Page 27 of Love Over Time

“Okay. So this is going to require a bit more planning.”

“You think?” He met my gaze and tilted the bottle until the beer was all gone. Brows furrowed, he blew out a breath. “What happened tonight?”

“I’m not exactly sure. Either your uncle found out you’d seen your mom, or he has really good intuition. The man stole millions from you. He must have a proper criminal mind.” That had sounded funnier in my head. “I’m sorry. I know you were hoping to have your mom back tonight.” I placed my hand on his shoulder, swigged my beer, and glared at the wall to our right. The one with the last fifteen years of my sister’s life and the pictures of his dad’s last moments pinned to it. The answer to this mad puzzle was in there somewhere.

“So what do we know?” Henry followed my line of sight. His eyes filled with tears when he saw the murder board. “It’s all connected, isn’t it?”

Chapter Ten

A Scratch Is All We Have

Henry

She nodded. “Maybe tonight wasn’t a complete bust. We did learn something.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Someone other than me believes in Lisa’s innocence.” She smiled, placing a hand over her heart. “That means that somewhere out there, there’s proof Lisa didn’t kill your dad.”

My mind churned with flashes of that day, like a dream within a dream. I hadn’t come back to Paradise Creek to stir up old memories. I’d come back to set things right. If Lisa was innocent, every minute she spent in jail was a huge injustice, one that Mom at some point had tried to fix. I owed this much to Nikki, Mom, and Lisa. Time to face the past. It still hurt to think of Dad, but I had to try. I pushed my feelings aside and went to the wall plastered with my worst nightmare.

“What did we see that day? Do you remember?”

Nikki drank some more of her beer. “Sometimes I feel like I saw something. But I don’t know what. You know? Like when you can’t think of a word and it’s right there at the edge of your mind, but you can’t quite reach it. And other words you know are not right jump in its place.”

I rubbed a hand over my face and into my hair. “Fuck. Nikki. I know exactly what you mean.”

“So what did we see? How do we know what’s real?”

“Or what’s part of a waking nightmare?” I finished her thought.

She nodded in agreement and took my hand in hers, her gaze full of pity. “I felt something tug at my brain when I put these pictures up. Maybe if we go through it together, we might come up with something.”

I stared at the images in front of me, not recognizing the face of the man in them. What a brutal crime. So much hate. So much blood. “How does a man as big as me get beaten this bad?”

I vaguely remembered going to court. The details of the trial were a blur. All I remembered was spending most of my days wondering where they had Dad, if he was really dead.

The story I read later on the internet said Lisa Morrow had been convicted of murder in the first degree. The defense attorney had argued that it’d been a crime of passion. Lisa had been eighteen at the time, almost twenty years younger than Dad. How the fuck had the lawyer come up with that? In the end, the attorney’s argument had been what saved Lisa from life in prison. Temporary insanity—the same insanity that had made her strong enough to beat a grown man to death.

Nikki squeezed my fingers. “Whoever did this was strong enough to move the body.”

“What?” I frowned at her. “What do you mean?”

“You remember Dom?”

I rolled my eyes and crossed my arms. “Yeah, your nonclient.” Why did it matter if he was a client or not? Nikki wasn’t mine. She never was.

“That’s the one.” She pointed a finger at me. “He found a mark on…the body. According to his expert friend, based on coloration and whatever else, his friend thinks it was postmortem.”

“He thinks someone moved Dad and scratched his arm in the process?”

“He’s working that angle. He thinks that it might create enough reasonable doubt to call for a retrial.” She looked down at her hands, biting her lip.

“But?”

“But that’s not what Lisa wants. She doesn’t want to be free. She wants to come home. Do you understand?”

I rubbed my eyes and exhaled. I might not remember the details of the trial, but I remembered how Lisa and Nikki had been treated during the entire ordeal. This town had turned all the love they had for my dad and my family into hate for the Morrow girls. At school, Nikki had been placed in a special classroom because she was jumped in the hallway by a group of kids. I’d tried to help her and ended up with a busted lip. That had been my last day of school. My uncle had thought it would beprudentto send me to a boarding school in Tucson. Nikki’d stayed behind, and God only knew what else she had to put up with. All I knew was that when I came back five years later, she had decided to run away from foster care.

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