Page 115 of This is Why We Lied

Faith assumed Sara had asked him what subjects he enjoyed in school.

“My poor baby boys.” Bitty patted her fingers to her chest again. “I did my best to keep Dave away from Mercy. I knew she would drag him down with her, and look at where he is now.”

Faith struggled to keep her tone even. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

“Well, don’t think I won’t get him back. I’ve already reached out to a lawyer from Atlanta, so good luck keeping him in jail.” She sounded very sure that the legal system would work. “Is that all?”

“Do you have a map of the property I can have?”

“Those maps are for guests.” Her head turned toward the parking pad. “For the love of God, who’s here now?”

Faith heard an engine rumbling. Another UTV had pulled up. Sara was behind the wheel.

“Another liar come up here to lie.” Bitty ended the conversation with that. She walked up the stairs, went into the house, and shut the door behind her.

“Jesus.” Faith hooked her purse over her shoulder and made her way to the parking pad. This place wasn’t The Lottery. It was Children of the Corn.

“Hi.” Sara was lifting a heavy duffel bag out of the UTV. She smiled at Faith. “Did you fall?”

Faith had forgotten she was covered in mud and horse farts. “A bird attacked my car and I ended up in a ditch.”

“I’m sorry.” Sara didn’t look sorry. “I saw you were talking to Bitty. What do you think?”

“I think she’s more worried about Dave than her murdered daughter.” Faith still couldn’t wrap her head around it. “What is it with these Boy Moms? She sounded like Dave’s psycho ex-girlfriend. And don’t even get me started on the Jon part. I hate when grown women speak in that breathless girlie voice. It’s like Holly Hobby fucked the Devil.”

Sara laughed. “Any progress?”

“Not on my end. I was about to go down to the dining hall to find Will.” Faith glanced around, making sure they were alone. “Do you think Mercy knew she was pregnant?”

Sara shrugged. “It’s hard to say. She was nauseated last night, but I assumed that was sequela to the strangulation. Mercy didn’t tell me otherwise, but she wouldn’t necessarily share that information with a stranger.”

“My period is so irregular I can barely keep up with it.” Faith wondered if Mercy had used an app on her phone or marked a calendar. “Who did you tell?”

“Only Amanda and Will. I think that Nadine, the coroner, figured it out when I did the manual exam to assess the uterus, but she didn’t say a word. She knows that Biscuits is close to the family. She probably didn’t want it getting out.”

“Biscuits didn’t see the X-ray?”

“You have to know what you’re looking for,” Sara said. “Normally, you would never X-ray a woman at any time during pregnancy. The risk of radiation exposure outweighs the diagnostic value. And at twelve weeks, there’s not a lot to see. The fetus is roughly two inches long, so around the length of a double-A battery. The bones haven’t calcified enough to show up on film. I only knew what I was looking at because I’ve seen it before.”

Faith didn’t want to think about how she’d seen it before. “I can’t remember what it felt like to be twelve weeks along.”

“Bloating, nausea, mood swings, headache. Some women mistake it for PMD. Some miscarry and assume it’s just a bad period. Eight out of ten miscarriages happen before twelve weeks.” Sara rested the duffel on the UTV. “When you look at who was around Mercy during conception, keep in mind that it’s twelve weeks from the last reported period, not twelve weeks from the sexual encounter. Ovulation happens two weeks after your period, which puts the timeline around ten weeks, so you’re talking two to two and a half months ago, if we’re being picky.”

“We definitely need to be picky.” Faith got to the hard part. “What about rape?”

“I found trace amounts of seminal fluid, but that only indicates she had sexual contact with a man forty-eight hours prior to death. I can’t rule out sexual assault, but I can’t rule it in, either.”

Faith could only imagine how annoyed Amanda had been with the equivocation. “But, between us?”

“Between us, I honestly don’t know,” Sara said. “She didn’t have defensive wounds. Maybe she made the decision that it’s safer to not fight back. There’s a clear finding that Mercy suffered a high level of abuse. Broken bones, cigarette burns. I’m assuming a lot of it was at the hands of Dave, but some of the damage dates back to her childhood. If there was any fight in her, she used it judiciously.”

Faith was struck by a profound sadness at the thought of Mercy’s tortured life. Penny was right. She had never stood a chance. “Anything on the murder weapon?”

“That part I can help you with,” Sara said. “So, in the design of a knife, you know that in a full tang, the metal extends all the way through from the tip of the blade to the butt of the handle.”

Faith did not know this, but she nodded.

“The blade inside Mercy was a five-inch-long half-tang, which is a cheaper, less durable construction used in steak knives. With a half tang, you get a skeleton inside the handle, basically a horse-shoe-shaped piece of thin metal that helps keep the handle attached to the blade. You following?”