Kitchen Boss

I wrap my arms around myself as I shiver.

“I launch myself into the water and start swimming. My arms hit the water. My legs move behind me. There’s no current. It’s like I’m in a pool. I keep swimming. But then pain shoots up my leg.”

I wince from the pain.

“I get a cramp. I can’t swim anymore. I look at the shore and Trisha’s there. I try to get her attention but she’s not looking at me. She’s drinking from a bottle. I splash around. My body’s getting heavier and heavier. I start sinking. I go under water. I can’t breathe. It hurts. It hurts all over. And I’m so scared. I don’t want to die. Someone save me. Someone…”

“That’s enough,” I hear my mother’s voice, clear as a bell, ringing through the air as I feel her arms wrap around me.

I open my eyes and find myself back in the hotel room. I’m not in the water anymore. My body still feels heavy, though. My chest still hurts.

“Shh.” My mother rubs my back. “It’s okay now. You’re safe now, sweetheart. Mommy’s here. Everything’s okay now.”

I say nothing as tears trickle down my cheeks. I don’t believe her, though. How can everything be okay now that I know that I nearly drowned? I nearly drowned but I didn’t die. I didn’t die and Trisha did, even though I was in the water and she was on the shore, which means that Trisha saved me. She died saving me.

Just as I thought, she died because of me.

I grip my mother’s shirt as I start to sob. How can I still say I’m innocent?

Chapter 18

Jackson

“You don’t think Cathy is a murderer, do you?” Ken asks me without looking up from her tablet as she examines the contents of the pantry.

I pause to glance at her with slightly arched eyebrows. I’m surprised she knows about Cathy’s case. I didn’t tell her about it. Then again, Ken has a lot of connections.

I think of correcting her – Cathy is being charged with manslaughter, not murder; there’s a difference – but I say nothing as I transfer the bottles of olives from the box on the floor to the shelf. I know what Ken means.

Could Cathy have taken someone else’s life?

I’ve been wondering about the same thing for the past few days, ever since those cops showed up at the house. The papers from the prosecutor’s office say the caretaker of one of the cabins near the lake where Trisha drowned, a man named Gary Pitts, came forward and said he saw what happened that night – that Cathy deliberately held Trisha’s head below water while they were in the lake. It came as a shock to me, of course. I still find it hard to believe or even imagine. Even so, I can’t help but wonder if it might be true, especially since Cathy told me herself that she thinks she killed Trisha.

What did she mean? Could she really have drowned Trisha?

I wish I knew. I wish I could talk to Cathy one more time and understand what’s going on with her. But I can’t. She’s gone now, off to Staggart to deal with the charges made against her. She didn’t even say goodbye. Besides, I’m not supposed to talk to her, not now that I’ve received my own papers from the court asking me to share my testimony regarding what happened to my sister.

I let out a sigh. The distance between us just seems to be getting wider and wider.

“Hey.” Ken puts her tablet down. “Don’t tell me you’re not going to help her.”

“I don’t think there’s anything I can do,” I answer as I grab another bottle of olives. “Besides, Cathy doesn’t want my help.”

Ken snorts. “Did she really say that, or are you just saying that because the two of you broke up?”

I glance at her curiously. Broke up? Who said anything about that?

“What?” Ken shrugs. “Everyone here knows the temperature between the two of you has gone cold.”

I place the bottle on the shelf. “We didn’t break up. Why would we when we’re not together? She’s not my fiancee for real, remember?”

“You mean you didn’t propose to her for real?” Ken asks. “Or at least, ask her to be your girlfriend?”

Come to think of it, maybe I should have. Well, even if I had, she’d still have left.

“It doesn’t matter,” I tell Ken. “She doesn’t love me.”

She never said she did.

“Really?”

“And yes, she said she doesn’t want my help.”

“So what? You’re just going to give up on her?”

I don’t answer.

Ken snorts. “I guess you’re not as much of a man as I thought you were.”

I frown. “What do you want me to do, huh? Tell the judge that Cathy had nothing to do with my sister’s death even though I wasn’t there when it happened and she doesn’t remember it?”