Page 84 of The Death Row Club
The truth stings.
“I really thought he’d changed.”
A dull thwack echoes through the shack. Both our heads twisttoward the sound. Probably a loose branch. We wait—but the night’s gone silent.
“Men like our fathers don’t change,” she says.
“They do. Just look at yours. He stopped killing for twenty years because he realized how much damage he’d done to you.”
I’ve tried so hard to conceal my jealousy from her. Her father loved her enough to stop, whereas mine went less than a year before picking up another hitchhiker from the side of the road.
“You think that’s the reason he stopped?” She laughs. “Jesus Christ. He stopped because I never gave him the chance to do it again. I called him between classes to check in, drove straight to the hardware store after school, kept my bedroom window open so I could hear any sounds from the driveway—like a pickup truck engine turning over in the night.”
It feels like I’m seeing her for the first time. All the nights we sat opposite each other at Barry’s, splitting a bottle of that godawful wine; all the times I’d studied her on the television monitors during dailies had been nothing more than an illusion.
“You knew?”
“I suspected.”
That’s when she tells me about Claire. Her eyes stay fixed on the floor as she recounts how she discovered the text messages, then left the phone behind in the bathroom for her father to find, knowing he would read them. How she’d become an expert on the case while trying to exculpate him, only to come up short again and again.
“If you suspected your dad, why agree to be on the show?”
“Like you would’ve left without getting an interview.”
“You could’ve given me a quick one and sent me on my way. But you didn’t. You guided me through the crimes, one by one, knowing your dad was probably the one who committed them. Why? You must’ve known that if you helped me, you ran the risk of losing him.”
The night air has turned sharp. She wraps her arms around her knees, tugs them tight to her chest.
“He killed my best friend.”
“He loved you. He only killed her because she hurt you.”
She hesitates, then says, “I was the one who identified Claire’s remains. I don’t know if I ever told you that. Her parents hadn’t arrived yet, and the police wanted a positive ID so they could move forward with the investigation. My dad sat next to me on the overstuffed couch as the detective placed the photo facedown on the table. I hadn’t wanted to cry; I’d even researched what victims of drowning looked like before coming into the station so I wouldn’t embarrass myself. It made no difference. I sobbed into my dad’s shirt while he rubbed my back and whispered that everything would be all right. But when we finally broke apart, and I looked up at him, I realized that his attention had long since drifted away from me. He was staring at the photo.”
She lifts her gaze to meet mine. “You want to know why I helped you? The afternoon we met, you asked if I wanted to know the truth, and I realized I did. My father didn’t kill Claire because he loved me. He used love as an excuse to do what he wanted. The same way Tom Woods did.”
I don’t know how she turned this around on me, but she’s completely off base. “What are you saying?”
“He kept you locked up in that cabin.”
“I could’ve left at any time.”
“But you didn’t.”
“I’d been running for most of my life. I wasn’t about to throw away the first place I’d ever felt safe.”
She doesn’t understand. Her father might’ve been a murderer, but I saw the way he treated her. She’s never had to wonder, with everyblow to the side of the head, ifthiswill be the time he goes too far—ifthiswill be the time she doesn’t get back up.
“He never would’ve let you go,” she says, then hesitates before adding, “the same way your real father was never going to let you go.”
She has no idea what she’s talking about.
“Don’t ever compare the two of them. Tom kept me safe.”
“Tom kept you trapped.”
We fall silent after that. Tom gave me a home when no one else would. I never had a problem shucking off my old identity, marooning Steffani Arnosti at that run-down gas station, because he was more my father than the real one had ever been. But even as all these thoughts spin around my mind, I can’t ignore the sinking feeling that Nicola Fischer might be right.
