“Ryan had a favorite book,” he said. “He kept it in his back pocket all the time.”
“Did he?” She looked outside, at the quiet street. No sign of Mr. Watts or anyone at all.
“You know he did,” he said.
She turned and, for the first time ever, he looked at her like he knew she was lying. Which she was, though she wasn’t sure why. But in that look, his eyes dark and sad, she knew something had ended, that great parental loss, the moment they realize you’re not perfect, and maybe even a little worse.
“In his back pocket,” he added, watching her, squinting. “You know it.”
She sat in her car for a minute, staring up at the sprawling house, bright yellow with white trim, like a slab of coconut cake, layers piled high.
The new cedar deck stretched twice the length of the entire first floor of the Knox house.
No sign of the detectives’ unmarked black Dodge.
Katie smelled her shampoo first. Like Love’s Baby Soft.
Then, walking across the softly carpeted living room, she saw her.
Knees together, hands folded, Hailey posed. Swimmer’s shoulders hidden in a blush-pink oxford shirt, her face was paler than her usual golden-girl glow, but she was meticulously groomed. Katie pictured Tina leaning over her niece, brushes and wands and implements, incanting some kind of brisk Southern sorority-girl magic. Jerking Hailey’s curls into a long ponytail that looked as shiny as a girl’s favorite doll, soft and staticky and overtended so Katie could see every brush mark.
But something was wrong. One sandy spiral hung down, a forelock that didn’t belong. A big hank of her hair got torn out. Artfully positioned to cover a bare patch, pink puckered. Her scalp opened up where she hit the floor.
“Okay,” Katie said. “Why am I here?”
All three of them, sentried together on the sofa, heavily upholstered in bold plaid, her uncle and aunt didn’t look at Hailey, and she didn’t look at them.
They all looked only at Katie, their eyes clear and inscrutable.
“Eric wouldn’t come?” Teddy asked.
“I told you he’s at work. You’re going to have to deal with me.”
Teddy nodded, then Tina too, watching Katie closely, with twinkling eyes.
“Katie, we are thanking the heavens that Hailey’s name has been cleared.”
“Has it, Tina?” Katie said, straightening herself. Readying herself. “Because my daughter’s battered body suggests otherwise.”
Teddy’s head bobbed in dramatic assent. “I know that none of this takes away what Hailey did, laying her hand in anger on our Devon,” he said, pointing at his niece as though she were set in a pillory, face winsome and pleading. “But Katie, can I ask you, do you know, truly, how you might behave if you lost the person who mattered most to you?”
“And you were the one blamed?” Tina burst in. “That you not only lose your true love in a horrific accident, but on top of it you face this smear campaign—suspicion, rumors, dirty digs—”
Teddy raised his arm in front of Tina like spotting the girls on the bars, and her mouth closed briskly.
“Grief can drive you mad, Katie,” he said, taking a different tack. “That wasn’t our Hailey in the locker room with Devon. That was grief.”
“Well,” Katie said, looking over at Hailey, unable to stop herself, “it sure looked like Hailey when I pulled her off my four-foot-ten, ninety-two-pound little girl.”
Turning her head slowly, Hailey met Katie’s gaze. Composed, enigmatic. Katie had never seen her like this—a young woman whose face had always been like soft taffy, stretched into smiles, laughter, C’mon, gymmies, let’s show ’em what we got. But maybe that had been a composition too, a mask. You never really knew anybody.
“Katie,” Teddy said, clearing his throat, leaning forward. “I understand there’ve been some issues between Devon and Hailey.”
He turned, for the first time, to Hailey.
“But Hailey was wrong about some things.”
Katie looked over at Hailey, her stillness.
“And”—Teddy was still talking, his dulcet tones and bent brow, that mesmer-coach thing he could do—“I need you to know she has not shared with the police any of the wrong things she once believed. About your daughter.”
“Ron wouldn’t let her, thank God!” Tina jumped in. “He said it would only have made things worse for her. It would have made her look…a certain way. That’s what Ron—”
Teddy’s arm came up once more.
“And she will not be telling them now, or ever,” he said. “None of us will.”
Teddy and Tina looked earnestly, meaningfully at Katie. Their matching ivory hair, their tanned skin and finely laundered sportswear.
Beside them, Hailey. All three of them, their honeyed tans blurring together, the crispness of their shirts. All three becoming as one. A united front. Confederates. That’s what families were, weren’t they? The strong ones, the ones that last. Not supporters or enablers so much as collaborators, accomplices, coconspirators.