Louise went to the door, yanked it open, stepped out. As her heels clicked away down the hall, Rummel became his old self for a moment, walking to the water cooler, filling a cup for me. After I wiped my eyes and took a sip, he told me he was going to give me a few minutes. “Would you like your sister and her boyfriend to come inside?”
Her boyfriend. It was the first anyone had referred to Dereck that way, though given the amount of time he spent with Rose lately, I supposed it was true. That need to practice speaking my answers didn’t seem to matter anymore, so I just shook my head. Rummel went out to the hallway, shutting the door. I heard him say something briefly to my sister before his footsteps receded in the same direction as Louise’s.
Alone at the table, I thought of the lingering doubt I’d lived with ever since Detective Rummel first brought Lynch’s photo to the hospital and asked if it was the man I saw. How much of his and Louise’s talk about making things right for my parents—of being their good daughter one last time, which was what they were saying even if they didn’t know it—had helped me to feel certain? And how much was tangled in the lie Rose and I had told . . . were still telling? The thought led me to look at the folders Rummel left on the table. As I listened for the return of his footsteps, I leaned forward and opened one. On top lay a photo of a gun that I recognized: a small black pistol with a blunt silver nose. I turned it over, kept searching. Most details I already knew, but I found a piece of information buried in those papers that I’d always wondered about. I read the line over and over again, until Rummel’s thudding footsteps moved down the hall in my direction. Quickly, I began to close the folder, but not before I noticed words scratched randomly on the inside in blocky script:
Howard Mason. Brother of male victim. Lacks verifiable alibi in the days surrounding murders. Motive?
“Where’s Louise?” I asked as Rummel opened the door, seconds after I pushed that folder away.
He stopped a moment, taking in the sight of me at the table, those folders he’d left behind. “Ms. Hock decided she’s done for the afternoon. We all are, actually.”
I reached for my father’s tote and began to stand, but the detective held up a hand and told me to hang on a second. I sat back down, studying him. Judging from his grim face and hunched shoulders, I got the feeling that he and Louise had a fight about me. He folded his arms in front of his chest and said, “Here’s how this is going to work, Sylvie. Right now, it’s Friday. Just after three. Not much is going to get done at this point. But come Monday, nine A.M., the gears start turning. So we’ll give you till then. That’s—”
“Sixty-six hours,” I said, staring at the watch on his hairy wrist.
Rummel glanced at it too. “Is that what it works out to?” He fixed me with a look I didn’t recognize. “You’re a quick thinker, Sylvie. And that’s right: you’ve got sixty-six hours to consider exactly what you did or did not see in the church last winter. First thing Monday you will report back here and you will let us know whether or not you’ll be recanting your account of that evening. Understood?”
“Understood.”
Rummel gathered his folders from the table as I sat watching.
“And if I do recant, what happens?”
“What happens, Sylvie, is that the game changes. Significantly. Lynch will likely be released. We’ll be back to square one.”
“And will you look at other suspects?”
“That’s my job.”
“Who?” I asked, thinking of the note scratched inside one of those folders.
“Well, if it comes to that, I’d count on you and your sister to help. We should have talked about other possibilities in greater detail early on, before zeroing in on just Lynch. That was my slipup. But if things change come Monday, I’ll want to hear from both of you if there was anyone else who had reason to do your parents harm. Someone you might not have thought of before. Also, we should talk again about why they left Rose at home that night. I know you both said that was normal, but other people might not think so.”
Mr. Knothead—that was the name of Rose’s pet rabbit who once lived in the cage out by the well. She had begged for him one Christmas years before and given him that name on account of the bony lumps between his ears. Unlikely as it seemed, I thought of that twitchy-nosed creature then, the way I used to press my cheek to its soft white fur, feeling the frantic tic-tic-tic of his heart beneath. That’s how my heart felt the moment Rummel brought up my parents leaving Rose at home—a detail that had been dissected early on in the case but had since been accepted as fact. Now it was back, and I’d have to repeat the same story again, being more careful than ever not to give away the truth.