Melissa looked surprised. “They can go in the water even when it’s super cold? And when there’s ice?”
“Oh yeah, they’ve got these special wetsuits that help keep them warm.”
“I couldn’t do that. Swim in freezing cold water. I can’t even go in a pool unless it’s like eighty-five or ninety.”
Wedmore gave her a warm smile. “I’m like that, too. It’s got to be soup before I’ll get in. So, Melissa, your father, he put the car in the water?”
“Yep. He drove out onto the lake, where the ice was thin. Then he waited for the car to go through.” She started to tear up. “And then it did.”
“How do you know this, Melissa? Did your father tell you what he did?”
“I saw it. I saw the car go through the ice.”
“Where were you?”
“I was on the shore, watching.” A solitary tear ran down her cheek. She bit her lip, trying to hold it together.
“Why were you there?”
“Dad needed a car to come back. I drove up behind him.”
“So you saw all this?”
Melissa nodded.
“Melissa, do you know a woman named Laci Harmon?”
“I know who she is. She works at the Home Depot with my dad.”
“Do you know whether they’re close friends?”
Melissa cast her eyes down. “I think they’ve been having an affair.”
“How long do you think that’s been going on?”
“I don’t know. I only saw them the one time.”
“When was that?”
“Like, a month ago? I was driving past a hotel and I saw my dad’s car and I saw her in the front seat with him. They were kind of making out a little.”
“How did that make you feel?”
“Sad. And kind of… creepy.”
“Did you tell your father you’d seen him with this woman?”
“No.”
“What about your mother? Did you tell her?”
“No, I didn’t tell her. I kept hoping maybe I was wrong, maybe I didn’t see what I thought I saw, so I didn’t want to say anything.”
“Do you think that’s why your father killed your mother? Because of this woman? That maybe he wanted to run away with her?”
Melissa blinked. “What?”
Wedmore repeated the question, and added, “It happens, you know. A man starts seeing another woman, his wife finds out about it, they have a fight, and then, well, you know. The wife ends up dead.”
“Is that what you think happened?”
“It’s one possibility. But maybe you know differently. Do you know why your father killed your mother?”
“Dad didn’t kill her. Is that what you’ve been thinking?”
Now it was Wedmore’s turn to look surprised.
“Isn’t that why you’re here, Melissa?”
The dead woman’s daughter sighed and shook her head. “I guess I should start at the beginning.”
Fifteen
When Keisha Ceylon saw the pink sash drop past her eyes, she reached up instinctively to get her fingers between it and her neck. But she wasn’t quick enough. Wendell Garfield wrapped it tightly around her throat and began to twist.
“I swear, I don’t know how you know, but you’re not going to tell anyone,” he said.
Keisha clawed at the sash, her fingernails ripping into her own skin as she tried to loosen his hold on her. But the satiny ribbon was already cutting deep into her neck and there wasn’t a hope of getting her fingers in there.
Garfield was leaning down over her, his mouth close to her right ear. His breath was hot against her cheek.
She tried to say something, to scream, but with her windpipe squeezed, nothing came out. Not a sound. She felt her eyes bulging. She kicked at the floor, dug into the carpet with her heels.
Keisha Ceylon knew, in that instant, that she was going to die. She didn’t need mystical skills for that vision of the future.
It certainly wasn’t going to be the distant future.
A number of thoughts ran through her head during those milliseconds. One wouldn’t have expected there to be much time for introspection, but the world has a way of slowing down during such moments, and Keisha had an opportunity to think: Maybe I’ve had this coming.
You go around making your living by exploiting people at their most vulnerable, wasn’t there bound to be a reckoning at some point? If there was anyone who’d believe in karma, wouldn’t it be Keisha?
Wouldn’t English teacher Terry Archer love to see her now? Wouldn’t her predicament make the perfect lesson the next time he was trying to get across to his students the concept of irony? Especially the part about how Keisha never saw it coming. How she walked right into it.
Pretty goddamn rich, she had to admit.
And yet, in that moment, she didn’t feel bitter. What she felt was regretful. If she could have spoken, if she’d been able to get a breath of air, what she might have said was, “Sorry.”
There were more than a few people who deserved an apology. But the person whose face floated before her eyes first was Matthew’s.
“Sorry, sweetheart,” she heard herself saying. “Sorry Mommy fucked up.”
All these thoughts fired through her synapses in a fraction of a second. She might have liked to spend even more time considering how her misdeeds had impacted herself and others, to have done a bit of soul-searching, but there was a part of her brain that was deliberating over more immediate matters.
Even though things look pretty bad right now, I need to try to get out of this.
Which was why was still clawing at her throat, trying, without success, to get her fingers under the bathrobe sash.
“You must have been there,” Garfield said through gritted teeth. “You had to be watching. That’s the only way I can figure it. You were up there, you saw me put the car on the ice, you saw it go under, and then you figured you could blackmail me. A thousand today, another thousand next week, and then the week after that, until I had nothing left.”
He had the ends of the sash twisted several times around his palms and kept pulling. Keisha could feel herself starting to lose consciousness. Her fingers stopped trying. Her hands fell away from her neck and landed next to her, resting on the chair cushion. She wondered, ever so briefly, what he would do with her body. He hoped he wouldn’t put her in the lake along with Mrs. Garfield.
She didn’t like the water. When she was ten, her mother briefly dated a man who had a place on Cape Cod, and Keisha never so much as stuck her toe into the Atlantic. She had a fear of sharks from that movie. No way she was going out into that. Luckily, they never went back because the man decided to return to his wife.
In the seconds just before Keisha figured she was going to black out, her fingers dug into the seat of her chair.
Her right hand brushed up against something.
Something soft, almost furry.
Yarn.
