Dead Silence A Body Finder Novel

Chapter 6


“VIOLET, WAKE UP. UNCLE STEPHEN’S HERE.” IT was her dad’s voice, finding her in the darkness of her room. Automatically, she reached for her cell phone, checking the time and realizing it wasn’t even midnight yet. She hadn’t meant to fall asleep.

Still groggy, she nodded and rose up on her elbow. “I’ll be right down,” she managed to croak.

She waited till her dad left the room before throwing back her covers and grabbing a pair of sweatpants. She pulled her hair into a ponytail, not bothering to check the mirror. There was no point.

In the kitchen, the lights seemed too bright and Violet could smell the fresh coffee brewing in the pot. But more than that she could taste the presence of her uncle—his own unique imprint—the dandelion taste that coated her tongue whenever he was around. All eyes shot her way when she staggered in and she glanced around at them—her mother, her father, and her uncle—while the repeating music-box loop played in her head.

“So?” Violet asked, pulling up a chair at the table and joining the rest of her family. “Did you find her?” She leaned across the table expectantly.

There are pauses people take when you know that what they’ll say isn’t what you want to hear. For Violet, this was one of those moments. She knew, even before her uncle opened his mouth, the news wasn’t good. His pause was exactly that long.

“I’m sorry, Vi.” He shook his head woefully, and Violet wondered if he’d had to practice that expression, that look of patient sympathy. If this was the same look he gave others when he had to deliver bad news. Even his voice sounded too smooth, too practiced.

Violet turned to her dad, and then back to her uncle. She hated the knot of confusion that coiled in her gut, warning her there was more to this visit than just that denial. It was too late to drop by if he didn’t know something.

“Well,” Violet started, “if you don’t know where she is, then what do you know? What about . . .” She choked on the feel of his name, bitter on her tongue. “What about Grady? Did you talk to him?”

Her uncle’s expression cracked, just slightly, and he gave a slight nod. He glanced down at his coffee mug, staring but not drinking. He just watched the steam rising up from it. “We did. He didn’t know where she was either.”

“And . . . ?” There was definitely more. Violet’s Spidey senses were tingling off the charts. She knew her uncle was holding back.

“We found his prints all over their house,” her uncle admitted, still not meeting her eyes.

Violet relaxed a little. “So what? Is that so weird? Wouldn’t that make sense if they were dating or whatever?” She’d seen the picture. Most girls didn’t go to the prom with someone they hadn’t spent at least a little time with.

But then her uncle went on, “He also had some of her things in his possession. An iPod, a bracelet . . . things he admitted belonged to her. And we think there might more, things that were missing from the house, but we haven’t been able to get an accurate inventory just yet.”

“Again . . .” Violet hedged, thinking of all the things she’d left at Jay’s house, all of the things that were probably there now. “If they were dating, wouldn’t that kind of explain her stuff being there?”

Her uncle cleared his throat. It was strange to watch him shift and squirm in his chair, like a schoolboy who’d been caught cheating on a test.

“Violet,” her mom interjected. She cast a meaningful glance at Stephen, reproachful almost. “They think Grady might’ve had something to do with what happened to the girl’s family.” She continued, a heavy sigh buried behind her words. “They found some strange pictures at his place.”

Violet’s heart felt like it was jammed in her throat. “What . . . ?” She swallowed, trying to clear a space for her words. “What are you talking about? What kind of strange pictures?”

Her uncle nodded, as if he hadn’t just chickened out and had delivered the news himself. “Photos of the girl,” he said, sounding like himself again. “Veronica, by the way. Her name is Veronica Bowman.” He kept going, while Violet let the name sink in. She didn’t recognize it, not that she’d expected to. “The pictures were . . .” her uncle continued, stopping for just a moment to chew the inside of his lip. “Well, they were mutilated. The girl’s eyes had been gouged out, and he’d drawn horns on her—”

Violet interrupted then, trying to give them a rational explanation. Surely even that could be explained. “Okay, so maybe they broke up. Maybe he was pissed and he ruined some pictures. That’s not a crime—”

This time it was her uncle who interrupted her. “There were red slash marks drawn on her neck and wrists.”

Violet’s mouth was still open. She’d been ready to argue, to take up Grady’s defense, when her uncle’s words had caused it to go bone dry. She thought about the bodies of the girl’s—Veronica’s—family, of the way their throats had been sliced open.

