Page 79 of The Chain House
CHAPTER41
“THANK YOU,” JENNIFER said to Nancy Tanner. “For agreeing to speak to me on such short notice.”
“You can’t look at me, can you?”
Jennifer forced herself to look up to the clear partition, at Nancy’s face looming on the other side of it, at the puckered wound of her missing eye. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?” Nancy asked.
Jennifer let out a nervous laugh. “I don’t even know.”
“I know what they called me,” Nancy said.
They called you a lot of things, Jennifer thought. Pure evil. Full of malice. Soulless. The prettiest of all of Sal’s Angels. “The weakest link,” Jennifer said.
“But they were wrong. I was the strongest … the only one willing to speak up at trial.”
“And look what happened to you.”
“And look what happened to me,” she said, in agreement. “But do you know what? Do you want to know why I recanted my testimony?”
“Because you claimed to be high when you said it.”
Nancy chewed on her lower lip, stared at Jennifer with her lone blue-gray eye. “You were a cute little girl. You’ve grown into a gorgeous young woman.”
Jennifer didn’t feel worthy of the flattery. “Were you? High … at trial?”
“We were all high, honey, on that ranch … all the time we were high. But at the trial … no. I spoke the truth about Justice Minks being there.”
“Then why did you recant?”
“Do you know what would be worse than being in prison the rest of your life?”
“Death row?”
Nancy grinned. “No, that would have been preferred, to tell you the truth.” Nancy leaned forward. Despite her changed appearance, the shorter, grayer hair, and the hideous wound where her eye had been, she was still pretty. “It’s being completely blind in prison for the rest of your life. That’s what would be worse than just being in prison. They already told me they were taking one eye. They said if I didn’t recant, I’d lose both. So maybe I was the weakest link.”
Jennifer almost said, I’m sorry again, but stopped herself. Nancy Tanner had slaughtered multiple people with a machete and then celebrated it with a drunken orgy around a campfire. She had put herself here. “So Minks was there that night,” Jennifer said.
“Of course he was. He bragged about killing Beth Hawthorne with a wine bottle opener,” Nancy said. “I forgive you, by the way. Those drawings you did of us. There was a time, at trial, where I would have cut your hands off for drawing them. For starting the ball rolling, really, for the ranch’s demise.”
Jennifer sat strong, rigid in her seat. “I think you all got the ball rolling plenty fast enough with what you all did that night.”
“Would you believe me if I said I don’t remember it?”
“No.”
“I wouldn’t either,” she said with a grin. “But I don’t.”
“Because of the drugs?”
“Yeah,” she said. “And time. Nightmares show me snippets. I choose not to believe them.”
“What about remorse?”
“Would it bring them back?”
“No.”
