Chapter 4 - THE BLOOD DIDN'T BELONG TO PETER
Police searched the backyard again.
Not with my shovel.
With technicians.
Lights.
Evidence markers.
Ground-penetrating equipment.
I stood on Mom’s porch watching strangers move around the tree she had protected my entire life.
Joe stood twenty feet away.
I could not bring myself to stand beside him.
Detective Mills eventually came toward us.
“No remains.”
Relief hit me so hard I had to grip the porch rail.
“So Peter wasn’t buried there.”
“No.”
Joe whispered:
“I told you.”
I turned.
“You told me nothing for twenty-seven years.”
He stopped.
The forensic lab rushed testing on a dark stain found on one of the papers inside the metal container.
Blood.
But not Peter’s.
The blood belonged to a woman.
Later, DNA from Mom’s hairbrush confirmed it.
Margaret.
I stared at Joe.
“You said you hit Peter.”
“I did.”
“Then why was Mom bleeding?”
“Because before I arrived, he pushed her into the fireplace.”
The cassette had not captured everything.
Peter arrived furious because Mom refused another payment.
He threatened to go to my house.
I had been newly engaged to Joe.
Planning a wedding.
Completely unaware that my mother’s former accountant was my biological father.
Peter grabbed Mom.
She fought him.
He struck her.
Joe arrived because Mom had called him earlier that evening.
“You called Joe?”
I asked the empty room as if Mom could answer.
Joe said:
“She knew I had investigated Peter.”
“She trusted you?”
“No.”
He laughed bitterly.
“She hated that I knew.”
That was the beginning.
Not personality.
Not class.
Not pride.
Mom despised Joe because he had seen the most humiliating secret of her life.
Joe resented Mom because she demanded his silence.
The night of the confrontation, Joe hit Peter once with the poker.
Peter fell.
Then stood again.
“He was alive?”
“Yes.”
“Conscious?”
“Yes.”
Peter ran outside.
Got into his truck.
Drove away.
Joe followed for several miles.
Then lost him.
The next morning, the truck was found abandoned at a bus station.
No body.
No Peter.
“So why bury the evidence?”
Joe looked ashamed.
“Margaret panicked.”
The broken papers contained proof of the blackmail.
Proof she had falsified corporate payments.
Proof I was Peter’s daughter.
She wanted everything gone.
Joe refused to burn it.
They compromised.
A metal box beneath the newly planted maple.
“I thought someday you deserved to know.”
I stared at him.
“But you buried it anyway.”
“Yes.”
Then Detective Mills returned holding a bank record.
“Laura, there’s another problem.”
She had found six payments to Peter Lawson after the date he supposedly disappeared.
The last one occurred six years later.
May you like
Mom had known he survived.
And she had continued paying him.
