The bartender was back with her change. She left it on the bar, nodded toward the glass. He poured another, then leaned against the bar to watch TV. Some half-bald guy in a suit was talking about the possibility of a football coach getting fired.
“Bullshit,” the man at the end of the bar mumbled. He rubbed his jaw, which was rough with stubble. For some reason, Andy’s gaze found his hand. The fingers were long and lean, like the rest of him. “I can’t believe what that moron just said.”
The bartender asked, “Want me to turn it?”
“Well, hell yeah. Why would I want to keep listening to that crap?” The guy took off his burgundy-colored baseball cap and threw it onto the bar. He ran his fingers through his thick hair. He turned to Andy and her jaw dropped open in shock.
Alabama.
From the hospital.
She was certain of it.
“I know you.” His finger was pointing at her. “Right? Don’t I know you?”
Fear snapped her jaw shut.
What was he doing here? Had he followed her?
“You were at the—” He stood up. He was taller than she remembered, leaner. “Are you following me?” He swiped his hat off the bar as he walked down to her end of the bar.
She looked at the door. He was in her way. He was getting closer. He was standing right in front of her.
“You’re the same gal, right?” He waited for an answer that Andy could not give. “From the hospital?”
Andy’s back was to the wall. She had nowhere else to go.
His expression changed from annoyed to concerned. “You okay?”
Andy could not answer.
“Hey, buddy,” Alabama called to the bartender. “What’d you give her?”
The bartender looked insulted. “What the hell are you—”
“Sorry.” Alabama held up his hand, but his eyes stayed on Andy. “What are you doing here?”
She couldn’t swallow, let alone speak.
“Seriously, lady. Did you follow me?”
The bartender was listening now. “She’s from Canada,” he said, like that might help clear things up.
“Canada?” Alabama had his arms crossed. He looked uneasy. “This is some kind of weird freaking coincidence.” He told the bartender, “I saw this same gal yesterday down in Savannah. I told you my granny was poorly. Had to drive down to see her. And now here’s this lady right in front of me that I saw outside of the hospital the day I left. Weird, right?”
The bartender nodded. “Weird.”
Alabama asked Andy, “Are you going to talk to me or what?”
“Yeah,” the bartender echoed. “What’s up, little bit? You stalking this guy?” He told Alabama, “You could be stalked by worse, bro.”
“Not funny, man.” Alabama told Andy, “Explain yourself, porcupine. Or should I call the cops?”
“I—” Andy couldn’t let him call the police. “I don’t know.” She realized that wasn’t enough. “I was visiting,” she said. “My mother. And—” Fuck, fuck, fuck. What could she say? How could she turn this around?
Her mental Gordon offered the solution: she could turn it around.
Andy tried to make her voice strong. “What are you doing here?”
“Me?”
She tried to sound indignant. “I was just passing through. Why are you following me?”
“What?” he seemed taken aback by the question.
“You,” she said, because his presence made about as much sense as hers did. “I’m on my way back from visiting my parents. That’s why I’m here.” She squared her shoulders. “What’s your reason? Why are you here?”
“Why am I here?” He reached behind his back.
Andy braced herself for a police badge or, worse, a gun.
But he took out his wallet. There was no badge, just his Alabama driver’s license. He held it up to her face. “I live here.”
Andy scanned the name.
Michael Benjamin Knepper.
He introduced himself. “Mike Knepper. The K is silent.”
“Mi’e?” The joke came out before she could stop it.
He gave a startled laugh. His face broke out into a grin. “Holy shit, I can’t believe I’ve gone thirty-eight years with nobody ever making that joke.”
The bartender was laughing, too. They clearly knew each other, which made sense because they were roughly the same age. In a town this small, they’d probably gone to school together.
Andy felt some of the tension leave her chest. So, this was a coincidence.
Was it?
She hadn’t looked closely at the photo on his license. She hadn’t looked to see what town he was from.
“You’re a funny lady.” Mike was already tucking his wallet back into his pocket. “What’re you drinking?”
The bartender said, “Vodka.”
Mike held out two fingers as he sat down on the stool beside her. “How’s your mom doing?”
“My—” Andy suddenly felt tipsy from the alcohol. This didn’t feel completely right. She probably shouldn’t drink anything else.
“Hello?” Mike said. “You still in there?”
Andy said, “My mother is fine. Just needs rest.”
“I bet.” He was scratching his jaw again. She tried not to look at his fingers. He looked like a man, was the thing that kept drawing her attention. Andy had only ever dated guys who looked like guys. Her last sort-of almost boyfriend had shaved once a week and needed a trigger warning anytime Andy talked about calls that came in through dispatch.
“Here ya go.” The bartender placed a Sam Adams in front of Mike and a new glass of vodka in front of Andy. This one had less ice and more alcohol. He gave Mike a salute before walking to the far end of the bar.
“To coincidences.” Mike raised his beer.
Andy tapped her glass against his bottle. She kept her gaze away from his hands. She took a drink before she remembered not to.
Mike said, “You cleaned up nice.”
Andy felt a blush work its way up her neck.
“Seriously,” Mike said. “What are you doing in Muscle Shoals?”
