Page 153 of This is Why We Lied

“I did.”

“You said she was making the rounds.”

“She was.”

“Did you talk to her?”

Paul started unfolding the pleats. “Yes.”

“What did you say?”

“You won’t believe me,” Paul said. “Gordon told me to stay away from you. He said that you were just a big dumb cop looking to arrest anybody with half a reason.”

“You’ve got more than half a reason,” Will said. “What did you say to Mercy on the trail last night, Paul? She was doing her job, making her rounds, and you came out of your cottage around 10:30 and you talked to her.”

“That’s accurate.”

“What did you say?”

“That—” He let out another long sigh. “That I forgive her.”

Will watched Paul start back in on the pleats.

“I forgave her,” Paul said. “I blamed Mercy for so many years. It ate me up inside, you know? Gabbie was my big sister. I was only fifteen when it happened. There was so much of her life—our lives together—that was stolen from me. I never got to know her as a real person.”

“Is that why you killed Mercy?”

“I didn’t kill her,” Paul said. “You have to hate someone in order to kill them.”

“You didn’t hate the woman who was responsible for your sister’s death?”

“I did for many years. And then I found out the truth.” Paul looked up at Will. “Mercy wasn’t driving the car.”

Will studied the man, but he gave nothing away. “How do you know she wasn’t driving?”

“The same way that I know Cecil McAlpine raped her.”

Will felt like all of the oxygen had been burned out of the room. He checked in with Faith. She looked just as thrown as Will.

Paul continued, “I also know that Cecil and Christopher put Gabbie in the car with Mercy. I’m hoping that Gabbie was dead by then. I don’t want to think about her waking up like that, watching the car barrel toward that sharp curve in the road and knowing that there was nothing she could do to stop it.”

Will glanced at Faith again. She had moved to the edge of her chair.

“Her pelvis was crushed, too,” Paul said. “My mother told me that little detail last year. The poor woman was on her deathbed. Pancreatic cancer, plus dementia, plus a raging urinary tract infection. She was on high doses of morphine. Her brain—her beautiful brain—kept her trapped inside the summer Gabbie died. Helping her pack for the mountains, making sure she had the right clothes, waving goodbye as my father drove her away. Then picking up the phone. Hearing about the car crash. Learning that Gabbie was dead.”

Paul leaned down and picked up the bottle from the floor. He took a long drink before continuing.

“It was just me at my mother’s bedside. My father died of a heart attack two years ago.” Paul hugged the bottle to his chest. “Dementia knows no patterns. The strangest little detail would come and go from her mind—that Gabbie had forgotten to pack her stuffed bear. Maybe we could mail it to her. Or that she hoped the McAlpines were feeding Gabbie well. Weren’t they such nice people? She’d talked to the father on the phone when Gabbie applied for the internship. His name was Cecil, but everyone called him Papa. He was the one who called to tell us that Gabbie was dead.”

Paul started to drink, but changed his mind. He handed the bottle to Will. “That phone call from Cecil—that’s what really stuck with her. Papa gave her all the details from the accident. My mother assumed that he was trying to be helpful with his brutal honesty, but that’s not what it was about. He was reliving the violence. Can you imagine what kind of psychopath you’d have to be to rape and murder a woman’s child, then call her up and tell her all about it?”

Will had met that kind of psychopath, but he hadn’t realized that Cecil McAlpine was one until now.

“That phone call hounded my mother to the grave. She only had a few hours left, and it was all she could talk about. Not the happy times, like one of Gabbie’s violin recitals or track meets or when I surprised everybody and got into medical school, but that phone call from Cecil McAlpine telling her all the gory details about Gabbie’s death. And I had to listen to every single word, because those were the final moments that I would ever have with my mother on earth.”

He looked out the window, his eyes glistening in the light.

Faith asked, “How did you find out that Cecil killed your sister?”