Page 50 of Justice & Liberty

Twice.

“Oh! I’m terribly sorry. I?—”

Hunter pulled back, laughing. “It’s your house, Abigail.You’ve got nothing to be sorry for. I’m sorry I was trying to kiss someone on your couch.”

Abigail shook her head resolutely. “You shouldn’t be. It’s been too long since this house saw a single positive emotion.” She pursed her lips, looking behind her, like maybe someone was listening in from the doorway, and I wondered how often she’d ever been allowed to have private conversations in her entire life. “Do you know why they think Sabrina did it? Because she argued with him the night before he died, and that old monster grabbed the necklace her mother left her from right around her neck. He broke it, and it was still here on the floor of the office. They think Sabrina killed him because he was an abusive bastard.” She gasped in a deep lungful of air, looking away from both of us and just breathing for a moment. “They don’t understand, none of them. Charlotte maybe could have done it. But me? Sabrina? We never could have killed him. We were never strong enough for that.”

A shiver wracked my whole body at the words, and I...“No. Absolutely not.” I shoved myself up and walked over to her. “I’m not saying you should have killed him, but don’t sell yourself and Bree short like that. It’s not a crime, not to be assertive. We’re all trained from childhood that we shouldn’t be. You’re not a bad person because you learned what they were teaching you.”

“You two didn’t. And look at you?—”

“Look at me,” I agreed. “I just caught my girlfriend cheating on me and moved back home to Iowa. Being assertive doesn’t fix everything. If you want to learn it, you totally should. But it doesn’t make you a better person, or necessarily a happier one.”

With that, she crumpled against me, crying onto my shoulder. “It’s ridiculous. I hated him. I shouldn’t miss him.”

“Emotions aren’t that simple,” Hunter said, coming upbeside us and resting her free hand on Abigail’s back. “You’ve lived with him your whole life. You’re allowed to miss him. For the broken habit of being around him, if nothing else. For what he could have been to you, if he hadn’t been such an asshole. For a thousand reasons, and no one gets to judge any of them. If you didn’t miss him at all, that wouldn’t be anyone’s place to judge either. No one had your relationship with your grandfather but you.”

For a long time, we just stood there like that, Abigail crying on my shoulder, and Hunter, eventually braced against the back of a chair, rubbing circles between her shoulder blades.

Eventually, she pulled herself back, breathing deep and giving us each a tremulous smile. “Thank you. I...just thank you. Both of you.” Then she reached into a pocket and pulled out an envelope. “This arrived for Grandfather the day after he died, and I thought it was odd. I would have given it to Sheriff Parker, but he hasn’t been back since they took the body away, even to ask me if I killed him.”

She handed it to me, so I looked it over. A letter from a law firm in Iowa City, postmarked the day before the murder. Huh. I looked up at Hunter. “Do you know Dooley and Franks? I don’t recognize the firm name.”

She quirked a brow, but didn’t look especially impressed. “Ambulance chasers, basically.”

“They have a commercial,” Abigail piped up. “Grandfather used to watch some reruns on television, old mystery shows from the seventies. I’m sure he saw it.”

That was when I remembered. “I thought Martin Hayes was your grandfather’s lawyer.”

“He was,” she agreed. “That was why I thought it was strange. Things have been a little tense since Mr. Hayes told him he couldn’t”—she glanced at Hunter, then away—“suesomeone for slander. So I wondered if maybe he was planning to try to do that again. Maybe even?—”

“Hayden?” Hunter asked, but there was more amusement in her voice than annoyance. “I mean, we can ask if he’s been served papers or anything. I’m gonna be honest, though, even if my brother were that angry, I picture him as a chihuahua. Tons of bark, but too small to get much leverage even if he tried to bite. I can’t see him actually poisoning someone. Plus with him, there actually is the issue of opportunity. He was working that day, and it’s not like the old man would have invited him in for a drink if he’d showed up at your door.”

“No, that’s true,” Abigail said, sighing. “Honestly, I don’t know. We didn’t have any guests at all that I saw the day Grandfather died. I just...I wish he’d stop ruining lives. He’s dead. He shouldn’t be able to do that anymore.”

Hunter pushed off the chair, giving Abigail’s back one last firm thump, and smiled at her. “Serious, Abigail, stop worrying about this. We’re going to figure things out, and the only person who will get in trouble is whoever actually took the law into their own hands. You and Sabrina will be fine.”

“I should talk to her about Charlotte,” she said, sighing and drawing back into herself as she let go of me. “Grandfather cut her out of his will, but that’s not right. She’s family. We should make sure she gets a share of the money. She might even need it more than we do, living in the big city.”

That was...well, frankly, it was the opposite of what you saw in all those mystery shows where people killed each other over inheritances.

It was like I’d told Estelle, though: it was South Liberty. A town originally populated by outcasts and weirdos, and a town that took care of its own.

The best kind of town.

26

The letter—yeahyeah, we weren’t supposed to open it, sue us—was just a confirmation of an upcoming appointment. An appointment that would have happened the day after Ephraim died.

Hunter called the office, and unsurprisingly, they wouldn’t give her any information, even when she sounded super official to me, and said she was working with the sheriff’s office and investigating Ephraim’s murder. I’d have been convinced. They told her she would need a subpoena if she wanted anything more than a confirmation that yes, he’d had an appointment with them.

She shrugged it off after she hung up, seeming unsurprised by their lack of interest in helping solve his murder.

“People are cutthroat. There’s nothing in it for them to help find his murderer. It’s possible they don’t actually know anything, too.”

I scowled at the notion as I pulled into my driveway. “Then they should say so.”

Hunter smiled, leaning over the center console andbrushing her lips across my cheek. “I like that you still think people might care about justice. It’s...”

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