All the Secrets We Keep (Quarry Book 2) Read online

  “Other nights?” Ilya grabbed the front of Barry’s shirt and yanked him closer. “If you ever put your fucking hands on her—”

  “Just once, just the once!” Barry shouted, cringing away from Ilya. “She came on to me—”

  “Jenni would never have come on to you,” Ilya said, disgusted and recoiling from the idea. “She thought you were a creep, and she was right.”

  “You think I don’t know that? You think I believed a girl like her would have the hots for me, for real? It was because of the money she owed me,” Barry said. “She owed me a lot. She told me that instead of paying me back, she’d . . . do things. Stuff she learned from that trucker she went with.”

  Ilya went cold first, then hot, then cold again. “The fuck you say?”

  “Yeah. Bet you didn’t know that, did you?” Ilya’s clear shock seemed to give Barry courage. His sneer twisted. “Your girl was no angel.”

  That’s when Ilya finally punched him in the mouth. He pulled it at the last second, so at least the old man would be able to keep his rotten teeth, but the blow still landed with enough force to send Barry tottering back against the counter. It split one of Ilya’s knuckles, and a few fat drops of blood spattered onto the stained linoleum.

  “You shut up,” Ilya said.

  Barry smeared his palm across his lips, spreading the crimson stain. “You said you wanted to know what happened? Are you really sure? Because it’s not something you can forget about, you little punk. Once you know it, you’re going to have to know it for the rest of your life.”

  Ilya had always known Jennilynn was no angel, but Barry’s words still hit him hard. He’d spent decades without knowing what had happened to Jenni in the months leading up to the night she died. He’d spent as many years being uncertain of what had caused her death.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  Before he answered, Barry went to the cupboard and pulled out a bottle of wine, the screw-top kind, and filled two mugs. He handed one to Ilya, who took it but didn’t drink. The other, Barry held in both his hands as though he was afraid their shaking would spill the liquid. Barry also didn’t drink, although he looked into the mug’s depths as though he wanted to drown inside them.

  “She was the perfect salesgirl. She wanted the money, was crazy for it—”

  “She had a job at the diner,” Ilya cut in.

  Barry frowned. “Yeah? So? You know women. Always needed money for new shoes, get their hair done, whatever. Once she told me she needed cash so she could run away.”

  Ilya flinched at that, not because he hated the words but because immediately upon hearing them, he knew they were true. “So you got her pushing your pills. What then?”

  “She took to it. I figured she liked getting the guys hooked. She had that way about her, you know? Like she really got off on making people want something she had, just so she could keep it from you.” Barry tipped the mug to his lips but then took it away without drinking. “Shit. I promised Theresa I wouldn’t. Dammit.”

  Yes. Jenni had been that way. Holding out the promise of something always forever slightly out of reach. Shaking, Ilya turned away from the old man.

  “That night,” he said.

  Barry was quiet for so long Ilya became convinced he wasn’t going to speak. In that moment, it would have been so easy for Ilya to walk away. More of his life had been haunted by the memories of Jennilynn Harrison than he’d ever spent making them. She’d become a fantasy. He didn’t want that anymore.

  “That night,” he repeated when Barry still said nothing. “Tell me what happened.”

  “She was working her shift at the diner. She was supposed to be making a payment to me that night, but I was suspicious that she was going to run off with the cash and the pills.”

  Ilya remembered that night. Watching Jenni and the trucker. The fight Ilya’d had with her, after, in the parking lot.

  “So you picked her up?”

  Barry looked surprised. “No.”

  “Who did?”

  “I don’t know.” Barry shrugged and tipped the mug to his lips again. “One of her boyfriends, if you can call a guy twenty years older than her a boyfriend.”

  Ilya frowned. “I saw her at the diner that night. She got picked up by somebody.”

  “Well, whoever it was, she ended up with a black eye and a bloody nose,” Barry said in a clipped tone. “And she didn’t seem to mind it, if you know what I mean.”

  Ilya’s lip curled. “I don’t know what you mean, and if you don’t stop fucking around with me, you’re going to get the same as she had. And you will fucking mind.”

  “It means she was into rough trade,” Barry said. “She liked it.”

  Ilya shook his head. “What are you talking about?”

  “She liked it when guys hurt her.” As soon as he said it, Barry put up a hand as though Ilya was going to hit him again.

  “No . . .” Ilya shook his head again. “That’s . . .”

  “Look, you don’t have to believe it. I didn’t want to. But the time she was . . . with . . . me . . .” Barry paused. “She wanted me to choke her.”

  Sickness flooded him. “Did you?”

  “No!” Barry shouted, but weakly. “Hell, no. Hey, there’s no doubt I was enough of a piece of shit to cheat on your mother with a teenage girl who came on to me, yeah, but me and a hundred other middle-aged guys would do the same thing.”

  “You were the piece of shit who got her hooked on pills—”

  “She was never,” Barry put in, “supposed to be taking them. Only selling.”

  Ilya paced in Barry’s narrow galley kitchen, clenching and unclenching his fists to keep himself from hitting something. Anything. Punching a hole in the damned wall or beating Barry to a pulp. Hitting himself in the face so he wouldn’t have to listen to this anymore.

  “She came to the house. What then?”

  “We met at the old equipment shed, not the house. There was no way I could risk that. I demanded my money. She said she didn’t have it, or the pills, and she wasn’t going to give it to me anyway. She threatened to tell Galina about us if I tried to come after her for it. She told me she was only a few days away from running off. I asked her with who, but she wouldn’t tell me.”

  Ilya’s shoulders hunched, and he spun on one heel to face Barry. “You’re lying.”

  “I’m not. She was already drunk when we were in the shed. High, too. She said otherwise, but . . .” Barry looked truly shamefaced for the first time as he lifted the mug. “I knew. I could tell.”

  “So you left her there?”

  “What did you want me to do? She was threatening to ruin the rest of my life! And shit,” Barry added, “she did. Didn’t she? She ruined all our lives.”

  “Do you think . . . whoever it was she was with . . . do you think he killed her?”

  Barry put the mug on the counter and linked his hands together in front of him. Again, he didn’t speak right away, and when he finally did, his voice was low and rasping. “I’ve wondered. If maybe, yeah. All I can tell you for sure is she was totally shitfaced when I left her, and it makes total sense that she might’ve tried to go swimming and fallen by accident. She didn’t say anything about meeting anyone else there. So far as I know, she had no reason to. I don’t know, Ilya. I’ve thought over the years about it, if I could go to the police and tell them what I knew, see if they could connect anything. Because, sure, yeah, I wanted to know what happened, the way all of you did. If it was somebody who did it, wouldn’t it be a relief to know, so they could be punished?”

  Yes. So they could be punished the way Ilya had come here tonight in order to bring some justice down on Barry. “But you never said anything. You never went to the police.”

  Barry frowned. “I’d have been implicated.”

  “You’re a hypocrite and a coward,” Ilya said with a sneer.

  “Yes.” Barry nodded. “Yeah, I am.”

  “I should still go. Tell them what I know.”

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