Tell Me You're Sorry (13 page)

He hadn't been too surprised when he'd found out his dad and Lacee were dating. The old man had sure bounced back quickly from Ryan's mom's suicide. Then, of course, he'd needed someone to cook, clean, and look after his kids. Until Lacee started running the household, Ryan's grandmother had gone over there several times a week to help out. She also had Ashley and Keith over to dinner every Thursday night so Ryan could spend time with them. They still did that every week—without their dad and his bride.

Both Ashley and Keith liked her well enough. She basically let them do whatever they wanted and eat whatever they wanted. The kitchen cupboards were well stocked with chips and store-bought cookies. She ordered out a lot or she made them microwave dinners, which were eaten in front of the TV. Keith's favorite “home cooked” dinner became Stouffer's lasagna.

Keith thought Lacee smelled nice, “kind of like Febreze.” He was fascinated with the machine she turned on at night to help her sleep with its rain forest sounds, including a croaking frog. Ashley let it be known that Lacee dyed her hair, because she'd seen a Clairol Nice 'n Easy kit labeled
Natural Light Auburn
along with all those packages of cookies and the microwave dinners in her grocery bag after a trip to Sunset Foods. Ryan's grandmother surmised that her 33-year-old daughter-in-law must be prematurely gray.

Despite all the cookies and ice cream she bought, Lacee wasn't much for desserts herself. According to Ashley, her stepmother liked having a couple of Frangelico liqueur cordials after dinner. Ryan's sister had a hard time pronouncing “Frangelico” when she told him about it. She said the stuff came in a funny-shaped bottle, which Keith had mistaken one weekend morning for the Mrs. Butterworth's syrup. He'd drowned his Eggos in it, and ended up getting sick to his stomach after only a few forkfuls. “The dumb-head kept eating it,” Ashley said. “You'd think he'd catch on after one bite. God knows why he thought the Mrs. Butterworth's was suddenly where Dad keeps the booze.” Apparently, at first, Lacee had been furious he'd wasted so much of her after-dinner libation, but then later, everyone had gotten a good laugh out of it.

It was sort of a family joke now. But Ryan wasn't in on it. He wasn't a part of it at all.

A huge branch had fallen and now blocked one side of his old street. Avoiding it, Ryan had to drive through a puddle so deep it spread over the curb and half the parkway. In the heavy rain, its surface looked like a thousand little explosions. As Ryan neared the house, he didn't see any lights on in the front. That was odd, since Lacee had been so adamant about his coming over. He thought she would have left some lights on for him—especially in this weather. Except for the chandelier in the front hallway, the house looked dark. Then again, the family room and his dad's study were in the back of the house.

His heart was racing as he pulled into the driveway. He hadn't been by in weeks. He thought how right Billy was about the old Victorian house looking like something out of a horror movie. Tonight it looked sinister, dark, and still—while the trees and bushes all around it flailed wildly in the storm.

A bright flash of lightning almost blinded him, and for a moment, the whole house lit up. Then an earsplitting crack of thunder seemed to make the earth shake. A couple of car alarms went off. The thunder came right after the lightning. When he was a kid, his dad had taught him to count between the lightning and the clap of thunder that succeeded it. The seconds that passed were supposed to tell you how many miles away the center of the storm was—one mile for every five seconds.
One one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand . . .
There had been barely a second between the flash and the boom of thunder just now. Ryan knew he was in the center of the storm.

He sat in the idling car, the wipers madly fanning across the windshield in front of him. After driving all this way, he suddenly didn't want to go inside that house. It wasn't his home anymore. And if Lacee or his father had really wanted him to come over, one of them should have left an outside light on for him.

Ryan took a deep breath, and then shifted into reverse. He started to back out of the driveway.

Past the static-laced radio, the car alarms, and the rain drumming on the roof of his VW, he couldn't hear anything else.

Ryan couldn't hear the screams and the shots fired inside the house that used to be his home.

 

 

“Brent, what are you doing calling at this hour?”

“Dennis, as my lawyer, I thought you should know. I wanted to set the record straight—”

“What the hell are you talking about? Are you okay, Brent?”

“I wanted to set the record straight,” he repeated. “I'll be sending you an e-mail within the hour. Read it carefully. I'm sorry about all this. Please, don't call me back. Just wait for the e-mail.”

