Sleeping in Eden (47 page)

“He wouldn't take me any farther than the truck stop,” she muttered.

Dylan shook his head. “I couldn't.”

Something struck Lucas. He reached across the table and grabbed Angela by the wrist. Waited until she gathered the courage to look him in the eye. “You just spent days scouring his house, Angela. They're there, aren't they? Meg's bags.”

“There were no bags,” Angela hissed.

Lucas thought for a moment. “He dismantled them. There were strange clothes in your closet, weren't there? Stuff you didn't recognize, but that DCI would simply assume was yours.”

The fact that she wouldn't answer was affirmation.

After a minute Lucas said gently, “It works, Angela. His story works.”

Angela's eyes flashed and she turned on Dylan. “Why didn't you step forward when Meg turned up missing? Her parents had to have filed a missing persons report. If you're so innocent, why didn't you tell them your story?”

“I've spent the last eight years running as far as I could from any connection I ever had with Meg. When I left Sutton, I didn't look back. I didn't really have friends in Iowa besides her, and I worked hard to keep it that way.”

“That's very convenient.” Angela sniffed.

“I'm not proud of it.” Dylan hung his head for a moment before lifting it to gaze out the darkened window. “I feel like I've lived half my life trying to forget Meg Painter. And after she left me, I didn't want to know about her happy ending and how she had reunited with Jess.”

“Jess Langbroek?”

“How do you know Jess?” Dylan asked suspiciously.

Lucas held up the ring. “We did a little investigating. He was the person we were looking for. Not you.” Suddenly Lucas remembered his visit with Mrs. Langbroek and the cell phone clip that had brought them to the Gaslight Inn and Dylan. He had pocketed the clip in the midst of the uproar, and as he fished it out, he felt deeply indebted to Mrs. Langbroek and the part she didn't even know she had played. He slid the phone clip across the table and Dylan caught it. “You left this at the Langbroeks'.”

Dylan fingered the plastic accessory but didn't seem to register what it was or where it had come from. His mind was on Meg. “I thought she was with him all this time,” he whispered. “I had no idea Meg was missing until I saw that piece on the news about Jim.”

“And you put it all together.” Lucas realized he was still holding Angela's wrist, and he released her belatedly. She rubbed her forearm as if smoothing away the evidence of his fingers.

“Parts of it. Enough.” Dylan's shoulders rounded and he sank into himself. “I came to see Greg and Linda—her parents. To tell them what I know.”

Dylan didn't have to admit that he had never made it to the Painters'. His shame was palpable. He must have considered the Langbroeks a sort of stand-in, a step between him and the people whose lives his story would change forever. Lucas noticed a slight tremor in Dylan's hand, and wondered what caused the involuntary motion. Fear? Horror at finally learning the ugly truth? Or did Dylan medicate himself to forget? He didn't smell like booze, and he didn't seem like an addict. But
Lucas was all too aware that there were many different ways to numb the pain. Some more subtle than others.

Lucas studied the ring that he had slipped on his pinky, taking in the curve of leaves and the cracked opal, the iridescent beauty split down the middle. He had spent his life striving to do the right thing. To help people. To promote justice. But after hearing Dylan's tale, he couldn't see clearly enough to determine what that was. He couldn't help thinking of what Angela had said in the car only hours before: Maybe it's not always about being right . . . It's about being good. Maybe this time what was right and what was good were not the same thing.

Dylan would be questioned mercilessly, maybe even suspected of a role in Meg's death—Angela certainly seemed convinced of his guilt. His life would definitely never be the same. And maybe that was the point. As Lucas looked between the two of them, he accepted that everyone had to be held accountable for the things that they did—and didn't do.

“It's not my story to tell,” he said eventually, and he slid the ring off his finger and handed it to Dylan.

Angela gasped, but Dylan accepted the ring without pause. He seemed grateful to hold it again, and for one of the first times in his life, Lucas couldn't predict far enough ahead to assume an answer. Black and white didn't seem so clear.

“Thank you,” Dylan said, and when he began to cry, Lucas had to look away. “Thank you, but it's not mine. It never was.” He closed his fist tight around the ring for a second, then released it onto the table, setting the gold into a spin that Lucas stopped with the weight of his palm.

Dylan had made his choice.

“Okay,” Lucas said, picking up his cell phone. “I've got a call to make.”

Alex was beyond livid, but Lucas didn't care.

While they waited nearly two hours for the DCI team to arrive, Dylan found his way to an empty booth and laid his
head down on the table, face turned toward the wall. His arms arched over his head like he was trying to hide himself from the world, and Lucas wondered, from the slow, deep way he breathed, if he was crying. Lucas knew that kind of grief. That kind of crawl-out-of-your-skin, kill-me-now, I-can't-stand-it grief. He had seen Jenna curled into the same ball the day they buried Audrey.

Lucas wanted to tell Dylan how sorry he was. How deeply he felt the younger man's loss, and how he knew what it was like to believe you that had been forsaken by the world. By a cruel God who didn't care and refused to help. Though it wasn't logical, Lucas fought an urge to touch the top of Dylan's bowed head. He raised his hand a little, maybe to hold it out for a handshake, maybe to raise it in condemnation. Or blessing. But Dylan never saw the offering of the doctor's outstretched hand because he wouldn't, or couldn't, lift his head. Lucas dropped his arm to his side and turned away without saying anything.

