Page 7 of Between Now & Heartbreak

“What? Why?”

Dina shrugs. “Who knows. From what I’ve been able to gather, initially the police thought she’d been kidnapped. She was a missing person. No one thought she’d been the one to kill him.”

I’m horrified to know that all of this happened in Winsome and I had no idea. “What about the baby? Did it die in the fire?”

“No, she was still pregnant when she did it. But no one knew that. When she was examined after her arrest, they found that she’d given childbirth sometime in the previous three months. She denied having a baby. But her body made it clear she was lying. I don’t understand why they didn’t charge her with anything related to that. But they didn’t. I’m hoping to get more answers.”

“So she killed her first kid. Got married, killed her husband, had a baby in secret, killed it, too, came back to face the music for her husband’s murder and denied that she’d had a kid?” I recite the facts and shiver. What kind of person does that?

“Yup. You couldn’t make it up, right?” She shakes her head in disbelief. “Even stranger is that nowhere in the police reports or the records from her hearings is there even a mention of the first child who disappeared. I mean, maybe they didn’t look through the birth records. I’ll admit that getting those records wasn’t easy. But this is a small town, I don’t see how a young girl could be pregnant, give birth and no one remember.”

That sends chills up my spine, too. “Me neither. What’s the family’s name? Do we know them?”

“Her maiden name was Martin. Her father moved here from New York to work as an engineer for Wolfe and settled here. They fell on hard times when her dad died, but she went to work for the Tremaine family in some sort of domestic position right after high school. Her name changed to Kendicott after she got married. Her husband worked construction at Wolfe, but he was just a worker bee. They kept to themselves mostly.”

“Why did she kill him? Did she ever say?” I’m dazed by this story. And by the fact that I’ve never heard it before. This town has a lot of myths and lore, but this isn’t one of them.

“Not really. There’s a note in the police report, her mentioning that he hit her regularly. I don’t know what happened the day she pulled that trigger. She plead guilty. There wasn’t a trial. At the sentencing, his family spoke, but she never did. Beyond the interview with the police and her official confession and statement, there’s nothing.”

“Maybe she got tired of that bastard beating her. I don’t know how anyone is expected to live that way.” I think about the months I spent my grandmother’s. Years of that would make me want to kill someone, too.

Dina lets out a long suffering sigh.

“I know, girl. I know. Let’s talk about something else. This is depressing. And you still have to tell me all about your great love affair with Duke Tremaine.”

2

LIAR, LIAR

BETH

Her sudden leftturn in the conversation catches me off guard.

The story I’ve memorized and repeated dozens of time in answer to this question jumble and get stuck in my throat.

Ihatelying to Dina. She’s the only person who hasn’t let me down and the last person who deserves it.

Her family moved here when her father started working as an Engineer at Wolfe. She was sixteen, from Seattle and full of ideas and dreams.

And she cursed like a sailor.

Her family is from Vietnam originally, and the very first time we talked she promised to take me there one day.

I could tell she meant it.

I’d never met anyone like her and I loved her immediately.

That first year of our friendship was spent making grand plans. She was going to be a famous true crime novelist and editor, and I was going to be an artist.

We’d live in an apartment in Paris, wear beautiful clothes, dance with handsome men in trendy nightclubs, and sleep as late as we wanted.

The closest I’ve come to living that life has been vicarious glimpses of Dina’s adventures from the pictures and postcards she sends me.

She’s in her final year at college, and she’s had an internship every summer with a publishing house in New York including one she spent at their European headquarters in Paris. She married Wes, her childhood school sweetheart just last year.

She’s living my dream life and I should hate her, but I don’t because she’s the real deal. I love her so much.

Lying to her feels like stealing something from her. And even if Icouldtell her everything, she wouldn’t understand. I know it.

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