The Sinner - Molly O'Keefe Page 0,40

care.

I walked to the house but stopped at the door and tore chunks of chipped white paint from the door frame, flicking them away with my thumb.

“Are you married?” I asked.

“No,” he said, his voice thick and solid.

“I can find out if you’re lying.”

“Then why ask?”

I rested my head against the screen door, hating that the worst thing I’d ever done had brought me Katie, the best thing that had ever happened to me.

“I’m not married,” he said, softly.

“Good.” I pushed the word past the ball of sick in my throat. I stepped through the door and stopped again, sympathy and a dozen other things I didn’t want to examine too closely stopping my feet.

“There’s gumbo in the fridge,” I said and listened to the humming silence behind me for a moment and went inside.

It was easy, in the end.

I sat in my dark ridiculous bed, moonlight splashed across my lap and the computer cradled there, my finger poised over the enter key.

Matt Woods typed into the search engine.

No matter what he said, Matt was absolutely not okay. I didn’t want to see it, but it was like watching someone self-destruct right in front of my eyes. Something was eating him, from the inside out.

Guilt deserves to be punished.

I had the terrible suspicion that Matt was using my courtyard as punishment.

But for what?

Without a second thought, I hit the enter key.

“Matt Woods receives award,” I muttered, reading the files. “Woods Takes On Downtown. Architect Has ‘Elemental’ Vision For The City. Contractor begins work on billion-dollar rejuvenation.”

And finally:

“Tragedy!”

I followed that link, my heart in my throat, to a three-page article in the Post-Dispatch.

The grand opening of Matt Woods’s new Elements Building ended in tragedy last night when twenty-eight-year-old Peter Borjat died in the partial building collapse.

I sat back, feeling as if I’d swallowed rocks.

Instead of a picture of a happy family including Matt, what I saw was somehow worse. A haunting picture of a wide-open room with gabled ceilings and skylights, soaring steel girders and polished pine floors. Chandeliers glittered and cocktail tables still held half-filled martini glasses, as though the drinkers had just gone to the bathroom. A woman’s red high heel lay next to a gaping, jagged hole in the corner. A curvy steel sculpture jutted out of the black crater like a horrific swizzle stick.

I clicked onto the second page.

Officials now say that the floor collapse was caused by poor construction. The remodel of the two-hundred-year-old warehouse was incomplete and insufficient for the planned usage of the space. According to investigators, the floor in question was not properly reinforced.

“The lives of everyone at that party were in jeopardy,” Inspector Phillip Jefferson states. “It’s a blessing there weren’t more deaths.”

“The plans for that particular space were changed last minute,” Matt Woods said in a written statement. “That, however is no excuse and I take full responsibility.”

A picture was coming together in my mind and it wasn’t pretty. Poor construction? The death of a twenty-eight-year-old man?

My stomach twisted and churned, acid rising in my throat.

And I thought my demons were bad?

Matt had blood on his hands.

However, the next story muddied the picture in my mind.

Architect Proves No Knowledge of Poor Construction.

In deposition today, Matt Woods proved he had no knowledge of what his general contractor was doing to cut costs in the construction of the Elements Building.

Woods, who has been unreachable since the tragedy, appeared grief-stricken and shocked outside the courtroom. Despite the ruling, he defended the contractor.

“What happened,” Woods said, “was my fault as much as it was my contractor’s. This was a partnership. My condolences and sincere regret go out to Peter’s family and friends. I know there is nothing I can do to repair your loss and I am deeply sorry for my role in this tragedy.”

I rubbed my hands over my face.

Hero? I wondered. Or bad guy?

There was only one way to find out.

11

MATT

The sky was still bruised, but pink touched the eastern clouds so I figured it was close enough to day to get to work.

I rose from the chair I’d spent the night in and pulled on the clean clothes that Margot laundered for me at the end of each day. I barely felt the denim and cotton. Or the sting of my blistered palms. I was dimly aware of an ache in my stomach, but food, I’d learned, wasn’t going down so well these days.

I filled my thermos with water in the bathroom and stepped outside into the hot damp kiss of a