She thought too about the way Grady had groped her last year at the party they’d been at, when he’d backed her against his car and tried to kiss her, putting his hands all over her. He’d been drunk and stupid, but he’d also been aggressive. “What did he say?” she finally managed to ask, her voice sounding far less confident. Far less outraged. “When you asked him about it, what did he say?”

Her uncle ran his hand through his hair, looking weary. Her mom put a hand on his shoulder.

“He said what you said, that they’d had a fight and he was mad at her. That the pictures didn’t mean anything.”

Violet wasn’t sure what to think now. “Maybe they didn’t. Did you find other fingerprints at the house?”

Stephen nodded, but it wasn’t a convincing nod . . . not to any one of them sitting at the table. “Of course we did. Several of them. Most are being processed now, but in the meantime Grady is a suspect.”

“Grady—” Violet sputtered. “Are you serious?” Even though Grady had made mistakes, and was probably a first-class jerk, that didn’t make him a killer. The idea made her stomach twist.

“What we’re sure of, Vi, is that we have a family who’s been murdered, a girl who’s still missing, and an ex-boyfriend who’s harboring a grudge. Right now he’s all we have, and until he can convince us that we shouldn’t be looking at him, we’re looking.” Her uncle’s chair scraped across the floor as he got to his feet. He looked like her uncle again, Violet thought, examining him more closely, only a wearier, more exhausted version. His eyes were red-rimmed, and his shirt was wrinkled and untucked. “Now, it’s late and I’m tired, and I’d like to get home.”

Violet wanted to nod, to give him some signal that she’d understood what he’d said, and that she was okay with his decisions. But she couldn’t . . . because she wasn’t. Because no matter how much time she’d spent avoiding Grady, she just couldn’t accept that he was the cold-blooded killer her uncle insinuated he might be.

Instead, she listened while her parents walked her uncle out . . . and then she heard the deadbolt sliding into place and the beeping of the new alarm system being set for the night. More reminders that there’d been a time she wasn’t safe in her own home.

After her mom came back in and kissed her good night, her dad lingered behind in the kitchen. He sat beside her at the table, in the seat her uncle had just occupied. “He did the right thing, you know?” he told her, his voice soft and comforting. “They’ll question your friend and they’ll figure out he didn’t do it. But they have to pursue every possible option. It wouldn’t be fair to the girl if they didn’t.”

Violet gritted her teeth. She knew her dad was right, that they all were, but it didn’t change things. It didn’t make her feel better that someone she knew, someone she’d once considered a friend, was the prime suspect.



Violet went back to her room, but couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t stop thinking about Grady.

She couldn’t stop thinking about the girl . . . and her family.

She thought about calling Jay, to see if he was still up. But she knew it was too late for that.

She glanced at the box, still on the floor, still filled with her grandmother’s journals. She settled down beside it and reached inside, pulling out diary after diary, trying to find where her grandmother had picked up writing again.

She began sorting them into chronological order as she drew each one out, flipping through the pages and searching for dates. She found entries from her grandmother’s later years, which she placed near the end, and those from her early married life—with mentions of her husband, Violet’s grandfather, whom Violet had never known—which she placed near the middle. Finally, after searching through several of the journals, she found the one she’d been looking for, from when her grandmother had started writing again.

There was a significant gap in time. There were no more entries from her grandmother’s high school years. They didn’t resume again until after she’d moved away to start college. She’d left home, Violet read, deciding to leave her parents in Michigan, where they’d settled after the incident with Ian, so she could start anew at the University of Washington, in Seattle.

It was a big change for her grandmother, being on her own, but as Violet flipped through the pages, she realized that she’d seemed happy then, maybe for the first time in her life. She was free from the parents who’d looked down on her, who had hidden both her and what she could do. She’d made friends in college. She’d taken classes in psychology, religion, art, and history, exploring worlds and ideas she’d never even considered before.

And she’d met a man.

Violet ran her finger over the page when she read his name. John Anderson. Such an ordinary name. If she were to look, there were probably hundreds of John Andersons in the phone book at this very moment.

But this John Anderson was different. This was Violet’s grandfather.



