Livvy kept her attention pinned to Vernice, and she saw the woman manage to lift up her hands. She caught hold of the edge of the tape on her mouth, and inch by inch, she worked it off.
“Help me,” Vernice blurted the second she could speak. “He’ll kill me. He’ll kill all of us.”
“Who’she?” Ethan demanded, and he thankfully didn’t bolt out to try to help Vernice.
She shook her head. “I don’t know. A man wearing a ski mask and a heavy coat. He attacked me at my office and drove me here.”
Maybe. But Livvy still wasn’t going to accept whatever the woman was saying as gospel.
“Does he want you dead because you witnessed Chloe murdering my mother?” Livvy couldn’t stop herself from shouting. “You saw everything, and you did nothing to stop her. Nothing!”
A loud sob tore from Vernice’s mouth. “Oh, God. You remember. I knew one day you’d remember.”
Every muscle in Livvy’s body tightened to the point of being painful. The anger roared through her, quickly spinning into a hot rage. Or at least it would have had Ethan not touched her arm. That gentle gesture was enough to remind her to rein in her fury over what Vernice had done.
“She’ll pay for that,” Ethan murmured, his voice a soothing balm to her tangle of emotions.
Livvy definitely wanted Vernice to pay, and there could be charges brought against her for not reporting a murder that she’d personally witnessed. But Vernice might have been responsible for a whole lot more than that.
“Did you help Chloe kill my mother?” Livvy demanded. And while she wanted to know the answer to that, she also didn’t want to get shot by the person who’d fired at them, so she kept watch.
“No.” Vernice sobbed again, and it blended with the sounds of pain that Sunny was making. The approaching sirens, too. “I was having an affair with Paul, and Chloe confronted me. She was going to kill me, so I told her it wasn’t me sleeping with her husband but rather Belinda. I didn’t know she would kill her.”
Livvy got a too-clear picture of that. “But you must have known Chloe was going to do something bad because you followed her to the house where my mother had taken me.”
Vernice was crying now, the tears streaming down her cheeks. And she eventually nodded. “It was too late for me to stop Chloe. I swear it was too late. Chloe didn’t see,” she added, her breath hiccupping with the sobs. “Chloe left, and I went in to check on Belinda and you.”
There was some movement in the cornfield, just to Vernice’s left, and Livvy and Ethan took aim there. She couldn’t spot the shooter, but he was possibly moving into position to start firing again.
“You were catatonic or something,” Vernice went on. “Not moving, not responding to anything. You were holding the knife, but I took it from you. I figured if Chloe tried to come after me, I could use it as leverage since I believed it would have her prints on it. The knife would be a way of implicating Chloe without me having to admit that I’d seen her murder someone.”
Since Chloe’s prints hadn’t been on the knife, she had likely worn gloves as Franklin had said. Did that mean the rest of what the man had said was also true? If so, where had Hank been when Chloe was murdering Belinda? Vernice hadn’t mentioned him, and Livvy wasn’t going to question Vernice about that.
Not now anyway.
Because it occurred to her that Vernice could be talking to try to distract them. She could be working with someone who planned to try to kill them all.
There was more movement in the field, but Livvy couldn’t be sure if a shift of wind was responsible or if a would-be killer was actually there.
“Let’s go with our plan to fire and aim low,” she suggested.
This time Grace didn’t even hesitate. “Do it. Sunny needs that ambulance now.”
Ethan and Livvy adjusted their weapons again. And both fired. The shots were deafening, and they kicked up a spray of dirt at the base of the cornstalks. What they didn’t do was cause anyone to run out of there.
However, someone fired back at them.
They dropped lower again, but the bullet hadn’t even come close to them. It’d smacked into the exterior wall up near the roof. At first Livvy thought that was because the shooter had been scrambling away.
But no.
More shots came, nonstop now, all of them tearing into the eaves of the roof. And when Livvy looked up, her heart dropped. Because the bullets had weakened a huge chunk of the wood beam, and it was ready to fall right on Ethan and her.
Ethan no doubt saw it, too, because cursing, he pushed her out of the way, moving her closer toward Grace. But their attacker adjusted his shots, and the gunfire began to slam all around them. He was trying to kill them.
And he just might succeed.
“Get under the house,” Ethan ordered her.
