Page 30 of Thicker Than Water
“It’s the only lead we have,” I say—to her as much as to Maeve. “And I’m sick of sitting around, waiting for the cops to be proven wrong. If I were in trouble, there’s no way Jason would just sit back, twiddling his thumbs. He’d do anything to help me.”
The memory flashes: Jason wrenching Clive away from me. In that moment, it felt like he was freeing me from a room that had caved in on top of me. Clive had three inches and twenty pounds on my brother, but Jason tossed him aside as easily as debris.
On the other end of the phone, Maeve is silent. I picture her squinting at the road with a skeptical gaze. But when she finally speaks, it’s exactly the answer I want.
“Don’t show up before ten this morning,” she says. “After that, the crew will be out at the jobsites, and it’ll give me a chance to warn you if the police are there. But if all seems clear—” As Maeve pauses, I smile across the table at Julia, whose face is still tight, whose lips tuck inward. “I’ll leave the door unlocked for you.”
Chapter NineJULIA
What if we get caught?”
I’m holding on to the door handle as if I might thrust it open and roll from this moving car. I watch the speedometer creep ten, then fifteen miles above the speed limit.
“We won’t,” Sienna says. “The warehouse will be empty, and Maeve will warn us if we need to leave.”
“We should be at the hospital, though. With Jason.”
I’ve been trying not to picture him there, alone, sunlight rolling across his bed as the day drives ahead. Since the moment the cops asked for Jason’s financial records, my nerves have rattled like chains, my mind whirring with things I don’t want to wonder, things I can’t even discuss with Sienna. Still, I hate to think of it: Jason lying in that room, bruised and tubed, with nothing but sterile air to hold his hand.
“We’ll go there after,” Sienna says. She readjusts her grip on the steering wheel as if she’s worried it might squirm out of her grasp. “But right now he doesn’t need us there. What he needs is for us toget the cops off his back. That way, when he wakes up, he can recover in peace,withoutJerry Beck and his smug little warrants.”
For a moment this morning, as he stood in my doorway, Beck’s mouth had curved into a smirk. But up in Jason’s office, where I uploaded files onto the flash drive, the detective’s lips were pinched with pity—and I can’t decide which expression was worse.
“But,” I say to Sienna, “I’m still not sure what you’re hoping to find.”
She heaves out a sigh, her answer laced with impatience: “What Gavin was up to in the warehouse. Why he was hiding all that cash.”
“Right, but—how will that help us exactly? It’ll only give us more information abouthim. We won’t have anything that can clear Jason’s name or provide an alibi.”
“Unless,” Sienna says, “we find out who was involved in what Gavin was up to. Because they might be the real killer.”
“Why are you so convinced that anyone elsewasinvolved? Or that, if they were, they’d be motivated to hurt him?”
Sienna opens her mouth, then quickly snaps it shut. She slaps her blinker, indicating the turn toward the industrial park where Integrity Plus resides. Her silence fills the car, and her eyes flick across the windshield, as if trying to find an answer on its glass.
“Sienna?”
“The cops are looking for motive in Jason’s financial records, so they obviously think Gavin’s killer was tied up in whatever shady shit he was doing. And since we know thatJasonwasn’t the one tied up in it, then that means someone else was.”
My fingers shook this morning as I clicked the trackpad to dump our bank statements into the flash drive. I thought of what the police would find there: a December withdrawal for ten thousand dollars. I have no idea who Jason gave that money to.It was a bad investment. He screwed me over.But with Beck demanding Jason’s financial records for a murder investigation, it’s hard not to wonder if that person—the unnamedhe—was the murdered man himself.
Sienna pulls into Integrity Plus’s lot. “No cops,” she notes, driving around back to park behind the warehouse. “The trucks are gone, too, so we’re good to go inside.”
My palms are slick, my hairline damp, because even my skin is aware we’re entering someplace we don’t belong. Sienna has done this before, dragged me into trespassing. A couple years ago, when Clive Clayton posted that he was on a family vacation at Disney World, Sienna made a pitstop on our way to Wyatt’s. She’d told me she needed to pick up some sketches she’d left there, but first she parked in front of Clive’s vacant house.I just want to see, up close, what his life looks like, she said after I took her hand in protest. And when she tugged free of my grip, I had no choice but to follow her out of the car; it’s always been my job to keep her in check.
As Sienna peered into Clive’s window, I hung back, heart pounding. I could see from her shoulders that her breathing had quickened—tight, searing huffs. When I hissed her mantra, she turned, then winced.This is unhinged, isn’t it?she asked, and I nodded, letting out a tight breath of my own.I just miss them, she said, batting away a tear as if it had betrayed her.My parents are dead, and Clive’s on a damn vacation.
It’s a memory that always stings, both from the pain in her eyes and the way she’d lied to me beforehand, telling me we were going to Wyatt’s when she only wanted to scope out Clive’s. This time, Sienna hasn’t lured me here under false pretenses, but as she exits the car, I feel that day in my body again, feel all my muscles clench with our impending transgression.
“Wait,” I say. Sienna’s hand pauses on the warehouse door. She looks back at me, expectant, but when I don’t continue, her mouth sinks into a frown.
“Jules, come on. Don’t you want to help Jason?”
Of course I do. But I don’t have words for the threads of thought tangling in my head: the bad investment, the promise of a promotion, Jason keeping silent when he didn’t get the job, the warrant for financial records. For months now, I’ve kept Sienna in the dark about the ten grand Jason took, and now I can’t reveal my concerns without also revealing I’ve kept something from her. I can’t explain why I’m so nervous—not just about sneaking into the warehouse, which is bad enough, but about digging into Gavin’s secrets. And I definitely can’t tell her what, as of this morning, I’m most afraid of: finding a tie between Gavin and Jason I didn’t know was there.
And anyway, she’s already decided. I can no more keep her from this warehouse than I could once keep her from charging up Clive’s lawn. I nod at her to open the door.
Inside looks like a Home Depot without any aisles: boxes of downspouts and garage doors, a section for fireplaces and venting pipes, coils that look like huge rolls of duct tape. Shoved against one wall are piles of pallets, while another supports a selection of wire shelves. There’s insulation, too, stacked like staircases, and I think of what Maeve said, how Gavin cornered her in that very spot, dripped his dream into her ear like a poison. I shudder and Sienna waves me onward.