She sipped some vodka to give herself time to think. “I thought this was Florence?”
“Same difference.” His smile was crooked. There were flecks of umber in his brown eyes. Was he flirting with her? He couldn’t be flirting with her. He was too good-looking and Andy had always looked too much like somebody’s kid sister.
He said, “You gonna tell me why you’re here or do I have to guess?”
Andy could have cried with relief. “Guess.”
He squinted at her like she was a crystal ball. “People either come here for the book warehouse or the music, but you got a rock-n-roll thing going with your hair, so I’m gonna say music.”
She liked the hair compliment, though she was completely clueless about his guess. “Music is right.”
“You gotta book appointments to tour the studios.” He kept looking at her mouth in a very obvious way. Or maybe it wasn’t obvious. Maybe she was imagining the sparkle in his beautiful eyes, because in her long history of being Andy, no man had ever openly flirted with her like this.
Mike said, “Nobody really plays on weeknights, but there’s a bar over near the river—”
“Tuscumbia,” the bartender volunteered.
“Right, anyway, a lot of musicians, they’ll go out to the clubs and work on new material. You can check online to see who’s gonna be where.” He took his phone out of his back pocket. She watched him dial in the code, which was all 3s. He said, “My mom’s got this story. Back when she was a kid, she saw George Michael working a live set trying out that song, ‘Careless Whisper.’ You know it?”
Andy shook her head. He was just being nice. He wasn’t flirting. She was the only woman here, and he was the best-looking guy, so it followed that he’d be the one talking with her.
But should she be talking back? He had been at the hospital. Now he was here. That couldn’t be right. A
ndy should go. But she didn’t want to go.
Every time the pendulum of doubt swung her away, he managed to charm it back in his direction.
“Here we go.” Mike put his phone on the bar so she could see the screen. He’d pulled up a website that listed a bunch of names she had never heard of alongside clubs she would never go to.
To be polite, Andy pretended to read the list. Then she wondered if he was waiting for her to suggest they go to a club together, then she wondered how embarrassing it would be if she asked Mike to go and he said no, then she was finishing her drink in one gulp and motioning for another.
Mike asked, “So, where’re you heading to from here?”
Andy almost told him, but she still had a bit of sanity underneath the all-consuming flattery of his attention. “What happened to your head?” She hadn’t noticed before, but he had those weird clear strips holding together a not insignificant cut on his temple.
“Weedeater kicked a rock in my face. Does it look bad?”
Nothing could make him look bad. “How did you know he was my father?”
The crooked grin was back. “The weedeater?”
“The guy with us. Driving the car. At the hospital yester—The day before, or whenever.” Andy had lost track. “You told my dad you were sorry his family was going through this. How did you know he was my father?”
Mike rubbed his jaw again. “I’m kind of nosey.” He spoke with a mixture of embarrassment and pride. “I blame my three older sisters. They were always keeping things from me, so I just kind of got nosey as a way of self-preservation.”
“I haven’t drunk so much that I didn’t notice that you didn’t answer the question.” Andy never articulated her thoughts this way, which should have been a warning, but she was sick of feeling terrified all of the time. “How did you know he was my dad?”
“Your cell phone,” he admitted. “I saw you pull up the text messages and it said DAD at the top, and you texted ‘hurry.’” He pointed to his eyes. “They just go where they want to go.” As if to prove the point, he looked down at her mouth again.
Andy used her last bit of common sense to turn back toward the bar. She rolled her glass between her hands. She had to stop being stupid with this man. Mike was flirting with her when nobody ever flirted with her. He had been at the hospital and now he was hundreds of miles away in a town whose name Andy had never even heard of before she saw it on the exit sign. Setting aside her criminal enterprises, it was just damn creepy that he was here. Not just here, but smiling at her, looking at her mouth, making her feel sexy, buying her drinks.
But Mike lived here. The bartender knew him. And his explanations made sense, especially about Gordon. She remembered Mike hovering at her elbow in front of the hospital while she wrote the text. She remembered the glare that sent him to the bench on the opposite side of the doors.
She asked, “Why did you stay?”
“Stay where?”
“Outside the hospital.” She watched his face, because she wanted to see if he was lying. “You backed off, but you didn’t go back inside. You sat down on the bench outside.”
“Ah.” He drank a swig of beer. “Well, I told you that my granny was sick. She’s not a nice person. Which is hard, because, well, as my granny herself used to say, when somebody dies, you forget they’re an asshole. But at that point when you saw me outside, she wasn’t dead yet. She was still alive and disapproving of me and my sisters—especially my sisters—so I just needed a break.” He took another drink. He gave her a sideways glance. “Okay, that’s not completely truthful.”
Andy felt like an idiot, because she had bought the entire story until he’d told her not to.
Mike said, “I saw the news and . . .” He lowered his voice. “I don’t know, it’s kind of weird, but I saw you in the waiting room and I recognized you from the video, and I just wanted to talk to you.”
Andy had no words.
“I’m not a creep.” He laughed. “I understand that’s what a creep would say, but this thing happened when I was a kid, and . . .” He was leaning closer to her, his voice lower. “This guy broke into our house, and my dad shot him.”
