“It wasn’t like I was trying to throw her to the wolves, whatever she might have thought. But I suspected that she knew something that might have helped you. And judging by how fiercely you guarded her secrets, I’m guessing you thought the same,” Chris said. “You took a bullet for your sisters, Emma. And that’s your prerogative. But right now, you ought to remember that they’re not your only family anymore. And you’ve got other obligations.”
Emma’s hand started instinctively toward her abdomen, but she forced herself to drop it. “Believe me, I know,” she said.
He made a noise of surrender. “Get the footage if you can and send it to me. I can pass it along to the police if they don’t already have it—and assuming it shows what we expect it to.”
“You mean, as long as it doesn’t show me waltzing out with a gun to murder my husband?” she asked. “I’ll get it.”
“And then you stay put,” he said.
Stay put. Sit tight. Wait for things to blow over—or not. That was the smart thing to do.
And there was no way she was going to do it.
35
EMMA
Now
It took Emma three tries to remember the password, but then she was looking at camera feeds. Gabriel had brought a laptop into the guest room and sat beside her on the bed as she pulled up the footage from the night Nathan died. Emma watched with her heart in her throat, but if she had hoped for a smoking gun, a perfect image of a killer stalking toward the carriage house, she was disappointed.
There were two cameras. One above the front door, which captured the courtyard drive but didn’t show the carriage house itself; and one at the back of the house, overlooking the woods. The back door camera hadn’t caught anything more interesting than a deer picking its way across the lawn. The front was what Emma had been more interested in anyway. She plugged in 7:30 P.M., the night of the argument, and sped up the footage.
There she was, walking out to the car. Her shoulders were stiff, her gait tense. She got into the car and drove away.
About fifteen minutes later, another car pulled in. The memory of the wineglasses in the dishwasher flashed through her mind, and for a moment she thought of Addison—but the car was JJ’s. JJ walked up to the front steps carrying a bottle of wine and knocked.
Emma caught her breath as Nathan emerged from the house. The camera only showed the back of his head—it didn’t show his face at all. But still her heart squeezed, and she only realized she had made a sound when Gabriel put his hand on her shoulder.
“We don’t have to watch this,” Gabriel reminded her. “I could do it, or you could give it to your lawyer.”
Emma shook her head. “No. It’s fine. It doesn’t show the carriage house. It won’t show the murder.” She made herself finish the sentence, refusing to trail off into the mercy of silence.
On the screen, JJ and Nathan had disappeared inside. “Did JJ tell you she was there last night?” Gabriel asked.
“No. She failed to mention that,” Emma said, voice brittle.
“You don’t think that she and Nathan…”
“No,” Emma said immediately, but what did she know? She remembered the way Nathan had looked at her. JJ said she was gay, but that didn’t make it impossible.
It was only twenty-five minutes later that JJ emerged, striding out to her car with her hands cupped around her elbows. She threw herself in and sat there a moment. Emma couldn’t see her face from this angle, but JJ suddenly slammed her palm against the wheel and then peeled away, kicking up gravel as Nathan stepped out on the porch. He watched her go with a frown. His head turned, as if he was looking toward the carriage house. He stepped off the porch.
Nathan walked to the carriage house and left the view of the camera. There was nothing for a long time, just the lengthening of shadows, the dimming of the light. An occasional car driving past. Maybe the police could at least track those people down and ask if they saw anything odd.
The car pulled back into the drive. Emma returning. She walked back toward the house, stopping to look toward the carriage house. Emma tried to remember what she’d been feeling, but her grief was superimposed over it. When she tried to remember looking at the carriage house, what she felt was desperate agony, the need to go inside. She willed the Emma in the video to turn. To walk over there and knock on the door.
But instead, the Emma on the video walked into the house.
Stillness. Seconds streamed by, minutes ticking over. Then an hour. Emma would have been in bed by now, grateful for once for the fatigue that dragged her so inescapably into sleep each night.
Then, suddenly, Nathan veered into the frame again, moving at comical speed, and vanished inside. It happened so fast that he was gone before Emma could scramble to pause, rewind, slow the footage down.
When she played it back at regular speed, he came jogging toward the house with an intense expression on his face, and he was carrying something. Holding it up like he’d been examining it.
“Is that a flash drive?” Gabriel asked, squinting. Emma’s stomach dropped. She rewound frame by frame and paused on the clearest image. The object was the length of a thumb, squared off at the end like a USB drive. The resolution wasn’t good enough to see anything better than that.
“I think so,” Emma replied. She tried to keep her voice neutral. There was no reason it would be that flash drive. And no reason that if it was, it meant anything, she told herself.
“That’s interesting,” Gabriel said.
Emma thought of Nathan’s laptop, all his gear splayed out across the table. The compressed air. The USB adaptor. “I think he was trying to see what was on the drive.”
“Sure. That makes sense. Find a weird flash drive, the first thing you want is to know what’s on it,” Gabriel said, nodding. “It just seems a little odd that he would act so urgent about it.”
What had happened to the drive that night? It had been in her pocket, and then …
It hadn’t been there later. She was sure of it. But how had it ended up in the carriage house?
Nathan was inside for almost an hour. When he emerged again, he had his phone out. He was calling someone. Putting it to his ear. He looked agitated. His hand rubbed the back of his head. Then he nodded. He hung up and went back inside. The conversation had lasted less than two minutes. He was inside for another three, and then emerged, the flash drive in his hand again, his phone sticking out of his back pocket. He walked toward the carriage house and out of sight.
“It looks like he found something on the drive,” Gabriel noted. “Who did he call?”
“I have no idea,” Emma said.
Gabriel reached over to speed up the footage yet again, but the time flew by and Nathan never emerged. There was no more movement at all. Not until the sky lightened into morning and Emma walked out of the house. Emma went to stop the recording, but Gabriel restrained her with a gentle hand. “The woman who helped you,” he reminded Emma.
The footage kept playing. Emma walked into the carriage house.
Now Emma shut her eyes. She tried not to play it in her mind again. Stepping inside. Walking forward, knowing what she was going to find, thinking that knowledge somehow made it impossible. That what she feared couldn’t come true. She was anxious. She was paranoid. Her fears were not supposed to be real.
“Damn,” Gabriel said. Emma’s eyes popped open. She was looking at an empty courtyard.
“What is it?” Emma asked.
“Here, look.” Gabriel rewound, and Emma watched as her mirror self appeared at the edge of the frame, supported by a woman in a baggy teal shirt and black leggings. They skittered backward, the woman lowering Emma to the ground before gliding back out of the frame. Gabriel played it forward, and Emma watched the scene unfold properly, with the woman helping her to her feet and up the stairs.
“You never see her face,” Emma said. “Maybe when she comes out?”
But when the woman emerged from the house, her face was turned slightly away and down as she dug in her purse. Then she walked across the drive, out of the gate, and out of sight. Emma sat back with a sigh.
“Maybe someone in the neighborhood would recognize her,” Gabriel suggested.