“Maybe.”
“Hold on,” Gabriel said, frowning. He reached over and pulled the laptop toward her. His fingers tapped on the keys and the touch pad. “There. Look.” He spun the laptop around so Emma could see the screen again. It was paused on a view of the courtyard. Empty. The time stamp indicated that it was right after Emma left for the bar.
“What am I looking at?” Emma asked.
“There, on the street,” Gabriel said. He pointed. There was a woman on the sidewalk, walking by with a terrier at her heels.
“That’s the same woman,” Emma said. “Okay, so we know she has a dog and she likes to go on walks.”
“Totally normal. Except look at this.” Gabriel skipped forward. It was night now, and dark. And the woman was there again. Or at least, it looked like the same woman—no dog this time, though, and it was hard to tell from this distance, with only the streetlights to illuminate her.
Emma scrubbed through the footage again, eyes fixed on the space beyond the gates. She watched police cars arrive.
Watched the woman walk past, leading a black lab on a red leash. “Different dog,” she noted. This time, the woman was looking at the house. The camera caught her full-on, in daylight, and Emma’s mouth dropped open.
“Emma?” Gabriel asked, looking concerned.
“I think that’s Daphne,” Emma said. “When I saw her at the wedding her hair was blond and much longer, but … yeah, I think that’s her.”
Daphne had been watching them. Daphne had been there, when she found Nathan’s body. Daphne had been in the house.
Daphne had been in the tree house, covered in blood.
Emma stared at the frozen image. That night, after she’d found the money—she’d run. She’d tripped. The flash drive had been in her pocket, but it must have fallen out. She hadn’t seen Daphne in the tree house—she’d assumed she was asleep. But what if her little sister had seen her? It was the only way she could think that the flash drive would have gotten back inside. Assuming it was the same flash drive.
She needed to know what was on that thing. “Gabriel, I think I know where that flash drive came from,” she said. “If it’s the same one I’m thinking of, my mother had it hidden away. I think … I think it might have had something to do with what your dad found out. About what my father was doing.”
“You think he was actually right about something going on,” Gabriel said, and Emma nodded. He rubbed his hand over his chin and mouth.
“You’re sure you don’t know anything more about what he thought he’d found?” Emma asked.
“No, but—hold on.” Gabriel stood and walked out without explanation. Emma sat, feeling adrift. The still image of the driveway glowed at her. She shut the laptop with a shudder.
A few minutes later Gabriel returned carrying a cardboard box, which he set on the bed. “Dad’s stuff,” he said. “This is everything he left behind. Nana’s held on to it, for when he comes back.” Disdain and sadness mingled in his voice. “He said he’d figured it all out. He claimed he had proof. I remember he had … Here we go.”
He pulled out a palm-size spiral notepad. The cover was battered, the pages bent up at the end. He flipped through it, and Emma’s eyes swam at the dense sets of numbers, scribbled without apparent regard for readability or the orientation of the lines. It was like he’d been trying to get it all down as fast as possible. Some of them looked like they might have been dates or weights or maybe tracking numbers, but she couldn’t say for sure.
“I thought maybe looking at it again would make it comprehensible,” Gabriel said with a helpless shrug. “I never could make heads or tails of it. You?”
Emma took it from him. “I have no idea what I’m looking at,” she admitted. Maybe an expert would be able to tease some meaning out of this, but it was so chaotic she doubted it. Damp had gotten inside the box at some point, and the ink had bled, rendering whole sections unintelligible.
She turned to the last page with any text on it. Instead of the wild bramble of numbers, there were six dates written out. The earliest date was in 2008; the last one, early 2009. “Do these mean anything to you?” Emma asked.
Gabriel shook his head. Emma grabbed the laptop again. She opened the lid and quickly minimized the open window, pulling up another. She plugged the first date in, but the results were too broad. A thousand things happened on any given day.
“Try to filter by local stuff?” Gabriel suggested.
She tried Arden Hills, then went statewide. She’d crawled through five of the dates without anything popping up that seemed significant and was ready to give up when the final date brought up a result that stopped her in her tracks.
ONE DEAD IN TRUCK ROBBERY
Emma clicked through with her heart beating wildly. Her eye caught on fragmented phrases—string of robberies—state task force—before she calmed down enough to read through the whole thing. The article described the latest in a string of cargo thefts—both of goods and of trucks. None of the previous robberies had been violent. This one was different. Cargo had been stolen off a truck in New Hampshire; its driver was found nearby with a head injury, and died several days later. It looked like some kind of scuffle had resulted in him falling and hitting his head. Unintentional, maybe.
Still murder.
“Try those other dates again,” Gabriel said, but she was already nodding, typing them in. This time, she added robbery and cargo, and there they were. Each of the dates corresponded to a cargo theft somewhere within about a hundred miles of Arden Falls.
“Palmer Transportation almost shut down at the beginning of the recession,” Emma said raggedly. “Dad wasn’t as good at managing the business as his father. But things evened out. Good luck, he said.”
“He was moving stolen goods.”
“Or he was the one arranging the thefts in the first place,” Emma said.
“But then someone died. So they stopped,” Gabriel said, filling in the blanks.
“But then your dad noticed something weird with the weights,” Emma continued. “So he confronts my father. Maybe that’s how my mom found out about it. She started collecting her own evidence.”
“And Dad took off,” Gabriel said. He straightened up. “Jesus. I didn’t believe him.”
“My dad didn’t like to be challenged,” she said quietly. “Your dad disappeared. What if he didn’t just leave?”
Gabriel shook his head. “He came back, though. You heard Nana. He was in town right … right when your folks were killed.” He swallowed.
“You don’t think—”
“He blamed your dad for ruining his life,” Gabriel said.
“You think he’d be capable of it?”
“Honestly? I have no idea. One of the things I’ve realized as I’ve gotten older is that I really didn’t know the man at all,” Gabriel said, voice laced with old pain that she understood, bone-deep.
The older she got, the less she thought she knew anyone at all.
36
JJ
Now
JJ approached the small cottage with trepidation. The house was secluded, tucked behind a white picket fence strewn with flowering vines. The lawn was shaggy, but the flower beds relatively well tended. Little statues of frogs and turtles dotted the garden, and a half-dozen wind chimes decorated the porch. It was the kind of house she had always imagined her sister ending up in, maybe with a black cat sitting on the steps to complete the look.