“What's going on? Brent, you don't sound right. What—”

Brent hung up the phone. He sat in the swivel chair at his desk. The window curtains in his study were drawn.

One section of the paneled room had been in transition for several months. In the built-in bookcase, the framed photos of Ryan playing football had been removed. However, Ryan was still in some of the family pictures on display. Recently, the framed photographs of Brent's first wife, Sharon, had been put away, too. So—like Ryan, she remained only in group-family shots. Brent had nothing to replace those photos of his dead wife, because his current spouse didn't like having her picture taken. He'd also done away with several pieces of Notre Dame memorabilia. So the bookcases of Brent Farrell's carefully appointed study had several empty gaps—and though completely unintentional on Brent's part, each one of those gaps represented something once cherished that he had lost.

In front of him was a piece of notebook paper with words scribbled on it—a script of exactly what he'd just said to his lawyer, Dennis Meeks.

Brent was dressed in a white T-shirt and sweatpants. The father who had taught his son early on that “real men don't cry” had tears streaming down his face. He also had a gun pressed to the side of his head.

A crack of thunder made him flinch. “Okay,” he said, sobbing. One shaky hand still clutched the phone receiver. “I've done what you've told me to. Now what?”

The woman behind him moved the gun barrel—so it poked into the flesh that had gone soft under his chin.

Trembling, Brent closed his eyes. “For Christ's sake, what do you want?”

He felt her leaning forward. Her lips brushed against his ear.

“Tell me you're sorry,” she whispered.

C
HAPTER
N
INE

 

S
tephanie had never crashed a funeral before.

It had been a stupid mistake to wear the black suit she'd bought on Thanksgiving weekend for Scott and the kids' funeral. The material was thick, and now she was roasting as she stood in the hot midday sun by the crypt in St. Mary Cemetery. Though the outside temperature reading on her rental car was 77 degrees, the humidity level made it seem more like August than May. Her forehead was damp with perspiration, and she was beginning to feel the effects of taking the redeye to O'Hare this morning. Except for a nap on the plane, she hadn't gotten any real sleep in thirty hours.

Stephanie was pretty sure she'd spotted Ryan Farrell and his grandmother with a priest, leading the way for the extended family into the mausoleum-like structure. With the three caskets laying in wait, there wasn't much room for the mourners. At least a hundred people stood outside the stone edifice. Most of them were high-school age or younger—children mourning their dead classmates. It reminded her of the crowd at the funeral for Scott, CC, and Ernie.

Two TV news vans were parked outside the cemetery gate. Several reporters and photographers had gathered there. Someone from the funeral home had kept them from going any farther. This was national news. Stephanie had seen the headline on page three of the
Seattle Times
four days ago while in the food court between planes at Sea-Tac:

According to the article, after embezzling $350,000 of his company's funds—and then losing it only God knew where—a Lake Forest man named Brent H. Farrell e-mailed a full confession to his lawyer. It was written late Saturday night during a severe thunderstorm. In his P.S., he stated:

Stephanie might not have read any more of the grisly story if it hadn't mentioned in the fourth paragraph that Farrell, a widower, had married his second wife just six weeks earlier. Lacee Roth Farrell had been found on their bedroom floor, shot in the face.

The fifth paragraph had been only one sentence. But when she'd read it, Stephanie made up her mind right then that she needed to fly to Chicago and talk with the surviving son and his grandmother:

Two photos accompanied the article. One snapshot showed the two children: a girl, twelve, and a boy, nine—both smiling for the camera at a baseball game. The little boy had a Cubs hat on. The other photo was of Lacee and Brent Farrell at their wedding. Her face was slightly obscured as she kissed her new husband on the cheek. For Stephanie, that photo was the clincher. It made her recall the picture CC had e-mailed her of Scott and Halle. Halle's face had been half-hidden in nearly the same way. It was as if both women had struck the same pose.

Staring at Brent and Lacee's wedding photo, Stephanie had wondered why the newspapers had used this one—when the woman's face was only partially visible. Weren't there any better photos of her? What bride in her right mind would settle for a wedding photo in which her face was hardly seen?

