Page 109 of Haunted

“Well, she was there normally. I saw her.”

“But he had no way of knowing I would be there.” His face clouds. “Actually, that’s wrong. I was at the Phoenix Society meeting, and when Alice said she wanted to talk to me, I said yes. I asked for Tuesday morning because on Monday I had to see about the tickets and then go to a doctor’s appointment with my aunt. If he heard that, he had two days to work out where I’d be.”

I let the air out of my lungs. “So many ifs. I don’t like them.”

“Me neither. Any lawyer worth his salt will tear them apart. But you said you knew killers. You said you would be able to spot one and Henry…” He shrugs.

“I know what I said, Jonny.” It comes out harder than I mean it to, and I make myself slow down. “And I have spent all afternoon thinking about the fact that I have been wrong about exactly that, once already, this month. I told you Nash was loud. I told you Nash breaks things where you can watch him do it. And then he taped a photograph to our door in the middle of the night and walked away without a sound.”

He’s quiet.

“I’ve been in rooms with men who’ve killed people,” I say. “And I stood there and told the man I love that I can tell which ones by looking at them. But the truth is, maybe I don’t know. It’s one of them. Or it’s neither of them and some stranger came down that boardwalk with a rock, and I don’t believe that for a second.”

Jonny puts the clipping down on the bed between us, and then he does something I don’t expect. He laughs—one short unhappy breath of it—and drags his hands down his face. “Tomorrow morning,” he says, “I’m standing up under a tent in front of four hundred people to read out that woman’s speech and they’ll both be there.”

I hadn’t got that far, and the floor goes out from under me when he says it. Of course they’ll both be there. Henry runs the society. Rex is an officer of the university. This is a big deal for the entire country club set.

“You don’t have to do it,” I say. “I’ll call Margaret right now. You’ve had a rough month, nobody on God’s earth would think twice—”

“Lance.”

He waits until I stop.

“Alice wrote that speech,” he says. “She was going to stand up and read it herself and she never got to, because she went down to a boathouse at seven in the morning to tell me who my father was.” He crawls off the bed. “So somebody’s reading it. I think at the very least that it should be me.”

There is a version of me—and he is not very far under the surface, and he was in charge of my entire life eight days ago—who says absolutely not, takes the car keys, makes a phone call, and handles it.

I put my hands in my pockets instead.

“Okay,” I grind out the word, because if I’m going to be agreeing to this, then he needs to know it was under extreme duress. “Then I’ll be sitting where I can see you.”

He looks up and smiles fondly at me. “That,” he says, “is allowed.” He pauses. “In fact, I absolutely will not be separated from you, Lance Broussard.”

“Keep saying that and you’ll get lucky,” I murmur.

Later, when the light has gone and he has finally stopped writing, I lie awake with him asleep against my shoulder and think about Angela Bishop.

I’ve judged her for a decade. I’ve called her abusive, controlling, suffocating. I said it to his face in a classroom with a police officer down the hall and nearly lost him over it, and I was right, and being right is not the same as being kind.

But I watched a video last night. I watched a seventeen-year-old square his shoulders and swallow whatever he was feeling for the greater good.

Parker’s kindness didn’t happen despite Angela. It happened inside her house, in her crucible, under her rules. The patience, the gentleness, the way he can read a room and know exactly what a person needs before they know it themselves—all of it was forged in the years she spent using him up. She didn’t mean to give him any of that. She meant to keep him.

Chapter thirty-eight

Jonny

The Suzannah Drumm Memorial Park is a strip of ground out where the Farley High school field used to be, and until about six weeks ago it was scrub and a chain-link fence. Now it has laid turf you can still see the seams in, nine young oaks staked and guy-wired against a wind they aren’t old enough for, and a wall.

Four hundred folding chairs in rows on the new grass. A stage at the front with a lectern and the university seal on it. Cameras from three local stations. A white awning off to the right where the dignitaries are being given coffee in the shade, and at the edge of the crowd, two Virginia State Police troopers in uniform standing where they can see everything and doing absolutely nothing, because the Lieutenant Governor made the drive.

And the wall.

It’s low and long and dark, and there are thirty-one names cut into it, and Henry Drumm has spent two years raising the money for it.

Lance and I walk up through the October morning, and I can feel him vibrating with a tension he is not letting anywhere near his face.

“She’ll be here,” he says, for the third time.