Guilty (15 page)

“What does it look like?”

She's starting to drive me crazy now. What does a manual have to do with anything?

“What does it matter?”

“Please, Finn?”

I don't know why, but I'm surprised she remembers my name. I'm surprised, too, by how I feel when she says it. I like it.

“It's like a book, only with a paper cover. It's filled with fine print in about ten different languages. There are a couple of diagrams inside, you know, with arrows pointing at them. But it's practically impossible to understand. It's written in that crazy English—it sounds like it was originally Japanese or something, and someone ran it through one of those online translation sites.”

She nods.

“What about the night your stepmother was killed?” she asks.

I notice that she doesn't say “the night my father killed your stepmother,” and it makes me angry all over again.

“What do you want?” I say. “Why are you asking me all these questions?”

“Just tell me what you saw.”

“I've already answered a bunch of questions for you. If you want more, first you have to tell me why you want to know all this.”

She draws in a deep breath and pulls herself up straight.

“He didn't do it,” she says.

What?

“What are you talking about?”

“My father,” she says softly. “He didn't do it. He didn't kill your mother.”

“I saw him.” My voice is loud again. “I saw what he did. I was right in the window the night he killed Tracie. I saw the whole thing.”

That shuts her up, but only for a minute.

“He didn't kill your mother,” she says. “There's no way—”

My fists curl again. But instead of hitting her, I push past her. I stride out into the hallway, down the stairs, into the street. I do not turn around when she calls my name.

Twenty-Four

LILA

I
know what I have to do. I dig in my pocket for a business card and take it to the phone in the kitchen to make a call.

The phone is dead.

Maybe the phone bill is overdue. Maybe the person who lived here before finally cancelled his service. Or maybe he got another phone. Either way, if I want to make a call, I sure can't do it from here.

I lock the door and walk down the street looking for a phone booth. I have to go nearly ten blocks before I find one, and the phone in it isn't working either. I keep walking and finally spot another phone through the window of a Laundromat. I go inside, fish a couple of quarters out of my pocket and punch in the number on the business card.

“Detective Sanders is off today,” someone on the other end tells me. “Do you want to leave a message?”

What's the point? She won't be able to call me back. I don't have a phone.

“When is she back in the office?”

“Tomorrow.”

“I'll call her back then.”

I will call tomorrow. Better, I'll go and see her in person. I'll tell her everything Dodo told me, everything Peter Struthers told me, and what little I know from what Finn said. I'll see what she says.

I leave the Laundromat, then turn and go back inside again, looking for a phone book. There isn't one. So I go to the library instead and wait ten minutes until I can get on the Internet. It's the only way I can think of to get Finn's address.

It takes me forty-five minutes to get to his house by bus and then by walking another dozen or so blocks. They don't run bus routes through the neighborhood where he lives. They don't have to. Everyone there has their own car. And, judging from the size of the garages, I do mean everyone—every man, woman and child.

I find Finn's house. It's big and solid and sits on a small but well-tended lawn neatly bordered by flower beds. I walk up the stone steps and push the button under the intercom next to the big double door.

No one answers.

I push the button again.

Still no answer.

Maybe he isn't home yet. Maybe he went out again. I suddenly realize that this is where my father was killed. That this is the last place he was alive. I want to run, but I can't. I wait.

Half an hour later, I'm ready to go when I see Finn swing around the corner. He's on foot. He has a pizza box in one hand and a slice of pizza in the other. He's wolfing down the slice. He pauses to open the box to pull out another slice but stops when he sees me. He lopes toward me, frowning.

“What are you doing here?”

“I need to tell you something. You left so fast, and I think it's only fair you know…”

“I have nothing to say to you.”

“They—the cops—they say my father got the code for your security system from your father's office. Supposedly your father wrote it inside the manual for the alarm system, and my father saw the manual and found the code. They say that's how he got into the house.”

“Yeah? So?” He's still angry at me.

“It couldn't have happened that way. You told me yourself that there was no picture on the front of it.”

He shoves by me and fishes in his pocket for a key.

“If there was no picture on it, there's no way my father would have known what it was.”

He unlocks the front door and steps inside. Only then does he turn to face me.

“What, was he stupid or something?”

What a jerk! But then, what did I expect? What kind of dream world did I think I was living in?

“I didn't have to come here to tell you that,” I said. “I just thought you might care. I could have gone straight to the police.”

“Right,” he says. “Like they're going to believe what you're saying. Like anything you say is going to make a difference.”

I tell myself that what happens next is because I'm tired. Tired and discouraged and disappointed—and missing my father. Despite everything, I miss him so much. I miss the life we were going to have together. I feel my cheeks start to burn. Tears well up in my eyes. Angry tears.

“You mean because he's dead, don't you?” I spit the words at him. “You think no one will care because he's dead.”

He looks genuinely surprised.

Twenty-Five

FINN

I
f anyone had ever told me that I would look one day at the daughter of the man who killed my mother and
I
would be ashamed of something I said to her, I would have told that person he was crazy. Certifiably insane. What could I possibly say to the daughter of a murderer that I would ever have to be ashamed of or feel I had to apologize for?

But here I am, standing in the front hall of my own house with exactly that person, the daughter of a murderer, looking right into her eyes and seeing nothing but pain and grief caused by words I have just spoken—and I feel terrible.

“No,” I tell her. “No, that's not what I meant.”

She's hurt, but she's also full of fire.

“You think it doesn't matter,” she says. Tears are trickling down her cheeks. “You think
he
doesn't matter. You're the only one who's important, is that it? You lost your mother. Well,
I
lost someone too. I lost my father. And I don't care what you or anyone else thinks. I loved him.”