Violet awoke the next morning surrounded by her grandmother’s words. She smiled at the journals covering her bed as she stretched. Pushing them aside with her feet, she had to climb over them to get up. She quickly reorganized them, tucking them safely away in their box, careful to keep them in order now that she’d sorted them, and she gently placed the box in the bottom of her closet, like they were rare, irreplaceable treasures.

All but one. The one she’d fallen asleep reading. The one in which her grandmother wrote about falling in love with her grandfather.

Violet knew it was cheesy, but she couldn’t help herself, it was better than any romance novel ever written. Her grandmother wrote so eloquently about him, and Violet found herself feeling sorry that he hadn’t lived long enough for her to know him in person. She was certain she would have loved him as much as she’d loved her grandmother.

She set that particular journal aside, not yet ready to tuck it away.

And then the memories of the day before settled over her, crushing her chest and making it suddenly hard to breathe.

The family at the lake. The missing girl.

Grady . . .

She knew what she had to do. It was the only way to clear his name.



Violet rapped softly on the front door, mentally preparing herself for the possibility that she’d been wrong about all this. That Grady was responsible for killing that family after all, and that he’d be wearing the imprints that would condemn him—the stale coffee grounds, the menagerie of colors, and the missing echo that belonged to the boy.

His mother answered, looking like she hadn’t slept all night.

“Violet Ambrose?” She sounded as surprised as she looked. “I’m afraid Grady’s not really up for visitors, dear.”

As if on cue, Grady appeared in the hallway behind his mother. There was a time when Violet had believed Grady was handsome—in a goofy, boyish sort of way. They’d spent enough time together over the years that she hadn’t always noticed it, the way friends sometimes did, but it was there all the same. Now, however, he looked pale and tired and skittish.

“Violet?” He blinked as he realized who had come to see him. “What are you doing here?”

Violet started to rush toward him, not sure whether she should hug him . . . or hit him for making her care. But even after everything he’d done, she did care.

He wasn’t a killer. That much she knew.

That much she was 100 percent certain of.

“How are you?” she asked, cringing to be asking such a stupid question. She could see just by looking at the dark circles beneath his eyes how he was.

Grady just stared at her, as if she’d grown a second—or third—head. “I don’t get it. What are you doing here?”

“I . . . I just wanted to see if you’re okay.” She wondered how many times she’d been asked that very thing. It felt strange to be standing here, practically begging for his response.

Grady watched her, and for a moment Violet thought he wasn’t going to answer at all. Then his face softened, transforming into the old Grady, the boy she’d climbed trees with in the fourth grade, as he smiled at her. A slow, wistful smile. “I’ll be okay, Violet,” he said, his voice low and rough. “Thanks for . . .” Emotion choked his words. “Thanks for coming by.”



After dinner, which was takeout from her favorite Thai restaurant, and dessert, cupcakes that her dad had picked up from the bakery in town, Violet retreated to her bedroom. It wasn’t that she didn’t appreciate the extra effort her parents were making in the wake of what had happened at the lake house . . . especially their attempts to bribe her with baked goods. But it was too much like a flashback of the days following her return home after the kidnapping, when every conversation had had an edge of forced cheer, and when an almost endless stream of neighbors and acquaintances had come to the door, bringing with them cookies and pies and casseroles.

Like she’d died rather than survived.

Even her friends had been awkward around her at first, not sure how to act when she’d finally relented and invited them over for a girls’ night to watch a movie. Like everyone else, Chelsea seemed to think that food solved everything and had shown up with a grocery store cake decorated with pink and yellow roses, and pink piping that spelled out the word Congratulations on it.

Congratulations. Violet had stood there staring at the cake Chelsea had thrust out to her, wondering what she was being congratulated for exactly. Congratulations on being the lone survivor of a serial killer? Or just your average, everyday congratulations-for-killing-a-guy?

If it hadn’t been for Jules, who’d shoved Chelsea and called her an “inconsiderate A-hole,” and then scooped up a piece of the pretty white cake with her bare hand and smooshed it in Chelsea’s face, it probably would’ve stayed awkward. As it turned out, it’s not food that fixes things, it’s food fights.

Violet had been more than happy to stand in the corner of her kitchen and watch as Jules and Chelsea, and even Claire, had demolished the cake, smashing and shoving and squishing it all over one another, until they’d all had to change clothes, and had spent the rest of the night digging frosting out of their ears and noses.

