This Daphne was far closer to the version she’d met at the wedding than the one on the cameras. She wore a sharp blazer over a crisp white top and rust-colored skirt, lace-up boots clinging to her calves. Her sunglasses flattered her face, and so did the pixie cut—no more blunt bob or brown hair, no more shapeless tunic. The transformation made the hair on the backs of Emma’s arms stand on end.
The three of them stood spaced a few feet apart, no one quite moving to greet the others. Only Daphne managed a smile. “Here we all are. I wasn’t sure this would ever happen,” she said, upbeat.
“Why don’t you both come in,” Emma suggested, to spare either her or JJ the need to formulate a response. She walked in, and the others trooped after her. She brought them into the living room. “If you want coffee or water or anything, you’re going to have to get it yourself.” She sat down, arms crossed, on one end of the couch.
“Oh, I’m fine,” Daphne said, with a determined kind of pleasantness. She set her purse down next to her on the floor as she took a seat in one of the armchairs. JJ walked to the other but perched on the arm instead of sitting in it, shoulders stooped inward defensively.
“So,” JJ said.
“So,” Emma echoed. She had tried to plan this moment, but every time she imagined it, the pieces fell apart in her mind. Her imagined conversations were braided fragments of words and anger and blame and confusion that didn’t add up to anything. “Where have you been?” she asked.
“You’re the one who took off,” JJ pointed out.
“I didn’t trust you,” Emma said.
JJ’s chin dipped sharply. “Yeah. I got that.”
“Let’s not start out being angry at each other,” Daphne said. She fidgeted with her sleeve.
“How long have you been in town?” Emma asked, looking to Daphne. “I know it’s been at least a week.”
“About that long,” Daphne acknowledged.
“You were spying on me.”
“Checking on you,” Daphne corrected. “I didn’t know if you’d want to see me. Or if I was ready to see you.”
Emma grunted. JJ’s rejection she’d always understood, in a way. Daphne’s was the one that broke her. She’d thought that the two of them understood each other. They didn’t like to get noticed, didn’t know how to play along. She’d been able to bear it, knowing that Daphne and Juliette had been estranged from each other, too. That all three of them had cut themselves adrift—or been cut. She’d been able to convince herself this was just the way that things were always going to be.
But now they were here together. They’d been talking. Sharing secrets. She was in the dark, and maybe she always had been.
“And was that what you were doing here?” she said, looking at JJ. “When you brought a bottle of wine to the house, were you checking up on me?”
JJ’s throat bobbed. “No,” she said.
“Then what?” Emma demanded.
“I didn’t know you wouldn’t be home,” JJ said. “I came to talk.” But she couldn’t look Emma in the eye.
“She went because we needed to get into the carriage house,” Daphne said.
“You needed to get the flash drive,” Emma guessed. Daphne looked almost pleased that Emma had figured it out.
“You dropped it that night—it was you, wasn’t it? I picked it up,” Daphne said. “Dad found me with it. I hadn’t seen much—at least nothing I understood—but he was angry, in that quiet way of his. The dangerous way. I overheard him talking on the phone, afterward. He told someone that one of us had seen, and that he’d take care of it. I didn’t know who he was talking to, but I knew it sounded dangerous, so after I found the bodies, I took it. And I hid it.”
“In the carriage house,” Emma said, and Daphne nodded.
“What was Dad up to?” JJ asked.
“I think I know. Some of it, at least,” Emma said. They looked at her quizzically. “He was involved in some kind of cargo robbery scheme. Moving the stolen goods. Mom knew about it. She was going to turn him in, I think. Or use it as leverage to get away from him.”
“I guess she finally got tired of him cheating on her,” JJ said.
“She was cheating on him, too,” Daphne said flatly.
“Are you sure?” JJ asked.
Daphne laughed a little. “Trust me. I’m sure.”
Emma thought of the bracelet. The makeup hidden away in her private drawer. Forever yours.
“Wait—Dad said one of us had seen. Did you look at what was on the drive?” JJ asked.
“Yeah. It was mostly numbers—ledgers, I think. It looked like two sets, maybe one real one and one fake? I couldn’t make heads or tails of it, but there were photos, too.”
“What kind of photos?” Emma asked.
“I only saw one. It was taken from a distance, like through a car window. There were three men. One of them was facing away and it was dark, so you couldn’t make him out at all. But Dad was there. He had a gun. I think it was at the old quarry,” Daphne said.
“What about the other man? You said there were three,” Emma asked.
Daphne shook her head. “I didn’t recognize him. All I remember was that he was white. Dark hair, I think? And he had a birthmark. Like a port-wine stain,” she said, pointing to her jaw.
Emma’s stomach twisted.
“That sounds like Kenneth Mahoney,” she said. She swallowed. “He disappeared. A couple of months before—before our parents died.”
That flash drive was evidence of her father’s misdeeds. Smuggling, yes. And a photo of Kenneth Mahoney. Of her father. Of a gun.
Kenneth had accused Randolph of smuggling, and then he’d disappeared. No one questioned it, because Kenneth Mahoney was a drunk. He’d disappeared before. And then there was his mother saying she knew for a fact he’d come back months later.
Daphne’s mouth opened a little, surprise and realization. “There was this man who came by the house a few times. I think he was a private detective. Mom must have hired him to get photos of Dad cheating or something, but he got more than he bargained for. I think he took those photos. He gave them to her and told her never to contact him again.”
“Okay,” Emma said slowly. “Okay. But what I don’t understand is why you needed the flash drive so badly. If what you’re saying is true, there’s nothing on there that would incriminate either of you.” She waited. JJ spoke first.
“It wasn’t just the flash drive.”
“JJ,” Daphne said, almost warningly.
“That night,” Emma began. Her voice failed. She tried again. “That night, I didn’t know what had happened, but I thought—I assumed—that one of you had killed them. Juliette was acting so strange, and she was wearing the wrong clothes. Daphne had blood on her. I thought the best way to protect you was to hide everything.”
“You made me change,” Daphne said. “You washed my hands. Under the fingernails, too. There was blood in my hair and you trimmed it off.”
She’d taken the clothes and sneaked back to the Saracen house, which by then was empty. She burned them in the old fireplace. Not quite well enough to obliterate them, but enough that no one ever connected the clothes to Daphne. The ashes in the fireplace and the graffiti on the walls were enough to start the Satanic rumors—and link the crime to the teens who used the Saracen house as their crash pad. Including, occasionally, Gabriel.
The hair, just a half inch from the end and enough to even it up and make it look natural, she’d scattered here and there in the woods as she went, letting the wind catch it and carry it away.
She’d checked Juliette’s clothes for any sign of blood, but she hadn’t been able to find anything. She’d debated burning them, too, but in the end she simply folded the clothes and put them away in the bottom of Juliette’s drawers. She supplied them each with fresh pajamas, changed her own clothes—leaving her discards in the hamper. And she’d told them what they should say.
They’d been sleeping in the tree house. Daphne had to go inside to use the bathroom. Emma figured Daphne was the least likely to be suspected. People always thought she was just a little girl, treated her like she was six instead of almost a teenager.