Chapter Twenty-One
Lily
I didn’t dare touch the gun, and my hands trembled as I regarded it. What the hell was Jackson doing with something like this in his house? He was firmly anti-gun; I knew that. At least that’s what one of his campaign policies was.
Maybe it simply wasn’t his gun. But if that were the case, then why the hell was it here? It had to be his. So perhaps he was only just pretending to be against guns, because that’s what many of the voters in our state wanted in a politician. Then again, I was sure he hated them. He had to. After all, Jenna was murdered all those years ago with one, and surely anyone who lost a loved one to gun violence would despise the things…I personally would, anyway.
I stood up and nudged the gun away with my foot, wanting it as far away as possible. There was a file underneath it, which must’ve been sitting in the box below the pistol, and I frowned and knelt down as I made out the faded words on it.
Simmons Life Insurance.
Curious, I opened the file. My stomach twisted into knots as I leafed through the paperwork. It was from around six and a half years ago, and it was a life insurance policy belonging to Jenna Potter. It looked like it had been taken out in her name mere weeks before she died, and the beneficiary was listed as….
Jackson Barker.
The policy was for over a million dollars.
My heart pounded as I tried to comprehend everything I’d just discovered. A life insurance policy taken out only three weeks before Jenna was murdered, resulting in Jackson being paid a lot of money seemed seedy enough. But finding a gun with it? That was really dodgy, and it was making me question everything I thought I knew about Jackson.
I knew it wasn’t the gun that killed Jenna (that particular one was found at the crime scene with my Mom’s prints all over it), but just the fact that Jackson owned one at all despite being so publicly anti-gun made him seem untrustworthy. It was hypocritical as hell.
God, what if I didn’t really know Jackson at all?
I sat back on the floor, my head spinning as I began to recall all those nightmares I used to have. I’d never been able to figure out if the first man I heard in those dreams was real. But what if he was? What if it was Jackson, and what if…what if he was there that day Jenna died? I knew he’d supposedly been at Dad’s office building all day, helping out with tax stuff, but back in those days my dad had a lot of staff and the place was always very busy all hours of the day. Jackson could’ve easily slipped out for a couple of hours without anyone noticing.
I thought back to the tape Dr. Steinberg played me after my hypnosis session.
‘Lily, where are you right now? What’s happening?’
‘I’m here. At Jackson and Jenna’s house. He’s here too. I hear him.’
‘Who’s ‘he’, Lily?’
‘He’s saying that I did it. He’s asking why I did this. Oh god, there’s blood everywhere. I have the gun…’
It hadn’t occurred to me before now, but Jackson was the most obvious answer to the question of who ‘he’ was in that context. It was his damn house, after all.
My mind began to whirl even more. There were too many unanswered questions floating in there now. If the man in the dream was real, and it was Jackson, then why the hell was he in the house that day when Jenna was killed? Why was he telling me I did it, and why was I holding a gun?
A horrifying thought suddenly occurred to me, but I immediately pushed it to the back of my mind. I could barely entertain the idea, because I loved Jackson. I trusted him…didn’t I?
Then again, how could I trust him right now, with all these things I’d just found? It was just too damn messed up. The awful thought returned to the forefront of my mind, and I finally whispered the words out loud.
“What if he killed Jenna?”
There were so many ifs and maybes. Too damn many.
Maybe he took out that massive life insurance policy on Jenna, and he killed her and plotted to frame my mother in order to collect the money. Maybe I heard noises that day and actually went over there, and in my sick haze at the time, I barely registered what was going on. Maybe I walked in and found Jenna and the gun, and that’s why I had this shockingly strong memory of smelling and seeing all the blood, which came to me in my nightmares. Maybe Jackson walked back in after cleaning himself off and found me, and he told me I did it to make me think I was simply sleepwalking and having a crazy nightmare, and so I went back home and got back into bed to return to my blissful sleep.
And maybe what I heard earlier was Jenna pleading for my mother to help, because she was there too. When I thought she screamed ‘K, please, don’t do this!’, perhaps she was actually saying ‘K, please!’ to my mother and then ‘Don’t do this!’ to Jackson separately. But then Jackson killed her along with my mother, then made my mother ‘disappear’ in order to make it look like she committed the crime. He could’ve easily cleaned off the gun and put it in her hand to put her prints on it, and then bam…she looked guilty as hell, even though she was actually buried in a ditch somewhere.
Tears gathered in my eyes at the horrible thought of my mother being dead this whole time, and I tried to choke them back.
When I went to Jackson all those weeks ago and confided in him about my nightmares and how I was worried they were real memories returning to me, maybe he somehow forged the letter from my mother to put my mind at ease and make me think she was alive and really committed the murder. After all, he’d received plenty of holiday cards and letters from our family over the years when we were still close, and Mom wrote them all back then, so he could’ve easily found a sample of her handwriting to copy.
And last of all, maybe this whole thing was why he was with me now. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer, as they say. Perhaps he wanted me close to make sure I never fully remembered anything, and if I did, he’d be the first to know so he could deal with the situation in his own way.
So many maybes.
