Yet she was back. We could all look ahead.
“Sis?” Ronnie said.
I turned to him. He was looking down.
“Your hand,” he said.
I looked down as well. A bandage had come undone on one of my fingers. A bright drop of red blood flowed from beneath it, forming a nearly perfectly round bead.
“Shit,” I said. And ran to the bathroom.
I peeled the bandage off the ring finger of my right hand. The butterfly strips the paramedic had placed on the cut had worked themselves loose, and the cut had reopened. A smear of blood ran up my finger. I turned the tap on and let the warm water run over my wound. I used a dab of soap to clean the blood.
Paul kept everything so neat. I made sure to drip into the sink and not onto the tile or the carpet. I used a tissue to stem the flow. I applied enough pressure and held tight against the cut until it seemed the blood flow had stopped.
I used my left hand to open the medicine cabinet.
“Band-Aids, Band-Aids,” I said to myself.
I didn’t see them right away, and I felt anxious to get back to the moment we were sharing in the other room.
I moved some things around and finally found the Band-Aids. I took one out, peeled it open, and managed to wrap it around my finger. It felt tight and secure. I tossed my trash away and tried to put the contents of Paul’s medicine cabinet back in order. I righted some bottles, adjusted some creams and pastes.
Then I saw the prescription bottle with Paul’s name on it.
My hand shook as I reached out and picked it up.
The cut on my finger became the least of my worries. Whatever blood was in my body turned to rock-solid ice.
Chapter Sixty-three
As I walked down the hallway, the prescription bottle in my hand, I heard faint laughter from the living room. It was Ronnie and Paul laughing. Together.
I came to the end of the hallway and stood in the doorway.
Paul saw the look on my face. So did Beth.
Ronnie noticed something was wrong with me as well. For the second time that night he said, “Sis, are you okay?”
“I stopped the bleeding,” I said.
No one said anything else. They were all looking at me, waiting.
Paul’s eyes were wide. He looked stiff and nervous again. He cleared his throat and said, “Maybe Ronnie needs to head to bed—”
“No,” I said. “He can hear this. He should hear this.” I held up the pill bottle and shook it. The pills rattled against the plastic bottle. “Digoxin, Paul? Do you take digoxin for your heart?”
Paul’s face remained frozen, a mask showing uncertainty and nervousness. His eyes ticked back and forth. If he tried to lie, if he tried to create some excuse—
But he didn’t. The mask crumpled. He lowered his head. His entire body was shriveling into the couch. He raised one hand to his forehead, as if he wanted to shade his eyes from a bright light.
“They’re my pills,” he said, his voice shaky. “But I didn’t give them to Ronnie that day. That was Gordon. He took the pills. He went to the hospital and did it. He made a flood upstairs. He had some plan—”
“But you gave Gordon the pills?” I asked. “Why?”
He lowered his hand to cover his eyes. I looked at Beth. She had scooted against the armrest of the couch. Then she stood up. She backed away from the couch. From Paul.
“Why would you cooperate with Gordon on something like that?” I asked, moving toward him. “What did he know about you that would make you do that?”
Paul was sobbing now, his shoulders shaking. He couldn’t have spoken even if he wanted to.
I said it for him.
“It wasn’t Gordon. It was you. You killed Mom, didn’t you?”
He didn’t show his face. He kept it hidden from us. He said something, something I couldn’t make out. It was muffled by his hand.
“What?” I asked.
He moved his hand aside and said, “She knew.”
She knew? What did she know?
“What did she know, Paul? What could Mom have possibly known?”
He said nothing more.
“Paul?” I said. “What? Did Mom know something… something about Gordon or you?”
“I was there,” he said. “Beth… that night…”
“Where were you?” I asked.
Beth supplied the answer. “Oh, Jesus. It was you. You drove the car that night. You were with Gordon, and you were the one who drove me to the bus station.”
I came farther into the room. I sat in the chair I had been sitting in before. I looked at Ronnie. He stared at Paul, his mouth open. He looked confused, angry.
“You drove Beth away that night. And Mom found out. And you killed her because… she was going to report you? Is that it?”
He didn’t respond.
“That’s why she changed the will before she died. That’s why she removed you as Ronnie’s guardian. She knew you drove Beth away. Who told her? Gordon?”
“Yes,” he said, his voice feeble.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because she wouldn’t give him any more money,” he said. “And he was a fucking bastard, and he wanted to make your mom feel rotten about me and everything else in her life. That’s why.”
“And when Mom found out, she cut you out of her life.” I looked at Ronnie again. “And our lives. But why did you have to kill her?”
Paul finally spoke. “She said she wasn’t going to, but she changed her mind. She’d been reconnecting with Beth. I guess doing that brought back a lot of the old feelings from when Beth… went away. The guilt, mostly. Your mom experienced a lot of guilt. She hadn’t fought hard enough to find Beth. She felt she could have pushed the police harder and made something happen. So she wasn’t going to let me off the hook. She was going to turn me in. Gordon too.”
“But after all that time?” Beth asked. “What could they do to you?”
“We’d have faced some trouble,” he said. “Real trouble. What do you think the police and the media would think of a story like that? What would people think here in Dover? You know, there’s no statute of limitations on kidnapping a child. And that’s really what we did. Beth was a minor. She didn’t know what she was doing. Children are entrusted to our care. We can’t just… cast them out. Leslie wanted to send me to jail. I went there that night to talk to her, to try to convince her that she didn’t have to do it. She sent Ronnie away so we could talk in private.” He wiped at his nose with the back of his hand. “I begged her not to do it. I really did. I told her that her whole family was back together again. She knew Beth. She had the two of you. I was still her brother. I told her that—I was still her brother. But she wouldn’t budge. Her guilt was so strong, her instinct to do whatever she could for you kids. She just… wouldn’t listen.”
I looked at Paul, the empty shell of the uncle I once knew. I thought that if I opened the front door and the wind blew in, it would turn him into scraps and whisk him away. He was gone. Whatever I once knew in him was gone.
“I was going to tell the police,” Paul said. “That day at the hospital, when I asked to talk to the detective alone. I was going to confess. I wanted to. I thought… I thought I couldn’t live with it all anymore. I wanted to get caught, to have it all over with. But I didn’t get my chance to talk to the police—you were there the whole time.”
“You didn’t have the guts,” I said. “You couldn’t stand up to Gordon.”
“No, I couldn’t. You’re right. I still can’t.”
“Still?”
“That night,” he said.
“What night?”
“We went to the diner…”