Love You More - Lisa Gardner [100]
“Can’t.”
“Can’t?”
I leaned forward, best I could with my hands tied. “I’m going to kill him,” I said somberly. “And it’s not nice to speak ill of the dead.”
“Oh please,” D.D. interjected crossly. “You sound like a Looney Tune.”
“Well, I have taken some blows to the head.”
The eye roll again. “You’re no more crazy than I’m kindhearted,” D.D. snapped. “We know all about you, Tessa. The gambling-addicted husband who cleaned out your savings accounts. The horny teenage brother of your best friend, who figured he might get lucky one night. You seem to have a history of attracting the wrong men, then shooting them.”
I didn’t say anything. The good detective did have a way of cutting to the heart of the matter.
“But why your daughter?” she asked relentlessly. “Trust me, I don’t fault you for plugging Brian with three in the chest. But what the hell made you turn on your own kid?”
“What did Shane have to say?” I asked.
D.D. frowned at me. “You mean before or after your loser friend tried to deck me?”
I whistled low. “See, this is what happens. You hit your first woman, and it gets easier after that.”
“Were you and Brian arguing?” Bobby spoke up now. “Maybe the fight turned physical. Sophie got in the way.”
“I reported for duty Friday night,” I said, looking out the window. Fewer houses, more woods. We were getting close. “I haven’t seen my daughter alive since.”
“So Brian did it? Why not just blame him? Why cover it up, concoct such an elaborate story?”
“Shane didn’t believe me. If he couldn’t, then who would?”
Red-painted apple stand, off to the left. Empty now, but sold the best glasses of cider in the fall. We had come here just seven months ago, drinking apple cider, going on a hay ride, then visiting the pumpkin patch. Is that what had brought me back, Saturday afternoon when my heart had been pounding and the daylight fading and I had felt like a Looney Tune, crazed by grief and panic and sheer desperation? I’d had to move, fast, fast, fast. Less thinking. More doing.
Which had brought me here, to the place of our last family outing before Brian shipped out for the fall. One of my last happy memories.
Sophie had loved this apple stand. She’d consumed three cups of cider and then, hopped up on fermented sugar, had run laps in the pumpkin patch before picking out not one pumpkin, but three. A daddy pumpkin, a mommy pumpkin, and a girl pumpkin, she’d declared. A whole entire pumpkin family.
“Can we, Mommy? Can we can we can we? Please, please, please.”
“Sure, sweetheart, you’re absolutely right. It would be a shame to separate them. Let’s save the whole family.”
“Yippee! Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, we’re gonna buy a pumpkin family! Yippee!”
“Turn right up ahead,” I murmured.
“Right?” D.D. braked hard, made the turn.
“Quarter mile up, next left, onto a rural road.…”
“Three pumpkins?” Brian shaking his head at me. “Softy.”
“You bought her the donuts to go with the cider.”
“So three donuts equals three pumpkins?”
“Apparently.”
“Okay, but dibs on carving the daddy pumpkin …”
“The tree! Turn here. Left, left. Now, thirty yards, road on the right.”
“Sure you couldn’t have drawn a map?” D.D. scowled at me.
“I’m sure.”
D.D. turned right onto the smaller, rural road, tires spinning on the hardpacked snow. Behind us, one, two, three, four cars labored to follow suit, then a couple of white SUVs, then the line of police cruisers.
Definitely going to snow, I decided.
But I didn’t mind anymore. Civilization was long gone. This was the land of skeletal trees, frozen ponds, and white barren fields. The kind of place lots of things could happen before the general population noticed. The kind of place a desperate woman might use for her last stand.
Bad Tessa, rising.
“We’re here,” I said.
And Detective D. D. Warren, heaven help her, pulled over.
“Get out,” she said crossly.
I smiled. I couldn’t help myself. I looked the fine detective in the eye and I said, “Words I’ve been waiting to hear all day.”
29
I don’t want her walking the woods!” D.D. was arguing with Bobby ten minutes later, off