and vacation shots, birthday party pictures, mother and daughter, smiling and young, forever hopeful, just we two . . . Quentin’s jaw tensed, a tiny, bitter seed taking root at the pit of his stomach.
He took a deep breath, willing the tension out of his body as he’d learned in the holistic yoga class his husband, Dean, had forced him to take. In with the positive energy, out with the negative . . . God, Dean could be so Californian sometimes, but it was better than nothing. Worse than downing a globe-size martini, or putting one’s fist through drywall. But better than nothing.
“They’re all I have,” said Reg. “Those pictures you’re looking at. They’re the only family I have left.”
“Well . . .” said Quentin.
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes.” Quentin struggled to keep his tone neutral. “I know what you mean.” But the truth was still right here with them, hanging in the stale air and coursing through Quentin’s tensed muscles, showing itself in his narrow face and his slight overbite and the thick black lashes that used to get him teased when he was a kid. No matter what Reg Sharkey thought he meant, the truth was with them. It had nowhere else to go.
Reg and Clara had another daughter, a girl ten years older than Kimmy. At the edge of the mantel stood the evidence, a faded professional photo of the Sharkey family: Kimmy as a baby in Clara’s arms, posed between Reg and that older daughter, Kate.
Quentin stared at the ten-year-old standing next to her mother, a skinny kid with a pained, buck-toothed smile, a puffy-sleeved pink party dress that seemed to swallow her whole. Thick lashes behind plastic-framed glasses, dark eyes identical to his own.
He gritted his teeth. One picture. Out of this entire gallery, just one picture of Kate in a bent, cardboard frame. Anger bubbled within him, the kind a healing breath couldn’t fix, and Quentin had an urge to point that out—just one fucking picture of her—but he kept his mouth shut, remembering Reg’s rough voice over the phone. How he’d relented, finally, to thirty minutes and not a second more. Quentin needed those thirty minutes if this podcast was going to work. He needed to keep calm.
Quentin cleared his throat. “Back to my original question,” he said. “What did April Cooper do to make you think she was the real killer?”
“She didn’t do anything.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
Reg sighed heavily. “Gabriel LeRoy was all over the place. He was firing at everybody in that Arco station. He was consumed by rage. Out of control.”
“Okay . . .”
“She wasn’t.”
Quentin nodded slowly. “She could have stopped him, but she didn’t.”
“Yep.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” he said, “but I’m really trying to understand this. Can you explain to me why that makes a fifteen-year-old girl guiltier of murder than the legal adult who actually killed everyone?”
He drew a long, weary breath. “Think about a house on fire. It’s your house. Burning to the ground, taking with it everything you own. Everything you love. April Cooper—a fifteen-year-old girl as you point out—is standing next to the firehose, but she doesn’t make a move toward it. She just watches the flames and smiles.” Reg ran a hand through his hair and leaned forward, eyes blazing. “Who are you going to blame for all that destruction—the fire? It’s a thing of nature. It can’t exist without burning.”
Quentin took too big a gulp of the iced tea Reg had brought him—lukewarm and bitter. Hard to swallow. Everything you love.
“Kimmy was just eleven years younger than April Cooper,” Reg was saying. “She could have been her little sister, but that . . . that girl just stood there. Her boyfriend shot my daughter in cold blood. He took away everything I loved and April Cooper stood there, like she was watching a movie. Do you understand me now?”
Dark thoughts whirled through Quentin’s brain. He tried another of Dean’s deep, healing breaths. “Yes,” he said. “I understand.”
“Good.”
Quentin pulled his steno pad out of his pocket. With shaking hands, he thumbed through the pages he’d covered in notes from the hours he’d spent online, reading old issues of the San Bernardino Sun.
“I haven’t seen one of those since I was still working.” Reg gestured at the pad. “I did the books for a Ford dealership in La Quinta. Spent twenty-five years in that same office, one secretary the whole time. Sweet old lady named Dee. I bet a kid your age wouldn’t even know