The suicide of wife number one, the quick courtship and marriage with wife number two, and just weeks later, the family shot to death. It was too much of a coincidence.

Jim said she was crazy. The killers of her sister's family had been caught. The police had even gotten a confession out of the two teenagers. They'd found Scott's abandoned car somewhere in New Jersey. But none of Rebecca's things had been recovered yet. Stephanie couldn't help thinking the police had lumped the murder of her sister's family in with all those commuter neighborhood robberies. They could have coerced a confession from those two boys—intimidating them or depriving them of sleep. She'd heard of things like that happening. They still hadn't gone to trial yet. That was set for July.

She'd probably alienated the police, badgering them about where Scott's money had gone. They kept telling her it had nothing to do with their investigation into the murders. Everyone was getting fed up with her. Again and again, Jim said, “Why don't you accept the fact that the money's all gone?”

Perhaps eventually she might have—if she hadn't read about Brent Farrell shooting everyone in his family—before putting a bullet in his own head. The $350,000 he'd embezzled—that money was all gone, too.

Stephanie hadn't been able to get away until last night, so she'd missed the wake yesterday. Lacee Farrell's body was being flown back to her native Boston this morning—for a memorial service and burial there. Stephanie figured the body was probably being loaded on a departing flight just as she was arriving at O'Hare. A lot of people didn't realize it was common practice to have a dead body or two in cargo aboard any given commercial flight. “Low-maintenance customers,” one of her fellow pilots liked to say.

She'd phoned J. B. Church to ask if he could attend Lacee Farrell's memorial in Boston, and find out what he could about her. There wasn't much about Lacee online, and no photographs—except the one from the wedding. The detective said he was wrapping up another case today, but promised to get on it first thing in the morning. She had a feeling J. B. Church, like everyone else, thought she was crazy.

Her room hadn't been ready when she'd arrived at the hotel this morning, so Stephanie had changed clothes in the bathroom at the Hilton Garden Inn in Lake Forest. She'd come to the cemetery with photos of Halle and a carefully worded letter to Ryan and his grandmother, Mrs. Farrell—in case they didn't have the time or desire to talk with her. In the letter, she'd written down a link to a news article about the Thanksgiving night murders. She also had her contact information on there. She was bound to come across as a nutcase, and had to approach them as discreetly and delicately as possible.

The close family members started to file out of the crypt, several of them crying. Ryan and his grandmother were dry-eyed, but they looked so tired and bewildered. Stephanie stayed back, watching as different people came up to talk with them and shake their hands or hug them. Down by the gate, the photographers and reporters suddenly seemed restless—as if they were on alert. Stephanie felt like one of them, ready to pounce on Ryan or his grandmother once the crowd thinned out.

A handful of mourners still hovered around Ryan and Mrs. Farrell as they made their way toward an idling limousine. One of the group—a tall, slender young Asian American man—stuck close to them both. Stephanie took a deep breath and walked over to them. Along with his navy blazer and gray pants, Ryan wore a dark tie that needed to be readjusted. His grandmother was a well preserved seventysomething matron with ash-auburn hair.

“Ryan? Mrs. Farrell?” she called gently.

They stopped to stare at her.

“You don't know me,” Stephanie said. “But I'm so sorry for your loss . . .”

Ryan nodded politely and reached out to shake her hand. He seemed to be doing it by rote.

“Thank you,” the grandmother murmured. Then she ducked into the limo.

“My name's Stephanie Coburn.” She shook Ryan's hand. “I—I know what you're going through. Last year around this time, my sister—my only sister, Rebecca—she killed herself. Just a few months later, her husband remarried, and very shortly after that, the whole family was killed. My sister had two children—around your brother's and sister's ages. Someone broke into their house, tied them up, and shot them . . .”

Ryan stole a look at his friend, and then he shook his head at her. “Um, I'm really sorry . . .”

She pulled the letter and photographs out of her purse. “It happened just outside New York on Thanksgiving night. Maybe you read about it. The police think it was a routine robbery gone haywire. But I think it had something to do with the woman who took my sister's place—the woman who married my brother-in-law . . .”

“Ryan?” Mrs. Farrell called from inside the limo.

