than the government putting to death the man she believed had killed her daughter.
Claire said, “Just don’t go to Huckleberry, okay? You’ll understand later. I need you to trust me. He’s not a good man.”
“Sweetpea, I’ve been trusting you all day. I’m not going to stop now.”
Again, Claire thought about Dee. Helen was a grandmother. She deserved to know. But Claire knew it wasn’t just a matter of telling her mother. Helen would want details. She would want to meet Dee, talk to her, touch her, hold her. She would want to know why Claire was keeping them apart. And then she would start asking about Lydia.
“Honey?” Helen asked. “Is there something else?”
“I love you, Mom.”
“I love you, too.”
Claire flipped the phone closed. She tossed it onto the seat beside her. She grabbed the wheel with both hands. She looked at the clock on the dashboard and she gave herself one full minute to let out the grief and despair that she hadn’t had the wherewithal to express at her father’s funeral.
“Okay,” she told herself. “Okay.”
The grief would help her. It would give her the strength she needed to do what she had to do. She was going to kill Paul for showing her father the tape of Julia. She was going to kill him for what he’d done to them all.
Rain pelted the windshield, almost blinding her, but she kept driving because the only thing she had on Paul was the element of surprise. Exactly how that surprise would play out was still a mystery. Claire had the gun. She had hollow-point bullets that could tear a man in half.
She remembered that long-ago day that she’d taken Paul shooting. The first thing the rangemaster had said was that you should never point a weapon at another person unless you were willing to pull the trigger.
Claire was more than willing to pull the trigger. She just didn’t know how she was going to find the opportunity to do it. There was a chance she could get to the Fuller house ahead of Paul. She could park her mother’s car in the stand of trees beside the house and walk on foot to the back door. There were several places she could lie in wait: in one of the bedrooms, in the hallway, in the garage.
Unless he was already there. Unless he was lying to her again and he’d been there this whole time.
She had assumed he had another house, but maybe the Fuller house was the only house Paul needed. Her husband liked for everything to stay the same. He was a slave to routine. He used the same bowl for breakfast, the same coffee cup. He would wear the same style black suit every day if Claire let him. He needed structure. He needed familiarity.
There was a chiming sound coming from the dashboard. Claire had no idea what the noise meant. She slowed her mother’s car. She couldn’t have the engine stall on her. She frantically searched for warning lights on the dashboard, but the only yellow light was the gas can over the fuel gauge.