Death Before Facebook

killed her only son twenty-seven years later, and it hurt almost more than the fact that he did it. It was the real reason she never balked at taking the pills, why she wanted to sleep all the time.
    Leighton’s killing was done in self-defense. She was the only witness and she knew that Cole wasn’t going to jail even if Geoff remembered seeing him there, remembered how he and Marguerite covered up what had happened.
    But he might have been dragged down to the police station, might even have been arrested and had to stand trial, would almost certainly have been subjected to public scrutiny.
    What’s wrong with me? How could I have been so passive? How could I have let it happen?
    But she knew why. She could only face it now because that morning there weren’t any pills. Last night there had been some, she was almost sure….
    Oh, Jesus. He gave them to Lenore!
    She had found the diary. Feeling more energetic than usual, she had picked up in the kitchen a little, and discovered it under some newspapers. It meant nothing to her, she’d noted only that Geoff was trying hypnotherapy with Kit and thought how odd that was, considering Cole had once been married to Kit, and she wondered if Geoff knew that.
    All day she’d felt odd. She was probably in withdrawal, now that she thought of it. She’d felt uneasy and angry. Then when the cop had come and dragged her off, she’d directed her anger at her, at the cop.
    Cole took her home and left. Left her after what she’d been through! And he didn’t even say where he was going.
    Then Neetsie came over to see how she was doing. They’d gotten to talking—about too many things. Had she told Neetsie what happened that night in 1967? She didn’t know.
    She did know that somehow, somewhere, in that conversation, her veil against the world had finally dropped, that she had admitted to herself that Cole killed her son.
    And Neetsie knew too.
    She’d been clinging to that Baton Rouge thing, telling herself that it couldn’t have been Cole because he was away.
    That seemed ludicrous once she said it out loud.
    It was only an hour there and an hour back—Cole could have been back in bed at his hotel by seven-thirty, even allowing half an hour for Geoff to wake up and try to rescue the cat.
    It was Neetsie who figured out that Kit was in danger, Neetsie who’d taken her to the hospital, had known about Kit’s private place, the solarium in the old leper ward.
    But Marguerite was firm—she’d insisted the girl stay out of the room with Cole. Her father.
    Marguerite realized something strange on the way to the hospital—that Neetsie knew Kit well, and she loved her. In some odd way, Cole’s ex-wife, a woman she had no use for—in principle, anyway—was a mother of sorts to her daughter.
    She was hunkered down now, wishing she didn’t know that or any of it—wishing for the pills. How to answer when her daughter, who was all she had left, asked her if she was all right?
    She had touched Neetsie’s shoulder to make sure she was really there and not in the past like Geoff and Cole. Neetsie must have taken it as a good sign. She had hugged her mother, something she hadn’t done in years, not even the day Geoff died.
    She knew what Neetsie knew. She had been a mother one last time, when she had forbidden her daughter to enter the solarium, but in the end she had failed, and Neetsie had had to face down her own father. Marguerite had exhausted her strength. Neetsie was
her
mother now.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
     
    CAPPELLO HAD COME to Skip’s aid. She had gotten her out of there and into a car with no one except the two of them, and had asked her if she was okay, if she needed some coffee before they went back to headquarters.
    “No, I’m fine. Let’s go right over.” In fact, her adrenaline was pumping, and she was dying to get there, to go into action again.
    “I don’t think you realize what just happened to you. I want you to take five.”
    “No, really.”
    “Humor me. Just walk around the block with me.” She parked in the garage and led Skip outside.
    The wind in Skip’s face was a caress.
    Cappello shivered. “I’m freezing.”
    “I feel great.”
    “I’ll bet you do. You were in that tunnel with all your dead relatives beckoning.”
    Skip was surprised. “I guess I was. I was too mad to notice. That asshole could have hurt somebody, you know that?”
    Cappello hooted, but Skip was impatient, in no mood to join in.
    They didn’t walk around the