Stacey fled. She didn’t need to hear more. It was nothing she hadn’t heard before, thanks to Bully Underwood and his friends calling her fat, ugly, and crazy back in the day. Yet it stung even worse, hearing it from her own parents. Not in those same words, but in equally hurtful ones.
That night, she vowed to change the one thing she could control: her appearance. She’ll never be a Barbie doll like her mother and sister, but she’s a lot healthier than she used to be.
As for the rest—mood swings and quirky habits don’t make a person crazy. They make her normal, like Dad said. She doesn’t need a psychiatrist.
She drops the shade, turns away from the window, turns off the light, and climbs into bed.
Nora
This time, Keith really is sleeping, and Nora is certain she’ll soon follow, courtesy of the busy day and boozy dinner.
But every attempt to lull herself with pleasant thoughts boomerangs her to the triple homicide.
Leave it to Stacey to unearth an article about the case as soon as they got home. She’ll want to know everything about it. For someone like her, knowledge provides a measure of control. The more information you have about how terrible things happened to other people, the better equipped you are to ensure they don’t happen to you.
Only sometimes, terrible things happen to people through no fault of their own.
“Keith?”
Her whisper doesn’t interrupt the steady snoring. Nor does the soft creaking of the mattress when she gets up and grabs her phone from the nightstand, or her quiet footsteps across the room.
She opens a drawer and reaches way into the back. There are several prescription bottles hidden beneath her clothes. She opens her phone screen to cast enough illumination so that she can read the labels. Finding the right bottle, she shakes a pill into her hand, swallows it without water, and returns to bed.
She closes her eyes, waiting for sleep, knowing this time it will come.
But not soon enough.
She thinks of Stanley and Lena Toska, dead on this very spot.
Hit men don’t typically take out the wives and children.
She hears Jules’s voice, her tone almost glib, as if she were sharing innocuous gossip and not another family’s tragedy.
She hears Keith’s rhythmic breathing.
She hears the echo of stealthy footsteps on the stairs a long, long time ago. Long before her girls were born. But no, not before she was.
When sleep comes at last, it’s laced with nightmares of bullets and bloodstains, and a killer fleeing in the night, and an echo of her daughter’s frightened voice . . .
A killer always returns to the scene of a crime . . .
Stacey
Tuesday morning, as Piper takes the world’s longest shower heedless of the others waiting to get into the bathroom, Stacey lies in bed dreading the school day ahead and listening to her parents in the next room.
It’s not like she’s actively eavesdropping. And the walls of this old house aren’t as thin as they are back home. But under this roof, the residents are in close proximity even when they’re in their own private space. Sometimes you can’t help but hear what’s going on in the next room.
She thinks of the family shot in their beds. Of the daughter who died in this room, and the parents in the next. Had the girl heard anything? A confrontation? An intruder’s footsteps? The fatal shots in the adjacent room?
Lennon’s comment echoes back to her. Suppressors don’t really make the shot silent. Just muffled.
In this moment, Stacey can hear the hangers scraping along the metal pole as Dad rummages through the closet. He’s trying to figure out what to wear to the office, wondering whether to dress up or down. Mom is offering advice, as if she knows anything about anything.
Unlike the rest of the family, she gets to lounge around at home all day with the dog and do whatever she feels like doing. She doesn’t have to plunge into an unfamiliar world populated by strangers, hoping to find acceptance.
Maybe things will be different here. It’s not like Stacey needs to make a bunch of friends, or any, really. But it would be nice not to spend every weekday in queasy apprehension. Her old school had prided itself on its anti-bullying campaign, abolishing schoolyard picks in PE and hanging Kindness Counts posters in the corridors. But that didn’t eliminate the endless awkward moments and pervasive reminders of her misfit status.
“I can’t believe she didn’t tell us,” Dad says on the other side of the wall, and Stacey assumes he’s talking about her, since she doesn’t tell them anything.
“Well, I checked New York’s stigmatized property rules, and it turns out listing agents aren’t required to disclose things like that.”
“Like a triple homicide? Doesn’t it seem only fair that she’d tell us?”
“If she had, there’s no way we’d have moved in here. But it’s not like we’re in danger, right? Or do you think—”
“No! Of course we’re not in danger.” There’s a pause, then Dad adds, “But maybe we should install some kind of alarm system, with camera surveillance, just in case—”
“Keith, no! Can you imagine how upset the girls would be if we did that?”
“You don’t think it would make them feel safer?”
“I think it would make them feel like we’re lying when we tell them there’s nothing to worry about. And if you honestly think there is, then why are we even living here? Maybe we should move out. But we’d have to find another place right away, so—”
“No, never mind. That’s not necessary. Not unless something happens. And nothing’s going to happen.”
Someone bangs on Stacey’s door, and she cries out, startled.
“It’s just me,” Piper calls.
“Yeah, no kidding.”
Piper opens the door a crack. She’s wrapped in a towel and has another one wrapped around her head.
“Hey! You don’t just barge into someone’s room.”
“I’m not in, and anyway, I knocked.”
The sisterly bond forged Sunday night had been fleeting. Yesterday, she and Piper had alternated moody silences with bickering—about hogging the bathroom, about whose turn it was to unload the dishwasher, about whose fault it was that Kato threw up a sock, about whose sock it was.
“Why aren’t you up? It’s your turn,” Piper says.
“Let Dad go first.”
“Don’t you think you should? I mean, you want to make sure you have enough time to get ready, right? Fix your hair, put on makeup . . . since it’s a new school and everything.”
“Don’t worry, Pipe. I won’t embarrass you.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“It’s fine. Just go.”
“I’m going.” Piper heads back down the hall.
“I mean to school. Don’t wait for me. I’ll go when I’m ready.”
“We have to wait for Dad anyway.”
“Wait, what? We’re supposed to go on our own. That’s why he showed us how to take the subway the other day.”
“I guess he changed his mind.”
“He did,” Dad informs them, now in the hall. Stacey sees him, shirtless in pajama bottoms, tanned and muscular like some California surfer.
“You’re kidding, right? You want to take us to school on our first day? This isn’t kindergarten.”
“I’m going to the office anyway. We can all go together until you get used to things.”
“But that’s not what you said!”