“I’m only saying what others think.”
That last line was so typical of her mother. Liz thought that her mom somehow derived a perverse sense of dignity from dispensing a mean remark. She managed to do it with a smile on those Elizabeth Arden–pink lips of hers.
“Others don’t think that,” Liz said.
“They do,” she said. “They always will. Whenever he’s out and about in town, all of them think it. They all remember what happened. No amount of drinking will ever erase what happened. Nothing that he did that day will ever go away.”
PART ONE
BLAME
Where did the blood come from, Carole?
—David Franklin
CHAPTER ONE
JUST BEFORE
Liz Jarrett lifted her head from her grandparents’ old dining table. A spiky jolt of adrenaline traveled through her body. Her fingers found her cell phone, and she looked at the time. It was a little after 10:00 a.m. Shit! Liz peeled herself from the chair and went for the shower. As fast as she could, she stripped off her T-shirt and sweats, not even waiting for the water to warm before jumping in. A blast of cold was what she needed. Ice ran down her spinal column as she steadied herself in the stall. Liz needed to shock herself into alertness. She had been up all night, mixing coffee with Adderall, poring over books and her laptop for the most important test of her life.
Her second attempt at it.
I can’t screw this up again. The thought of the exam she’d taken three months before contracted her stomach into a tight, burning nut. I have to pass. As the cold water rushed over her, her internal monologue shifted. I will pass. I’m smart. I can do this.
At twenty-nine, Liz was no longer young—at least not by the standards of her law-school class at the University of Oregon. Certainly there were older candidates for a law degree. In the beginning, Liz had placed those in their thirties or older somewhere along a spectrum between pity and admiration. She’d even caught herself thinking it was “cute” that a grandmother from Wilsonville had made it through the admissions process. Really, Liz? What’s that about? Someone starting over late in life, working like a dog at it, “cute”? Someday that might be you. Chasing a dream. Never getting there. A dangling carrot that her fingers could only graze.
Move.
Like a crazed marionette, Liz jumped from the shower and pulled a towel from atop the train rack over the toilet. No time to use the hair dryer. Working at her dark brown hair under the fluffy weight of the white terry cloth, she looked at herself in a mirror that did not offer the benefit of the concealing condensation a hot shower would have provided. She winced. She looked wired. Ugh. Her hands shook as she applied deodorant, and for the life of her she couldn’t step into her underwear without sitting on the toilet. The room was spinning a little, and for just a flash she thought of the carousel at Disneyland, where her parents had taken her and her brother when they were kids. She’d gotten sick and thrown up on Jim. He never let her forget it. She felt that same queasiness now.
Liz needed to get to the testing center. Now. The location was a hotel conference room in Beaverton, more than three hours away. She’d need to risk a speeding ticket to get there on time.
Jeans finally on. Top on. And only one shoe. Liz hobbled through the house, looking everywhere for her other shoe. She stumbled and leaned against the doorjamb. Where is that shoe? Finally, back in the bedroom, she found it next to Owen’s side of the bed.
Owen! She could kill him just then. Why had he let her sleep? Why hadn’t he shaken her awake at the table? He knew the importance of this exam. It was everything to her. It was the pathway to all she wanted to be. It would provide the proof to her husband that she could fulfill a dream.
That she had a goddamn right to one too.
As she slipped her foot into the second shoe, though, Liz recalled Owen speaking to her that morning. The memory came to her through a gauzy veil. Everything about the night before was a little foggy. The pills. The coffee. The reciting of case law out loud until her voice was a rasp. The fishing through the refrigerator for orange juice because she thought it would give her more energy than a Red Bull. Only because she was out of Red Bull.
Yes, Owen had tried to wake her that morning. He had. Great. Her lateness was her own fault.
Liz remembered him actually lifting her out of the dining chair. “You are zonked out, babe,” he said, hooking his strong hands under her arms. “You need to get yourself together. Get cleaned up and go.”
“I need to sleep,” Liz told him, resisting his help and sinking back into her chair. “Test tomorrow.”
“More like today,” he said. “Four hours from now, right?”
She looked at him. Her eyes were sore and dry. She knew she looked like a junkie at a 7-Eleven, watching the hot dogs on heated metal rollers as though they were as fascinating as a breaching whale.
“Four hours?”
He held out his phone, showing her the time.
“Shit,” she said. “I’ve got to get going.”
“Yeah, you do. And so do I. I have that meeting with Damon and the other principals this morning. Got to be there on time.”
Even now, in her addled state with both shoes on and the memory of his attempt to rouse her, Liz couldn’t suppress the feeling that Owen had always put his needs before hers. It had been that way since before their wedding. He had told her over and over that they would live large—and not because of her skills as an attorney.
“Lawyers are a dime a dozen,” he’d said more than one time. “No offense, babe. Technology is king. You’ll see.”
She hated technology. Sometimes she hated Owen. He was so sure of himself, so insistent that he was on his way to something very important. Something big.
With his firm about to go public, Owen had started a list of all the things money could buy. A Ferrari. A month in Fiji in one of those grass huts that stuck out over the ocean. It went on and on. She went along with his dreams, mostly because there was no point in arguing. Either they’d happen or they wouldn’t. Only one item on his list had made Liz push back: Owen planned to bulldoze their little house on the river. However, it wasn’t at the top of his ever-growing list, and for a long time she had hoped that he would forget he’d suggested it.
Liz couldn’t argue that the house didn’t have its problems. Dry rot had weakened the beams under it. Indeed, the floors slanted in the kitchen so steeply that once when she dropped a cherry tomato it rolled to the corner with such velocity that it could’ve been an outtake from Poltergeist.
“We have such history here,” she would remind him.