That had been the first time Violet had laughed—really laughed—after coming home.

This wasn’t quite the same, but there was still that strange awkwardness about it. So, for now, she much preferred the less awkward peace of her bedroom.

The first soft ping blended in with the sounds of her imprint, and was easy enough to ignore. But it persisted—the pinging that struck the side of her house—once even hitting her window with a sharp crack.

Violet didn’t have to look to know who it was, or that if she didn’t stop him, her parents would.

She opened her window, leaning over the windowsill on her elbows. “You’re either going to break the window,” she whisper-shouted down to Jay, whose arm was cocked behind him, ready to launch another pebble, “or get arrested for being a nuisance.”

He wiped his hands on his jeans and grinned up at her, a grin that was equal parts wholesome and predatory. “Come down here and I’ll stop throwing rocks at your house,” he taunted.

She didn’t answer, just shut her window and stole out of her room. Jay was probably the only person who could’ve coaxed her out tonight, the only person she actually wanted to see.

Violet shook her head as she hopped down her front steps. “What are you doing here?” She stopped just before she reached him and put her hands on her hips. She didn’t tell him that perched against his car like that, he took her breath away, or that she was thrilled to see him. Instead, she tried to glare. “It’s kinda late, isn’t it?”

Jay grinned, looking for all the world like he had no place better to be than standing there, in her driveway, waiting for her. He shrugged at the same time, his easygoing stance never shifting. “Violet,” he explained, reaching out and looping his finger into the top of her jeans. He tugged, dragging her the rest of the way to him. The feel of his chest beneath hers made it even harder to breathe. “It’s only nine.”

“But it’s a Sunday,” she offered.

“Mm-hmm . . .” he responded, his voice distracted as he leaned down and nuzzled the side of her neck. His lips brushed playfully over her earlobe, as the soft stubble on his chin grazed the sensitive skin of her shoulder.

“It’s a school night.” She almost didn’t get the words out as she stopped caring what she was saying. As she stopped caring about anything but his touch. She closed whatever space remained between them, and her fingers curved up to his shoulder and around his neck, slipping into the back of his hair so she could anchor herself. Everything inside of her reacted to him, like he’d flipped a switch, awakening her in all the right places as she ached for more. The evening air was thick and warm, and smelled like grass and cedars and Jay.

Whatever spell they were under didn’t last nearly long enough, however, and with a shaky breath Jay drew his mouth away from her neck, resting his cheek against hers. It seemed to take all the effort he had just to stay like that. “If we don’t stop now, your parents are going to make the driveway off-limits too.” He remained frozen against her, his breathing harsh and uneven for several long minutes.

Violet couldn’t quite gather her thoughts. Instead she concentrated on the beat of his heart beneath hers and the fact that they were separated by only two thin T-shirts. “Is there somewhere we can go?”

She knew he wanted it too, but he just shook his head. “I wish, Vi.” He turned, just enough so his lips could leave the promise of a kiss on her cheek before he drew away completely . . . unsteadily. “It is a school night, you know?” he mocked, but he didn’t fool her with his forced smile. He was as shaken as she was.

Violet sighed, leaning her head against his shoulder. “I saw Grady,” she blurted out unexpectedly.

Jay paused, looking down at her. “You did? When?”

“Today. I went by his house.” She tried to decipher what she saw in Jay’s face. She knew how he felt about Grady after what he’d tried to do to her at the party last year. But she also knew that he and Jay had once been friends—there was no way Jay wanted the accusations to be true. “He didn’t do it, Jay. He didn’t have an imprint.”

Jay studied her, as if he could uncover the answers to all his questions hidden in her expression, buried in her features. And then he asked, “What’d your uncle say? When you told him?” Violet was silent for too long, and Jay squeezed his eyes shut before sighing. “You did tell him, didn’t you?”

She chewed on her lower lip as she dropped her eyes. “Not exactly,” she ground out. But before Jay could interject, telling her it was foolish to keep things from her uncle, she tried to explain. “I know it was the chicken’s way out, but you weren’t here last night. You didn’t see the way Uncle Stephen looked. He’s not gonna be happy when he finds out I went to see Grady by myself.”

“When will you start trusting other people?” His words were harsh but his tone was so tender that Violet turned to watch his face. His eyes told her all the things his words didn’t—that he was worried for her, and fearful of losing her. That he loved her.