Andy felt her hand go to her throat.
“Yeah, it was pretty bad. I mean, shit, I was a kid, so I didn’t realize how bad it really was. Plus it turned out to be the guy he shot was dating one of my sisters, but she had broken up with him, and he had all this shit on him like handcuffs and a gag and a knife, and, anyway—” he waved all of that off. “After it happened, I had this sick feeling in my gut all of the time. Like, on the one hand, this guy was going to kidnap my sister and probably hurt her really bad. On the other hand, my dad had killed somebody.” He shrugged. “I saw you and I thought, well, hey, there’s somebody who knows what it feels like. For, like, the first time in my life.”
Andy tilted the vodka to her lips but she did not drink. The story was too good. Somewhere in the back of her head, she could hear warning bells clanging. This was too much of a coincidence. He had been at the hospital. He was here. He had a story that was similar to her own.
But he had the driver’s license. And the truck outside. And this was obviously his local bar, and coincidences happened, otherwise there wouldn’t be a word called coincidences.
Andy stared at the clear liquid in her glass. She needed to get out of here. It was too risky.
“—doesn’t make sense,” Mike was saying. “If you look at the part where—”
“What?”
“Here, let me show you.” He stood up. He turned Andy’s barstool so that she was facing him. “So, I’m the bad guy with the knife in his neck, right?”
Andy nodded, only now realizing that he was talking about the video from the Rise-n-Dine.
“Put the back of your left hand here at the left side of my neck like your mom.” He had already picked up her left hand and placed it in position. His skin was hot against the back of her hand. “So, she’s got her left hand trapped at his neck, and she crosses her other arm underneath and puts her right hand here.” He picked up Andy’s right hand and placed it just below his right shoulder. “Does that make sense, crossing all the way underneath to put your hand there?”
Andy considered the position of her hands. It was awkward. One arm was twisted under the other. The heel of her palm barely reached into the meaty part of his shoulder.
One hand pushing, one hand pulling.
The calm expression on Laura’s face.
“Okay,” Mike said. “Keep your left hand where it is, pinned to my neck. Push me with your right hand.”
She pushed, but not hard, because her right arm was mostly already extended. His right shoulder barely twinged back. The rest of his body did not move. Her left hand, the one at his neck, had stayed firmly at his neck.
“Now here.” He moved her right hand to the center of his chest. “Push.”
It was easier to push hard this time. Mike took a step back. If she’d had a knife sticking through the back of her left hand, it would’ve come straight out of his neck.
Mike said, “Right?”
Andy mentally ran through the motions, saw Laura with the knife, pushing and pulling—but maybe not.
Mike said, “No offense, but we both know your mom knew what she was doing. You don’t catch a knife like that, then your next move is to tweak the guy on the shoulder. If you’re gonna kill him, you’re gonna shove him hard, center mass.”
Andy nodded. She was starting to see it now. Laura had not been pushing Jonah away. Her right hand had reached for his shoulder. She was trying to grab onto it.
Mike asked, “Have you looked at her feet in the video?”
“Her feet?”
“You’d step forward, right? If you were planning on yanking out that knife, you’d counterbalance the movement with one foot in front, the other in back. Basic Einstein. But that’s not what she does.”
“What does she do?”
“She steps her foot out to the side, like th
is.” He slid his feet shoulder-width apart, like a boxer, or like someone who does not want to lose their balance because they are trying to keep another person from moving.
Mike said, “It’s Helsinger who starts to step back. Watch the video again. You can see him lift his foot, clear as day.”
Andy hadn’t noticed any of this. She had assumed that her mother was some kind of cold-blooded killing machine when in fact, her right hand had gone to Jonah Helsinger’s shoulder to keep him from moving, not aid in his violent murder.
She asked, “You’re sure he was stepping back on his own? Not stepping back to catch himself?”
“That’s what it looks like to me.”
Andy replayed the familiar sequence in her head. Had Jonah really stepped back? He’d written a suicide note. He’d clearly had a death wish. But was an eighteen-year-old kid really capable of stepping back from the knife, knowing what a horrific death he would be giving himself?
Mike asked, “She said something, right?”
Andy almost answered.
Mike shrugged it off. “The geeks will figure it out. But what I’m saying is, everybody’s been watching the faces in the video when they should’ve been watching the feet.”
Andy’s head was reeling as she tried to process it in her mind’s eye. Was he right? Or was he some kind of Belle Isle truther trying to spread conspiracy theories, and Andy believed him because she so desperately wanted another explanation?
Mike said, “Hey, listen, I gotta go see a man about a dog.”
Andy nodded. She wanted time to think about this. She needed to see the video again.
Mike joked, “Don’t follow me this time.”
Andy didn’t laugh. She watched him head to the back of the bar and disappear down a hallway. The men’s room door squeaked open and banged closed.
Andy rubbed her face with her hands. She was more than tipsy after all of those stupid gulps from the glass. She needed to think about what Mike had said about the diner video. And consider her own guilt, because she had assumed that her mother was a killer. No one, not Andy, not Gordon, had thought for a moment that Laura was trying to do the right thing.