I shook my head a second later. This was utterly ridiculous. Totally freaking ridiculous. What the hell was I thinking?
Of course none of that was true. It wasn’t even possible. How could Jackson plot something so evil? Why would he need insurance money when he was already rich, as far as we all knew? And if I was really over there that day for whatever reason, why would he be so stupid as to let me think it was just a bad dream and go right on home? If he was willing to kill two innocent women, then he’d have no qualms about killing a young girl as well, if it meant saving his own hide.
He didn’t do it. No way.
My nightmares were really just that—nightmares. There was no truth to them at all, and the fact that I’d even conjured up such an awful image of Jackson made me a bad person.
A bad girl.
My hands shaking, I closed the life insurance policy folder and stood up. I knew exactly what to do now in order to get to the bottom of this. I had to be careful, but all I had to do was go and ask Jackson if he’d ever owned a gun, and maybe also try and sneak in a question about life insurance. If he was honest, then there had to be an innocent explanation for everything, and I would probably laugh about all this one day; laugh about how silly I was for suspecting a thing. But if he lied…then maybe the awful picture of Jackson my mind had just painted wasn’t so inaccurate after all…
I went downstairs to find him sitting at the kitchen table. Two steaming plates of lasagne sat on the table along with two glasses of red wine, and as I sat down in front of my plate, Jackson smiled at me. “There you are. I was about to come looking for you to see if you were okay.”
I forced a smile in return. “I’m fine. I looked for ages, but I couldn’t find the globes.”
“No worries. I’ll go find them after dinner.”
He took a bite of his food, then peered at me as he chewed. “Everything okay?” he asked after he swallowed. “You look worried.”
“Sorry. This is just my thinking face,” I said. “My friend Alexandra has always told me I look really concerned when I think hard.”
“What are you thinking about so hard?”
“A few things,” I said, trying to sound as airy as possible. “I’ve been looking online at the course stuff for next semester at college, and I’m already kinda stressing about some of the content.”
“Oh?”
“One of the business classes apparently focuses on insurance a fair bit. I don’t know anything about that; I’ve never really thought about it.”
He chuckled. “You know what insurance is, Lily.”
I smiled. “I know. I didn’t mean it like that. Of course I know what it is, it’s just the finer details I don’t know anything about. Like life insurance, for example. How does that work, exactly?”
Jackson had been in the middle of lifting a forkful of lasagne to his mouth again, but he lowered it at my words and frowned. My heart lurched, and I worried I’d been too obvious already.
“You don’t need to worry so much, baby girl. I’m sure your professors will have all the answers you need when the next semester begins. But that isn’t for weeks. You don’t need to get ahead of yourself, so stop worrying that pretty little head,” he said, reaching over and ruffling my hair.
I breathed a quiet sigh of relief. Thank god, he had no idea what I was up to, so I could press a little harder. “Have you ever had life insurance? Or anyone you know?”
He grinned. “Are you planning to kill me, Lily? Hoping for some sweet cash? Because no, I don’t have any life insurance. And I’ve never known anyone who does. The whole concept has always seemed a bit off to me.”
I had to force myself to laugh at his joke about me, but on the inside I felt like throwing up. Why would he lie and say he’d never known anyone who had life insurance when he received over a million dollars in beneficiary payouts from Jenna’s policy after she died? Maybe he simply didn’t want to talk about it, but I couldn’t be sure.
I changed tactics. “Oh, I just remembered. While I was Googling the college stuff, I saw something else,” I said. “Apparently some girls at the college had their apartment broken into over the weekend.”
“That’s awful.”
“He had a gun. That’s how he forced his way in,” I continued. “Isn’t that just terrible? It’s so scary.”
Jackson reached across and patted my hand. “It is. But you’re always safe with me, baby girl. You know that.”
“Am I?” I blurted out before I could stop myself.
He frowned, and there was a strange flicker in his eyes. “What do you mean?”
I quickly covered myself. “I mean, what if someone broke in here while we were asleep and tried to attack us? Do you have anything in the house that could protect us? Like a gun, or a baseball bat, or something like that?”
His frown grew deeper. “For Christ’s sake, Lily, of course I don’t have a gun. You know how I feel about them.”
My heart sank. Another lie. That could only mean one thing…
Jackson leaned forward and stared at me, and I saw that his eyes had gone steely. It instantly reminded me of the cold look he had on his face that day he threatened my father during their fight, and I gulped.
“What’s going on?” he asked, his voice stiff. “You’re acting very strangely, and you’re asking all sorts of weird questions. I wasn’t born yesterday, Lily. I can tell there’s something.”
I was sprung. It was now or never.
I jumped up from the table, preparing to run out of the kitchen and out of the house if need be. “I found the stuff in the attic,” I said. “The gun and Jenna’s life insurance policy. You just lied about it all! And there’s only one reason I can think of why you’d do that.”
Jackson’s eyes remained cold, and he stood up, face etched with fury. Before I could run away, he was on my side of the table, hand gripping my upper arm. I tried to squirm out of his grip, but he held me still and leaned down.
“You’re coming with me, little girl,” he said. “Right fucking now.”