Page 86 of The Secrets We Hide
Neither Emmy nor Jude moved as Lee sauntered back to the BMW. He used his left hand to pull himself into the car and shut the door. Then he waved as the thug pulled away from the curb.
“Jesus Christ.” Emmy could barely summon enough breath to speak. “Jesus Christ.”
“Get in the car.” Jude opened the passenger-side door. “Emmy, let’s go.”
She didn’t move. “What the hell was that?”
“I’m going to walk back to the station.” Jude shut the door. “I’ll meet you there.”
“The hell you will.”
Jude took off in the opposite direction.
“Hold up.” Emmy jogged to catch up with her. “You need to explain yourself right now. Lee Rawley clearly knows you.”
“He doesn’t know a damn thing about me.” She was walking fast enough to labor her breathing. “For godsakes, Emmy. I said I’ll meet you at the station. Just give me some time and I promise I’ll tell you the truth.”
“Bullshit.” Emmy had finally figured out how to sneeze into the windstorm. “You’re rattled, Dr. Archer. You want time to figure out a way to control my response to whatever version of the truth you come up with.”
“Emmy Lou.”
“Don’tEmmy Loume.” She would’ve laughed if they weren’t talking about a sadistic drug dealer. “You’ve spent the last twenty-four hours lecturing me and therapizing me without my consent, but when it’s your turn to open up, you’re just as fluent in silence as I am.”
“Okay.” Jude swung around on Emmy. “I’m going to say this, then you’re going to get in your car, and I’ll meet you at the station. All right?”
Emmy had never seen her like this before. She wasn’t rattled. She was fractured. “All right.”
“Did you see his arm? That’s my fault. Lee Rawley was the reason I left town forty years ago. I was outrunning a manslaughter charge. I almost killed him.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Jude walked down Main Street, dread slowing her pace. She felt her eyes watering behind her sunglasses. She had forgotten how different the light was in the south. Brighter. Starker. Prone to exposing things you preferred left in the dark.
Seeing Lee Rawley so unexpectedly had thrown her, but Emmy’s questions had nearly brought Jude to her knees. She’d felt like a boxer on the ropes. The only thing that had saved her was the shock value of her admission. Emmy had let Jude walk away, but Jude was under no impression that she would let it go. The second Emmy caught her breath, she would start peppering Jude with questions. The sheriff’s station was up ahead. Jude wasn’t strong enough for a lengthy interrogation. She sat down on a metal bench in front of the flower shop. She looked down at her hands. They were shaking worse than Emmy’s ever had.
On some level, Jude had known if she stayed in North Falls long enough, she would run into Lee eventually. She’d assumed it would be on her own terms, not that she’d be walking in the middle of a yard and find herself trapped in the gaze of his cold, blue eyes. Jude had let herself forget the visceral fear that Lee could inspire. She’d somehow lost the memory of his jocular laugh that always rippled with violence under the surface.
A car drove by. Then a second one. Then a third. She heard the distant ring of church bells as service let out. Jude looked across the street at the lamp-post. The bricks in the sidewalk. The scuffed edge of the curb.
Another memory pushed its way in. Not from Memphis or North Falls, but from Folsom State Prison. Jude had asked FreddyHenley to talk about his childhood. He’d given her one of his patronizing laughs.
You gotta bury the bad memories, doll. Keep ’em outta the sunshine. Don’t never let nobody make you dig ’em up.
Easy for a psychopath to say. They were incapable of feeling remorse because they never held themselves responsible for causing harm. Everyone else was always to blame. The only regret they ever felt was when they were caught. For non-psychopaths, bad memories were like seeds. If you buried them, they would only grow.
Jude felt a shadow fall over her face. She looked up at Emmy.
“Did I give you enough time to get your story straight?”
“It’s not a story,” Jude said. “It’s my life. Lee’s life, too. For what that’s worth.”
Emmy looked out at the street. Watched the church traffic roll by.
Jude took a deep breath. “Lee was Tommy’s friend, not mine.”
“Really?” Emmy sounded dubious.
“Ask him.” Jude had already texted Tommy to warn him. “We all steered clear of Lee. At least the girls did. Even back then, we knew that Lee Rawley was the kind of man who left Jane Does on the highway.”
