Page 123 of Moonshine Kiss
I pulled myself off the couch and shuffled down the hall. The door was unlocked, as always, but she was asking for permission.
I opened it. Cassidy hadn’t bothered changing out of her ice cream and sex clothes. She was clutching a thin stack of papers. “Hey,” she said.
“Hey.”
“I’m sorry for kind of ghosting on you,” she said.
I remained silent. I wasn’t going to make this easy for her anymore.
“Bow, your mom never let your dad drive her car.”
“What are you talking about, Cass?” I asked wearily.
“But he took her car to New York. He was in her car when he got the speeding ticket.”
To give myself something to do besides feel hurt and confused, I headed into the kitchen for another beer even though I’d barely touched the one I had. Cassidy followed me.
“There was something that bothered me about your dad’s speeding ticket. It was the fact that he got it in your mother’s car. A car he wasn’t allowed to drive. So why would she have lent it to him for a multi-state road trip?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he stole it,” I said.
Or maybe he needed the trunk of a car to conceal something he couldn’t haul in the open bed of a pickup.The thought turned my stomach, and I put the second beer on the counter next to the first.
She was fired up. I could see her cop brain working. Excitement was crackling off of her. And I wanted to take it away from her the way she’d taken my hope away from me.
“What does it matter? My mother died in that car. It was totaled.”
“And sent to Buddy Foster, Jr.’s junkyard,” she said, shuffling the papers. “Buddy never gets rid of anything. There’s a chance her car is still there.”
If my father had used that car to cart Callie’s body out of the state… “It’s been more than ten years.”
“But there might be something in it. Some clue.”
“What could you possibly find?” I asked, not caring that I was raising my voice. “There’s no way DNA evidence could survive ten years in the elements.”
“We have to try, Bowie.”
The woman I loved, the one I wanted to marry, was asking me to help her prove that my father was a murderer. She was, essentially, expecting me to help her ruin my family’s life. Didn’t she care what this would do to my family? Not just to our reputation, but how we saw ourselves. We were already the sons and daughter of a drunk. What would adding “murderer” to that description do?
“What about the pictures from the Kendalls?” I was grasping at straws.
“If we find the car and there’s nothing in it, no evidence that Callie was ever in it, that could pull in favor of the theory that she hurt herself. If there’s nothing to be found, that’s another huge piece of evidence that Connelly can’t keep ignoring.”
I needed her to say it.Did she think my father was guilty or innocent?
Cassidy took a deep breath and blew it out again. “I’ve been struggling with wondering if I should tell you something or not. So I’m gonna say it. You have a right to know.”
“You’re starting to make me nervous,” I said, picking up one of the beers.
“There’s a possibility that your mom’s accident wasn’t an accident.” She blurted the words out, and the beer went bitter on my tongue. “I talked to my dad about it and he had his suspicions.”
“What? You think my dad murdered Callie and got a taste for it so he went ahead and killed my mom, too?”It would have been laughable if it weren’t my fucking life. My fucking family.
“No. Not that kind of a not an accident,” she explained gently. “There’s a chance—a small one—that your mom crashed on purpose.”
“Suicide? You think she went through that guardrail on purpose?”
“We both know she wasn’t happy, Bowie,” Cassidy began. “She had dreams much bigger than being a stay at home mom in a tiny town always worrying about money.”
