Hush (4 page)

“What are you talking about, son?” She walked to the coffee table, ground out her cigarette in a chipped ceramic ashtray, poured a slug of Jack into a plastic cup. “I never kicked Megan out of this house.”

“Why would she say you did?”

“Same reason she told all her fibs, I suppose. Megan craved attention.” She tossed back the whiskey and coughed. “Did you know I had her when I was only sixteen? I weren’t a perfect mother, but I did my best. You want a drink?”

It was a little after ten o’clock in the morning. “Yeah. A drink would be good.”

He waited while she went into the kitchen and came back with another clear plastic cup.

Her eyes no longer had that flat, glassy look. Instead they pleaded with him for understanding. “I didn’t kick Megan out of the house. She left in a huff because she didn’t want to follow my rules about boys and drinking.” Mrs. O’Neal splashed whiskey into both cups and handed one to him. “I couldn’t set an example, so I set rules instead. I wanted her to have a better life than me.” Her voice cracked. “Maybe I was harder on her than I should’ve been.”

“Megan loved you,” he said, not really knowing, but hoping it was true.

“And she sure liked you a lot, son. It weren’t all pretend.” One hand went to her collarbone and swept back and forth, searching. “Megan wore that necklace you gave her every day, right up to the end. You remember the one? It had an old-fashioned key dangling off it.”

“The key to my heart.” At least that’s what he’d told Megan. Megan had never truly had possession of his heart, but he did work hard on that damn necklace. Took him a full week of shop class, and she had smiled so brightly when he’d given it to her.
No one ever made me a necklace before, Drex
. She’d tiptoed up and kissed his cheek. Nostalgia clogged his throat. “I’d like to see it. I mean if you still have it.”

Her brow drew down in a deep frown. “I wanted to bury that necklace with my baby, she loved it so, but after she died it weren’t nowhere to be found.” Her shoulders drooped. “Look, Drex. You’ve said your piece. Thank you for caring about my girl. But none of this was your doing. So you can go on home now…and please don’t tell anyone you were here.”

She went to the window and peeked out, quickly letting the curtain fall back in place before turning to face him again.

Clearly, she was anxious for him to go, but he hadn’t finished his business here. His gaze met hers. “I hate to put you through anything else, but there’s something I need to ask.”

Just as Mrs. O’Neal had done, he lifted the cup to his lips and belted the whiskey. It singed his throat on the way down. “The note. If you could just tell me what was in Megan’s suicide note, it would help me put the past behind me once and for all.”

Her hands covered her eyes. Her shoulders vibrated, and then she stumbled across the room and crumpled into a sloppy heap on the couch. “I guess you got the right to ask. There weren’t no note, Drex. That’s one reason I went to Deputy Hawkins and asked him what made him so sure my baby did
that
to herself. How did he know Megan weren’t murdered?”

“There was no note?” In all this time, he’d never considered that possibility.

“I thought that was suspicious, but Deputy Hawkins took me by the hand and explained right nicely that most people who kill themselves don’t leave notes. Megan weren’t murdered. So the fact there weren’t no note didn’t mean nothing.”

His headed pounded from the smoke and the whiskey. He picked up the bottle off the table and poured himself another drink. No note did mean something. It meant he’d never know for sure if Megan killed herself because he broke it off with her, or if she’d had some other reason.

Maureen continued to talk, as though the memories had come flooding back, and she couldn’t dam them up any longer. “Anyway, I came home and I Googled up
suicide
and I found out what Hawkins told me was true. There’s usually no note. But I found out something else while I was about it, and I went back to the deputy and told him I didn’t think my baby shot herself in the head. Most girls use more ladylike methods, like pills and whatnot.”

“That always bothered me too,” he said, between swigs. But there had been no evidence of a robbery, and Megan had been in a terrible state of mind.

“Anyway, Hawkins got his back up. I didn’t get the hand-holding treatment that time around so much as the brush-off. He said all the evidence pointed to suicide. There weren’t no robbery. She had no known enemies. Megan’s prints were the only ones on the gun. There was gunshot residue on Megan’s hands.”

She took a long draw off her cigarette, followed by another. “Then I called him a rotten liar.”

“Why would you do that?”

Her fingers passed over her lips. “Because the night Megan died, Hawkins came here all keyed up, told me there weren’t no gunpowder on Megan’s hands. He asked me did I know someone who wanted to hurt her. And then just two days later he looks me square in the eyes and says he made a mistake, his test was wrong and the crime lab’s test was right. He’s sorry, he says, but there
was
gunpowder on Megan’s hand after all. There had to be, he says, because electric microscopes don’t lie.”

Charlie didn’t know much about forensics, but he was on a first-name basis with microscopes courtesy of his premed studies. “Did Hawkins maybe say
electron
microscopes don’t lie?”

“That’s it exactly.
Electric microscopes don’t lie
. He told me to chin up to the stone cold truth. My girl was heartbroke, and she shot herself and I had to accept it.”

Hawkins was right—at least about electron microscopes—those findings would be dead accurate, more so than any rapid test for gunshot residue the deputy might have done at the scene. Charlie needed to sit down.

Maureen began to slur her words. “I went home like he told me, but I couldn’t sleep that night. So the next day, I went back to Hawkins, and I asked if anyone checked Simone Kincaid’s hands for gunshot residue. That was before Simone was a Carlisle, you know.”

He slumped down next to Mrs. O’Neal on the couch, her words drilling into him. She thought Simone might’ve killed Megan. Even for a grieving mother, that seemed like a stretch. Simone was a wonderful kid, with no motive at all for harming Megan—at least not any motive that Charlie could dream up.