“I trust you,” she tried, but even she knew that wasn’t what he meant.

Wrapping his arms around her, his muscles tensed, consuming her in his silent oath. “I do my best, Vi,” he said against the top of her head. “But I can only do so much to keep you out of trouble.”

She laughed, but she knew he was being at least semi-serious. He wanted to protect her, like some sort of knight in shining armor. The thing was, she wasn’t a damsel, at least not the kind who needed saving from dragons and whatnot. Her worst enemy, as it turns out, was herself.

“Oh, and now you’re laughing at me. Great.” He groaned as he released her. “You’re not a walk in the park, you know?” His head was tilted to the side as he considered her thoughtfully. “You know what I think? I think you don’t even deserve the present I got you.”

“Present?” Violet exclaimed. “For me?” She pulled away, a tiny thrill shivering through her as she stared into his flecked eyes. “You’re wrong, I totally deserve it,” she exclaimed. She playfully walked her fingers up his chest, puckering her lips and batting her eyes at him.

“You’re ridiculous,” he scoffed, but he was laughing at her.

Giggling, Violet glanced down at his empty hands, her brows arching. “Well . . . you know I hate surprises.”

Without turning, Jay reached one hand behind his back, through the open window of his car to the seat below. When it came back he was holding a small, gold-colored bag with gold tissue sticking up from inside of it.

Violet recognized the name on the bag, even though she’d never gone into the shop. It was a store in the mall, the kind of place that sold jewelry and picture frames and collectibles. Not exactly a store where she imagined Jay would shop.

“Jay,” she breathed, not sure how to feel about this. First her parents, and now Jay. “What’s it for?”

“Just because.” He shrugged. “I saw it and it reminded me of you. I hope it’s not too weird.”

Weird? Violet thought, wondering what kind of “weird” thing could possibly be contained in this beautiful bag.

He waited while she reached inside, excavating the diaphanous paper, and took it when she handed it to him. When she peeked inside, she looked back up at him, confusion painting her expression. “A turtle?” she asked, wrinkling her nose. “Okay, maybe it’s a little weird.”

“Not the turtle . . .” He pushed the bag toward her again, prodding her to keep going. “Take it out.”

Violet reached inside and lifted out the heavy silver turtle. She looked dubiously from it to Jay and back again. “It’s . . . cute . . . ?” She didn’t mean for it to sound like a question, but it totally had. She tried to rack her brain for reasons that Jay might think she wanted a turtle, or to think of something she’d done to make it remind him of her.

“Yes, Violet, it’s cute,” Jay sighed. “But that’s not why I got it for you. Open it.”

Violet looked again, and realized he was right, there was a tiny silver clasp she hadn’t noticed before, just beneath the edge of the embellished shell. Pushing it, the shell popped open, and Violet’s breath caught.

The inside was lined with black velvet, and Violet ran her finger over its soft silken surface.

She picked it up and turned it over. Engraved on the bottom were the words: Moonlight Sonata.

That was it, just Moonlight Sonata.

Violet looked back to Jay for a clue. “I still don’t get it. I mean, I like it, I just don’t get it.”

Jay exhaled and took it from her hands. “It’s a music box, Vi. You have to wind it up.” He flipped it over and wound the almost unnoticeable silver key she hadn’t seen before.

And that’s when it started . . . the music.

The music.

She knew within two notes which song it was, and because of the engraving on the bottom, she also now knew the name of it: Moonlight Sonata.

It was haunting, hearing it played out loud and out of sync with the version in her head. Knowing that Jay could hear it too. Haunting and hypnotic and terrifying.

“How . . . ?” she breathed, not even able to finish that single thought.

“It’s the right one, isn’t it?” He was watching her expectantly, eagerly.

She wanted to tell him yes. She wanted to ask him how he’d known what was buried—hidden—deep inside her head. She wanted to wrap her arms around him and smother him with kisses for giving her this one tiny, probably insignificant piece of the crazy puzzle that had become her life.

Instead, she nodded. Slowly.

He shrugged again, looking so pleased with himself that Violet had to wonder if someone could actually burst from pride. “I heard you humming it,” he explained, answering the question she’d been unable to ask. “You do it, when you think no one’s listening. Thing is, I always listen, Vi.”

