“So I go back and I relieve one of the flight attendants for a couple of minutes, and this poor little kid is crying because her dad’s going into cardiac arrest right in front of her, and nobody can calm her down, so I did what I always do—”
“Took refuge in inappropriate humor?”
“Gosh, however did you guess? Anyway, the guy actually comes around, we give him oxygen, he’s coherent enough to give his kid a thumbs-up, I talk to her for a couple more minutes and explained that we had the best medical care all lined up for him and he’d be whisked to the hospital—in Daytona, but you know what they say about beggars and choosers—and then I went back to the cockpit to give Vang a sitrep and we landed and the guy turned out fine. And his kid, this adorable little strawberry blonde, just gloms onto me when we’re all finally on the tarmac and starts asking what classes you have to take to be a pilot, and I eventually peeled her off me and helped her and her mom into the car the airline provided for them, and away they went.”
“Remarkable.”
“It was a busy morning,” she agreed. “And I guess we’d better get back to ours.”
They got out of Tom’s van and headed into the funeral home, their idea to kill time while setting up the Becka intervention (“We think you might be in league with a killer, and it’s affected our lives in the following ways…”). They might not get any closer to finding Dennis, but it was better than waiting around for the next awful thing to be set in motion.
* * *
“Hello again, Ava.”
Blinking in the sudden gloom—damn, it was sunny outside—Ava didn’t immediately place him until he came closer.
“Hi, Pete. This—” She started to introduce Tom, who was inexplicably facedown on the carpet before she could finish with “… is my lover, or he will be when I devirginize him.”
Taser, she thought, staring. Pete was holding a dull black electroshock weapon little bigger than his hand, from which he’d fired two electrodes and their conductors. Both were now trapped beneath Tom, who had gone over like he’d fallen off a cliff. He was waiting for me. But he didn’t count on Tom. And, out loud: “Oh, shit.”
“Well put,” Pete agreed.
Forty-Five
“Wh-wh-why-what-wh-”
“Articulate as ever,” Pete said with a thin smile. “Just like when we were in high school.”
“We weren’t in school together, you cock!”
“Yes, we were!” This in a high-pitched scream that was almost as shocking as watching Tom succumb to fifty thousand volts. She didn’t dare look down at him; she needed to keep her focus to fill the time.
Meanwhile, Pete had visibly calmed himself. “We were. For two years. I graduated at the end of your sophomore year. You didn’t remember me then, just like you didn’t remember me at the nursing home or last week or probably next week, if you were still alive next week.”
Past tense. Aw, c’mon, spoiler alert! “So it’s my fault you’re…” Boring? Forgettable? Uninteresting? Inconsequential? The human equivalent of dryer lint? “… introverted?”
“Ah, yes, the new feel-good term for shy people. Sure. Introverted.”
“Pete—why?”
His narrow face twisted, and she could see he wanted to shout at her again. When he spoke, his voice was noticeably strained. “Don’t do that. You know. Don’t pretend otherwise.”
“Pete: I promise; I’m clueless. Ask anyone. You and I weren’t close and you barely knew Danielle. You haven’t even seen me for a decade. Besides, you were so calm at the memorial. Remember? There’s—there was nothing there.”
“Wrong,” he said coldly, and she had a flashback to the word written in Danielle’s ashes.
“Jesus, you trashed the funeral home, too,” she realized. “But why?”
“No, I just finished trashing it.”
“Wait, what?”
“It wasn’t supposed to be Dani,” he muttered, and she made a note to get her hearing checked, because she was having trouble following him. It’s probably not your ears, her inner self soothed. It’s him, because he’s crazy.
“What are you saying?”
“It was supposed to be you!”
For the first time, she noticed how wretched he looked. The dapper guy in the pricey clothes who lived a nice life abroad was gone. Now he was in faded jeans and an old T-shirt, sneakers, no socks. Ironically, seeing him slouching around in what had essentially been his high school uniform helped a memory click home.
“Is this because of the nursing home?”
“You know it is! Stop pretending otherwise.”
“I’m not pretending anything, Pete. I have no idea what you’re going on about.”
“Why are you doing this to me?”
“Pete, you’ve got the right script, but you’re reading the wrong lines. Why are you doing this to me?”
“You know, Ava! You even taunted me about it at the memorial. Bad enough to find out you were alive, bad enough to have to come back here and end up face-to-face with my worst fucking nightmare—”
“Hey!”
“—but you just had to get your little digs in.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking—” But then she did.
Did you hear Shady Oaks finally had to shut down?
Shit.
I guess the drug thing—the latest drug thing—was a bridge too far.
“Are you a pharmacist now?” he mimicked. “You fucking well knew I wasn’t.”
Would the truth—that she had no inkling of his career path—help or hurt?
“You must have figured out why I left by now.”
She was still wrestling with her dilemma. Tell the truth? I didn’t notice when you left. I didn’t care when you left. I didn’t think of you while you were gone. And I barely remembered you when you came back.
She strove for a reasonable, measured tone. “You said you moved abroad after you got your degree.”
“Yes, from Inver.”
“An associate’s degree,” she realized aloud, because Inver was a community college. “Two years. And you’re two years older than me. You didn’t leave because you got your degree—that was just how the timing worked out. You left because you wanted an ocean between you and your murder. But I still don’t know why you killed Da—” He visibly twitched at that, and she rapidly rephrased. “—why you wanted to kill me.”
“You found my stash. You sent me an e-mail about it. You were going to report me.”
It was finally coming back to her, but in pieces. She might have remembered sooner, if Pete had been the slightest bit memorable and if she had been the slightest bit less self-absorbed. But he wasn’t, and she wasn’t. Back then she had been too wrapped up in her own grief and, after her parents died, her own need to get far away.
“I only sent it because I didn’t know what was going on. I found all this stuff from residents who died, and when I looked up the paperwork, you were on shift each time and … shit, I didn’t know. Shady Oaks was slacking off even then, and when I asked around, nobody seemed to know what you were doing, or even gave a shit.”