Page 16 of Echoes
Her mother looked out the window again and said, “I still miss him.”
“Me too,” Eliza replied.
“I wish I… would’ve seen him. I just remember seeing blackness and you pulling me. Then, we were in the cabin, and I’d left your father to die in the dirt.”
“Mom, Dad wouldn’t have wanted us to get hurt. He told me to run when he saw me.”
While Eliza had no problem alleviating her mother’s guilt about that, truthfully, she herself had thought the same thing since it happened: she’d been a coward. She’d left her father there to die in the dirt, worrying about her mom and her own safety more than helping him. Yes, she’d grabbed a shotgun that she didn’t know how to use, and she’d gone back outside, but that had been minutes later. Her dad had been long gone by then, just like the man who had murdered him right in front of her.
“He was my husband,” her mother argued.
“He was my father,” she reminded. “And I’m finally going to do something about his murderer.”
Three Days Later
“How are you doing with all this?” Lydia asked.
“I’ve been better. And I think I’ve been way worse, too,” Eliza replied and took a sip of her beer.
“We didn’t really talk about it yet… What happened to make you remember, exactly? You said something triggered the memory, but how would looking at some old stamps or whatever he was collecting back then do that?”
And here it was, the reason she’d been avoiding this conversation with Lydia. Everyone else had just believed her when Eliza had told them that she’d seen an old box of her dad’s stuff that had somehow given her a clearer image of his killer, but Lydia had always seen right through her. Even when they’d first met in high school, Lydia could tell when Eliza was lying or not telling her the whole truth. One look, and Lydia usually knew. It had been one of the reasons Eliza had stopped their visits during their freshman year of college: she’d known that if Lydia saw her, she’d figure out that something was going on with her and ask her about it.
This was different, though. Eliza planned on telling her best friend what had actually happened in that storage room, but she wanted to get some answers first. She wanted to find the man who had killed her father, and she wanted him to talk to her and tell her why he’d done it. She wanted to find out what her father and this man had been hiding and if it had anything to do with this boomerang device that someone wanted to keep away from the world but couldn’t figure out how to destroy.
She wasn’t sure how much danger, if any, she was in for using it in the first place, and she didn’t know if telling someone else about it would put them in danger, either. What she did know was that she’d never do anything to risk hurting Lydia, despite needing someone to talk to about what had happened to her and how she’d really been able to identify this man that the police were currently looking for to question him about the crime.
“El?” Lydia pressed as they sat on Eliza’s sofa, turned toward one another after finishing a dinner of Chinese food that Eliza had ordered for them.
“I can’t tell you.”
“Youcan’ttell me? I saw you throw up outside, and you were so pale and looked like you’d seen a ghost. You also wouldn’t let me go in and see that storage unit. Youactivelystopped me, and I’ve been trying to figure out why this whole time. Any picture or some old shirt or whatever wouldn’t be something you’d need to keep from me, so I have no idea what’s going on, and we tell each other everything. We always have.”
Eliza swallowed and said, “That’s not entirely true.”
“Well, okay, maybe noteverything. We don’t really talk about our sex lives or sometimes lack thereof with each other, but we used to date, so that makes sense to me. Everything else, though, we always talk about. I guess you didn’t tell me about going back to therapy and that being one of the reasons we ended, but I can understand that, too.” Lydia paused then, trying to examine her face. “Something’s up, and you’re not telling me. Did you at least talk to your mom about it the other day?”
“No,” she replied. “I have to find some things out first before I tell anyone.IfI tell anyone, I mean.”
“If? Are you waiting until they find this guy?”
“Yes. I need him to tell me why he did it.”
“What if he doesn’t tell you?”
“I think he will.”
“Why?” Lydia asked. “He’d have no reason to confess. He’s gotten away with it for this long. Even if you could say for certain that he was the man who killed your dad, there’s literally no other evidence. There were no prints. There was no DNA. They couldn’t trace the knife he’d used.”
“I know all of that, Lydia.”
Eliza stood and picked up one of the to-go containers to take to the kitchen more to have something to do than anything else, but Lydia, unfortunately, followed her into the kitchen with more questions.
“So, why would he confess when he could probably still get away with it?”
“Do you want to just stay here tonight? It’s late.”
“Don’t change the subject. What is going on with you?”