Лиза Гарднер - Never Tell - A Novel (A D.D. Warren and Flora Dane Novel)

“Someone’s in the second-story bathroom,” the woman screams back. “I saw someone through the window!”

“Thanks!”

Then I spot it, a rickety metal fire escape. I hit the bottom rung and start to climb.

Chapter 41 EVIE, D.D., AND FLORA

I DON’T SPEAK RIGHT AWAY. BESIDE me, my mother stands perfectly still.

As Mr. Delaney steps through the smoke, heading straight for us. He’s holding a handgun, I realize now. My eyes had been playing a trick on me, seeing the past when I need to be focused on the present. I’m not sure what kind of gun he currently has, but his grip is steady, his aim true.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” he tells me tightly, his voice already raspy from the smoke. “You said you had a meeting.”

“I finished early.” My voice sounds strange to me. Too normal. Too polite. Like this is any other conversation we’ve ever had. Like we’re not standing in the middle of the conflagration, and that his comments alone didn’t just reveal that while I wasn’t supposed to be here, he assumed my mother would be.

“You killed my dad,” I say.

Watching him now, the way he holds the gun, the way he moves comfortably through the house—how had I not seen it before? That day, I hadn’t seen anyone leaving the house or scuttling down the sidewalk—all the more reason to think my father had possibly shot himself. Except, of course, there was another option—the shooter hadn’t left the house. Maybe Dick Delaney had seen our car pull up and had simply moved to the front of the building, or even walked upstairs. He knew our house that well, my parents’ oldest and dearest friend. He could’ve cleaned up in one of the upstairs baths while my mother was screaming, I was sobbing. Then once my mother had called him, he could’ve used the ongoing chaos to walk out the front door and walk back in the side door. Neither one of us had been paying attention.

But now … Now I feel like I’m seeing everything.

“My mom told you what she’d done. She admitted that much to me.”

Delaney frowns. He seems agitated, but his grip on the gun is certain. The smoke is building around us, the fire growing closer. It occurs to me, he may have a pistol, but Mom and I have wet towels. Fire doesn’t care about bullets, but it does hate getting wet.

“You always were impetuous,” he snarls at my mother now. She still stands stiffly beside me. She’s thinking something, but I can’t tell what.

“You can’t just call off a hit,” Delaney says impatiently. “Good God, only you would be stupid enough to take one out in the first place, then honestly believe you could change your mind. That’s not how things work with these people.”

“You were one of them,” I fill in now, speaking my suspicions out loud. “That’s how you knew who to call. You were one of them.”

“I did my best,” Delaney says tersely. “I even paid the goddamn bill, once your mother saw the light, told the man it was for his trouble and he’d best go away. But I saw the look in his eyes. Hired killers don’t simply quit jobs. I actually came here that afternoon to warn your father about you.” Delaney glances at my mother. “Trying to kill off his mistress? Good God, you were always dramatic, but that was just plain crazy. Unstable. I tried to tell him. Because we all knew he wasn’t going to change his ways.” Delaney stares hard at my mother again. “Meaning what about the next mistress? Or the one after that?”

Now he positively glares at my mother.

“You tried to warn my father?” I ask, starting to inch backward, away from him, away from the blaze.

“He was cleaning his shotgun. Said Joyce had already confessed to it all. He was sorry for the trouble and expected there was some kind of reasonable solution that could be reached. When I tried to explain the severity of the situation, that you can’t just hire a professional assassin then simply walk away, that it was one thing for Joyce to be possessive, quite another for her to homicidal. Good God …” Delaney stops. Coughs raggedly. I glance quickly at his gun, but he still has it pointed at my mother’s chest.

“He didn’t believe you?” I ask. Because I didn’t understand this either. My father was a very rational man. And there was nothing rational about a wife who tried to resolve marital disputes through contract killers.

For the first time, Mr. Delaney looks at me. What he says next comes out flat and hard: “He accused me of being jealous.”

In that moment, I get it. Mr. Delaney. His close relationship with my father. But always as a friend, the outsider looking in, because my father had my mother, not to mention so many other women.

“He knew how you felt about him. How you really felt about him,” I say, I’m saddened for this man and how much that had to hurt.

“He always saw everything,” Mr. Delaney muttered roughly, which is answer enough.

“You loved him.”

“It didn’t matter! He had her. For your father it was always about her!” He jabs the gun toward my mother’s chest. “So much so, that even when her actions threatened him, his reputation, his own mistress, for the love of God, even when I, as a good friend, tried to warn him no good would come of their increasingly volatile marriage, he didn’t hear me. He laughed. He … He …”

“He rejected you.” I can see it clearly. My father, who could be arrogant, who hadn’t wanted to hear how his relationship with his wife might be wrong. Easier for him to turn on the messenger instead. Dismiss a legitimate warning as nothing more than the jealous ramblings from a friend he’d always known had more than friendly feelings for him. And Delaney, standing there, having come in good faith to talk about something he was the expert on … Delaney, who had loved my father, respectfully, from a distance, only to have his closest friend turn on him.

I can see it. I can see all of it. And it hurts so much.

“I picked up the shotgun,” Delaney says now, as if watching the movie in my mind. “At the last minute, Earl realized what I was going to do. We struggled. It went off.” Delaney’s voice falters. He and I both know no shotgun just “went off.” It had to be pumped. It had to be fired. Into the torso of his best friend.

“He fell down. And I heard a car. Your vehicle in the driveway.” He glances at my mother. “I wiped down the shotgun. Took off my shoes and tiptoed out of the kitchen. Upstairs, in Earl’s bathroom, I rinsed my hair, hands, and face. Then I balled up my bloody clothes to be retrieved later and re-dressed in items from Earl’s closet. You never even noticed.”

My mother still isn’t talking or moving. But I feel it now, a subtle pressure from her hand, tugging me closer to her. For a moment, I resist. Because I have to know the rest.

“Then I said I shot him, and you were home free,” I provide now.

“I thought you knew.” Delaney stares at my mother. “I thought you knew and asked Evie to confess to protect me. I kept waiting for you to approach me, make some kind of demand in return. But you never did. Then one day I realized, my best friend was dead.” Delaney took a shuddering breath, coughed again from the rapidly thickening smoke now. “And I got away with it.”

“And Conrad?” I whisper because there’s more to this story; I know that now. More things I don’t want to hear but have to know. I press the wet towel closer to my lips and nose. I can feel the heat growing. The fire is coming for us.

In fact, that’s what I’m hoping for.

“You’re on the dark web, aren’t you?” I hear myself now. “A man with your past experiences, current contacts. What do you do? Run a site, a forum, something?”

“Even on the internet, it takes personal connections to vouch for, say, certain professionals.” Mr. Delaney shrugs, as if this is the most obvious thing in the world. Maybe for him, it is. Maybe for my husband, all those years, all those aliases, logged online, it was as well. I know too much, I think, and yet still feel like I know nothing at all.