Page 79 of The Truth You Told

Shay

December 2013

Four months before the kidnapping

I didn’t shoot him, Shay. Beau did.

The words trembled in the air between Shay and Max, the aftershocks of an earthquake. Shay concentrated on just breathing as Max watched her.

“You thought Beau told you everything, didn’t you?” Max asked. “He has so many secrets. You’re just so easy to lie to because you always believe anything he tells you. He loves that about you.”

“Don’t be cruel,” Shay snapped.

But Max was Max. Even if she hadn’t ever killed anyone, she still had a mean streak. “You really think his father went out on a joyride at three a.m.?”

Shay pictured Callum in their kitchen in Houston after Billy’s funeral.

Where was he driving to?

Did he have any enemies?

“Do you really think it was a coincidence that two men connected to our family died like that?” Max asked, relentless. Heartless. “I walked in on Beau just after he pulled the trigger, you know. He was still holding the literally smoking gun.”

Shay’s world rearranged itself. She had always imagined the scene in reverse. Max holding the gun, Beau walking in on her and the body. Beau taking and stashing the gun as he told her to go call 911. They would suggest it was a robbery and let the cops take it from there.

But then she thought of the way Beau had defended Max. He had always insisted that Max was fine, that she was normal, that she wasn’t going to turn into a vicious criminal. Shay had thought it sweet of him to have such faith, but that had never been the case. He’d simply been lying to her all along.

Or ... she tried to remember. Had he ever said Max was the one who’d shot her father? Had he just implied it? The three of them had never addressed the incident head-on, and both her siblings must have been going out of their way to protect the other.

So had she. She’d been the one who’d driven nearly to Galveston in a panic that night after meeting Callum the first time. She’d just been protecting a different person than she’d thought.

And it would have been important for Max to be the one to find the body if they wanted to keep Beau out of jail. If Beau had been the one to call the police, the cops would have been far less likely to go with the far-fetched story of a startled petty criminal. Max had been eleven—no one would have wanted to prosecute, even if they were shaky about the truth of it all. Beau was a different story.

But Shay wasn’t the cops. They could have told her.

Then there was Billy.

How had Callum been the only one to sense something was going on beneath the surface there? And why had Beau done it?

Even if Max was being cruel right now, painting Beau as something he wasn’t, Shay knew him.

Sheknewhim. He would never kill just to kill. And he’d forgiven Billy long ago, so it wasn’t revenge.

Should Shay even believe Max? What if Max was the one lying to her?

“Just remember how old I was when Billy had his little accident,” Max said. She must have read Shay’s mind.

Max would have been young, too young to pour two bottles of Jack down Billy’s throat and then manhandle him into his car.

That didn’t mean she wasn’t lying about her father. Shay chewed on her lip. Maybe it didn’t matter either way.

“I never actually thought you were the Alphabet Man,” Shay said, directing this conversation back to the present. “Just because you were collecting all that stuff about him. Even when I thought you’d already killed once.”

“I was, like, twelve when he started killing,” Max said, the eye roll obvious in her voice. “I’m not saying twelve-year-olds can’t kill people, but even if you think I’m both totally psychotic and also incredibly mature for my age, I still would have struggled to do all this.”

She waved a hand at the articles, at the maps. “The tattooing alone should have ruled me out.”

“I’m saying I never thought you were a serial killer,” Shay said again. “And I don’t think Beau is, either.”

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