Total pages in book: 113
Estimated words: 106422 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 532(@200wpm)___ 426(@250wpm)___ 355(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 106422 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 532(@200wpm)___ 426(@250wpm)___ 355(@300wpm)
“But I’ve been clean since before I met Diya.” Mostly because my father had made it plain that the cops would otherwise use my addiction to convict me of murder.
Two very rich women are dead under suspicious circumstances, and you’re bleeding money, he’d said. I’d fucking convict you, too. Shut. It. Down.
Even though the program to which I’d admitted myself was top-of-the-line, it hadn’t been easy to fight the urge…but then I’d met Diya, and she’d become my new addiction.
I was fine with that—she was the kind of addiction who could get a man through life.
“This isn’t good, Tavish,” Ngata said. “It just increases what Ackerson sees as your financial motive. Talk to your father, get him to transfer you a wad of cash. No way for anyone to know if it’s a gift or a loan—and it’s an indication of your resources.”
“I saved Diya,” I reminded him. “Don’t let Ackerson forget that.”
“She’s going to say you were forced into it because of the neighbor who was with you.”
I fisted my hand. “I can’t wait for my wife to wake up and tell that cop she’s full of shit.”
“I hope for your sake that one of the women does wake up. Call your father.”
Frustrated and angry after he hung up, I strode back along the pathway while smoke curled up from the stone all around me, a small private hell.
Ani.
Rhiannon.
Shumi.
Three women Bobby had hurt. Two dead. One barely clinging to life. If those three existed, so would others. And now, thanks to Richard, I knew of one woman who would’ve tried to keep track of the boy she blamed for the murder of her child.
* * *
—
Rhiannon’s mother wasn’t difficult to locate with the details Richard had given me. Her hyphenated surname had been in the papers, and it wasn’t a common one. When I did a social media search, she showed up as the third hit down—her profile picture was of the same smiling teenage girl I’d seen in the newspaper articles, but the other images on her page were of an adult woman with deep lines on her thin face.
Only fifty but I’d have pegged her as more than a decade older. Grief and anger left marks.
Her location was listed as Auckland…and there, on her profile, was a link to a website: Justice for Rhiannon.
When I clicked through, I found myself on a badly designed site that I could tell hadn’t been updated on the back end for some time. But someone was still writing a post on it every year on Rhiannon’s birthday.
I began to read one at random.
My sweet girl would’ve been twenty-one today if only she hadn’t had the bad luck to fall in love with a psychopath. Everyone tells me I shouldn’t say these things, but I don’t care. It’s the truth and the truth needs to be spoken. Maybe they’ve gagged me with their rich people lawyers against saying his name, but I know. You all know.
My girl could swim like a fish. And you’re telling me she drowned on a clear day when the sea was all but smooth? I saw him after. He’d been swimming, too. Said it was with his sister, but he was a teenage boy, didn’t want to be hanging around with his kid sister.
He drowned my Rhi, my sweet girl. She was such a strong swimmer that he had to have held her under or done something else to her. She used to swim out to that far buoy and back without problem.
His sister was an adorable thing, though. Rhiannon loved her, used to make a special batch of cookies for her right before we went down each summer. “For my little Dee,” she’d say. “My adopted baby sister.”
I don’t know how one child in a family could be so sweet, and the other a monster. I still have the letters that little girl wrote to my girl after each summer. She loved that Rhiannon was a dancer and would always be excited for Rhiannon to teach her new steps.
He was always around them, though. Always watching. I should’ve known, but who thinks these kinds of things about a kid? Who could know that he was a murderer?
Sarita and Rajesh.
The answer to the writer’s final question.
After baby Ani, how could they not know? But I couldn’t ask them. Rhiannon’s mother, however, was alive—and Andrea Smithy-Carr had listed her personal phone number on the website, in case anyone had information about her daughter’s death.
I considered whether to call ahead, decided against it. I didn’t want her to talk herself out of it during my drive. It had been more than ten years, after all—and I was Bobby’s in-law. Better to call once I was within Auckland’s borders, give her less time to overthink.
The GPS told me the drive to Auckland would take roughly three hours. If I left now, I’d get there before five. Even if I ended up spending a couple of hours with her, I could still make it back to Rotorua tonight.