She told her father all the rest of it before she paused for a moment, then rubbed her fingers over his knuckles, wishing he would squeeze her hand again, show her he knew she was here and recognized her. “I saw Sherlock in Savich’s office this morning, and she smacked him real hard on the arm, not that she could do much damage, he’s hard as a brick outhouse, and then she kissed him. I know she must still be replaying what happened again and again in her mind. Can you imagine, Dad? Two innocent kids, and knowing all the way to your soul their lives were in the balance?
“Sherlock called the father and gave him the name of a shrink for the kids. I’ll bet they’re going to have nightmares for a while.”
She smoothed her palm over her father’s forehead, his cheeks. His skin felt clammy, and why was that? His leg jerked, then he was motionless again, and there was only the sound of his slow, difficult breathing. Lucy laid her cheek against his chest. “You’re too young to leave me, Dad, please, you know it’s always been just you and me, so you need to stay. You need to get better and tell Dr. Pellotti you’re going to outlive him and his kids. Will you do that for me, Dad?”
She was crying silently when her father suddenly yelled, “Mom, what did you do? Why did you stab Dad? Oh my God, he’s not moving. There’s so much blood. Why, Mom?”
Lucy reared back, her mouth open to shout for the nurses when she saw he was looking at her, recognized her. He squeezed her hand. “Lucy,” he whispered, and then he closed his eyes and took in a hitching breath, and then he lay still.
She ran to the door to yell for the nurses, but she heard a nurse scream, “Code blue!” before she got there, and then the room filled up with men and women, and she stood by the lone window in the hospital room and watched them start to work frantically to save him, until she was ushered out.
Her father, Joshua Acker Carlyle, was pronounced dead by a young physician she’d never seen before, at 3:06 a.m.
Dawn was moments away when Lucy walked to the hospital parking lot. She realized she didn’t feel much of anything. Her brain, her heart, felt empty. But I’m really here, she thought. I’ve still got to put one foot in front of the other, walk to my car, get in, go home—and what?
Lie in bed and plan Dad’s memorial service—not a funeral, no, Dad told me often enough he never wanted to have his carcass stuffed in one of those high-shine coffins sitting on wheels in the front of a church with a big stupid photo of himself beside it that everyone had to look at. No, burn him up in private and spread a nice long trail of ashes into the Chesapeake, where he loved to sail, swim, and eat every crab he pulled out of it.
Lucy didn’t cry until after she’d called her great-uncle, Alan Silverman, at seven o’clock a.m. and told him his nephew was dead.
Then the tears wouldn’t stop. When she called Dillon at eight o’clock a.m., she sounded like a scratchy old record.
The worst of it was hearing her father’s words again, sharp, clear, and panicked. “Mom, what did you do? Why did you stab Dad? Oh my God, he’s not moving. . . .”
Special Agent Luciana Claudine Carlyle knew her father had witnessed his own mother murdering her husband, Milton, Lucy’s grandfather, a man she’d been told had gone walkabout twenty-two years ago. Whenever she’d asked, that’s what she’d been told—Your grandfather left us, no word, no reason, just gone—until she’d simply set him away in the back of her mind, and eventually stopped thinking much about him at all. As far as she knew, no one had ever heard from him again; he’d simply left one day and never come back.
Well, that was a lie. He hadn’t just disappeared. Her grandmother had murdered him, stabbed him to death twenty-two years ago, her own father a witness. That would have made her father forty years old when it happened, a grown man living with his parents, since his wife had died and he’d needed help with his small daughter, namely herself. Why hadn’t he stopped it? Because he’d been too late to stop it, that’s why. He’d never let on, never said a word to anyone, as far as she knew. Should she ask Uncle Alan? Would he know? She shook her head. She couldn’t ask him that question, not without knowing more. Surely he didn’t know, as she hadn’t known.
Her father had seen his own father’s murder again in the moments before he died.
Lucy couldn’t get her mind around it, couldn’t accept it. Her grandmother a murderer? Her grandmother, Helen Carlyle, had died peacefully in her bed at home three years ago. Both Lucy and her father were with her, and Lucy had kissed her good-bye on her forehead.