Page 8 of The Truth You Told (Raisa Susanto #2)

CHAPTER SIX

Shay

September 2009

Four and a half years before the kidnapping

The dead girl was all anyone talked about for a month straight. And all Shay could think was that if people cared this much for the girls when they were alive, there might be fewer dead ones in the long run.

Shay couldn’t focus too much on all that, though, because there was another complicating factor taking up most of her attention.

Namely, the fact that Callum Kilkenny was back at her bar.

He sat at the end, looking half-hopeful and half-shamefaced, like he acknowledged that she’d snuck out on him while he was still sleeping a month ago, but believed she had a reason for it.

She did, of course. It was just one that he could never know.

Shay was the only person working, and so she couldn’t pawn him off on someone else. She took a deep breath, distantly wished she’d thrown on some makeup, acknowledged that thought as stupid, and then sauntered over to him, a bottle of Four Roses at the ready.

“You look familiar,” she said, squinting at him, hoping it was obvious she was teasing him. “Do we know each other?”

It took a second, but then he grinned, a quick there-and-gone thing that she might have imagined. “I think I just have one of those faces.”

Shay laughed and poured him the drink that proved that she really did remember the men she slept with. Not that there would have been anything wrong with it if she hadn’t.

“Nah, yours is memorable.” She studied it until the tips of his ears went pink. Adorable. “It’s a good one.”

“Wasn’t sure it was to your liking,” he said, with the way you left implied. He wasn’t being a dick—she had a metric shit ton of experience dealing with passive-aggressive men, and this wasn’t that. It sounded more like he was giving her an out. If she said, “Yeah, you’re right,” she was pretty certain he’d leave. In fact, he had one foot on the floor.

That was the reason she ignored the sirens wailing in her mind to tell him just that. Instead, she said, “It was very much to my liking.”

The night was a repeat of the last time. Only, she didn’t sneak out of his hotel in a mad dash to hide incriminating evidence that could send her sister to jail. Instead, she lingered, lounged even, as he got dressed in the morning.

“I, uh, might be in town a bit over the next few months,” he said, as he knotted his tie. An excuse not to look at her, she was pretty sure. He was nervous. She hated that she found that endearing.

Then she remembered why he would probably be in town. The dead girl.

She sat up, tugging the sheet along with her. “Well, there’s usually an empty barstool at Lonnie’s on any given night.”

He smiled at the ground.

Shay said no the next time he stopped by just to prove she could. As she’d predicted, he took the rejection easily. The next time he came in, he hovered instead of taking a seat.

“I can leave,” he said.

She studied his face again. She had been right—it was a good one. And with the panic about Max and the gun long receded, she shook her head and grabbed him a glass.

“Stay.”

He’d been back several times since then, but today was Shay’s first day off in more than a week. She wasn’t about to waste any more of it thinking about dead girls or Callum Kilkenny or the gun that hadn’t been found yet.

That didn’t mean she could spend the day at a swimming hole with a six-pack and a hot boy, like she would have done as a teenager. She had responsibilities, and Max had an appointment with her psychiatrist.

Her sister currently had her feet up on the dashboard of Shay’s car, like she thought it would piss her off. Max was always doing crap like that—testing boundaries, some well-meaning social worker had told Shay. Max wasn’t confident of her place in the house, and so she tried to push Shay to whatever limit she had just so she could see how bad the reaction was. A common tactic for traumatized and abused children.

But while Shay knew that Max felt like a burden to them, she also knew that Max could just be a run-of-the-mill bratty preteen who liked doing things to irritate people.

Anyway, it was Beau who cared about muddy prints in his precious truck, not Shay.

“Can we go to Galveston after therapy?” Max asked, still staring out the passenger-side window.

Shay jerked the wheel, nearly swerving into the oncoming lane of traffic. A pickup blared its horn at them, and Shay tossed a finger out the window because it wasn’t like she’d meant to cause trouble.

“Jesus.” Max was gripping the door handle for dear life.

“Don’t be dramatic,” Shay said, trying to sound normal. But there was only one way to get to Galveston. The thought of driving back down that same road, past the junkyard again ... past the gun—with Max in the car, no less—had Shay’s hands trembling.

“I almost just died ,” Max said, playing it up on purpose. Shay relaxed enough to laugh, because she always enjoyed Max’s sense of humor.