“Hawkins laughed at me. He told me to go home and to stop watching those TV crime shows. And that’s exactly what I did. I went home, and I convinced myself that it happened just like he said. I told myself Megan weren’t scared of no intruders. She bought that revolver at the gun show because she didn’t want to live anymore.”

Mrs. O’Neal’s shoulders pumped up and down like she was holding back a hard sob. “I accepted the explanation that the law provided. Megan’s death was a suicide. And I kept the money because I needed it, and because I figured
he owed it to me
.”

Charlie’s eyebrows shot up. He turned and put his hands on her shoulders, both to comfort her and to help her stay focused. “What money? Who gave it to you?”

“Did I forget to mention the money?” She tapped her nose with her index finger. “Five hundred dollars. Came like clockwork every two weeks, until ten months ago that is. Then it just stopped. Well, I figured if he didn’t owe me nothing no more, I didn’t owe him nothing no more. So I went to that reporter, and I told her I thought
he’d
been sending me money all those years just because he didn’t want his good name bandied about in the same sentence with my poor girl.

It was all Charlie could do not to shake her. He tried to keep his voice low and easy. “Who didn’t want his name bandied about?”

Mrs. O’Neal catapulted to her feet, and Charlie went with her. She pushed his hands off her shoulders and somehow managed to stay upright. “I won’t tell you. I told Catherine Timmons and look what happened to her.”

“Catherine Timmons?” An ominous chill swept down his back. Catherine Timmons was the reporter who, according to the news, shot herself in the head yesterday.

Mrs. O’Neal nodded, and her reddened face drained of color.

“You think Catherine Timmons, the Channel Eight reporter, is dead because of something you said to her ten months ago?”

Her chin came up, and she stood perfectly straight. She seemed to have jolted herself into some sort of temporary sobriety. “I honest to God don’t know. That’s the worst part. I don’t know for sure who sent me money the last six years or why. I don’t know a damn thing about what happened to Megan in that farmhouse. I don’t know if it was suicide, like I made myself believe all these years, or if it weren’t.”

She buried her face in her hands, and when she looked back up, her eyes flooded with tears. “I don’t know if that reporter copied Megan and shot her own self in the head, or if someone else had a hand in it. But I do know this, the sheriff—Hawkins is the sheriff now you see—the sheriff don’t give a rat’s ass, and I can’t take no more chances. I’m getting out of this town, and I ain’t never coming back.”

She beat her fists against her chest. “I’ve owed you an apology, Drex, a long time. Now you have it.”

“No. It’s me who should apologize. I should’ve come here six years ago and told you how sorry I am for what happened. Instead I ran away. I did nothing to comfort you. I didn’t even stay in town long enough to go to Megan’s funeral.” He reached out and offered her his hands, palms up. “Why would you ever owe me, of all people, an apology?”

“Because you
do
give a rat’s ass. You run off to war and all but got yourself killed on account of you felt responsible for what happened to my Megan.” She took his hands. “And here this whole entire time
I knew
that while you were away working the oil rigs, Megan took up with someone else.
I knew
she got herself pregnant by that someone else, and then she lost
his
baby, and then she shot herself. And I never said another damn word about
him
after that because of five hundred lousy dollars every two weeks. And that’s why I owe you an apology.”

His breath hitched. He opened his mouth to speak, but couldn’t.

She gripped his hands harder. “You are
not
responsible for Megan’s death. Don’t ask me again who the other man was because I won’t tell you. I’ll be gone before dark, and I pray to God I never see Tangleheart, Texas, again.”

Chapter Three

Tangleheart: Monday, 6:00
P.M.

C
HARLIE HAD SOUNDED
odd on the phone—troubled. He’d said he needed to talk, and Anna had figured she had enough good sense to keep her emotions in check around him. But when she’d arrived at Charlie’s apartment, he’d put his hand on the small of her back to guide her way, and his touch had triggered a dangerous yearning that started low in her belly and spread all the way up through her aching chest. Clearly, she’d overestimated her good sense. Coming here had been a mistake—a big one.

She started to remove her purse from her shoulder, and then thought better of it. “You said you wanted to talk to me about something.”

He plopped down in the dead-middle of a small leather couch. His long legs opened wide, and then he patted a spot near his thigh. “Sit with me.”

Her gaze darted about the living room, taking in the unadorned white walls and a clean but worn brown carpet. The laminated coffee table looked like the type you’d get at Rent-A-Center. There were no chairs in the room, nor was there a loveseat to augment the couch. The place screamed temporary, and why wouldn’t it? Charlie had just gotten into med school–at UT Austin. Classes started in the fall. Too bad she didn’t know how to be his temporary friend. “I can’t stay, so do you or don’t you have something important to say me?”

“How ’bout
I’m sorry
?”

“We’ve covered that. You apologized, quite charmingly I might add, just after spinning me around on Simone’s front porch. And then I said there was no need for an apology, which in fact there is not, and that we should keep the past in the past. That was around forty-eight hours ago, surely you haven’t forgotten already.”

“No. I haven’t forgotten, and I was charming, I’ll grant you that, but I didn’t get to apologize properly because you cut me off.”

“So now I owe you the apology?”

“Peaches, just sit the hell down…please.”

Wishing she’d kept her keys in hand, she started digging through her purse for them. Way too much junk in there; receipts, candy, pennies.

He patted that alluring spot next to him again. “If you really want to put the past behind us, then hear me out. Let me say what I need to say, and after that I won’t bother you again…not unless you want me to.”

Charlie Drexler
bothering
her. How many of her teenage fantasies had revolved around that scenario? She took a deep breath and managed to whisper, “Fair enough.” She nudged Charlie’s knees to the side so she could sit down without their bodies touching and then sank down on the couch.

“I’m
sorry
.” He picked up her hand, and stroked his thumb in circles over her palm, sending little sparks flying up her arm.