It was possibly the sweetest thing she’d ever heard. His words . . . lingering with the sound of the music that now had a name.

How had she gotten so lucky? What had she done to deserve someone like Jay, someone who paid attention to the little things? Even something as trivial as which tune she hummed.

“And it’s not too weird? You know, that it matches your imprint?” He looked uncertain now, his eyebrows drawn together in the center of his forehead, his lips pursed.

Violet reached up and settled her hand against his jaw. “It’s so not too weird, Jay. I mean, yes, it is, but this is me we’re talking about here . . . weird is relative.” She sighed. “I love you,” she vowed. “And I love my turtle. . . .” She let out a choked laugh and then she hugged it to her chest, even as the last notes wound down. “You, Jay Heaton, are the best boyfriend ever.”



In her room that night, Violet played her new music box again and again. She memorized every detail of the silver turtle, each etched groove and flat polished plane. She silently repeated the name of the song too.

Moonlight Sonata. Moonlight Sonata. Moonlight Sonata.

The name was as beautiful as the tune.

She played her grandmother’s music box too, the one with Brahms Lullaby, setting them side by side, until all three songs blurred together—the two music boxes and the imprint in her head—creating a dissonant sound that probably only she could appreciate.

That only she thought was beautiful.

She listened to the last notes as she curled beneath her blankets to read her grandma’s scrawled handwriting.



July 13, 1971

Maggie is the perfect child. I’m sure every mother says that about her baby, but I’m certain that in this case it must be true.



Violet grinned, fascinated by the notion of her mother as anything but a grown-up. It was strange to consider her mom through her grandmother’s eyes. She kept reading, enthralled.



I can’t stop looking at her, studying her, trying to see who she is . . . and who she will be. She has curls and the unmistakable green eyes of her father. She has my lips though. It’s too soon to know what else she might have of mine, what else she might have inherited. I can only hope she doesn’t have it. I want nothing more than to know that Maggie will live in peace, never tasting or smelling or hearing the dead.



Violet’s chest ached as she gripped the pages, recognizing what her grandmother meant. She knew she shouldn’t let it bother her, that her grandma had wished for her mom not to share her ability—the ability that Violet herself had. But she couldn’t help it. It stung that the woman who she’d inherited it from hadn’t wanted it. Hadn’t wanted her daughter to have it.

Where once Violet had believed that she and her grandmother had shared a bond, she now realized they shared an affliction. Like a birth defect. At least in her grandmother’s eyes.

Still, Violet kept reading the passages, knowing that somewhere along the line something must have changed, because the woman she remembered hadn’t felt that way at all.



John says even if she has it, it won’t matter. He tells me it makes me who I am and he wouldn’t change a thing about me. He’s sweet that way, always trying to assure me that I’m normal, good even. If only I felt the same.



October 25, 1971

Winter’s coming, but Maggie and I bundle up whenever possible and head outdoors. She can’t tell me so, but I’m sure she likes our adventures as much as I do. I watch her closely whenever I feel them coming on, one of those echoes from the dead. So far she doesn’t seem to be aware of them. She looks safe and peaceful there, inside her stroller. She smiles and coos blissfully as they call to me.

But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t feel it. Maybe she’s sensing something different from what I do. Hopefully, though, she feels nothing at all.



Violet tried to remember the first time she’d ever heard the word echo. It’s what she’d always called the sensations she felt, but she’d never really considered where the term had come from. It never dawned on her that it might have been her grandmother who’d come up with it. It was strange to think how easily she’d accepted it, how it had just become part of her everyday vocabulary, like apple or cat or school.

She kept reading, page after page of entries about her mother’s first words and her first steps. She learned more about her grandfather—her mom’s dad—a man Violet was sure she would have liked, probably loved even. She saw the gradual change in her grandmother’s passages as, over the months and years, she’d learned to believe her husband’s words about her being a good person, a worthy person, until eventually she’d accepted her ability. She’d even begun to call it a gift.

Like Violet, her grandmother spent as much time outdoors as possible, so there were numerous accounts of the animals she’d discovered. Several times her grandmother had used her garden as an excuse for why her fingernails had dirt caked beneath them. But in the privacy of her journal she told another story. A tale of giving those animals the peace they craved.

Of silencing their echoes.

Violet knew what that was like. She had Shady Acres, where she’d buried more than her share of the animals she’d come across. Her way of finding her own silence.

