…
We retired to the table and chairs on the deck. Zack had snarled at Sam’s suggestion that we go indoors—“I’m not letting that fucker in my house”—even though technically it was Sam’s place—and the outside seating seemed safer. Zack sat there breathing heavily, stony-faced and furious, with his friends flanking him on either side. Sam stayed with Barry, now dabbing his bleeding nose with a wad of kitchen paper. I hovered on the edge of everything.
I desperately wanted to comfort Zack, but I don’t think he remembered I was there. From the second he set eyes on Marnie’s ex, he focused on nothing else.
I’d never seen Sam angry or upset. His gray eyes were calm, his expression neutral. He radiated confidence. His shoulder-length hair was tied back today, and his beard looked neater than usual, but otherwise he’d not changed his appearance in years. He’d found Barry, but was that a good thing? Or was there even more pain in store for Zack?
“I want to bury you in a hole where they’d never find you,” snarled Zack. “If I can’t do that, I’ll make sure you face justice.”
Barry’s eyes filled up again. “I loved her, man. I really loved her. I didn’t do anything.” He slurred his words, and I wondered if he was drunk. The combined stink of stale sweat and alcohol turned my stomach, and I inched farther away from him. His hoodie and jeans were scruffy and lined with dirt. He looked as though he’d crawled out of the gutter.
Zack leaned forward, was dragged back by his mates, and swore under his breath when they restrained him. “You hit her, Barry. You hurt my baby sister. So help me, I’m gonna make you pay for that.”
Sam slapped the table with his palm and everyone fell silent. “Zack. I didn’t bring him here for you to threaten.”
“So why the fuck did you?”
“You asked me to find him. You need to hear what happened.” He held up his hand to forestall Zack’s angry reply. Leaning back in his chair, he gestured toward Barry. “I’ll ask the questions and Zack, you’ll stay quiet.”
I couldn’t stay apart from my lover any longer. I stepped behind him and rested my palms on his rigid shoulders. He flinched, then let out a long breath, and nodded to Sam.
“Barry, when did Marnie move out?”
Barry rubbed at the surface of the table with his thumb and then cleared his throat. His gaze stayed fixed on the wooden patina. “A couple of weeks ago. I kept thinking she’d come to her senses, you know, and come back.” Zack growled, but subsided at a sharp glare from Sam. “I didn’t tell anyone. I thought she’d come back, and we’d forget all about it.”
“Tell us what happened on Monday morning.” The day Marnie died.
He let out a long, juddering breath and rubbed his eyes. Tears continued to well up. “I saw her walking up the drive and thought she was coming home. I was boozed, man. I’d not slept, and I was trying to get my head together to go to work, and then I saw her. And yeah, I thought she was coming back to me.” His thumb continued to work the tabletop. “I ran outside. And then I realized she was looking for that dumb cat. She was calling the stupid furball. And I walked up behind her, and she said, she said…” He stopped and swallowed hard before continuing. “She said she wanted to take it home—to her new home, and that’s when it hit me. She wasn’t coming back at all.”
I dug my fingers into Zack’s shoulders. He sat like a statue, cold and unmoving.
“Go on,” Sam encouraged him.
“I wanted to ask her why. I mean why would she go in the first place? She was happy. We were happy.” Zack tensed even further under my palms. “So when she went in the cellar, I followed her.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
You could have heard a pin drop. We all stared in total silence at the broken man crying at the table. My stomach churned like a washing machine on the spin cycle, and I couldn’t decide if I wanted to be sick. I wasn’t leaving Zack, though.
Barry sobbed in earnest now, great washes of tears cascading down his face, and he made no attempt to wipe them away. “I stepped onto the stairs just as she was coming back up. She held that damn cat, kissing its head. A fuckin’ cat for Chrissake. And it saw me. It fuckin’ hated me.” He bowed his head and scrubbed wildly at his eyes with a stained sleeve. “Do I have to?” He appealed to Sam.
“Yes. Either you tell them, or I do.”
“The cat flew out of her arms when it saw me. And she… She fuckin’ lost her balance and went backward. Hit the floor.”
I clung to Zack, willing him to stay still, to not make another lunge at Barry. I needed to touch him for my own sake, too. The story had a ring of truth. The smell of cat piss in the cellar, for one thing. Zack trembled. I felt the ripple through my hands and up my arms, but he stayed in his seat. Stayed quiet. Tears welled in my eyes, and I blinked them away. I wasn’t letting go of him.
There was a long pause before Sam spoke. “What did you do?”
Barry dropped his head and mumbled something. I didn’t catch it.
“Speak up, Barry.” Sam’s voice sounded hard.
“I left her. I grabbed my car keys and went to work.”
Oh my God. I couldn’t hold back my gasp of horror. Zack erupted, launching across the table. For a minute it was chaos. Barry scrambled out of his seat and ended up lying on the deck, arms over his head, with Zack shoving and pushing to get at him. “You left her,” he yelled, almost incoherent. “You fucking left her. She might have just been hurt, did you think of that? You killed her. Doesn’t matter whether you pushed her or she fell, her death is on your hands.”
Anders and Petey finally subdued him and dragged him back to his side of the table, and this time I wrapped my arms around him. He refused to sit down. He stood there, lungs heaving, his spine rigid and his gaze fixed on Barry.
“She didn’t move, man. Her eyes were open, but she didn’t fuckin’ move.” Barry sobbed, but I couldn’t find any shred of sympathy for him. He was toxic. I felt even more nauseated the more I thought about it.
“You left my sister and went to your fucking job.” Zack’s voice was colder and harder than I could ever have imagined. A muscle flicked in his cheek, but otherwise he was motionless. “And then you came home and pretended you knew nothing about it.”
I’d had enough of Barry’s hysterics, but something else made sense now. “You said nobody knew she’d left you, so nobody thought it odd that she was still there. At your house.”
He nodded. “I couldn’t stand to go back. I couldn’t face it.” His head lifted and he stared at me, as though noticing me for the first time. “Who the fuck are you?”
Sam moved this time, dispensing a rapid, blunt kick into Barry’s side. “Oops. Foot slipped.” Bending down, he grabbed a handful of Barry’s hair and raised the man’s head again. “Apologize to Holly. Now.”
“I’m suh-sorry,” he stammered.
Zack shifted position to tuck me into his side. “If you ever see Holly again, even across the other side of the street, you go the other way. Understand? Otherwise I will make your life a living hell. You’ll beg me to put an end to it.”
“What happens now?” I addressed Sam from the safe circle of Zack’s arms.
“We’re on our way to the police station where he’s going to revise his statement.”
“I should be going with you. She was my sister.” I felt the tension vibrating through Zack’s body when he spoke.
“You can’t go AWOL,” Petey muttered. His words struck a chord with me, reminded me of something that lay tantalizingly out of reach, but I couldn’t grasp it.
“One thing.” Zack’s voice rang out. “How can you be sure he’s telling the truth?”
Sam’s face was impassive. “You’re a soldier, Zack. You know there’s more than one way to get information out of somebody.” I shivered at the menace in the words.