“Yeah, they’ll be building statues in your honor.” Shay’s heartbeat was still way above resting, but this back-and-forth was familiar. Easy to fake.

“So can we go?”

“We didn’t bring any of our stuff,” Shay said, and they both knew it was a delay tactic.

“You have a suit in the back, don’t lie,” Max said, thumbing over her shoulder to the mess behind them. Shay was 99.9 percent certain she was right. “And we can stop at the Bargain Beachware for a ten-dollar bikini for me.”

Max asked for so little, Shay hated to say no.

“I’ll pay for the ice cream,” Max said, a wheedle in her voice.

And that did it, as Max had probably known it would. Beau and Shay tried giving Max an allowance so she wouldn’t feel completely dependent on them, but they skipped more weeks than they followed through. For Max, two ice creams could wipe out half her savings.

It was moments like these that made Shay doubt herself. Doubt her memory of Max standing over a dead body, covered in blood.

“Okay,” Shay said. But then shot Max a look. “If you promise to really try with Dr. Greene today.”

Max went back to staring out the window, but she gave a soft “Fine,” which was practically a pinkie promise from her.

As acknowledgment, Shay turned up the Eminem for the rest of the drive to Dr. Tori Greene’s office.

Max pretended not to like the psychiatrist, but Shay was pretty sure Max kind of, almost, did. As much as she ever liked any adult.

When they arrived, Tori stuck her head out of her office, smiling when she saw them.

Tori was one of those hot older Texas ladies—one who looked so much like the wife on Friday Night Lights that Shay had to actively remind herself not to call her Tami Taylor. She was in her late forties or early fifties, and was proof that God had favorites. Even at her age, she still had luscious, wavy hair. While the strawberry-blonde coloring likely came from a salon, that kind of volume couldn’t be faked. Her skin care routine must have been impeccable her entire life, because her face was smooth and glow-y despite the fact that she laughed easily and smiled even quicker.

Both Shay and Max—and Beau, really—had trust issues with mental health professionals, especially ones who were court mandated. But Tori Greene was tolerable, at least.

Tori didn’t do any dumb crap like tell Max to just call her Tori or exclude her from conversations with Shay and Beau. She kept her office filled with dozens of real plants, and hung paintings that were actually interesting instead of the dull landscapes and color blocks that Max’s first four psychiatrists had favored. She kept both candy bars and healthy snacks in the waiting room, as well as a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf full of romances, Westerns, thrillers, and all the latest YA fantasy heptalogies.

“We got the latest in that series you were reading,” Tori told Shay with a little eyebrow wriggle. It was one of those Fifty Shades of Grey rip-offs, but Shay was hooked.

Max made gagging sounds as she sidestepped Tori into the office.

“Keep that up and you’re getting a dramatic recitation at the beach,” Shay called after her.

Tori laughed, a husky, well-used sound, and winked as she closed the door.

Shay grabbed the book, mostly to put on a show for Chrissy, Tori’s nosy secretary. She couldn’t focus enough to actually read, though.

Can we go to Galveston?

What had prompted Max to ask that? In her mind, Shay turned over every inch of her car, every inch of the night she’d made that junkyard trip. There was nothing incriminating for Max to have stumbled over.

Max could be eerily perceptive sometimes, too perceptive for her age. There was a cold calculation to it as well, that always set Shay on edge.

There was an old joke Shay had heard one time about how to tell if someone was a sociopath. You gave them a scenario: They had met someone they were romantically interested in at their mother’s funeral, but didn’t get the person’s number. How did they find the person again?

For a sociopath, the answer was obvious. They killed their father.

Shay wasn’t sure what Max would say, and she had no interest in testing it.

A lot of the time, Max could be incredibly caring, especially when it came to Beau and Shay. But she could flip the switch when she had to.

If Max weren’t capable of that, Shay wouldn’t be sitting in Dr. Tori Greene’s office right now.

Shay tried not to shiver beneath the cool blast of the air conditioner at the thought.

Beau was sitting at the firepit at the side of their house when Shay and Max got back from Galveston.

Max offered a halfhearted wave that didn’t match the sheer joy she’d been letting seep out all day. Maybe her well was empty. That was fair. Shay’s own rarely got past half-full.

When Shay sat in the second cheap plastic lawn chair, Beau held out a Miller Lite, the top already off. She took a long swallow, savoring the slight bite of beer after a day at the beach, which was one of her favorite sensations in the world.

