“Bob was your ticket,” Jeremy whispered. “A ticket to a better life. More money, all the things you wanted.”
“I... I just need to explain it to you better,” Gloria said. “I told you, things were so far along. It was... it was a case of the lesser evil.”
We seemed to have an abundant supply of that at the moment.
A shout from the front of the house. “Weaver!”
It was Duckworth.
“Back here!” I called.
He was in the kitchen in three seconds, one uniformed officer trailing him. He saw Bob on the floor and looked angrily at me. “You were supposed to wait.”
I didn’t know what to say.
Duckworth pushed me aside, straddled Bob and told him to lie face down and put his hands behind his back. “I’m placing you under arrest, Mr. Butler,” he said. He cinched some plastic cuffs onto the man’s wrists and told him to get up. Awkwardly, Bob got to his knees first, then stood.
He allowed himself to be walked out of the kitchen. He kept his head bowed, avoiding eye contact with any of us on the way out.
The kitchen was very silent again.
“You have to understand,” Gloria said pleadingly. She reached out to touch Jeremy’s arm, and he recoiled as though she were a poisonous snake.
“I don’t believe it,” he said, more to himself than any of us.
“Oh Gloria,” Ms. Plimpton said. “How could you?”
From the front door, Duckworth shouted my name again.
I approached Jeremy. “I’ll be back in a minute, okay? We’re going to work this out. You can stay with me. We’ll get you out of this house.”
He seemed close to catatonic.
“Just give me a minute,” I repeated.
I walked briskly out of the kitchen. Ms. Plimpton followed me.
“Tell me this isn’t true,” she said.
Duckworth was standing just outside the door, pointing a finger at me as the officer put Bob into the back seat of what looked like the same cruiser that had taken Galen Broadhurst away.
“You screwed this up,” he said. “You should have waited.”
“Things happened quickly,” I said. It was a weak defense, I knew. “But we’ve got them. We’ve got the lot of them.”
“Someone please tell me exactly what’s going on,” Ms. Plimpton said.
Duckworth was shaking his head angrily.
That was when I remembered something Jeremy had told me the day before. About what was in one of the kitchen drawers.
I said to Duckworth, “I don’t want to leave Jeremy. He needs to see somebody. The kid’s falling—”
And then we heard the shot.
Ms. Plimpton screamed.
Duckworth bolted into the house. We both started heading for the kitchen, but stopped short of it. We didn’t know what we would be running into.
“Ms. Pilford!” Duckworth shouted. “Are you okay?”
“Jeremy!” I said. “What’s happened?”
There was nothing for several seconds. Then Jeremy’s voice.
“I’m going to come out,” he said. “I’ve put the gun down.”
Duckworth and I exchanged fearful looks.
Jeremy walked calmly out of the kitchen, stopped, looked at me, and managed to make his quivering lips smile ever so slightly.
“I did it,” he said. “I take full responsibility.” He paused. “I own this.”
I took him into my arms, while Duckworth ran into the kitchen to see how bad it was.
On the morning she will never forget, suburban teenager Cynthia Archer awakes with a nasty hangover and a feeling she is going to have an even nastier confrontation with her mom and dad. But when she leaves her bedroom, she discovers the house is empty, with no sign of her parents or younger brother Todd. In the blink of an eye, without any explanation, her family has simply disappeared.
Twenty-five years later Cynthia is still haunted by unanswered questions. Were her family murdered? And if they’re alive, why did they abandon her in such a cruel way? Now married with a daughter of her own, Cynthia fears that her new family will be taken from her just as her first one was. Then a letter arrives which makes no sense and yet chills Cynthia to the core. And soon she begins to realise that stirring up the past could be the worst mistake she has ever made...