Fool Me Once

Maya put up her hands in mock surrender. “Yeah, you got me. I guess I, what, killed Tom Douglass weeks ago judging by the condition of the body. Then I jammed his corpse into that storage bin, got clean away with it apparently, still went to his wife looking for him for some odd reason, and then-help me here, Kierce-I came back to reveal the body and implicate myself?”

He just sat there.

“And yes, I see the obvious connection between this and my husband. I guess I’m stupid enough to stick around murder scenes because that’s a great way to get away with it, right? Oh, and in the case of Joe, I even-wow, I’m good-somehow tracked down the gun someone used to kill my sister, even though I wasn’t even in the country when she was murdered, and used it on him. That about right, Detective Kierce? Did I leave anything out?”

Kierce said nothing.

“And while you’re trying to prove I committed two… Or, wait, did I kill my sister too? No, you told me already I couldn’t have done that one because you know I was serving our country overseas… But while you’re proving all of this, maybe we could also take a look at your relationship to the Burkett family.”

That got Kierce’s attention. “What are you talking about?”

“Never mind.” Maya rose and started toward the exit. “Look, you guys waste time any way you want. I’m going to pick up my daughter.”

* * *

They’d impounded her car.

“You got a warrant already?” Maya asked.

Curly handed it to her.

“Fast,” she said.

Curly shrugged.

Kierce said, “I’ll give you a ride.”

“No, thanks.”

Maya paged a taxi from her smartphone. It arrived in ten minutes. When she got back to her house, she grabbed the other car-Joe’s car-and headed to Claire and Eddie’s house.

Eddie was at the front door before she reached it. “So?”

She stayed in the doorway and told him about the night. Behind Eddie, she could see Alexa playing with Lily. She thought about Alexa and Daniel. Such good kids. Maya was result-oriented. You have good kids, you were probably good parents. Did Claire deserve all the credit for that? Who, in the end, would Maya trust most to raise her daughter?

“Eddie?”

“What?”

“I kept something from you.”

He looked at her.

“Philadelphia did mean something to me. It was where Andrew Burkett went to school.” She filled Eddie in on that connection as well. She debated taking it one more step and telling him about seeing Joe on that nanny cam, but right now she simply couldn’t see what that would add.

“So,” Eddie said, when she finished, “we have three murders.” He meant Claire, Joe, and newly discovered Tom Douglass. “And the only connection, as far as I can see, is Andrew Burkett.”

“Yes,” Maya said.

“It’s obvious, isn’t it, Maya? Something happened on that boat. Something so bad that, all these years later, it’s still killing people.”

Maya nodded.

“So who else was there that night?” Eddie asked. “Who else was on that boat?”

She thought about her email to Christopher Swain. So far, no answer. “Just some family and friends.”

“Which Burketts were on board?” Eddie asked.

“Andrew, Joe, and Caroline.”

Eddie rubbed his chin. “Two of them are dead.”

“Yes.”

“So that leaves…?”

“Caroline was only a kid. What could she have done?” Maya peered behind him. Lily looked sleepy. “It’s getting late, Eddie.”

“Yeah, okay.”

“And I need to put you on the pickup list at Lily’s school,” Maya said. “They won’t let you take her out again unless we do that in person.”

“Yeah, that Miss Kitty told me. We have to go in together and take an ID picture and all that.”

“Maybe we could do that tomorrow, if you’re free.”

Eddie looked at Lily sleepily playing some sort of patty-cake game with Alexa. “That should work.”

“Thank you, Eddie.”

All three of them-Eddie, Alexa, and now Daniel-walked Maya and Lily out to the car. Lily again tried to protest their departure, but she was too tired to do it with any sort of two-year-old-tantrum effectiveness. Her eyes were closed by the time Maya snapped the car seat buckle into place.

On the ride home, Maya tried to shake off the dead but of course that was easier said than done. Eddie was right. Whatever was happening now had a direct link to whatever happened on that yacht seventeen years ago. It made no sense, of course, but there it was. She longed for the simplicity of Occam’s razor again, but perhaps the more apropos philosophy once again came from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle via his creation Sherlock Holmes: “When you eliminate the impossible what remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

They say you can’t bury the past. That was probably true, but what they really meant was that trauma ripples and echoes and somehow stays alive. It wasn’t so different from what Maya was still experiencing. The trauma from that helicopter assault rippled and echoed and stayed alive, if only within her.

So go back. What was the initial trauma that started it all?

Some would say the night on the yacht, but that wasn’t where it started.

What was?