“How come I didn’t get an invite?” Beau asked, but he was just joking. He’d worked an overnight shift at the hospital and had likely only woken up in the late afternoon. “How was Dr. Greene’s?”

Shay lifted a shoulder. Max was never particularly chatty after the sessions.

“Same old.”

“Do you think she’s helping?” Beau asked after a minute of staring into the nonexistent fire. It was too hot to do anything more than prop their feet on the stone pit.

“More than the others.” Max had hated the previous therapists she’d seen and had spent more energy screwing with them than making progress. Although Shay wasn’t sure what progress looked like for a kid like Max.

Were they all just trying to keep a boulder from tumbling down a hill? Had her fate been determined the moment she’d pulled the trigger?

Shay slid a look at Beau. He was wearing his curly hair styled these days—short on the sides and long and floppy on the top. Shay had started calling him boy bander for a few days, but when he didn’t answer with a similar rejoinder or witty remark, she realized he cared. So she’d shut up about it.

He was relaxed now, in a way he usually wasn’t—limbs loose, a small smile on his lips. They both worried too much. Beau had also been carrying around an extra dose of anxiety ever since his father had fallen off the wagon in spectacular fashion and slammed his car into a tree. The accident hadn’t killed him, unfortunately. Instead, he’d ended up in long-term hospital care that insurance mostly but didn’t quite cover. She was pretty sure the stress of it weighed on Beau every day.

So, no, Beau didn’t need to know what she’d done with the gun, and he certainly didn’t need to know about Callum Kilkenny. He’d probably have an aneurysm if he found out she had an FBI agent’s number in her phone.

Or that an FBI agent had hers.

She took another swallow, and put it out of her thoughts. Callum Kilkenny had a lot more on his mind than the trashy bartender he was slumming it with.

“Thinking about visiting your dad on my next day off,” she said.

“He’d like that,” Beau said, but what he really meant was that Beau would like it. His dad was pretty much comatose most of the time, and high on morphine the rest. She doubted he could pick her out of a lineup if he was paid to.

Still, he was family in a strange, convoluted way. Or, more importantly, Beau was.

Hillary had imparted little in the ways of wisdom in the few years she’d stuck around to raise them, but she’d always made them appreciate the importance of that. Even though Shay could now see the irony of that particular lesson, it had also stuck for whatever reason. Maybe because Beau had. Even when the two of them had been saddled with a preteen with more attitude than vocabulary.

He’d stuck.

That was a truism she could always count on.

So she did her best to pay him back in little ways when she could. She sometimes bought him his favorite six-pack unexpectedly or shooed him away to the movies on her one night off. Or went and sat in a hospital room for an hour with no one for company but a man who drooled all over himself. Even though that same man had routinely taken all his aggression out on a ten-year-old’s little body. Had broken Beau’s bones, and bruised his skin, and then told him he loved him afterward, creating some kind of screwed-up feedback loop in Beau’s mind about relationships and violence.

Shay would still do it, and smile the whole time.

The CD player cranked up inside, a heavy bass vibrating down into the ground where they sat.

“I’m filling in for a psych nurse,” Beau said, breaking their comfortable silence. “She’s going on maternity leave.”

Beau was in oncology usually, but psych was where he wanted to end up. Sometimes she wondered if that had to do with Max. “Hey, congrats.”

“Just a short-term thing,” he said, ducking his head, bashful. She was the older of the two of them, but he always carried himself like he was twenty-two going on fifty. Until she was reminded in moments like these, Shay really did forget sometimes that he was just a sweet kid.

“It’ll give you experience and networking opportunities,” Shay said, like she actually knew what she was talking about. What the hell did she know about networking? What would she ever? Still, Beau tucked a smile away in the corners of his mouth, like anything could happen.

They drank the rest of the six-pack in silence, watching the sky go all sorts of colors in a gorgeous Texas sunset.

This had been a good day.

She wouldn’t let herself catastrophize about the gun or even the possibility of Beau deciding to apply to other hospitals if he liked this psych rotation as much as she expected him to.

No one was going to find the weapon, and if they did, it would never get traced back to Shay.

And if Beau moved on, as he had every right to do?

Well, she’d survive, she supposed.

That’s all she’d ever done. She was an expert at it now.