If only it were that easy now, she thought, listening to the imprint that clung to her.

She learned too that it hadn’t been a secret in her grandparents’ household, much like it wasn’t in Violet’s.

It wasn’t until she came to a passage written during the spring of 1976—over thirty years earlier—that Violet sat up in her bed, every part of her body singing with awareness. She reread her grandmother’s entry, which had been written hastily, as if she couldn’t get the words down fast enough:



March 23, 1976

I’m not sure what it means that a body doesn’t have an echo. None at all. I wasn’t even sure the poor little mouse was dead when I first saw it, curled in a ball in Maggie’s hands. I told Maggie to drop it, afraid it was just stunned, that it might come to at any second and bite her in an effort to escape. I almost didn’t realize I’d yelled at Maggie until she started crying. But I didn’t go after her, not right away. I had to be sure about the mouse.

It was dead though. Dead as dead. I uncurled its body, which was already cold and stiff, so I had to pry it apart. Its chest had been ripped apart. Mauled was more like it. But the strange part was the emptiness surrounding it, the lack of . . . anything.

I have a theory. John’s going to help me find out if I’m right.



April 1, 1976 (April Fools’ Day)

This is probably a good day for my experiment because surely I’m wrong and then the joke will be on me. I’m dying for John to get home.



April 1, 1976

It worked! Which means I was right. I’m not sure whether I should be so elated by this revelation, but I am. Probably because it means I understand one more thing about my gift, one more thing I didn’t before.

Tonight, John brought home a live chicken. We had to wait until Maggie had gone to bed and then one of us had to kill it. I thought he’d want me to do it, since it was my idea. Instead, he did it. I told him he didn’t have to, that I didn’t need an answer that badly, but he could tell I was lying. I did want to know. I can’t explain why.

Before he did it, I almost changed my mind again. I thought about Ian and how he smelled (and tasted) after he’d gone hunting with his daddy. I was worried about what might cling to John in the wake of the chicken’s death. But somehow, I couldn’t tell him that. I wanted to know that badly. I was willing to take that risk.

He didn’t make me watch, but I was sure he must have cried. His eyes were red when he came back and the chicken was limp in his hands. Its head was hanging at a strange angle and there was a scent of chicory coming off it . . . and off John. Chicory! I could live forever with chicory!

Turns out, the heart was the key. It seems like such a simple solution now, like something I should’ve known all along. The mouse’s was gone, torn out when whatever killed it was trying to eat it, I assume, since most of its chest was missing. As soon as I removed the chicken’s heart the chicory scent vanished. It was just a chicken then. A dead chicken.

The strange part was, the scent didn’t just vanish from the chicken, it vanished from John too. Whatever chicory I’d smelled on him was gone now. Forever, I suppose.



Violet read the entry again and again, her own heart pounding in her chest now. When she was certain she hadn’t misread it, that she understood exactly what her grandmother was saying, she reached for her cell phone.

Sara answered, her voice sounding thick and bleary. Violet glanced at the alarm clock on her nightstand. It was 1:04.

“Sorry, Sara, I didn’t mean to wake you.” Suddenly she wished she’d waited till morning, but she wasn’t sure she’d be able to. She had to know.

She heard rustling, and Sara cleared her throat. “It’s okay, Violet. What’s going on?”

“I had to ask you something. The boy, the one from the lake house . . . his body, was there anything strange about it?”

A brief pause, and then, “Strange how?”

Every muscle in her body tensed, as if this was the moment of truth. “His heart . . .” Violet said, thinking how weird this might sound if she was wrong. That maybe she’d awakened Sara for nothing. “Was it . . . missing?”

There was another pause, but this time there was no rustling sound coming from the other end. “How did you know that? How could you possibly know that?”

“So it’s true then?” Violet relaxed, practically sighing into the phone.

“I got a call from someone at the medical examiner’s office today. But I still don’t understand . . . how did you know?”

“It’s why he didn’t have an echo.” She explained what she’d read in her grandmother’s journals. “It’s why I couldn’t feel anything from him.”

“Holy crap,” Sara breathed softly, absorbing the information Violet had just given her.

Violet nodded. “I know, right?” Mentally, she added this to the ever-changing list of rules she’d created in her head.

No heart, no echo.