is what everyone in Dunwoody who’d ever met Claire or even seen her cross a room was doing. The women on her tennis team sounded devastated for the cameras, yet they all somehow managed to get their hair and make-up professionally done before appearing on film. Even Allison Hendrickson had joined the fray, though no one had yet made the obvious joke about Claire’s violent propensity toward kneecaps.
At least no one had but Claire.
Lydia said, “That teaching job at the school sounds nice. You love art.”
“Wynn thinks I’ll be all right.” Claire rolled onto her back. She stared up at the Billy Idol poster taped on the ceiling above the bed.
“You’ll still need to get a job.”
“Maybe.” Paul’s assets had been frozen. The Dunwoody house had been seized. Wynn Wallace had explained that sorting out the ill-gotten gains from Paul’s legitimate business holdings would take years and likely consume millions in legal fees.
Of course, Paul had obviously considered that when he structured his estate.
Claire told Lydia, “The life insurance policies were owned by an irrevocable trust that Quinn and Scott paid for. There’s a clear paper trail. I can draw from it any time.”
Lydia stared at her. “You can collect on Paul’s life insurance policies?”
“Seems only fair. I’m the one who killed him.”
“Claire,” Lydia warned, because Claire wasn’t supposed to joke about getting away with murder.
And as far as she knew, Claire had certainly gotten away with it. Not to brag—because Lydia wouldn’t let her do that, either—but if Claire had learned one thing from her previous sojourn into the criminal justice system, it was that you didn’t have to talk to the police unless you wanted to. Claire had sat in an interrogation room and remained silent until Wynn Wallace had arrived at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s regional office and helped her come up with a legally sound defense for arson and murder.
Good thing, because apparently, committing a felony in the act of a murder generally meant you ended up on death row.
Claire had ended up in the passenger’s seat of Wynn Wallace’s Mercedes.
Paul had started the fire. Claire had shot him in self-defense.
Lydia was the only witness, but she’d told the investigators that she’d blacked out, so she had no idea what happened.
Between the rain and the firemen who soaked the smoldering embers of the Fuller house, there wasn’t a lot of pesky evidence to poke holes in the story. Not that anyone was paying close attention to Claire’s crimes by then. Her timed email with the Tor link was already making the rounds. The Black and Red had picked it up first, then the Atlanta Journal, then the blogs, then the national news stations. So much for her fears that no one would click an anonymously sent link.
Her biggest regret was that she had included Huckleberry in the email list, because according to witnesses, Sheriff Carl Huckabee had been sitting at his computer reading Claire’s email when he grabbed his chest and died of a massive heart attack.
He was eighty-one years old. He lived in a nice house that was paid off. He’d seen his children and grandchildren grow up. He’d spent summers fishing and winters at the beach and pretty much enjoyed all of his other twisted hobbies with absolutely no impediments.
If you asked Claire, Huckleberry was the one who’d really gotten away with murder.
“Hey.” Lydia threw a sock at Claire to get her attention. “Have you given any more thought about seeing a real therapist?”
“‘With a poster of Rasputin and a beard down to his knee?’”
“More like ‘Kid Fears.’”
Claire laughed. They had been listening to Indigo Girls on one of the hundreds of mix tapes Julia had kept in a shoebox under her bed. “I’ll think about it,” she told Lydia, because she knew that the twelve-step program was important to her sister. It was also the only reason Lydia was able to stand there folding Julia’s clothes instead of curling into a ball in the corner.
But as Claire had told her court-appointed therapist during their last mandated session, her quick temper had ended up leading them to Julia. Maybe one day, maybe with a real therapist, Claire would work on her anger issues. God knew there was plenty enough to work on, but for right now, she wasn’t inclined to get rid of the very thing that had saved them all.
Who the hell would?
Lydia said, “Did you see the news?”
“Which news?” Claire asked, because there was so much that they could barely keep