“Yes.”
“Well, I took my car to the park and took a driving service from there to a couple of blocks away from the Happy Time bar. Walked the rest of the way. See, I’d already followed him to the bar just before doing that, so I knew where to catch up with him. And, sure enough, he was still there warming a stool.”
“Driving service? You mean a Lyft or an Uber?” Amanda asked.
Her mother snapped her fingers. “A Lyft, yes.”
That would explain why Trent hadn’t got anywhere with the taxi companies.
“Then after you killed him, you took his car to the park and drove off in your own?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What are you going to do?” Her father’s voice was gruff, and he looked at Amanda.
Both of her parents were watching her, and it would have been easy in a lot of ways to turn her back on this, but it really was out of her hands. And to see her mother so full of rage was unsettling—she’d always been a rock and one of the kindest, most gentle people she knew. But her grief and her hatred, her inability to forgive, had murdered her soul, her moral compass, her morality. And reflected in her mother’s eyes, Amanda saw herself. She’d been heading down the same path, but the victim would have been herself.
“I have no choice but to turn you over—”
“No.” Her mother thrust out her chin. “If I’m being arrested, it’s by you. It will clear your name of that awful accusation made in the paper.” Her mother looked at her father, who raised his hands.
“I’m off this case, Mom, but I will be by your side every step of the way. My partner is in the car and he’ll be the one to bring you in. As far as our conversation, your confession to me, none of it happened.”
Amanda got up, her feet like lead as she headed to the front door.
Epilogue
A week later…
Amanda reluctantly left a reunion at her parents’ house late afternoon. She hadn’t been able to get enough hugs from her brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews. Everyone was happy that Amanda was back but coming to grips with what Julie Steele had done, and there were moments when Amanda felt she may have imagined it all, but the horror of it was too much for her to have simply created. Like grief ebbed and flowed, so too did her mother’s actions play out in her mind as surreal, an alternate and imagined reality. If Amanda hadn’t heard her mother’s confession with her own ears, she never would have believed it, but the truth was there, not only in her words, but in her eyes. And the entire family would be the subject of county gossip for a long while to come—or at least until the next big thing. Right now, all anyone could talk about was the arrest of former police chief Nathan Steele’s wife in the murder of Chad Palmer. In the media, Detective Amanda Steele had been credited with the arrest, but officially it had been Trent.
The toughest reunion had come with her sister Kristen and niece, Ava. Amanda hadn’t realized just how much it had hurt to distance herself from them until she was holding on to them again. When she’d made the choice to cut them out of her life, it had been too painful to look at them because all she saw was the accident, the funeral, the lowering of the coffins… that little one that had housed her baby girl. At the sight of Kristen and Ava today, her heart had opened up like it hadn’t in years, and she let them in and soaked up their love and poured hers on them.
“I’m so sorry,” she’d whispered in Kristen’s ear when they hugged and wept.
“Me too. I ne
ver should have stopped fighting for you.” Kristen sniffled and stepped out of the embrace. “I just…” She palmed her wet cheeks.
“I know.” It hurt her and her sister and the rest of her family. But now they had a chance to at least inch toward healing old wounds, though it was shadowed by their mother facing prison time. Amanda had pulled her sister in for another hug and didn’t let her go until their baby sister, Sydney, who was twenty-five, nudged them apart.
The entire day had been somewhat bittersweet, but Amanda was happy to be reunited with her family again. She only wished she’d done it sooner. If she had, maybe her mother wouldn’t have murdered Palmer.
She pulled into the cemetery and walked across the lawn to the knoll and planted the bouquets she’d brought for Kevin and Lindsey in the holders in front of their stones. She crouched next to their graves and let the tears fall as she spoke to them from her heart and didn’t leave a detail out. It had been early evening when she’d arrived, and the sun had sunk in the sky by the time she was getting ready to leave.
She pressed a kiss to her palm and passed it to the stones. “Thank you, to both of you, for having been a part of my life and helping me through this…” She hiccupped a sob. “The worst pain I’ve ever experienced. I will love you always and I will always, always do everything I can to make you proud of me. Thank you, Lindsey, for helping Mommy keep her word.”
Amanda headed home, wanting nothing more than her bed and pillow, and she had some time to catch up on her sleep. Malone had granted her a week’s leave and Amanda was taking it. She’d use much of it visiting with her family, but she was also fulfilling her promise to be by her mother’s side through the judicial process. They’d hired Hannah Byrd out of Washington as her mother’s attorney and she’d got her mother out on bail. Hannah was optimistic she could get the sentencing down to fifteen years and, with good behavior, parole in seven and a half, but nothing was certain in the world of law. Nothing was for certain in the world period. Amanda didn’t miss the irony that her mother might not spend much more time than Palmer had behind bars, and how she’d always viewed the sentence as unjust and measly. And, sure, Palmer hadn’t deserved to go out the way he had, and her mother had to pay the price, but this was her mother. They’d fight for her.
Yesterday she had driven out to Williamsburg and returned the cast of Phoebe’s toes and fingers to the Baldwins. She’d also broken the news to them about their daughter. There’d been a lot of emotion and tears had fallen, but there was also a sense of relief that came with closure. Tanya had even commented that at least her daughter was no longer in pain. Amanda wasn’t so sure she could have seen the positive so quickly, but she supposed the Baldwins had been preparing themselves for this type of outcome for many years.
Amanda let herself in her house and dropped her keys in the bowl by the front door. She padded down the hall, and realized before she could drop into bed that there was something she should take care of first. It could wait until tomorrow, but by then she’d probably have come up with a slew of excuses.
She pulled out her phone and tapped a number in her contacts. With each ring, she prayed that her call wouldn’t be answered and then she could excuse herself and say that she’d tried.
Third ring, then, “Hi.”
She stopped breathing, then, “Logan?”