Page 6 of Luck of the Devil

Anger burned in my chest, and I gritted my teeth as I looked up at him. “So you’re like all those other idiots in town and think she killed herself?”

He stared back, his face blank, as he said, “No. I think she was murdered.”

Chapter 3

“What?” I blurted out. I supposed I now knew why he’d planned to stay, but his statement didn’t make any sense.

I shook my head. “First of all, why would you think that? And second, why the fuck would you care?” My voice rose, practically shouting at him as I finished the sentence.

He turned back to his task. “To answer your second question,” he said calmly, “I have my reasons, but as far as the first, I looked at the evidence.”

“What are you talking about? It was an accident.”

“Let me finish with this, then you can make me that coffee and we’ll talk.”

I nearly pressed him to talk now, but I suspected my brain was still too dazed to listen to anything he presented as evidence.

Who would want to murder my mother? Okay, dumb question, I suspected most of the town hated her, but I also doubted most of the them had the stomach to actually kill someone, even her. Besides, she had run off the road. There were skid marks on the bridge. There was water in her lungs. She’d drowned. Sure, the official autopsy report wasn’t out, but no one in the Lone County Sheriff’s Department was suspicious that she’d run into foul play. The idea had never even come up.

But the skid marks could have also meant someone had run her off.

I was still lost in my stupor while he finished removing the last stitch, and mercifully, he hadn’t said anything else about his suspicions. By the time I got up and started my espresso machine on autopilot, I’d already come to my own conclusion.

“I’m sure you think you’re helping, and I actually appreciate it more than you know,” I said in a slow, even tone. “It’s not uncommon for families to search for reasons for their loved one’s death. They think something sinister happened because they can’t accept that someone they love just died, through no fault of their own. There has to be some external force that caused their death, because they can’t accept that it was random. That someone could be here one moment, then gone the next.” I looked him dead in the eye. “But I’m not like those people. I’ve seen the randomness of death. I’ve accepted my mother’s death for what it was: an accident. She was a terrible driver, and she ran off the road. I don’t need you to try to make this more palatable for me. I’ve accepted it just fine.” That wasn’t the complete truth, but believing it was murder wouldn’t make me feel less guilty that she’d been in the river two days longer than she’d needed to be.

“That’s not what I’m doin’, Harper,” he said softly, still sitting in his chair, his legs spread apart in a relaxed posture. “Finish makin’ the coffee, and I’ll explain my reasoning. “

I lifted the heel of my hand to my forehead. I could at least hear him out. “What do you want? Same as last time?”

“Sure.”

I went through the motions of making him a vanilla latte, then set it in front of him then returned to my chair. “What is your reasoning?”

He picked up his mug and took a sip. Something like appreciation filled his eyes, but he didn’t comment as he set it back down on the table. Was he buying himself some time before responding, or was I imagining it?

“What have you heard from the autopsy report?” he finally asked.

“That she had some bruising and water in her lungs.”

“What specifically do you know about the bruising?”

I shook my head. “I didn’t ask, and they didn’t say. Detective Monahan said it was consistent with the car accident. Her car dropped from a thirty-foot bridge into a twelve-foot-deep river. Bruising was to be expected.”

“What about the toxicology report?” he asked.

“It hasn’t come back yet.”

“There’s a preliminary one.”

“And it didn’t show anything,” I said, my head beginning to throb.

“Harper, she had Sertraline in her system.” His brow lifted. “Did she take Sertraline?”

A strange numbness crept over me, like my brain refused to process what he’d just said. Sertraline was the pharmaceutical name for Zoloft. “No way. Absolutely not. She would have considered it a sign of weakness.”

But had I missed something? My mother had always been so controlled—rigid, even. Could she have been self-medicating?

A flicker of a memory surfaced—her fingers shaking slightly when she set down her wine glass last week, but I’d brushed it off.