Page 18 of The Truth You Told (Raisa Susanto #2)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Shay

March 2010

Four years before the kidnapping

Shay found Beau sitting on the floor of the kitchen, in the dark, clutching a mostly empty fifth of rum. She didn’t flip on the lights, simply slid down the cabinets until she was shoulder to shoulder with him.

He leaned his head against her. “Dad died.”

“Oh.” Shay grabbed for his hand.

They sat like that for an hour. Shay wasn’t even sure where Max was, but right now she couldn’t care. All she could think about was being a solid presence so that Beau could let go.

He didn’t cry. She wasn’t surprised.

Beau had a complicated relationship with his father, one that couldn’t be summed up by weeping or rejoicing. It was best described as exactly this: a dark kitchen floor and a bottle of alcohol.

A tiny, traitorous part of Shay was happy they would no longer be on the hook for the man’s medical bills. If the state hadn’t been picking up most of the total, they would have gone bankrupt by now.

It was a relief.

And it was a crappy thing to think.

That probably made her a bad person.

“He died a long time ago,” Beau finally said. “That wasn’t Dad in there.”

Shay nodded, her fingers finding a small, round scar on Beau’s hand. If you didn’t know the damaged skin was there, it could go unnoticed. She knew it was there. She’d seen it happen.

People were complicated, though. If Hillary cleaned up her act, if she put in time and actually tried hard to be a good mother, would Shay cut her out of her life anyway?

Clearly not. She couldn’t even do it when Hillary was still a mess.

Billy had become something like a good guy for the last decade of his life. Maybe that wasn’t enough to earn him a spot in heaven, but it had earned him a relationship with Beau.

They didn’t say anything the rest of the night, but Shay stayed right there with him until morning.

In the coming days, Shay did what she could to help him with the funeral arrangements.

Do you want me to come? Callum had texted her a few days before. I can.

She’d stared at the message for too long. What were they doing? It had been seven months since that first night. Neither of them was seeing anyone else.

But Max was twelve. That meant six more years where Shay was her legal guardian. Even if Shay was ridiculous for thinking so far out—what would they do to move the relationship forward? She couldn’t just drag her family up to Washington, which might as well be another country to the three of them. Callum couldn’t move down here, either. Where would he fit into her life? Hell, where would he fit into her house?

The whole thing was too complicated for what had started out as a one-night stand.

Her thumbs hovered over the keys, until she finally sent just one word. Please.

On the day of the funeral, she was incredibly thankful for that weak moment. Beau hadn’t reacted at all to the news that an FBI agent would be joining them, and Max had just shrugged. She never got as nervous around law enforcement as Shay did, and it made Shay doubt her own memory sometimes. But Max had been only eleven when everything had happened—maybe she didn’t even fully realize what she’d done.

They all drove to the church in silence, Beau and Max in the front, Callum and Shay in the back.

Halfway there, Callum reached out for Shay’s hand, and she gladly let him take it.

The service was poorly attended. Most of Billy’s friends had mourned him already and moved on. Max’s psychologist, Dr. Tori Greene, of all people, was one of the few to attend, and she looked somewhat uncomfortable once she realized the turnout was what it was.

At the end of it, she gave Shay a hug. “I’m glad he’s at peace now.”

Shay took the comfort, and when she drew back, she waved toward where Beau and Callum stood. Max was several feet away, looking horrified that her therapist had shown up.

“We’re having a get-together at the house,” Shay said. Tori’s hesitation made Shay think it was a step too far. But she’d already started ... “You’re more than welcome to come.”

“I have an appointment, I’m sorry,” Tori said, her mouth twisting with regret. “I was only able to sneak away for a moment.”

“Of course,” Shay murmured. In the next moment, an old buddy from Billy’s garage drew her attention, and Tori slipped out of the church. The buddy took them up on an offer for a ride, and then regaled them with fishing stories all the way back to the house. The place was already crowded with people who wouldn’t make a drive to see a closed casket but would turn up in droves for free booze and food.

Nathaniel Conrad found her in the kitchen during one of her lulls in conversation. “I’m sorry I couldn’t make it to the church.”

Shay waved that away and pulled him into a hug. He was warm and soft and comforting in the same way Beau was. She’d gotten to know him slightly better over the past few months, though she’d quickly realized that ride to work had been an anomaly. Still, Beau had invited him to hang by the firepit enough for her to consider Nathaniel a friend.

He was lovely but also strange sometimes. She had a theory that as a child he’d taught himself to be socially charming—because he very much could turn it on. Banter came quick to his tongue, and he always went along with a good bit. But sometimes he would say something strange and intense that made her pause. When he noticed, he would almost immediately recover, offering up some self-deprecating explanation for the gaffe or misstep.

Thus, her odd duckling–to–gorgeous swan theory had been born. It would explain the gaps she sometimes saw in the persona he presented to the world.

“How’s Beau?” Nathaniel asked.

Shay lifted one shoulder. “You know.”

“Yeah.”

There wasn’t much else to say to that. She nodded toward the window in the kitchen, toward their backyard. “If you want to, go ask him yourself.”

“Yeah,” he said again, squeezing her arm as he passed.

Callum came up behind her, pushing a wineglass into her hand. “Hey.”

Nathaniel stopped, midstride. He shifted back toward Callum and held out his hand.

“Nathaniel,” he introduced himself. “I’m a friend of Beau’s.”

“And mine,” Shay teased, and got a half smile.

“Callum. Nice to meet you.”

