BooksBarbecue
Back Never Look Back
Chapters (51)
  1. Cover
  2. Dedication
  3. One
  4. Two
  5. Three
  6. Four
  7. Five
  8. Six
  9. Seven
  10. Eight
  11. Nine
  12. Ten
  13. Eleven
  14. Twelve
  15. Thirteen
  16. Fourteen
  17. Fifteen
  18. Sixteen
  19. Seventeen
  20. Eighteen
  21. Nineteen
  22. Twenty
  23. Twenty-One
  24. Twenty-Two
  25. Twenty-Three
  26. Twenty-Four
  27. Twenty-Five
  28. Twenty-Six
  29. Twenty-Seven
  30. Twenty-Eight
  31. Twenty-Nine
  32. Thirty
  33. Thirty-One
  34. Thirty-Two
  35. Thirty-Three
  36. Thirty-Four
  37. Thirty-Five
  38. Thirty-Six
  39. Thirty-Seven
  40. Thirty-Eight
  41. Thirty-Nine
  42. Forty
  43. Forty-One
  44. Forty-Two
  45. Forty-Three
  46. Acknowledgments
  47. P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*
  48. About the Author
  49. About the Book
  50. Also by Alison Gaylin
  51. About the Publisher

She hadn’t come here to investigate. The police had swept the house days ago, after all, bagging anything noteworthy and taking it with them. No. Robin had devised an entire plan to get here unnoticed, just so she could breathe in this air and see if her parents’ home still held the same magic . . . the only place, all these years, where she ever truly felt calm.

It wasn’t the same. Of course it wasn’t. Tire tracks on the front lawn, remnants of yellow crime scene tape hanging from the front and back doors in tatters. The whole house dark, empty. Lifeless.

Who shot you, Dad? What were your last thoughts?

In her mind, she saw this place the way it had looked the night of the shootings. The whirling lights of the police cars, the rush to the front door. All those cops she didn’t know, pushing into her parents’ home. And Dad on the stretcher. The wide-open eyes. Whose eyes had he seen last? Who killed you, Dad?

Robin moved across the garden, to the line of hedges where she’d caught her father smoking. She could still smell cigarettes—clearly some miswired synapse, fried from grief.

She noticed something glinting between two of the hedges—a hard, shiny thing, reflecting the moonlight—and bent down for a closer look.

“Dad,” she whispered.

It was the ashtray. The same one.

Robin picked it up. An ashtray of red ceramic with black, white, and gold dice painted on it, the words Las Vegas swirling across one side in ’60s-glam cursive. So unlike her scholarly, quiet father. But then, it hadn’t been like him to smoke either.

It was a good-size ashtray, and there was easily a pack of butts in it. She wondered when he’d smoked the last of these, which were all the same brand. Dad had been a Marlboro man, apparently.

Robin thought about taking the ashtray home with her as a souvenir. But instead she decided to replace it, crouching down and setting it gently back in its spot behind the hedges, hidden from Mom, from the world.

As she did, Robin noticed something on the ground that had either been underneath the ashtray or beside it—a piece of lined paper, folded into eighths.

Robin picked it up and unfolded it—a clean, dry, pristine sheet that clearly hadn’t been outside long enough to survive a rain. And it had come from one of Robin’s father’s notebooks.