Page 10 of Thicker Than Water
Beck’s hand pauses as he glances at me above the notepad. “You sure about that?”
The follow-up is pointed, like he knows something I don’t, and it catches me off guard. Because no, I guess I can’t be sure. On Friday, I was surprised when it was nine, and then ten o’clock, and Jason wasn’t home yet. He hates the after-hours networking at conferences, always wants to duck out as soon as the last presentation is over. When I texted at ten to get his ETA, the message went undelivered—his phone dead again.
“Of course she is,” Sienna says, filling my silence, but Beck lingers on me, waiting for an answer.
My throat shrinks. If I say I’m sure, then I’m lying to a cop. But if I tell him the truth, I risk validating his suspicions, giving him space to wonder where else Jason went that night.
I compromise with a nod.
“All right,” Beck says. He clicks the top of his pen and slaps hisnotepad shut. “Thanks, Mrs. Larkin. I’ll reach out to your husband’s medical team.”
“You’re wasting your time,” Sienna says, but Beck is already swiveling toward the door, nodding to Wyatt to follow him. Wyatt hangs back, though, and Sienna continues her thought, aiming it at him instead of Beck. “Jason has nothing to do with what happened to Gavin.”
He stretches out a hand—as if his instinct, after all these months, is still to touch her—but he drops it at the sharp lash of her gaze.
“Miller,” Beck calls to Wyatt. “Let’s go.”
And then we’re alone again, Sienna and me, our hands knotted together, Jason laid out behind us like a body in a morgue.
I’ve never loved our house.
As we pull into the garage, this is what I think of. Not Jason’s coma. Not the blood on his knife. Not the dead man’s phone in his car.
The house is too big, too boxy, too similar to all the others in our town of Willow Creek. But when Jason first invited me to move in with him, I was soothed by the message it might send my mother:See? It doesn’t matter how well I know him. He’s not going to leave me. He’d have to leave his own house, his own history, too.So I kept my opinions stored away like the box of childhood mementos I brought with me. I pretended not to mind the pee-colored tile in the master bath, pretended it didn’t haunt me to sleep in his parents’ old room. Day after day, I looked at the rooster wallpaper downstairs and I said nothing, pretending it didn’t look like a crime scene.
For a moment, though, this house I don’t love is a comfort, a thing unchanged when everything else is warped and wrong. There’s the dent in the garage’s drywall where Aiden, careening infrom the driveway, crashed his bike when he was eight. There’s the fort, stacks of brick and wood, Jason helped him make in the corner at ten. And there’s the spot, empty now, for Jason’s car—which is smashed up somewhere, a gnarl of seats and steel. Evidence, apparently.
I stare at the vacant space, lingering behind the wheel even as Sienna rips off her seat belt beside me. “Come on,” she demands.
Numbly, I follow.
Inside, Sienna slams her purse onto the counter. “This is so stupid,” she says, a proclamation she threw out repeatedly on the drive back. “Who the fuck does Beck think he is?”
“Cool your—” I start, but the mantra’s words are lost beneath her own.
“There could be a million reasons why Jason had Gavin’s phone!”
I frown at that—because I haven’t been able to think of any. So I’ve tried not to think of it at all.
“He could have given Gavin a ride home from the conference,” Sienna says. “Maybe Gavin got sloshed at that dinner—Jason wouldn’t let him drive drunk—and the phone slipped out of his pocket in the car. Or maybe Jason saw Gavin leave it behind at the Marriott and figured he’d give it to him at work on Monday. Either way, it doesn’t mean hekilled him, and the cops are off their fucking rockers to think so.”
“The cops thinkwhat?”
We wince at Aiden’s voice. He shuffles into the kitchen, brown hair rumpled, cheek pillow-creased. I lurch toward him. “Honey…” But he recoils from my outstretched hand.
“Why do the cops think that?” he asks.
Silence oozes through the room. I’m struck mute by Aiden’s loose lounge pants that, even with his recent growth spurt, make him look like a little kid. They’re Jason’s, actually—bigger than Aiden’sold ones, but still too big overall. The plaid pantlegs pool around his heels, threatening to trip him up.
“It isn’t true,” Sienna says.
“But why do they think it?”
“Because they’re idiots. And because—”
I glare at her in warning. Aiden was troubled enough by Gavin’s murder, awake but zombie-faced in the middle of the night; the specifics of the cops’ suspicions will only disturb him even more. But Sienna barrels ahead.
“—there was a tiny bit of blood on his pocketknife. And Gavin’s phone was in his car. But it doesn’t even make sense. Who would kill someone and leave that evidence lying around?”