Shay was pretty sure Callum would immediately forget Nathaniel’s name. He had an incredible memory for the details of a case, but that seemed to take up all the room in his brain. Everything else got put in the garbage disposal.

“I’m gonna ...,” Nathaniel said, gesturing toward the door. It slammed shut on its hinges behind him.

“Nice guy?” Callum asked, leaning against the counter. His eyes were scanning the room, and the hallway beyond. She used to hate guys who did that, assuming they were looking for someone hotter to talk to. But Callum did it in every room and every situation because of his training. She knew he was still giving her at least 90 percent of his attention.

She rested against Callum, an echo of when she’d found Beau in here on the day of Billy’s death. “Hmm?”

“Nothing,” Callum murmured, his hand slipping up to cradle the nape of her neck. “Not important.”

His fingers worked at the tense muscles there, and she let herself enjoy it.

“You know what, I’ve never asked,” Kilkenny said after a few minutes of silence. The partygoers seemed to sense their need for this private moment and were leaving them be. “Why was he in the hospital in the first place?”

“Billy?” Shay asked, though of course that’s what he wanted to know. Her brain had gone a bit syrupy at his touch, and she needed a moment to come back online. “Car crash. He was plastered. They found two empty bottles of Jack in the footwell next to him.”

It had been two years now since that 3:00 a.m. call. Max hadn’t been living with them at the time, thank god for small mercies. Beau had woken Shay up, and they’d driven to the hospital in a daze. Billy was unresponsive, but alive enough.

Wasn’t that a funny thought? Alive enough to fuck up their finances for two years.

That was uncharitable, of course. Especially at his wake.

They didn’t often talk about the circumstances of Billy’s car crash, because those little facts had a way of erasing anyone’s sympathy for the man. But like Shay had thought a thousand times, people were complicated. How much should one night, one bad decision, decide the way a person was remembered?

“Did he hurt anyone?” Callum asked softly.

“No.” And thank god for that.

“Just himself.” Callum finished the thought. “Wasn’t he sober?”

“Five years,” Shay said. “He fell off the wagon, I guess.”

There was a long pause.

“Were there any signs of that?” Callum asked, and she heard the new tone in his voice. The FBI agent.

She straightened, disentangling herself from him. “Why are you asking?”

He shook his head, a dog shaking off water. “Sorry, ignore me.”

“Tell me,” Shay said, making sure it came out a plea instead of a demand. She plastered herself against him, looking up through her lashes. “What are you thinking?”

“It’s not unusual for someone to relapse, of course,” Callum said. “But it also strikes me as an effective way to get rid of someone with a history of alcohol abuse.”

Shay’s brows drew together. “What are you talking about?”

“It’s stupid—ignore me,” Callum said, trying to brush it off again.

“No,” Shay said, pulling him in tighter. “I’m not calling you crazy, I’m just not following.”

Though maybe she was. Maybe she was following too closely.

He pursed his lips. “Where was he driving to?”

“What?” She felt so stupid, like a parrot who only knew one word.

“He’d drunk two bottles of Jack, you said?” Callum asked. “For a guy who hadn’t had a drop of liquor in five years, why didn’t that lay him out flat?”

Shay blinked up at him. No one had ever questioned that before.

“And why were the bottles in the car with him if not to paint a picture of someone on a binge?” he asked, and then he shook his head again. “Or he was slipping for a while and they were old and weren’t actually what he drank that night.”

“Beau swears he wasn’t,” Shay offered. “Slipping.”

“Alcoholics learn to hide it really well.”

“Not if he was leaving bottles around in the footwell of his car,” Shay pointed out.

“True,” Callum said, his eyes sliding past as if trying to assess the guests in the other room. “Did he have any enemies?”

Shay sucked in a breath. Because she’d known that’s where this conversation was going, but his asking it outright made it all seem more real.

“You think he was killed?” It came out a hushed, too-gossipy whisper.

“No,” Callum said slowly. “No, I don’t. Parts of the story strike me as odd. Was there even an investigation?”

“No,” Shay said, and wanted to add Of course not . But Callum was used to working with the FBI, not a stressed-out sheriff’s department that saw a truck wrapped around a tree, a few bottles of Jack, and called it a day.

“Hmm.”

She slapped him lightly on the chest. “You do think he was murdered.”

He shook his head, but then asked again, “Is there anyone who would have wanted to get rid of him?”

The answer came before she even really had to think about it. Hillary.

Hillary.

This made ex-husband number two who had wound up dead. Some of that had to be attributed to the type of people she married—men who courted violence and/or made dumbass decisions because they were idiots. Her husbands tended to be men who put themselves in terrible situations, had terrible associates, and did terrible things for money and drugs.

She said all that to Callum and then asked, “Do you think it’s related?”

“I don’t know,” Callum said quietly, but he sounded like he did.

“Maybe he was just a drunk who drove into a tree,” she offered.

“Maybe.” He ran a hand over his face. “Don’t listen to me. I’m making trouble.”

It had been a miracle Billy had survived at all. That’s what the sheriff had told them and then the doctors, too. He hadn’t been wearing his seat belt, and he’d flown through the front windshield. By some lucky stroke, the glass had missed his arteries; otherwise he would have bled out in seconds.

They would have gotten away with the perfect murder.

Just like with Max’s father.

“Two is still a coincidence,” Shay said, and she could hear the desperation in her voice. Like she was convincing herself.

“Yes, but should we really wait until it becomes a pattern?”