Page 120 of Forever Dead

“Yeah.”

“But Norma came to see you?”

“She came to my dad's house. She wanted to tell me something.”

Selena remembered running into the road, kneeling beside her and trying to keep her alive.

“She never got the chance.”

Eric lowered his glass.

“Did you ever find out who hit her?”

“No. I went through the case file years later. No license plate, no useful description of the car, nobody who saw the driver. Nothing I could follow.”

“Did you ask Connor what she wanted?”

“Not properly. By then I didn't trust his answers, and he wasn't giving me much to work with.”

Selena rubbed her thumb against the arm of the chair.

“I could've kept asking. I didn't.”

“Why not?”

“Because I was afraid he'd tell me something I couldn't live with.”

Eric did not ask another question. She appreciated him for that.

By the time Selena finished the whiskey, her knee had begun to ache more deeply. She stood carefully.

“I’m going to bed.”

Eric rose too. “Need a hand? Eh… To stand… Not to go to bed… Sorry...”

“No. But thanks.”

“Night, Selena.”

“Night.”

Back in her room, Selena eased onto the bed and stretched out her right leg. The knee had stiffened again, and she adjusted the brace before settling against the pillows.

Ray Cutler's alibi. Curtis Halle's missing hours. The material beneath Eleanor's fingernails.

They had questions they could answer. Tomorrow, Connor and the others would start answering them.

Norma Jane was different.

Selena had spent years wondering what the woman wanted to tell her. She'd gone through the police file, considered every possibility she could think of, and still avoided the one person who might have known.

Connor.

She reached for the bedside lamp, then stopped.

He had nearly told her something about Morimer that morning. She'd seen it in the way he'd reacted to her question, just before the pumpkin rolled into the road.

Whatever he was keeping from her, she couldn't keep pretending she hadn't noticed.