The Family Secret

Chapter 2

2

Jack needed a second.

He stared at Iris, whose face was so much like his wife’s. Her chest rose as she waited for him to say something, as if waiting for the other shoe to drop. The blue of her eyes resembled his wife’s in some ways, but where Karen’s cheeks were plump, Iris had a narrow face and nose, and her lips were not quite as full.

He realized that what she’d just said concerned something he’d always seen as a big black circle of mystery about his wife’s father, just something none of the O’Connells spoke of.

Jack stood up and dragged his hand over his face, hearing the scrape of whiskers. Iris pressed her lips together, and he found himself looking to the door and hesitating, wondering when Karen would be done with her motion at the courthouse and back. It could be hours or minutes.

“I’m not sure where to start,” Iris finally said.

It wasn’t as if Jack had trouble getting clients to talk, but everyone was different, and this was Iris O’Connell, his wife’s mother, his family. “Well, let’s start with the fact that you’re here to see me. I need to ask, does Karen know about whatever this is?”

She hesitated and glanced away. “Not everything, only the part that Owen knew. My son came downstairs just as I had wrapped up the knife in some cloth. The office was a mess, broken things, paper everywhere, and there was blood. I asked Owen to get rid of the knife. I never really considered what he thought, because he never said anything. But apparently, he buried it in the woods. This just came out now. Someone saw him do it, that lady who was part of the recent high school trouble. I know Owen and Marcus have taken care of it now. They got the knife back. That woman had something on us, something that would prompt questions I don’t want to answer. I didn’t realize what Owen thought I had done until he and Marcus came to me. Suzanne was there, and Luke was home, too. They don’t know that I know this, but they shared it with Ryan and Karen even though I asked them not to… But they don’t know everything.” Her knuckles were white from gripping her purse.

“How is it possible that I believed someone I was so close and intimate with, then learned that everything was a lie? I told Owen that I needed his help to keep us together. Like, what the f**k is wrong with me? Owen was just a kid, a teenager. He went from just a typical sixteen-year-old to a father figure overnight, having to watch over his siblings. I knew it, but I was drowning in everything, trying to figure out how to put one foot in front of the other.” She sighed.

He realized he’d never had this kind of trouble before with a client, worrying about whether they had done the worst thing imaginable. Often, they had, but in this case, he wasn’t sure he wanted to know. What the hell was he going to tell Karen?

Nothing.

“So there was a knife and blood and a crime scene, and you basically…”

“Cleaned up,” she said. “I think that’s what you’re getting at. Yes, Jack, I cleaned up a crime scene. I cleaned up the office, I destroyed evidence, I dragged my impressionable teenage son into something unknowingly because he walked into the middle of everything as I was trying to wrap my head around it. You know what? That night has been with me for so long, yet there I was, all these years later, thinking it had finally stopped haunting me. I had spent night after night trying to make sense of what happened.”

She killed him, he thought. It was his first thought, yet he couldn’t ask. “Go on,” he said. “Tell me everything, Iris, so I can figure out how to help.”

She merely nodded. He could see how shallow her breathing was. This wasn’t the Iris O’Connell he was used to, who was always smiling and laughing with her kids. “Raymond had been acting strangely for some time, and I suspected he was involved in something, but I kept telling myself it was nothing. Have you ever known someone so well and then realized one day that you didn’t know anything about them? I did.”

She didn’t let him answer. He could see how she was struggling to find the words. “I just told myself I likely didn’t want to know, or it was nothing. Men I’d never seen before had started showing up late, when the kids were in bed, when I was getting ready to turn in for the night and expecting Raymond to follow. He’d started keeping to his office downstairs. When I came home with the kids to make dinner, there were times I found him there instead of at work. He was good with his hands, could fix anything. But he became dismissive, secretive, and I could feel him pushing me away. Then that night happened…”

That was all she said. Then she coughed.

“Let me get you some water,” Jack said, striding over to the small bar fridge. He opened it and reached for one of the bottles his wife kept stocked for him, then closed the fridge and took a second before turning around. Held out the water to her.

“Thank you.” She unscrewed the cap and took a swallow.

Jack took in the legal pad waiting on the desk for him to write something. His wife’s mother was confessing to something she’d done, and right now, he was positive this knowledge would be just something else that could come between him and his wife.

“So let’s go back to that night,” he said. “You said there were men there. Who were these men?”

She pulled in a breath and glanced down. “You know, Jack, I don’t know who they were. I’d never seen them before. I’d only heard voices and gone down once, and I saw a man, balding, sitting with my husband. The other standing. I’d never seen him before. But have you ever met someone and realized there was something about them, something that made you swear you’d never forget their face? Well, there was something about them that bothered me.

“That was the first time Raymond ever dismissed me—you know, telling me to go to bed, that he had business that didn’t concern me. I wanted to stand my ground and tell him where to go, but the way he looked at me and the amusement on the stranger’s face… I left. Of course, I waited for him, but I eventually fell asleep. I’m not even sure he came to bed. I was furious, and you know what I did? I ate that anger. I didn’t speak. Then I realized after days that he wasn’t going to apologize. That was the first time that it seemed as if he’d suddenly changed into a different person. He was no longer the tall, dashing, dark-haired, blue-eyed devil who’d arrived in town one day and swept me off my feet, a man who’d turned my life, our life, into a dream. It had turned into a nightmare.”

He was pacing now, his arms across his chest. “I’m not understanding what happened. You need to tell me what you did. Did you hurt him?”

She made a face and started to say something, but she pulled in a breath, and her jaw slackened. She glanced over to the window and shook her head before looking back to him. “There was a letter on his desk, in his handwriting. All it said was ‘Goodbye. Don’t look for me. I’m sorry.’ The problem is, Jack, I had woken up on the floor of his office and seen the mess and the blood, and I didn’t remember what had happened or how I’d got there. All I knew was that I was suddenly standing in the middle of something gruesome, bloody, and I had no idea where my husband was…”

He was positive there was more. He stared at her as she lowered her head, looking down at her hands, flexing them and holding her ringless fingers out in front of her as if they held all the answers.

“Are you telling me you woke up in a crime scene, and there was blood, a knife, and a messy room, and you don’t know how you got there? You remember nothing? Were you knocked out? You didn’t call the police?”

She shook her head, and for a minute, he had to remind himself this was Karen’s mother, because if it had been anyone else, he’d have told them he didn’t believe them.

“I don’t understand why you didn’t call the police, the sheriff,” he said. “That makes absolutely no sense, Iris.”

“You don’t get it, Jack?” she said.

He just stared at her, because none of this made any sense. “No. Fill me in, Iris, because from where I’m sitting, you haven’t given me one reason yet why you couldn’t have called the police. Why didn’t you report him missing? People had to wonder where he was. He had a job, right?”

All Iris did was lift her blue eyes to him, and this time her expression was filled with a confidence he wasn’t entirely comfortable with. “Reporting him missing wasn’t an option,” she said, “because when I woke up, the knife was in my hand.”