Page 83 of The Couple's Secret
“I didn’t know what it meant,” Jackson said tightly. “I don’t remember saying it to Olsen but all my life, everyone else said it. ‘Rachel ran off with some guy named Victor. Jackson saw them.’ I don’t know what I saw. I told you. I only have flashes. Fragments. I was three years old.”
“And you were traumatized,” Josie said. “Because you watched your father kill your mother and stuff her into the cabinet to get rid of her. She didn’t run off with some guy named Victor. She left the house in an antique Victor cabinet.”
Forty-Five
Zane looked stricken. His mouth hung open as he went completely still. Then his lips flapped soundlessly. Finally, he swallowed. Then he found his voice. It sounded choked. “Did you say Dad killed someone? Wait, are you saying our dad is a murderer? No, it can’t be. It can’t. I?—”
“Shut up!” Jackson snarled, cutting him off. Turning back to Josie and Gretchen, he said, “I don’t know what I saw. I don’t know what the fragments mean but yeah, I remember my mom playing records on this old wooden thing with that big horn. I never thought about any of it until I was a lot older. Never wanted to think about it. Dad took every opportunity he could to remind me what a worthless piece of shit Mom was, leaving her three-year-old behind in the hands of a stranger. He told me she was hooked on drugs and that she chose them over me. That was always what he said. He never mentioned another guy, not at home, not when he was talking shit about my mom. The Victor thing came from Olsen and from neighbors who overheard me saying it to him that day. It spread, took on a life of its own.”
The buzzy feeling inside Josie intensified. Her cop brain told her they were on the precipice of something important. “Jackson, Zane, you two need to come back down to the stationhouse with us. Let’s finish this conversation there.”
“No,” Jackson snapped.
“Wait, hold on,” Zane said, completely ignoring Josie’s instructions. His lower lip wobbled. Sporadic raindrops landed on his face, but he didn’t wipe them away.
When no more words came, Josie turned back toward Jackson. “The rain is starting. Unload the rest of this stuff and let’s get down to the stationhouse.”
“No.”
“Why not?” Zane said. “We were already there once.”
“Because I’m not going to be manipulated by a couple of cops.” He used his forearm to wipe at a few beads of moisture from his cheek. Tears or rain? Josie was guessing rain. He was wound too tight, vibrating with too much anger, to be crying. “If you’ve got something to say, say it here. If you have questions, ask them here.”
“I thought you wanted to get out of the rain,” Zane said.
Jackson gave him a dirty look but didn’t respond.
Gretchen sighed. “I’m going to read you both your rights before we go any further.”
“Fine,” the brothers said in unison but in very different tones.
Josie watched them as Gretchen recited their Miranda rights and asked them for verbal confirmation that they understood said rights. Jackson looked pissed but Zane looked curious and a little scared.
There was a moment of silence and Josie knew that Gretchen was giving them each a chance to request an attorney. When neither did, Josie attempted to get things back on track. “Jackson, I want to talk about your mom.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t want to talk about her. She’s gone. Everyone’s fucking gone.”
There it was—her way past his defenses—he needed to get some things off his chest. How long had he been holding his feelings in, holding back? Even with Riley, he had clearly been the strong and stoic one, keeping his emotions in check so he could tend to hers. He needed to let go, to unleash. That was the only way Josie would get what she needed from him.
“You’ve lost so much,” she said softly. “And it must have been terrible, growing up believing that your mom left you. It must have been difficult to hear the things Tobias said about her. Regardless of what she did or didn’t do. Any person could tell from the photos of the two of you that she loved you—no matter what came after—and it wasn’t right that Tobias tainted that.”
Jackson’s posture loosened a fraction as he relented, giving in to the opportunity to release some of his long-held frustration. “I hated it. My grandparents only said good things about her. How much she loved me and how she’d just made a mistake. I think that they thought she’d come back eventually. My grandmother, before she died, made some offhand comment about how my mom loved to play records for me because her and I would dance. That Tobias had this old antique record player and I’d tell Mom, ‘Play the Victor, play the Victor.’”
Zane’s head swiveled toward his brother. “Jacks,” he said, voice cracking.
Jackson laughed brokenly. “The cabinet itself wasn’t even a Victor. I found some pictures of it. I think it was a Pooley. Dad just put the Victor with the metal horn on top. It’s weird, right? The way you get stuck on details that absolutely don’t matter.”
Josie had seen it enough—experienced it enough herself—to know it wasn’t strange. “That’s more common than you think,” she said.
Gretchen’s pen and notepad were in her hands. A few raindrops splattered against the page she’d opened to. “When did you start to suspect that your dad had killed her?”
Horror stretched across Zane’s face. “Jacks, is this for real? Do you really think that Dad killed your mom?”
Jackson ignored his brother. “Not for a long time. It was right before I moved out. I was twenty. I found all these pictures of my mom and from when I was a toddler and there was the cabinet with the Victor on top. It wasn’t a… sudden thing. It was weeks of examining my fragments and things coming back to me in nightmares.”
“Then you started thinking about how you heard your dad arguing with Gabrielle right before she died,” Josie prompted. “Did you think that he’d killed her?”
“It was just a suspicion. I had no proof. Couldn’t figure out how he’d done it. But yeah, I thought he had.”
