Dead Silence (Stillwater Trilogy #1)(16)
Author: Brenda Novak

“What else can you remember?” Kirk asked.

Far more than she wanted to. She remembered how hard it’d been to wipe the sticky blood from her hands. The sound of the shovel scraping through the mud. The smell of rain and damp leaves. She remembered sitting in a tub of hot water, shivering, her teeth clacking together while her mother scrubbed her clean as if she was a baby. And she remembered the pink color of the bathwater when she got out.

She fought to blank her mind. “Nothing special,” she said. “That night was no different than any other.”

“Except that Jed never came to the door to get paid for his work. Don’t you think that’s strange?” Madeline asked.

It was strange. Grace didn’t know what he’d seen that night. Or whether he’d ever divulge it. At times, she believed he’d fixed the tractor and gone home without noticing anything amiss, just as he’d told the police. At other times she was certain he knew much more than he was saying. “Maybe he saw that Dad wasn’t home yet and decided not to bother us.”

“Or he was too busy hiding the body and hightailing it out of there,” Kirk volunteered.

Grace shook her head. “Jed’s not the type. You still haven’t given me a motive. Why would he want to harm the town’s most popular spiritual leader?”

“He didn’t consider him a spiritual leader,” Kirk responded. “He quit going to church several months before the reverend disappeared. Don’t you remember? One day he got up, walked out and never returned.”

“He’s not the only person to ever quit church.”

“He’s the only one I know who walked out in the middle of a sermon delivered by your father.”

“Maybe he didn’t like the way Dad preached.” Grace hadn’t liked it, either—not once she realized that what came out of his mouth had no correlation to what was in his heart.

“I went to Jed’s repair shop with Daddy once in a while,” Madeline said.

“Was there a problem between them?” Grace knew there wasn’t, so she risked another sip of wine.

“I sensed something unfriendly going on. When Daddy invited him back to church, Jed said he’d already heard more than enough from a man like him.” She ran a finger around the rim of her glass. “That shows some animosity, doesn’t it?”

“But the police couldn’t find any evidence to indicate that Jed did anything wrong,” Grace said, finally facing them.

“They never really looked. They pumped him for information, trying to get him to point his finger at Mom—that’s it.”

“And now you think he’s the one guilty of murder?” She realized after she’d spoken that she’d emphasized the wrong word. Fortunately, no one seemed to notice.

“Daddy didn’t drive off into the sunset, Grace. He wouldn’t leave me hanging. He wouldn’t leave Mom, you, Clay, Molly, the farm, his congregation. Not after what my real mother did,” she added softly. “He hated her for taking the easy way out.”

Grace bit her tongue. Madeline must’ve seen some of the cracks in her father’s marriage to the woman from Booneville, sensed the growing strain between him and his stepchildren. But it seemed that she’d chosen to ignore certain incidents and remember the past differently. If not for her loyal support and insistence that Irene was a good wife and mother, Grace thought the investigation might’ve gone on for years. They might even have gone to trial without a body. “But Jed, Maddy? He has no history of violence.”

“He’s not telling the truth about that night,” she insisted.

Did Madeline really want the truth? Grace longed to tell her to forget her father. To let what had happened go—because she’d only suffer more if she ever found the answers she craved. She stood to lose her mother, her sisters, her brother…Hadn’t she lost enough?

“You weren’t even there.” Madeline had been spending the night with a girlfriend, completely unaware that anything unusual was happening at home. But then, she’d been unaware of a lot of things. The reverend made sure of that.

“Jed said something strange to me once when I was at the shop to pick up my Jeep,” Kirk said. “At the time, I blew it off. But after talking to Matt…”

Grace stared at her own reflection in the window again. “What was it?”

“I was asking him about that night. At first, he wouldn’t say much, just gave all the same old lines. But when I asked him what he believes happened to Lee Barker, he said he thinks Madeline’s father got exactly what he deserved.”

A shiver ran from Grace’s head to her feet.

“What he deserved?” Madeline repeated. “See, Grace? My dad was a preacher, for heaven’s sake. A good man. What could he deserve?”

Grace closed her eyes, yearning for the innocence Madeline took for granted. “It means Jed didn’t like him, that’s all.”

“No, it’s more than that,” Madeline said. “And I’m going to prove it.”

The rain came in a constant downpour that night. For the first time since Grace had moved into Evonne’s house, she felt out of place as she sat alone on the leather couch in the living room, watching the water cascade down the back windows. Her conversation with Madeline and Kirk bothered her, but no more than the storm. She kept picturing the gullies formed by the runoff, the water moving the topsoil at the farm, dumping it into the irrigation ditches and washing it far away from the trees behind the barn. They hadn’t had time to dig much of a hole….

But no one had found Barker’s grave in eighteen years.

She poured herself some more wine. What if Madeline managed to convince the police that Jed had killed her father? Would he defend himself by revealing all he knew? What would that be? And how would she face Madeline again if her stepsister ever learned the truth?

She sipped her chardonnay, remembering her encounter with Clay a week ago. She’d told him she was here to decide whether or not to come forward. But that was a lie. Her hands were tied, and they both knew it. Or she would’ve told the truth years ago.

So why was she here? To find some way to justify her continued silence, she decided. To live with what had happened. That was all.

Trying to shake off the foreboding that seemed to hang around her like cobwebs, she set her glass aside and used her cell phone, which lay on the seat next to her, to call Clay.