FIVE HOURS LATER AND I needed dinner. I hadn’t found the ring, and I was irritable, and I knew it was partly because I was hungry, but also because of the ring, and also because Daniel’s car was in the driveway and I wanted quiet. I needed time to think, to work this all through. I needed to understand.
I ran through the rain, holding my purse over my head. “Daniel?” I called from just inside the front door. The only noise was from the rain on the roof, the wind against the windows, the distant rumble of thunder. “Daniel!” I called from the bottom of the stairs. Getting no reply again, I took the steps two at a time to the second-floor landing and paced the hall, calling his name.
The rooms were empty.
I went back downstairs for my phone, called his cell, and heard the familiar ringing from somewhere in the house. I pulled the phone from my ear and followed the noise into the kitchen, saw his phone on the edge of the table, beside his wallet and car keys. “Daniel!” I called louder.
I threw open the back door, eyes drilling into the woods. Surely he wouldn’t be out there in this storm. I switched on the back porch light and stood in the rain calling his name. Down the steps, around the side of the house, and no sign of Daniel. I ran to his car, peering in the window, now completely drenched. I saw a few tools in the backseat but nothing too out of the norm. Then I heard a sharp thud, like a hammer, just under the thunder—from the garage. A faint light seemed to be coming from the side window. I shielded my eyes from the rain, walking closer.
The sliding doors to the garage were shut, and Daniel had hung something over the windows. I pounded on the side walk-through door. “Daniel!” I yelled. “Are you in there?”
The noise stopped.
“Go in the house, Nic,” he called through the door.
I pounded more. “Open the fucking door!”
He unlocked the handle, pulled it open. His hands were covered in white chalk, and the floor was fractured and splintered—chunks of concrete off to the side, the earth below it exposed.
“What the hell is this?” I asked, pushing past him into the room. “What the fuck are you doing?”
He closed the door behind me. “What does it look like I’m doing? I’m digging.” He ran his hand over his face, the white chalk streaking down with his sweat. “I’m looking.”
“You’re looking . . . for what?” I asked.
“What do you think, Nic?”
For something buried. Something that’s been buried for ten years.
“And you think it’s here? You know this?” I stuck my finger in his chest, but he backed away. “Why do you know that, Daniel? Daniel, look at me!”
“I don’t know, Nic. Not for sure.”
“Really? Because you’re tearing up the goddamn floor. You seem awfully sure of yourself.”
“No, but I already dug up the fucking crawl space and the garden, and this is the only place left I can think of. We were getting ready to lay the floor the day Corinne went missing. But it wasn’t done.”
“You didn’t finish it?”
“No, I didn’t finish it. I assumed it was Tyler and his father, but don’t know for sure who finished it. And isn’t that a little troubling?”
His face was all shadows. I was shaking from the rain, and I wanted to be anywhere but here.
“Now, get out of here,” he said. “Go check on Laura. Tell her I’m working on the house. Tell her not to worry.”
I ran through the rain, back into the house, pacing the downstairs. I dialed Tyler, and he answered on the first ring. “Hey,” he said, “I’m just finishing up here. I’ll be over in a bit, okay?”
“Daniel lost his shit. He’s digging up the garage.”
A pause, and his voice dropped lower. “He’s doing what?”
“He’s digging up the garage, because he doesn’t know who finished the floor ten years ago.” I gripped the phone tighter, waiting for him to provide a safe explanation, an answer that made sense.
Silence.
“Was it you, Tyler? Did you lay the concrete? With your dad?”
“God, that was ten years ago. I don’t really remember.”
“Well, think,” I said. “Was it you?”
I heard him breathing on the other end before he answered. “I really don’t think so, Nic.”
“He’s got a sledgehammer and a shovel, and he’s digging all over the property. He’s lost his mind.”
“Hold on,” he said. “I’m coming.”
* * *
I WAITED THE FORTY-FIVE minutes for Tyler to show up so we could handle Daniel together. I couldn’t go back in there and have a real conversation with him alone—I had no idea how to talk to him about anything. He was paranoid. He was crazed. He had a sledgehammer, and I didn’t know if I believed him about why he was digging up the floor.
I stood on the porch when I heard Tyler’s truck. He pulled something out of the back of the truck and headed straight for the garage. I took off after him. “What the hell is that?” I asked.
He was already at the door, knocking. Daniel flinched when he opened it, scowling at me over Tyler’s shoulder. “You called Tyler? What the hell, Nic?”
Then he saw what was in Tyler’s hand, just as I had. A goddamn jackhammer.
“Let him finish, Nic. He already started,” Tyler said, walking into the room, his eyes slowly taking it all in, then drifting closed. “Okay. Let’s do this.”
I threw my hands in the air. “You’re both completely out of your minds.”
“We have to know,” Daniel said.
“No, we don’t!” I said. I had my head in my hands, searching for understanding, for answers. “Why is this happening? How did this happen?”
Daniel slammed the spade into the concrete. “You’re not asking the right questions. You want to know why and how, and you’re getting strangled by it! Listen to what Dad’s saying. Don’t sell the house. What do you think he means? He means this. The garage floors. It wasn’t me. I came in one day after, and they were just done.”
“That doesn’t mean it was him. It doesn’t mean he did it,” I said, storming out of the garage.
I slammed the door on them, the thunder directly overhead, muffling the sound of the jackhammer. Daniel had emptied the garage, and all the material sat behind it, out in the rain. The gardening supplies, the tools, the wheelbarrow.
I grabbed the wheelbarrow and pushed it back to the door, silently cursing them, and myself, and my dad, and Corinne for disappearing in the first place. Tyler and Daniel paused to stare at me when I threw open the door again. I started picking up chunks of concrete, hauling them into the wheelbarrow. “Well? What should I do with this?” I had my hands on my hips, trying to focus on the task. Just the task.
Tyler met my eyes. “Back of my truck,” he said.
I wheeled it out into the rain, lifted the tarp, and hauled the pieces underneath, my hands turning chalky, like Daniel’s. When I turned back for the garage, Tyler was standing a few feet away, watching me. “You should go to Dan’s place,” he said. The rain fell from his hair, soaked his clothes, came down in a torrent between us.
“Did he send you out here to tell me that?”
He stepped closer, and I couldn’t read the expression on his face in the dark, in the rain. “Yeah, he did.” Another step. “Look, it might be nothing.”
“If you believed that, you wouldn’t be here.”
He came closer, put a hand on the truck behind me. Dropped his head, letting out a breath I could feel on my forehead, resting his own against mine for a second. “I’m here because you called me. It’s as simple as that.” And then his lips were sliding over mine in the rain, my back against his truck, and my fingers were in his hair, pulling him impossibly, desperately closer, until the jackhammer started up once more. “I’m sorry,” he said, pushing himself away. “I wish we could go back.”
My hands were shaking. Everything about me was shaking, and the rain was coming down harder.
“You really should go,” he said, striding back to the garage with his head tucked down.
I should’ve listened. I wanted to. I wanted nothing more.
But it wasn’t fair to them or Corinne. I had to bear witness. I had to pay my debts.
* * *
THE NEXT FEW HOURS consisted of Daniel and Tyler dislodging fragments of the floor and me moving the pieces in a wheelbarrow to Tyler’s truck, all of us covered with white powder.