Mary Beth felt sick inside. The passing of years hadn’t lessened the pain for the boy who’d witnessed the worst that adults could do.

“Then I heard shots. And my dad went down. There must have been a sheriff’s cruiser close by because they got there quick. The other man put the gun to his head. The deputies tried to help them both but it was too late. One went in and got the woman. She was fighting him hard, screaming like a wildcat.

“But it wasn’t just her. I heard someone screaming right behind me. In the car.”

“What? Who?”

“Bobby Joe was in the backseat. He hung out there sometimes, climbed over and pretended it was his car, acted like he could drive. He told me later he’d fallen asleep there. He woke up when I was on the road out of town and he stayed down until after I got to the motel.”

“Oh my God.”

“He heard the woman’s husband yelling, but he didn’t know why and he couldn’t see anything crouched down in the backseat. He didn’t show his face until the sirens scared him. What he heard and saw was the woman and she was half crazy by then. ‘You did it. You killed him. You did it.’ She was pointing at this one and that one and finally she pointed at me.

“When it was all over Bobby Joe got the idea that I’d led the other man to the motel. He knew Daddy and I fought sometimes. He just didn’t know why. Never over the usual teenage stuff. It didn’t seem right to tell him that our old man was a lying, cheating bastard.”

Parr paused. There was a coldness in his last words that Mary Beth had never heard in his voice.

“Even when he was older and knew the whole story—at least what the newspapers printed, because he could look that up at the library—he didn’t want to believe my version.”

“Two witnesses. And both of them kids. Jesus.”

“I saw the shooting and the suicide,” he said curtly. “Bobby Joe didn’t. So he wasn’t a witness to anything.”

“Did you have to testify?”

Parr nodded. “In a manner of speaking, yes. With the murderer and victim both dead, it wasn’t like a trial. The woman was cleared of any involvement. I don’t know what happened to her.

“But I had to live with what I saw—and what I didn’t do—for years after. I can still see it like it happened yesterday.”

Almost two decades had passed.

“You can’t still think you should have saved your father, Parr.”