I don't doubt her. Not only that, but I don't think she's crazy to say what she's saying. And that's a huge surprise. I guess whenever I thought about it—and I can't say that I gave it much thought—I assumed that everyone in prison was one-hundred-percent screwed up and that the only people who could ever care about them were other criminals.

This girl is not a criminal. She's just a regular girl whose father died the same night Tracie died.

“Well?” she says angrily even while tears trickle down her cheeks. “Aren't you going to say anything?”

I glance across the street and see Mrs. Ashton coming down the walk with her shih tzu. She's looking at me.

“Come in,” I tell Lila. I step back to let her pass.

She hesitates, surprised, I think, by the invitation. At first I think she is going to stay put. But when I glance at Mrs. Ashton again, so does Lila, and a cynical little smile twists her lips. She steps in. I shut the door.

“Are you hungry?” I ask.

“No,” she says right away, as if she'd have said it no matter what I asked her. But she's looking at the pizza box. I think about her crappy little apartment. I remember the shelves in the kitchen. There was almost nothing there.

“Are you sure?” I say. “Because I have more than I need.”

She stares at the pizza box and takes longer to answer this time.

“Maybe one piece,” she says finally. She says it like she's doing me a favor.

I flip open the box, and she takes a slice. She takes a tiny bite. The next bite is a lot bigger and, suddenly, she has devoured the whole slice. She glances at me, a look of embarrassment on her face. I hold the box out to her again. She hesitates, but she is staring at the pizza box as if she wants to eat the whole thing.

“Why don't you come and sit down?” I say.

“I should go.”

“I thought you wanted to tell me something—about your father.”

She follows me into the kitchen. I pull out a couple of plates and some napkins. When I turn around, I see she is gazing around the kitchen, wide-eyed. Our place is nothing like her place.

I put the plates on the table and put another piece of pizza on mine. She glances at me. I nudge the box toward her. She takes a second slice.

“I'm going to have some juice,” I say. “You want some?”

She nods. “Please.”

We eat the pizza and drink the juice. She looks down at the table the whole time. Finally, when we're done, I wipe my mouth.

“What did you want to tell me about your father?”

She dabs at her mouth with her napkin. Her hands are folded in her lap now. She's studying me, trying to decide. And then she makes up her mind.

She stands up.

“Thanks for the pizza,” she says. She turns to go.

I jump to my feet and grab her arm.

“Wait!”

She looks at my hand. I release her. She turns her eyes on me.

“I'm sorry about what I said before. About your dad. Really.”

“Right.”

There's no way she believes me. Well, really, why do I think she will? You reap what you sow—my Grandma Fairlane used to say that all the time—and with Lila, all I have sowed is anger and hate.

“Please. Sit down. Tell me what you came to tell me.”

Our eyes lock. I'm staring at the daughter of my mother's murderer, and I'm thinking that I never in a million years would have thought I could feel what I'm feeling now. There's something about her—the way she holds her head as high as any other girl I know, the way she meets my gaze with grace but also with steel, the strength in her pose that tells me that she's a girl who doesn't give up.

“Please,” I say again.

“Why? So you can make fun of my dad again? He was a person, you know. A real person.”

“I'm sorry I said that. I want to hear what you have to say.”

“You won't like it.”

“Tell me anyway.”

She sits. So do I.

She stares at the table for a moment as she draws in a deep breath, as if she's gathering herself. Then I'm caught in her eyes again.

“My dad didn't know how to read or write,” she says, the words coming out all in a rush. Her eyes are still on me. She's daring me to say something negative about him.

But I'm too busy absorbing what she has just said—and what she has already told me. And what it might mean.

“There's no way he could have known what that manual was,” I say. “So how could he have found the code?”

I'm thinking about that manual. I remember it clearly. I remember my dad poring over it. I remember him bugging my mom to read it. I remember thinking I would help her by reading it to her—but when I tried, it didn't make any sense to me. A lot of the words were ones I had never seen or heard before.

“Don't you get it?” she says.

I shake my head. “If he told the cops that—”

“I don't think he did.”

“You don't
think
?”

And right there, with those three words, I've lived down to her expectations of me.

“If he'd said he couldn't read, they would have checked it out, right?” she says. “Or are you saying that the ace detectives who nailed him and sent him to prison are all of a sudden incompetent? Or maybe corrupt?”

She pauses a moment, but she's off again before I can get a word in.

“He hid it, okay? He hid it his whole life. He even hid it from me. I only found out after—” Her voice breaks, and she sucks in another deep breath to keep herself from crying again.

She talks for a long time after that, slowly and deliberately. She tells me about a man named Peter Struthers who showed up at her father's funeral. (His funeral… I never even thought about that. She had a funeral to go to, too.) She tells me about the box she found in her father's room and what was in that box. She tells me about Dodo at the club. She tells me what my father wrote in his notebooks, and when she's telling it, I get the impression that she's saying it out loud so that she can make sense of it herself, as if when she read those notebooks, it suddenly occurred to her how little she knew about her father. And then she says:

“If he couldn't read, then there's no way he could have got that code by seeing it in the manual. He wouldn't have known what the manual was. Your dad told the cops he set the alarm when he went out. But the house wasn't broken into, and no alarm went off. Whoever did it must have had the code. But my father didn't. He couldn't have. Which means that he couldn't have gotten into the house. He didn't do it. He didn't break into your house. He didn't—he didn't do the things they said he did.”