Page 36 of The Summer that Changed Everything
The best she could come up with at a moment’s notice was the bat she’d seen in the coat closet—something Sharon Smoot had probably put there when the murders occurred fifteen years ago.
Lucy retrieved it and set it just inside the door before throwing back her shoulders and poking her head out to see what her unlikely visitor wanted.
For probably fifteen seconds, she didn’t say anything. Neither did he. They just studied each other warily.
“What can I do for you?” she asked at length.
He stared at his worn tennis shoes before looking at her again. “My parents told me why you’re back.”
She stiffened as she continued to eye him, one hand on the door so she could slam it quickly, if that became necessary, and the other free to grab the bat if she didn’t make it in time. “I’m sorry if my being here upsets you. But I can only act on what I believe to be true, even if you’re convinced I’m wrong.”
He shoved his massive hands—calloused and rough, suggesting he worked with them—into the pockets of his worn jeans. He wasn’t over five-ten or five-eleven, but he looked almost as wide as he was tall. “That’s the thing,” he said. “I’m not convinced you’re wrong.”
Lucy gaped at him. “You don’t think it was my father who killed your sister?”
“I know it wasn’t.”
His response was so opposite to what she’d been expecting, it took a moment for the meaning to sink in. “Howcan you be so sure?”
“I saw your father the night Aurora went missing. He was at the liquor store.”
She’d never heard this before. “How does that preclude him from... from hurting your sister?”
“The timing. She was already missing by then. I’d been trying to reach her for almost an hour, was looking everywhere. There’s no way he would’ve had time to strangle her, dump her body in the river and get to where he was between the time I talked to her and she quit answering my calls and texts.”
“When did you last have contact with her?”
“Shortly after 1:00 a.m.”
At least that remained true to his testimony. “And when did you bump into him?”
“Maybe... one forty? The liquor store was the only business still open. I was running out of options, but I wasn’t about to go home without her. My mother was all over me that night, telling me I needed to get my sister before my father realized she hadn’t come in. She didn’t want him to be mad at her for letting Aurora go out again. Aurora had been partying too much, and Dad was worried about where it was all leading,” he said as an aside. “Anyway, I was hoping I’d find someone from the party making a liquor run or something, and I’d be able to figure out where she was. The last time she answered her phone, she told me she was at a big house on the Potomac. She was supposed to ask someone for the address and text it to me, but she never did. By the time I got to the liquor store, your father was the only one around—just drinking and leaning against one of the posts out front.”
Lucy remembered him relating some of the same details at her father’s trial—the part about the party and his attempts toget his sister to come home. But he’d never mentioned that he’d seen Mick. “Why didn’t you say something about this sooner? At the trial, for instance?”
Sighing, he stretched his neck. “It’s... complicated. I didn’t get the impression my parents, or the commonwealth attorney, wanted me to talk about it. I was never asked about it on the stand. So I just... kept quiet.”
Lucy wasn’t sure how to react. She had this big hulk of a man on her porch—so large he was intimidating—and yet he was coming forward with information that might help her. Sure, he could’ve said something before and didn’t. But given who he was, she couldn’t imagine it was easy for him to speak up even now. “Did you ask my father when you ran into him at the liquor store if he’d seen Aurora?”
“I did.”
“How’d he respond?”
“He didn’t even know who I was talking about. I got the impression he’d never met her. And he didn’t want to be bothered. He just shook his head and stumbled off, but what I noticed at that point also makes it hard for me to believe he was the one who killed her.”
She opened the door a little wider. “What did you notice?”
“He was drunk off his ass, could hardly stand up. He wouldn’t have had the physical strength, the balance or the coordination to be able to drag a woman into the woods, strangle her and dump her. How would he have gotten her to leave the party with him in the first place?Icouldn’t even get her to leave. And he didn’t have his car. There was no way she would ever have been interested enough in your old man to leave the party without some sort of force being involved, and he couldn’t force her if he could barely stand up. Besides, there would’ve been people around.”
“Why are you telling me this?” she asked.
“I wanted you to at least be able to tell the assholes who claim you put your father up to it to shut their damn mouths.”
She took a step back. “You realize you’re talking about your own parents.”
He ducked his head. “They aren’t the only ones, but... yeah.”
“Have you told them what you told me?”
