Page 22 of The Girl from Widow Hills
I took a second deciding what to say; I had spent my life telling lies by omission. Excising the irrelevant, the past, becoming someone with a different history or none at all. And so it was instinct. To tell the truth without all the facts. The details coming in an odd, detached way, in response to each question.I heard a noise. I found him outside. Yes, I touched him. I’m sure, I touched him. No, I can’t remember how. I can’t remember.
“What did you hear?” she asked, homing in on specific details.
“A phone.” The truth. It had woken me from the haze. Let her think it had carried across the yard.
“Who did you think it was out there?”
Jonah,at his desk, reading my text. Feet up, in his worn jeans, bourbon in a glass—
“I didn’t. I didn’t know. I just heard the ringing, and it was coming from the direction of Rick’s house, and—”
“Liv keeps an eye on me, Nina. She checks in,” Rick said. This, too, was not a lie. In the last few months, I’d started to notice that tremor in his hand—I worried about him. I worried about him driving. So I picked up groceries if I was going to the store, and I knocked on his door if I hadn’t seen him out all day.
Nina Rigby looked at him closely, like she was reading between the lines: Did I head outside because I thought it was Rick needing help? A good story that emerged between the details, whether it was true or not. Couldn’t it be true? Couldn’t Rick believe that, too?
Except Rick knew I had been sleepwalking outside yesterday. He knew, and he was covering now.
“Did you know he was dead?” she asked.
“I, I shook him.”Hands out in front of me, pushing at something that was no longer there.“I put my hands on his body. It was dark. I just shook him, and . . . he didn’t feel right. He was in the bushes. There was blood. Even in the dark, I could feel it.” Sticky, viscous, as I leaned against the tree. “I touched a tree out there, too.”
Her eyes drifted to my hands. I could smell the soap from here. “I washed my hands. I didn’t want to get it on Rick’s things.” The truth.
She nodded once, barely perceptible. “Did you feel for a pulse?”
“I don’t remember. I don’t think so. I just started running.”
“For here?”
“Yes.”
“Why’d you run here?”
The open door behind me, in the dark. Instinct carrying me forward—“Something happened to that man, and I was scared.”
“There’ve been animals,” Rick said. “We’ve seen them. Heard them.”
Nina’s head turned swiftly, the first crack in the demeanor. “That was no animal, Mr. Aimes.”
In the silence of the room, I could hear the crackle of a walkietalkie in the distance; the low hum of voices outside; a car door closing. Nina inhaled sharply, turning to face me. “I’d like you to walk me through exactly how you found him.”
I looked to the window. Didn’t understand what she was asking. Hadn’t I just done that?
“From your house,” she added, standing. “Mr. Aimes, I’m going to have someone else come take your full statement. Ms. Meyer, I’d like you to walk me through where you were when you heard the phone. It could help us. Would be good to know whether he was closer to your house at first, or whether he was already incapacitated when you heard it.”
I pushed myself to standing, unable to stop the wince as my leg bent.
A tiny indentation formed in Nina’s forehead. “Are you okay?”
“My knee,” I said. “I cut it.”
“She tripped,” Rick said, and we both stared in his direction.
“Cut it on a root, I think. It’s fine, though. I’m fine.”
EVEN THOUGH OUR HOMESwere close, Nina and I were prevented from walking through the border of the property line. “We’re not sure how far the crime scene extends right now,” Nina explained. She turned on her flashlight as we started walking down the long drive to the main road, where we could then cut back to my driveway.
But she immediately turned back, frowning at the way I was walking. “Let’s take my car,” she said. “These driveways are so dark, anyway.”
