Chapter Seventy
Stella
Lukas said Jeremy was on drugs. Lukas knows about these things. He sees cases like this all the time in his job. It wouldn’t have been our fault if the kid overdosed. With that mother, he was never going to amount to anything anyway.”
I clicked off the recording and let Mom’s twisted statement sit there.
They’d treated Jeremy like his life meant nothing. Lukas actively set up the scheme, then participated in a cover-up, probably more than one, to save his own political hide. He didn’t care about money. This was about power and position. Everything he ever wanted was slipping through his fingers. He couldn’t accept the end, but he could abandon his supposed moral code to change his circumstances. The same code he’d ignored when he touched Aubrey.
“None of that happened.” Lukas shook his head. “Your mom created a story. One that she starred in. We both know your mom exaggerates. The whole town knows.”
He refused to concede. The staggering pileup of evidence, inferences, and coincidences didn’t shake him. Even after sneaking in, after holding a knife to Hanna’s throat, he thought he could emerge the hero. Lie enough, fudge the truth, point fingers, confuse the timeline.
“Those were only this week’s sins. Your depravity stretches back far longer than that.” I fast-forwarded to another damning part of Mom’s unraveling.
“I followed Xavier to Patrick’s house after Hanna called. I don’t know what she said toXavierbut he was in a state. I’d never seen him like that. He needed to deal with that woman once and for all. Get her out of our lives. I didn’t care how he did it and told him so. Then I created a diversion in case he needed cover like he did with Dea. Like I’d done with my mother. I used his ridiculous truck to drive back and forth from the bookstore. I found Xavier at Patrick’s house with Lukas. Xavier said Lukas owed him. Something about blaming Stella for not fixing Aubrey fast enough.”
So many awful words and stunning admissions, but I focused on two names. “Xavier and Lukas.”
“No. Okay. See?” Lukas’s tone suggested he thought he could weasel out of the damning recording. “Now you know she’s mixed up. I was with you.”
“Lukas, did you forget to tell Stella you were already in my house when she called you to come over and help her?” Aubrey asked without her usual snotty affect. The wall of coolness and snide jabs dropped, leaving a voice scorched with a hard-to-define emotion. Pain? Anger? “Not to be indelicate, Stella, but your text popped up when we were in the passage behind myparents’ bedroom. He was wild. Practically stripped my clothes off.”
“Your parents’ bedroom?” Her words tore through me. My failings and my inability to draw a boundary put Aubrey in Lukas’s path. It was his job to ignore a messy teen who liked to play games. He was the grown-up. The perfect guy who never got angry. Who never did anything wrong.
Lukas tightened the knife against Hanna’s throat. “Everyone needs to listen to me.”
“Are you going to kill all of us? Is that your brilliant plan?” Aubrey asked. “Good luck with that.”
“I need a few minutes to explain. I don’t want to hurt Hanna.”
Aubrey snorted. “Why would I care if you did?”
I couldn’t stand looking at his face for one more second or think about what a weepy mess I’d been back then, so I focused on Hanna. I needed her to stay strong. Angry. Ready to move. “Lukas got to the house and we split up to search the grounds and the house for the kids.”
Aubrey shook her head. “No. He was already there. We saw you through the upstairs window. I didn’t see your car but watched you walk into the yard. I got distracted because there were footsteps coming down the hall. Then I heard Mom, so I used the passageway to get out of there.”
“Lukas stayed in the bedroom.” It wasn’t a question. I knew because I found him there, or I almost did. “He was heading out of the doorway when I came up the stairs.”
“That timing doesn’t work,” Hanna said. “Aubrey said you were outside.”
Both things were true and that meant... I couldn’t believe what that meant.
“Mom was inconsolable that day. Raving and not making a lot of sense. She’d lost it. It was like this perfect family she thought she’d built had turned out to be a fantasy and when she realized it she broke.” Aubrey glanced at Hanna. “I blamed you for a lot of that until recently.”
“Are you saying Victoria killed everyone and herself in some sort of downward spiral? That would make sense. You weren’t right there so you got away.” Shock. Disbelief. Lukas played the role as he hung on to Hanna like a shield.
“Have you always been this good of an actor?” My curiosity amounted to a desperate grab for absolution, but I really wanted to know. The answer wouldn’t diminish the blame that wrapped around me that day but maybe the binding wouldn’t clench so tight.
The fog cleared. Every last wisp. Lukas had been on the property that day because he was assaulting Aubrey. I called him and he left her to be with me.
“I checked the backyard. Everything was so quiet. I tried to call Xavier for an explanation and when he didn’t pick up I drove over to his house but he wasn’t around either, so I came back to Patrick’s and ran into Hanna.”
Hanna pushed on Lukas’s arm, shifting it away from her neck. “I thought you’d been in the house and saw the blood.”
“Not then. Not that blood. I heard voices when I got into the house. It’s why I went upstairs to the bedrooms or I probably would have gone into the kitchen and seen Patrick was already dead.”
“None of which you mentioned to the police.” Aubrey waved her hand in the air. “But carry on.”
