Chương 3
Blue bird. Silver back. Our initials inside, hers and mine, when we were kids.
Jonah stepped toward the table.
Mara stood so quickly her shoulder hit the underside of the tabletop.
“Back up.”
His eyes dropped to the locket.
That was enough.
“What is it?” Evelyn asked.
Jonah looked at her, not Mara.
The bourbon glass slipped slightly in his hand. He caught it before it fell.
Mara kept her body between him and the table. “Don’t move.”
“You don’t order me around in my house.”
“Then pretend I asked politely.”
He took another step.
Mara unclipped the holster strap beneath her jacket without drawing the weapon.
Jonah stopped.
Evelyn stared at the floor. Her face had gone colorless beneath her makeup.
“You know what that is,” Mara said to her.
“No.”
“You looked at it before I told you where it was.”
“I was looking at you.”
Jonah’s voice hardened. “This is absurd.”
Mara heard tires on wet gravel outside.
“Good,” she said. “You can explain it to the sheriff.”
Cal Danner entered with two deputies, rain shining on the shoulders of his uniform. He was sixty, broad through the chest, with a white mustache and the wary eyes of a man who had spent thirty years deciding which familiar person was lying to him.
He took in the room without speaking.
Mara pointed toward the table. “I photographed it in place. I haven’t touched it.”
Danner crouched. The older deputy beside him leaned down, then looked sharply at Mara.
“Is that what I think it is?” Danner asked.
“Yes.”
Jonah gave a short, disbelieving laugh. “You people have lost your minds.”
Danner stood. “Mr. Mercer, keep your hands where I can see them.”
“You’re taking her word over mine?”
“I’m telling you to show me your hands.”
“I know you, Cal.”
“I know.”
“We served on the hospital board together.”
“I remember.”
“And you’re going to let her come into my house, plant something under my table, and—”
Mara’s stomach tightened, but Danner did not look at her.
“Deputy Lane,” he said, “secure Mr. Mercer.”
Lane hesitated.
It lasted less than a second, but everyone saw it.
Jonah turned to him. “Ben, come on.”
The younger deputy’s face reddened. He had probably accepted Jonah’s explanation earlier. He had probably stood in the same kitchen while Evelyn called Chloe clumsy and Jonah acted offended.
Danner’s voice lowered. “Deputy.”
Lane stepped behind Jonah and told him to place his hands behind his back.
Jonah did not resist. He looked at Mara while the cuffs closed.
“This is what you wanted,” he said.
Mara glanced toward the blood on the refrigerator.
“No,” she said. “It isn’t.”
Danner photographed the locket and marked its position before a deputy placed it into a paper evidence envelope. He assigned another deputy to record the kitchen and called a state police investigator because the object appeared connected to an open missing-person case and Mara’s involvement created an obvious conflict.
Only after Jonah had been taken outside did Evelyn move.
She crossed the kitchen slowly and righted the fallen chair.
“Leave it,” Danner said.
“I don’t like furniture lying down.”
“Mrs. Mercer.”
Her hand remained on the chair back.
Danner asked whether she knew Leah Bell.
Evelyn gave him the same answer she had given six years earlier.
“Leah worked with Chloe for a few months. She was unreliable.”
“Did that locket belong to her?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“You just said you knew her.”
“I didn’t study her jewelry.”
Mara watched her mother smooth the front of her robe. Evelyn’s fingers trembled once and then stopped.
Danner asked where Chloe had been when she fell.
“Near the refrigerator.”
“What caused the fall?”
“She lost her balance.”
“Did Jonah touch her?”
“He tried to catch her.”
“Why is one crutch beneath the island?”
“I don’t know.”
“What broke the bracelet?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who cleaned the floor?”
Evelyn looked at the pink grout. “I wiped up water.”
“What water?”
“The glass.”
Danner glanced at the broken glass six feet away.
Evelyn saw the distance too late.
Mara left before she said something that would turn the interview into a family argument and the evidence into background noise.
Outside, Jonah stood beside a patrol car, cuffed, rain collecting in his hair. Deputy Lane held the rear door open.
Jonah leaned toward Mara as they passed.
“She’ll forgive me,” he said.
Mara did not ask which woman he meant.
St. Agnes Regional sat beside the highway in a low concrete building expanded so many times that its entrances seemed to have been added by people who disliked one another. Mara found the emergency department at 3:41 in the morning.
A security guard stopped her before she reached the treatment rooms.
“I’m her sister.”
“You’re also armed.”
Mara had forgotten the gun was visible beneath her damp jacket.
She locked the weapon in a secure box behind the guard’s station, surrendered her badge for a visitor sticker, and waited while a nurse called the treatment area.
The waiting room television showed a cooking competition with the sound off. A man in paint-stained clothes slept beneath a vending machine. Across from him, an elderly woman folded and unfolded the same tissue.
Mara sat under a poster about stroke symptoms and watched the automatic doors open for people who were not Chloe.
At 4:12, a forensic nurse named Dana Holt came out to meet her.
Dana was short, silver-haired, and unsentimental.
“Your sister has facial fractures, a concussion, bruising to her ribs, and injuries to her wrists and scalp,” she said. “She is stable.”
Mara’s knees weakened so suddenly that she had to sit.
Dana remained standing.
“She’s asking for you,” she continued. “Before you go in, understand something. She has already told three people she fell.”
“She called me and said—”
“I know what she told you. I also know what she is telling us.”
“She’s scared.”
“Yes.”
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“So you need to—”
“What I need is for you not to interrogate her.”
