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Mac gave me a pursed-lip smile, but nodded and gestured for his deputies to follow him out.

“You give me a holler if you need anything, Tom. You too, Mercy. We’ll talk tomorrow, okay? Get some rest.”

Dad waved him off. As soon as the others were gone, Dad more or less collapsed back to his seat.

“Don’t ask me if I’m okay again, Mercy.”

“Too bad. I’m going to worry about you anyway. Did you hit your head?” I was worried about far worse. Had he suffered a stroke?

“I just got lost,” he said, shaking his head. “Mercy, I’ve driven from here to Lloyd’s hundreds of times. Maybe thousands. It just ... stopped looking familiar. What’s wrong with me? Am I going crazy?”

I swallowed past a lump in my throat. “No.” I hugged my father, expecting him to put up a fight. He didn’t. Instead, he clung to me.

“We’re going to get you home,” I said. “But we’ll call Dr. Ricci in the morning. No arguing.”

He nodded as I broke our embrace. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. How was your day? Did you find Sidney’s son?”

“Come on,” I said, kissing my dad’s forehead. “We’ll talk when we get home and get you cleaned up.”

Dad nodded. He took my hand as we walked to the door. He kept the boat keys hanging on a hook beside it. He grabbed them and stared at them for a moment. Then, he placed them in my palm and walked out into the street ahead of me.

I wanted to punch a fist through the door glass. I’d been begging Dad to let me drive the boat for weeks. But now, it was the last thing I wanted to do.

Chapter

Eighteen

“I’m fine,” Dad grumbled. “I don’t need a babysitter.”

He’d been like this all morning. He sat in his recliner in the living room, staring at the black screen of the television he refused to turn on.

“I’m not leaving you like this. Come into the office with me. Come to my meeting with Geneva. I could use a second set of ears.”

He gave me his patented Tom Gale side-eye. “Don’t patronize me.”

“I’m not! For heaven’s sake, Dad. We’re working on this case together. I’m stuck. You know that. Boone Sidney stopped just short of throwing me out of his office. Dan Holland has a feeling about Geneva but no solid proof. All I know is that she and Annabelle Oleson were in the middle of teenage girl drama. Not the kind that would typically lead to mass murder. I don’t know whether my client is lying or not but right now, she seems to be the only one who really knows what happened that night.”

Dad’s eyes lit up. “I forgot. Crap. With all the drama yesterday, I forgot.”

“Forgot what?”

Dad hoisted himself out of his chair and went down the hall to his office. I had no choice but to follow him as he wouldn’t answer my question.

He rifled through some papers on his desk. Unsatisfied, he went to the printer in the corner. There were more papers scattered around it. He gathered them, then turned and thrust them at me.

“What is this?” I asked.

“My contact at the state police came through. I got copies of the examiner’s notes and a full report from Geneva’s polygraph.”

I sank onto the couch against the wall. The handwritten notes were almost illegible, written in a shorthand I couldn’t quite decipher. But four pages of this stack contained the actual questions Geneva was asked along with a mark showing whether deception was indicated for each.

I scoured through the thing. There were seven questions in total marked as likely deceptive.

“He actually asked her if she killed each one of the girls,” I said with disgust. Those questions were asked toward the beginning of the examination. I could only imagine how upsetting that would have been for Geneva if she were innocent. She had to be innocent.

Dad printed a second copy and read right along with me.

“She lied about her relationship with Annabelle,” Dad said. “She’s asked if she liked Annabelle. Geneva says yes. The readings say no.”