DAY 2
It was just after midnight. A new day, I thought. The long drive home behind me. Me and Cooley Ridge, slowly adjusting to each other once more. I’d get some sleep before sunrise and see it again with fresh eyes, and I’d do what I had to do to get Dad to talk, to remember what he’d seen. I’d come at it from a different angle. Work my way back to it. Find out what had been hiding, buried, for the last ten years. The ghost of Corinne, spinning and blurring in my mind.
I need to talk to you. That girl. I saw that girl.
I turned off the hall light, and the house was completely dark. I put my hand against the wall, feeling the familiar chips in the paint at the corners. Five steps from here to the stairs. I knew the way by heart.
Shit, the ring. I forgot the ring again. I’d left it in the middle of the kitchen table so it wouldn’t get lost amid the cleaning supplies.
Two steps back to the light switch, and the give of the floorboards at the kitchen entrance, and the faint flickering of something out in the night. I kept the light off, took a step closer to the window.
There was a shadow moving up on the hill. I could see it because there was a light in front of it. A narrow beam cutting through the trees. I pressed my face closer to the window. It was descending the hill, and for the briefest moment my heart soared and I thought, Tyler, like always.
But the shadow was too small. Too narrow. In my backyard, her blond hair caught the moonlight, and she flicked off the flashlight with her delicate fingers.
It occurred to me, as she stared at the darkened windows, that she couldn’t see me watching her.
She had an off-white packet of some sort under her arm, and I watched her bend down, disappearing from view. Then the gentle sound of paper wedging itself under the back door. It wouldn’t come completely inside, even as she tried to jimmy it a few times. She stood, and the door handle slowly began to turn. What the—
My hand went to the knob on instinct, pulling the door open before her. Then I hit the light switch, bathing us both in light. She jumped, gripping the envelope to her chest, her eyes wide and innocent. She blinked slowly, her face stoic.
“Hi,” I said, stepping back so she could enter. “Annaleise.” What can I do for you? or What’s up? seemed inappropriate now that I realized how late it was and that she’d been about to open my back door without knocking.
She stepped inside tentatively, her fingers pressing into the envelope, her knuckles blanching white.
“Is that for me?” I asked. I saw my name in boxy print, done in a ballpoint pen. Just Nic. Nothing more. “Is this a ‘Back off my boyfriend’ letter? Look, I could’ve saved you the trip. Tyler and I are done. He’s all yours.”
She cleared her throat, relaxed her grip on the envelope. “No, it’s not,” she said, sliding her phone from her back pocket and resting it on the kitchen table. She sat at my table, crossing her legs, her hands fidgeting in her lap. “That’s not what this is at all.” Her large eyes met mine, and her smile stretched wide, and I was taken aback—how different this Annaleise was from the thirteen-year-old girl I remembered. She pulled apart the envelope seal and flipped it over, dumping the contents on my kitchen table.
I saw the typed piece of paper first, the cost of silence and the price for the flash drive and leave at the abandoned Piper house, and my mind was scrambling to keep up with the dark, shadowy images strewn across the kitchen table.
“I don’t understand,” I said, my hands touching the glossy surface of the rest of the sheets. Pictures. Shades of black and gray, grainy and pixelated. Everything dark. So dark. I leaned closer, could make out almost nothing but the way the light shone out of a window and the shape of the tree branches. But I knew it was my house.
“I don’t— What is this?” I asked.
“Our agreement,” she said, her voice firm and measured.
I leaned closer, focusing on the backlight, the way it reflected off something—something lower, on the porch. A lump—a carpet? A blanket? There was a shadow hovering near the side of the frame. And at the edge of the blanket, something bronze and willowy. Hair. Hair. Bronze hair spilling out of a dark blanket. I threw the picture back on the table, jerked my hand back. “What—”
“Wrong question. Who. Looks to me like the body of Corinne Prescott. There’s no statute of limitation on murder, you know,” she said as my face gave way to a horrified understanding. Here, finally, the answer we’d sought for so long. Here was the body of Corinne Prescott—at my house.
“And you think I—”
She waved me off with a brush of her hand. “I don’t think anything. Actually, you’re going to pay me not to think.”
I picked up a picture with my pointer finger and thumb, strained to see the shadow off to the side. I could make out an arm . . . a dark shadow . . . nothing more. For a moment I thought, Daniel. Because there was a girl’s long hair and our back porch and it was dark. But it could’ve also been Dad—no, it could’ve been anyone. Maybe I just didn’t want it to be them.
“That part would be for the police to decide,” she said, tapping the shadow in another picture.
“Where did you get these?” The room had hollowed out, and my voice sounded tinny and far away.
“I’ve always had them, just didn’t know it,” she said. I had to struggle to focus on her words, which were slipping through the room like smoke. “I got this new camera the week before Corinne went missing. I was messing around with the settings, trying to figure out how to take pictures at night. Your house always seemed like this haunted place to me through the trees.” She shrugged. “Maybe because your mom died, but then the flowers went, too. I used to think it was contagious somehow.” Like death was leeching from the center, spreading out. “So I took these pictures that night after the fair, but I couldn’t see anything. Then my senior year, I got this new software, and a new computer, and I transferred everything—about to purge these old things. But I was tinkering with the setting and the software, and look what appeared.”
As with a Polaroid picture, shadows coming to life.
“You look sick. You really didn’t know?” she asked. “You never suspected?”
I was going to be sick. There wasn’t enough air in the room. Annaleise had seen these pictures at eighteen, a dangerous age. Boys and their uncontrollable passion, impulsive and coiled to snap. Girls, with the uncontrollable yearning for something intangible. Something else.
“No,” I said, trying to get a grip. And then to Annaleise, “Get the fuck out of here.”
She tilted her head to the side. “You think I won’t tell?” She picked up her phone, a mean smile on her face, her fingers flying across the keypad—
“Wait. Stop. What are you doing?”
She turned the phone around so I could see. “I went to school with Bailey Stewart’s brother. Officer Mark Stewart?”
The edges of my vision turned hazy. I struggled to focus on the screen. I have a few questions about the Corinne Prescott case. Can we set up a time to talk?
“You have until he wakes up and sees this tomorrow morning to change your mind.”
My throat burned. I stared at the images once more. This was happening. This was really fucking happening. The room was buzzing, the air electric. “How do I know you won’t send these out anyway?”
“Because,” she said, “I haven’t yet.”
“Yet?”
“I left these for your father years ago with this same note,” she said. She leaned forward in her chair. “And he paid. He pays. Why do you think he does that, Nic?”
My father had paid for her silence. Why does anyone pay? You have to pay your debts.
I picked up the note again; it trembled in my hand. “I can’t pay you this much.” Ten thousand to keep quiet. Twenty thousand for the flash drive.