Unhinged by Sarah Graves Page A

supposed to say so right then, let everyone know you were trying to catch me out?”
    “Huh.” I stared at my hands cupped around the cup. “It would have been awkward, wouldn’t it?”
    He shrugged. “Don’t worry about it, I do the same thing. Cop habit: you get so you don’t believe anything anybody says. So you check.”
    Then he took a deep breath and threw me the curveball, the one I couldn’t have seen coming in a million years.
    “Listen. This probably isn’t a good time to say this. But I know about your father.”
    I nearly choked on the coffee. “How . . .”
    But of course: when Harry Markle became a cop, my dad would have been a fresh entry in New York police lore. Jacob Tiptree, the fumble-fingered moron who blew up a Greenwich Village house while trying to rig an anarchist bomb, was a famous old radical villain.
    The blast broke windows for blocks, leveled the town house, killed six co-conspirators plus his young wife, Leonora. The lone survivor was Tiptree’s daughter, Jacobia Lee. It’s how I ended up in hill country being raised by my mom’s relatives.
    But sitting there in the hospital cafeteria I didn’t see how any of it could be linked to Sam, as Harry was implying.
    The steering column of Sam’s car had broken off on impact. The force of it had stopped his heart, and only the quick-thinking ambulance technician had known how to restart it:
    She’d hit him again. Hard, with her fist, while I’d struggled unsuccessfully to make the people at the crash site let me near. He’d flopped like a fish when she slugged him, I saw that much.
    I forced my mind from it. “If you’ve got something else to say, Harry, say it. I’m too exhausted to play twenty questions.”
    He sighed. “I was going to tell you, anyway. Because if you found out, you’d wonder why I didn’t. Like with the restaurants.”
    “Uh-huh.” I gazed at him, dumb with fatigue and the remnants of fear, waiting for the punch line.
    But I wasn’t ready for that either. “See, back then I was on the task force trying to catch him.”
    The
only
survivor: me.
    “He didn’t,” I said carefully through a throat thickened by sudden emotion, “live. He and my mother and their friends—”
    “Yeah,” Harry agreed. “That was the official story, that no one got out except the kid. You. But some thought different.”
    He leaned back in the chair. “I was a new young guy, but I’d been top of my class at the Academy. I was getting groomed. So as a rookie I was put on as errand boy to some biggish operations.”
    “One of them was to catch my father.” I couldn’t absorb it. So I defaulted back to the situation at hand: “But you still haven’t said what that’s got to do with Sam, with his accident.”
    “It’s complicated. Or was.” A look of pain creased his face.
    I must have made a sound of impatience.
    “Your dad was never found,” he told me. “We spent a long time searching. I even met you again a few years later. Remember?”
    I remembered men coming to the house. Strangers; not a good sign in the hills. I didn’t remember Harry. But that didn’t mean anything; by that time a man in a suit, clean-shaven and wearing shoes, might as well’ve been from Jupiter.
    A tired-appearing woman in nursing garb came in; my heart lurched, but she wasn’t looking for me. She tried the coffee urn, sighed, settled for hot water and a tea bag before going out again.
    “Anyway, the task force finally ended. I’d made detective. And not so long ago I got assigned to another case. A nut job who specialized. The victims were cops’ wives, husbands, or significant others. Remember?”
    I nodded. It was the kind of sensational story that got into the news loop, even way up here in Maine, and I recalled it now because it had happened in Manhattan, in my old stomping grounds. I’d followed it in the back pages of the
Bangor Daily News.
    And then I’d forgotten all about it. “But I don’t—”
    “You will, in a