And JJ still didn’t have a plan.
She was sitting in a dingy motel room, flipping her lighter open and shut, when her phone rang. The number was unfamiliar and so was the voice, when she answered, but the woman said her name like she knew her.
“JJ. It’s been a while,” the woman said.
“Daphne?” she said incredulously.
“You and I need to talk. It’s important.”
“This is Daphne, isn’t it?” JJ asked, brows drawing together.
There was a huff, impatient. “Yes. It’s Daphne.”
“Why are you calling?” JJ asked. “I thought you said I wasn’t ever supposed to contact you.”
“That was a long time ago. Things are different now,” Daphne said.
“Different how?” JJ asked. What was Daphne doing calling her?
“Emma’s back at the house, that’s how,” Daphne said, sounding a touch impatient. “They’re going to be cleaning the place out. Rooting around.”
“There’s nothing to find,” JJ said. They’d covered their tracks. “Emma made sure of it.” She stood, pacing in a tight circuit back and forth on the cheap motel carpet.
“Emma didn’t know about everything. She didn’t know about the gun,” Daphne said.
JJ’s heart dropped. “What gun?” she whispered.
“You know exactly what gun I’m talking about,” Daphne said deliberately.
JJ shut her eyes. Yellow wallpaper. White grip. Red hand. “It wasn’t there. The police never found it.”
“Because I hid it, JJ,” Daphne told her. “I hid it in the carriage house that night, before Emma got home.”
JJ couldn’t breathe. She squeezed her eyes shut. “I gave Nathan the keys to the carriage house.”
“I know,” Daphne said with a sigh. “And that means that we need to decide what to do.”
JJ sank down onto the bed.
Vic had been right. She shouldn’t have come.
Everything was falling apart, and this time, Emma wasn’t going to be willing to shoulder the blame.
26
EMMA
Now
Emma didn’t go back right away. She sat in the park instead, letting time spool out in the hopes that it would give Nathan’s temper time to cool. She drove home slowly, not eager to find out if her return would mean picking up the fight where they left off. When she pulled into the drive, the carriage house door was open a crack, and there was a light on inside. Rattling and banging echoed from the interior, the unmistakable soundtrack of Nathan’s “organizing” spree that had spanned half the house so far.
Feeling cowardly, she went inside the house instead of checking on him.
It turned out she hadn’t known Juliette at all. Hadn’t realized her mother was on drugs. Hadn’t known that her father was involved in some kind of criminal enterprise. What else hadn’t she seen back then?
She’d missed something.
She was still missing something.
She walked through the rooms. They were gutted, their contents strewn over surfaces and the floor, stuffed into bulging garbage bags, collected in untidy heaps. They bristled with labels. KEEP, SELL, DONATE, TOSS in Nathan’s careless blocky script. As if he had a right to any of it.
None of this held the answers she was looking for. She stood in front of the gun cabinet. On a whim she grabbed a pad of Post-it notes, scrawled TOSS on one, and slapped it onto the glass.
She walked to the study. Nathan had wanted to take it over, but she’d insisted he use the kitchen as his office instead. She couldn’t stand him in here, steeping in the scent of this room, her father’s sanctuary. The old whiskey decanter was still there, cap in place, two inches of liquid in the bottom. She turned up a glass—SELL—and poured. She held it up, the cold edge against her lip, inhaling the caramel and smoke smell without drinking. It was a different beast altogether than what Logan had served her. She remembered the taste of it, the way it had burned.
She’d been fifteen and rebellious; she’d sneaked a sip, and her father had caught her. Of course he had; she wasn’t the one that got away with things. He told her it was fine, that she could have some. Have some more. He made her drink until she got sick, to cure her, he said, of the desire.
She set the glass down, walked to the desk. There were papers here, sorted into thick stacks. The silver letter opener—SELL. The crystal paperweight—SELL. The fountain pen propped up on a wooden stand—SELL.
She flipped through pages of papers. More bills, forms, letters, the kind of endless paperwork of a time before much of anything was digital. There was nothing that looked at all suspicious. If there had been, the police would have found it fourteen years ago. Dad didn’t bring business home.
But her mother had known something. She’d told Chris as much. And then there was the flash drive. Emma closed her eyes, trying to picture it. The first time she’d seen it, her mother was kneeling in Daphne’s room, rooting through the closet. Emma stood in the hall, watching her through the sliver of open space between the door and the frame. Irene Palmer had looked, for once in her life, disheveled. Out of breath, with a red mark on her jaw the width of a thumb. She had dragged something out of the back of the closet—a metal lockbox, the fireproof kind for important documents.
Her mother had taken a key from her pocket and opened the box. From the box she took a fat wad of bills and added more to it, securing a rubber band around the whole thing and throwing it back in. Then she’d reached into the pocket of her cardigan and taken out the flash drive, tossed it in after.
The front door shut. Irene had jumped and quickly closed the box, locked it, shoved it back into the closet. Emma had crept backward, slipping inside Juliette’s room, since it was the closest, not quite shutting the door so it wouldn’t make a sound. Juliette, sitting on her bed with a magazine, stared at her. She pressed a finger to her lips, and Juliette nodded.
For all that they’d fought, that rule was never broken. You didn’t tell. You kept each other’s secrets.
No matter what.
Emma set another page aside. The next paper was a phone bill. There was a handwritten note at the bottom, slantwise and sloppy, as if it had been written idly on the nearest piece of paper without regard for what it was. Have to do something about Emma, it said, a half-finished thought.
She walked with precise steps to the spot just behind where the chair would have sat. Like JJ had done before, she raised her hand, fingers extended like a gun barrel. Brought her thumb down. Bang.
The idea of him being murdered because of money or drugs was so bloodless against the raw hatred that still burned in her gut when she thought of him. But she couldn’t discount the possibility. Whatever was on that flash drive, it was something her mother wanted hidden. The evidence she claimed to have, Emma could only assume. But the flash drive was long gone. She’d lost it that night.
The night they died.
27
EMMA
Then
She shows up on Gabriel’s doorstep after dark with her eye already swelling and red, her nose snotty from crying.
“What happened?” he asks, and she tries to tell him, but fresh tears well up and she finds herself sobbing and trying to force words out as he draws her inside and pushes her firmly and gently down onto the couch. “Wait here.”
He returns moments later with a bag of frozen peas wrapped in a kitchen towel. He sets it to her eye and guides her hand up to it, because she can’t seem to remember what to do by herself. His jaw is tense and his eyes sorrowful as he sits on the coffee table, his knees knocking against hers. They have never been this close, she thinks, and of course it’s now when she’s the furthest thing from lovely, with the peas against her swelling eye and her face red and puffy.
“Are you hurt anywhere else?” he asks. She shakes her head; it’s all she can manage. “Who did this? Your father?”
“They ruined it all. They took everything,” she says.