“It wasn’t me,” Emma told him. There was no real inflection to her voice, no strength. Just the words offered plainly, without performance.
“I’m going to do everything I can,” he promised. She could see in his eyes that he didn’t think it would be enough. “But, Emma, to protect you, I need to know what I’m protecting you from. Are you sure that you’ve told me everything?”
“I loved my husband,” Emma said quietly. Her hands were limp on her lap.
“I don’t recall questioning that,” Chris replied.
“But people will. They’re going to look at me and try to judge my grief. Whether I’m acting like a widow should. But it doesn’t matter what you do. If you cry, they call them crocodile tears. If you ever laugh, you’re a psychopath; if you never laugh, you’re, wait for it, probably a psychopath. If you smile, you’re remorseless, and if you don’t, you’re cold and unlikable.”
“I wish I could tell you that you’re wrong. But then, you’ve been through this before.”
“Maybe I’m cursed,” she suggested.
“Entirely possible,” he told her, surprising her into a small, mirthless laugh. He settled back in his chair. “The police want to bring you in to ask you some questions. You do not have to go; you aren’t being arrested. At least, not yet.”
“I should seem like I’m cooperating, shouldn’t I?” Emma asked. This time, she didn’t need to lie or spin a story. She hadn’t done anything. She wasn’t trying to hide anything.
“It’s your choice, but I’d advise against it, at least until we know more about what we’re looking at here, and whether they’re looking at you,” Chris said.
“I’ll go. Then we’ll know what it is they want to ask, right?” Maybe they’d found some evidence, something they would share. Right now, there was nothing for her to hold on to, just endless whirling questions in her mind.
“It’s your choice,” he said again. “But I need to know that there isn’t anything they’re going to surprise me with in there. You’re sure you’ve told me everything?”
He could see it on her face, she thought. Yes, there was one last thing. Something that shouldn’t have ever mattered. That should have been allowed to fade, unremarked.
“There is one thing you should know.”
32
DAPHNE
Then
Daphne has seen things die before. Last year she was in the garden on the old stone bench, not reading but rather holding a book and staring off into the distance, constructing a scenario in her mind in which her parents died in a car crash and she was badly injured. In the daydream she lost a leg and had a prosthetic. She ran a race and people wrote articles about her. Her sisters cheered.
The rat crawled out of the bushes. It pulled itself along the ground on its belly and stopped several feet from her. Its head rested on the ground, its black eye fixed on her. Its breathing was slow and labored. She knew immediately it was dying. It had probably been poisoned. Her father had the boxes set up around the house. He’d told her not to mess with them, and she hadn’t, but she looked up the poison and exactly what it would do. The blood in its body wouldn’t clot and it was dying from the slow accumulation of injuries created simply by moving, muscles flexing and tearing in microscopic ways that were meant to heal. Being alive just meant that your body could put itself back together faster than it tore itself apart. The poison adjusted the equation.
It could take days.
Several hours later her father found her there, still waiting for the rat to die. He made a face and got a shovel and brought it down three times, hard, stopping each time to check if the creature’s sides still rose and fell, and then it was done, and she didn’t find out how long the poison would have taken after all. Her stomach was twisted and pinched and her hands shook as she went to get the trash bag for her father.
“I put it out of its misery,” he said, and she felt guilty that she hadn’t thought of how horrible those hours had been. She teared up. “It was just a rat,” he said, and shook his head in disgust.
Her mother’s breathing is weaker than the rat’s. It has a wet, gurgling quality to it, and it comes unevenly, but it persists. A faint pulse flutters at her throat, and her eyes are open to slits, unfocused but looking at Daphne, who kneels beside her. Daphne puts a hand against the wound on her mother’s chest. She pushes down. Her mother lets out a noise, a whining moan of pain, and Daphne snatches her hand away.
“Shh, shh,” she says, trembling hands brushing the hair back from her mother’s face. She thinks of the rat and of the swift downward swing of the shovel, and thinks wildly that she shouldn’t let her mother suffer like this. Misery, she thinks, and the word repeats in her mind. She pulls her sleeve up over her hand and lays it over her mother’s mouth, pinching her nostrils shut, and holds it there. Her mother doesn’t struggle.
A floorboard creaks. Daphne’s head whips up.
She is not alone.
33
DAPHNE
Now
Daphne was worried about Emma. That wasn’t anything new, of course. She’d spent most of the last fourteen years worried about her in one way or another. She hadn’t wanted to leave Emma on the couch after finding her collapsed outside the carriage house, but she also hadn’t wanted to explain her presence either to her sister or to the police.
She’d thought she was in control of the situation. She’d been wrong. At least Emma was safe for now.
She clucked her tongue to Tigger, the rambunctious goldendoodle she was walking. She had three daily clients now, along with a handful of others she’d done one-off walks for on referral; her credentials were flawless, her testimonials glowing, and it had never been hard to get business. She drove close to Emma’s neighborhood with the dogs each day so she could walk past several times without raising too much suspicion.
She’d thought herself so very clever. But if she’d just knocked on the door that first day in town, told Emma everything, would any of this have even happened?
She steadied herself with a deep breath. Things had not played out the way she had hoped. But there was no reason to think Emma was in imminent danger. And she could get things under control again. She put the phone away as she walked past the house, keeping to the other side of the street. There were two police cruisers parked in the courtyard, and she could see the edge of a flapping piece of yellow crime scene tape over the carriage house door. Earlier, walking Domino the lab, she had seen officers carrying boxes out of both buildings.
The police had never searched the carriage house thoroughly after their parents died. There had been no reason. The carriage house had been locked, left undisturbed. Nothing but tools out there. A cursory check, that was all. But of course, now that would change. They would search.
Daphne had thought that she could take her time. Make the arrangements she needed to. She would tell Emma everything, but only once the pieces were in place.
She hadn’t anticipated Nathan dying. In the grand plan, the one that was more fantasy than intention, he was removed from the picture, of course. He was no good for Emma, and Daphne had thought about ways to ensure that she was free of him. Not like this, though.
Tigger bounced at the end of his lead. She walked him back to his home, handed him off to his very blond and very distracted owner, and walked to her car. She pulled up her older sister’s number. Her last four calls had gone to voice mail, but this time, JJ answered.
“Daphne,” JJ said in a strangled voice.
“Is Emma with you?” Daphne asked.
“Daphne, Nathan’s dead,” JJ said. She sounded like she was barely holding things together. Daphne pinched the bridge of her nose.
“I know. Where’s Emma?”
“She just left the hospital with Gabriel Mahoney,” JJ said.
Daphne blinked, unsure how to react to that. Optics aside, she supposed that wasn’t the worst place for Emma to be right now. “What happened last night?” she asked.
Silence. Then, “I fucked up.”