He glanced distractedly back at his grandmother, and then turned to her. “I'm really sorry. I—”

“Listen, my brother-in-law was very good with money,” Stephanie cut in. “But once he married this woman, all of his savings just vanished. Your father, I'm guessing he was an honest businessman—with an excellent reputation—until he married this woman. He was probably a wonderful father, too . . .”

Ryan seemed to flinch. Stephanie could tell she was losing him.

“I never met the woman who married my brother-in-law,” she said, a quaver in her throat. “How well did you know Lacee Roth?” She shoved one of the photos of Halle into his hand. “The hair is different, but did she look anything like this woman?

Frowning, he barely glimpsed at the picture. “I never met Lacee . . .” He looked like he was about to hand the photo back to her, but he hesitated and turned toward the limo. He ducked his head in and whispered something to his grandmother in the backseat.

Stephanie turned to Ryan's friend. “I'm really sorry to be so pushy. I know this is a terrible time . . .”

The young man shrugged. “They need to be at some brunch thing . . .”

Ryan straightened up, turned, and gave her back the photograph of Halle. “My grandmother met Lacee on several occasions, and she says this isn't her. I'm sorry I can't help you.”

Stephanie tried to give him the letter she'd written. “Please, if you could just read this—”

But Ryan shook his head and climbed into the limo.

“I'll be right behind you,” Ryan's friend said. “Meet you at the Deerpath Inn.” He shut Ryan's door and waved as the limo drove off. Then he gave Stephanie a contrite smile. “Well, nice meeting you,” he said. He started toward another car parked along the winding road within the cemetery. It was a beat-up old Honda Accord.

Stephanie noticed the reporters and photographers eagerly hovering around the limo as it crawled through the open gates.

“You must think I'm horrible—or crazy,” she said, trailing after Ryan's friend.

The young man stopped in front of his car door, and he frowned at her. “Ryan's had a lot of people calling or trying to see him—well-meaning friends, reporters, wackos, you name it. People have even been ringing his grandmother's doorbell or driving by the house, just to get a look at him . . .”

Stephanie gave the young man a weary, half-smile. “Well, this particular wacko flew on a redeye from Portland last night, because—well, I thought what happened to both our families is just too similar to be a coincidence.” She held out her letter. “For the record, I'm not crazy. I really did lose my sister's family on Thanksgiving. I wrote down a link to the news article here. Could you—could you ask Ryan to take a look at it? My contact information is on there. I'm staying at the Hilton Garden Inn tonight—and going back to Portland in the morning.”

He hesitated, then took the letter. “I'll give it to Ryan,” he muttered. “But I can't guarantee he'll read it or get back to you.”

“Thank you.”

He just nodded, then climbed inside his car and started up the engine.

Sweating in the black suit, Stephanie stepped back and watched the car move toward the cemetery gates.

 

 

The reporters and photographers by the entrance gate at St. Mary Cemetery had started to disperse. There was nothing left for them to see—or report on. But one man was still on the job. None of the other reporters had ever seen him before. The short, wiry, thirtysomething man with the receding brown hair lingered outside the fence, a camera phone in his hand. He'd just snapped a photo of one of the mourners. Now he was sending it to his cohort with the following text:

He didn't have to wait long for a response. His cell rang within moments. He answered it: “Yeah?”

“How long were they talking?” asked the woman on the other end of the line. She didn't sound alarmed, just slightly annoyed.

“About two minutes, max,” he replied. Behind him, one of the TV news vans was pulling away. He covered his other ear to block out the noise. “But get this. After Number One Son and grandma left, she gave a piece of paper to his friend, the Asian kid. What the hell are we going to do about her?”

“Relax. Whatever she thinks she knows, we're about five steps ahead of her.”

“She's here—at the funeral. So she's got something figured out. I'm looking at her right now. I can take care of this tonight.”

“Leave her alone for now. I mean it.”

With a sigh, he retreated toward his rented Chevy Impala. He glanced over his shoulder at the woman standing outside the crypt.

“If anything happened to her now,” his cohort told him, “it would just give Joe Quarterback a reason to think whatever she told him might have some—legitimacy. Right now, he's in the news and attracting a lot of crazies. He probably thinks she's one of them. Let's not give him a reason to suspect otherwise. We have her Portland address—or we'll catch her on the road.”

He ducked into the car and shut the door. “I guess,” he muttered.