Be with him, he thought. Lucas whispered it over and over again until the words bloomed of their own accord and the final hour of their vigil before the authorities burst in grew into a prayer of the sort he hadn't spoken in years. It was a balm to his soul, a comfort that made Angela's fury and Dylan's sorrow seem bearable somehow. Like small, black remnants of fabric that only made the mosaic more beautiful. Hadn't he learned that long ago? That the light shines brighter because of the darkness around it? Though it seemed impossible, Lucas felt hope in the wings. For himself. For Jenna. Even for Dylan. There was a certain expectation, a hint of lingering promise that he was just beginning to remember.

When Alex finally arrived, Lucas was ready for him.

After giving their statements and being interviewed for longer than Lucas felt necessary, Alex begrudgingly gave Lucas and Angela permission to go home. It sounded like heaven to Lucas, like some faraway fairy-tale land, and his heart nearly burst at the thought of leaving the sorrow of Dylan's story behind. But it wasn't something you simply walked away from.

In the moment before they left him, Lucas caught Dylan's eye and tried to smile. It didn't work, not completely, but something passed between them all the same. An understanding, if nothing else.

“What are you doing here?” Lucas asked Dylan, though he had already admitted that he had followed the newscast of Jim's suicide and the unidentified body in the barn back to Meg's hometown. DCI established that his next stop would have been Blackhawk and the last place he had seen her alive. He just hadn't made it that far.

“I came here to find her,” he whispered.

But Lucas knew that was only half of it. Dylan had also come to let her go.

A
ngela didn't have much to say on the way home. She sat curled against her door, arms wrapped tight around her abdomen and head tilted toward the window as if she couldn't get far enough away from Lucas. As if she longed to peel away the glass and hurl herself into the night as it careened by.

Lucas attempted conversation more than once, but there was nothing he could say. Her father's absolution had been swapped so quickly for a guilt Angela had never anticipated. Who could blame her for not being able to absorb it? He knew that any anger she clung to was the result of a lifetime of disappointments, accumulated like dust in an abandoned corner of her heart. Deep down, she had hoped to hear that her story was nothing but a misunderstanding: that the man who stole her youth and plagued her adulthood was not who she always believed he was. Didn't she deserve a fairy tale?

And yet, there was something redeeming in Jim's final years, in the way he cared for his daughter long-distance even though he couldn't bring himself to do it when she still lived beneath his roof. His watchfulness was a small thing, but it bespoke a depth that Lucas hadn't known Jim possessed. It held a quiet tenderness. It hinted at regret and hope and recompense for sins that could never be repaid. But at least he had tried.

Somehow, it made Lucas believe in the power of small things, the intangible kindnesses that communicated love in a language people rarely stopped to hear.

“It's okay,” Lucas wanted to tell her. “He loved you in his own way.” But he knew that she didn't want to hear it. Not right now. He prayed that someday, when there was enough distance between the life Angela had inherited and the hopes she'd attached to it—those impossible dreams that she couldn't have stopped if she tried—she'd look back and know that her father had done what he was capable of. It didn't make up for anything, but maybe amid the ruins of her past there remained a door, even a window, that opened on forgiveness.

By the time they drove up to the Hudsons' house on the edge of a sleeping Blackhawk, Angela had petrified: she was as hard and implacable as the furious woman who had stood in his kitchen nearly two weeks before and swore she would clear her father's name. After watching her soften, risking stability to believe in something with no guarantees and allowing herself to hope, it killed Lucas to see her so undone.

“I know that this isn't what you wanted,” Lucas said, chancing her wrath in an effort to coax her to talk a little. He thought it would be good for her to let at least some of it out. “But your dad tried to make amends. In his own way, I think he was asking for forgiveness.”

“He was a small man,” she muttered through clenched teeth. “Spineless and pathetic and weak. He made himself strong by preying on the frailty of others. I should have known. I don't know what I was expecting.”

A miracle, Lucas thought. You wanted to rewrite your story, swapping the evil father for a broken and misunderstood man you could love in retrospect. In spite of his earlier feelings for Jim Sparks, Lucas could admit that the man who hung himself in his barn was exactly those things: a collection of loss and failure that would never overcome the sum of all its shattered parts. Lucas just hoped that his daughter wouldn't spend her life paying for the sins of her father.

“Go home,” Lucas told Angela gently. “Go back to the life you had and leave this all behind.”

“I intend to.”

“Just leave your bitterness here.”

“So now you're a counselor?” Angela scoffed. “Advise me, O wise one. How exactly should I deal with all of this?”

“Look, I'm not trying to condescend. I just—”

“What? You just what?”

“I want good for you.”

Angela didn't say anything in response, and Lucas sat staring out of the windshield at his shadowed home. “She died that day,” he said after a moment. “Meg did. But your life began. Don't forget that.” As he watched, the first few flakes of the year began a spinning descent to the earth below. He had to squint to make them out, but within minutes, the air was sparkling, resplendent in waves of soft-strewn white like a gift of tossed confetti. It seemed victorious somehow, a halfhearted celebration in honor of all they had learned.