“Yes.”
“Why?”
There was only one possible explanation for it. “Someone else must have wanted Harris Mickler dead. Whoever it was must have seen us leave the bar and followed me home. When I went inside and left the van running, I left a perfect window of opportunity to kill him.” It was the kind of crime I might have written about. The kind no one would buy because it was so … neat.
Vero plucked Patricia’s envelope from my hand. I’d been squeezing it so tightly, I’d forgotten it was there. “Are you sure this isn’t just your guilt talking?”
“I may be guilty of a lot of things, Vero, but I did not close that garage door.”
She withdrew a stack of cash and held it to her face, her eyes closing as she fanned the edges and inhaled deeply. “Do we still get to keep the money?”
I reached behind me for the roll of duct tape on the workbench and threw it at her.
“Okay, fine,” she said, using Patricia Mickler’s envelope as a shield in case I decided to throw anything else. “Let’s assume for a minute you didn’t close the garage door and someone else did. Why pull the cord? Why not just push the button on the wall and run?”
I gnawed my thumbnail, sifting back through the events of the night. It would have taken awhile for the carbon monoxide to fill the garage. Which meant the killer must have closed the door right after I went inside. I’d been sitting on the floor of the kitchen, my back against the wall directly beside the garage as I’d talked to Georgia. We’d talked so long, I’d forgotten I’d left the van running. Then I’d gone upstairs to wash up and change. My bedroom was right above the garage. “No.” I shook my head. “No, they couldn’t have used the wall button, or even a remote. The motor’s too loud. I would have heard it. Whoever pulled that cord wanted to be silent.”
My eyes lifted to the red handle. Something still didn’t add up. The emergency release cord was anything but quiet. I’d used it one winter during a power outage, when the garage door was stuck open and the snow was blowing in. As soon as I’d pulled the cord, the door came crashing down, bouncing against the concrete with a bone-jarring smash, just as it had when I’d dropped it a few minutes ago to startle Mrs. Haggerty. Steven had heard the noise from our bedroom and had come running to see what had happened. He’d lectured me for a week about how I could have destroyed the frame. How I could have hurt myself or one of the kids. How I should never pull the release cord when the garage door is open. Not unless …
“What’s that look? I know that look,” Vero said as I grabbed the rusted step stool from the corner. “That’s the same look you got before you stuffed the Play-Doh in Theresa’s tailpipe.”
“Open the door,” I said as I positioned the stool under the red emergency cord.
“It’s heavy! You open it.”
“I can’t. I’m getting on the stool.”
Vero uttered a few choice words about where I could stick said stool as she hauled the garage door open with both hands. She shivered as a cold autumn wind sliced under the opening and rustled her hair. Cursing me under her breath, she slung the garage door high above her head on its track until it was fully opened, resting parallel with the ceiling. I climbed up the rungs and reconnected the belt to the pulley, the way Steven had shown me. Then I pulled the cord.
Vero shrieked as the door slid freely down the tracks, picking up speed as it dropped. She lunged, catching it before it hit the ground. “Are you nuts?” she hissed. “The last thing we need is Mrs. Haggerty hearing all this and poking her nosy ass all up in our business!” Vero eased the door to the ground with a quiet thud, a sound so small I might not have heard it inside the house.
“There were two of them,” I said, climbing down from the stool. Vero wrinkled her nose at me. “It’s the only way someone could have shut this garage without making any noise. One person pulled the cord. Someone else caught the door and controlled the drop.”
“So let me get this straight,” Vero said. “You mean to tell me someone else … no, two someone elses … killed Harris while you were on the phone with your sister?”
“Making it look like an accident.”
“Or setting you up to take the fall.” Vero picked up the envelope and slid it into the waistband of her yoga pants—my yoga pants—as if she were afraid I might suddenly decide to give it back. She yelped as I yanked it free, but there was nothing to be done about it now. I had already claimed the money. Regardless of who’d shut Harris inside the garage, I was the one who’d accepted payment for the hit job. And if anyone ever found Harris’s body, we were the ones who’d go down for it.
* * *
When the kids went down for their afternoon naps, I retreated to my office and closed the door. Patricia’s envelope rested on top of my desk. It was noticeably lighter since Vero had counted out her forty percent of the cash, but that didn’t make it any easier to look at, and I tucked it inside my desk drawer.
The money from Patricia was no different from my book advance, just one more unearned payment for a job I hadn’t done. Just one more thing to feel guilty about. As many problems as Patricia’s money could solve, it had come tied to even bigger ones. Scarier ones. The kinds of problems that meant losing my kids. The kinds of problems that meant spending the rest of my life behind bars. And the only way I’d ever have a leg to stand on if Harris’s disappearance came back to bite me was to know for certain what had really happened in my garage. To be able to prove, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that I hadn’t been the one to murder him.
I flipped on the old PC, waiting as it coughed and sputtered to life. I opened a blank Word document and titled it, typing the first words that came to mind, the one thing Sylvia and my editor were expecting of me—THE HIT by Finlay Donovan. The screen was blindingly white. The cursor stared back at me with an indifferent, slow blink as my calloused fingers hovered over the keys. It had been months since I’d been able to climb out of my own mire of self-defeating thoughts. Since Steven left, I hadn’t been able to cobble more than a few words together on a page. Every plotline seemed hopeless, every romance fell flat, and every story I dreamed up felt like a complete waste of time.
When I’d missed my first deadline after Steven moved out, Sylvia had called to lecture me. I’d told her I had writer’s block, but she’d insisted I push through it. Sometimes, she’d said, you can’t see the whole story until it’s laid out on the page, and the only way to figure out what happens next is to write your way through it, one scene after the next, until it’s done. Sylvia was all about tough love and finding your own answers. Mostly, Sylvia was all about earning a paycheck. Maybe I should’ve been, too.
I touched the keyboard, trying to figure out exactly where to start my contracted novel, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Harris’s story. Probably because, through my own stupidity, I’d managed to put myself in the middle of it. If the police managed to trace Harris from The Lush to my garage, I’d become their prime suspect. And Vero and I would go to prison unless we could prove the murder had been committed by someone else.