Page 116 of The River We Remember
“What is it, Brody?”
He looked deeply into her eyes, as if searching for the answer to a question he hadn’t yet asked.
“Now I have something to tell you,” he said, and his own confession spilled forth.
Even after the sun had set and the sky had gone from bruised purple to an indigo full of stars, they talked. There beside the silent flow of the Alabaster River, they split open the darkness inside both of them in which too many secrets had lain hidden.
“I was so afraid, Brody, so sure you wouldn’t understand.”
“We’re all broken. I’ve heard you say it a hundred times.”
“It’s that easy?”
“Why not?”
“Garnet knows everything.”
“You know about her, too, now,” Brody pointed out.
“I wouldn’t use it.”
“She won’t either.”
Angie settled in his arms and they watched the Alabaster begin to take on a white evanescence with the rise of the moon.
“Now you know the worst about me, and I know the worst about you,” she said. But she felt him tense. “Don’t I?”
“There’s one more thing, as long we’re sharing secrets.”
“What?”
“The night we found Jimmy Quinn’s body, I destroyed evidence.”
“Why?”
He stared at the river a long time. “Holden Caulfield, I guess.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I looked at everything out there on Inkpaduta Bend, and I knew something wasn’t right about the way it all sat. In my gut, I knew someone had killed Quinn.”
“Why did you destroy the evidence?”
“I couldn’t help thinking that there are a lot of good people here who had good reason to hate Jimmy and wouldn’t mind seeing him dead. What if it was one of our neighbors? This is the kind of thing that can tear a place apart, Angie. I thought that no one in this whole county would grieve Jimmy Quinn, and if I got rid of evidence that might say it was anything other than a terrible accident or, hell, even a suicide, we could all get back to our normal lives pretty quick, and things could just go on the way they always have. Maybe even a little better without Jimmy, you know?”
“Holden Caulfield out there in that rye field protecting the innocent,” she said.
“Something like that.”
“Do you think Noah Bluestone really did it?”
“If it wasn’t him, it was Kyoko. I don’t know the truth of it, but I know Quinn somehow drove them to it. That damn Connie Graff. If he’d just been willing to let it go, let me call it an accident, this would all be over now.”
The radio in Brody’s cruiser crackled, and they heard the voice of Hank Evans. “Base to Unit One. Do you read me, Brody?”
Brody slid his arms free. “I better take this.”
She stood up with him and, for the first of so many times that it would become impossible to count, she kissed him.
