“Let’s just get inside,” she said.
Up the steps. Suitcases off to the side. Find the key. Get the key to the lock, hands shaking—“I’ve got it,” Nathan said, taking it from her. He turned the key. Pushed open the door. He looked at her, asking wordlessly if she wanted to go in first. She shook her head. She couldn’t. But then he started forward and she grabbed his arm, fingers dimpling the fabric of his sleeve, a breath hissing between her teeth. He couldn’t go in there. No one should go in there.
“Emma?” he asked.
“No, no,” she said, dimly aware that it didn’t make sense as an answer, that he hadn’t asked a question, really. “Sorry. Go ahead.” She eased her grip on him.
Still looking at her more than ahead, he stepped across the threshold.
“Jesus,” he said. She stiffened and strode in after him, a wild anger filling her she couldn’t explain, but when she stepped past the threshold she stumbled to a stop.
The grand foyer, her mother had called it, though it wasn’t particularly grand. A staircase led up to the bedrooms. The drawing room was to the right, the formal dining room to the left, and straight ahead the hall that branched off to the kitchen, the “great room” that hosted her mother’s prize possession—her piano—and what had been her father’s study. The gun case, which had been in the foyer for as long as Emma could remember, still sat in its place of honor. In its heyday it had displayed a little over half of her father’s collection of rifles, handguns, and shotguns, an inartful combination of antiques and whatever new weapon caught his fancy, but now it was empty.
That wasn’t what Nathan was staring at. His gaze was fixed on the wall to the right, and the bright red graffiti scrawled there.
HAIL SATAN, it said, and beneath it, MURDER HOUSE. She could see the tail end of another phrase scrawled in the dining room. Numb, she drifted toward it.
The dining room, with its blue striped wallpaper and wide-open space, had been an easier target. MURDERER and KILLER and PSYCHO and a sloppy pentacle, an attempt at what might have been a gallows that had been crossed out. It was all done in the same color, but a few different styles of writing, like they’d passed the can around.
“This is seriously fucked-up,” Nathan said. “We should get out of here. If there’s someone dangerous in here—”
She looked at him blankly, then laughed, surprising them both. “‘Hail Satan’? They weren’t even that creative,” she said, voice devoid of amusement. “Gabriel said something about kids trying to break in,” she remembered. When had that been? Last year, the year before?
She hadn’t told him they were coming, she realized, anticipation and anxiety twisting through her gut at the thought of seeing him again. He’d never left Arden Hills. Not even after everything that had happened.
“Who’s Gabriel?” Nathan asked. “Why would someone write this shit? You said—people think—” He looked lost. On the verge of panic. But she wasn’t anymore. She reached out and took Nathan’s hand, and didn’t drop it when he flinched.
“Come with me,” she said. She drew him away from the scrawled graffiti, the old oak dining table covered in plastic, the china still neatly stacked inside the antique hutch in the corner. She led him back into the foyer and then down the hall, past the great room and the dust-choked piano, toward her father’s study.
It was still there, a few steps from the study door: a dark blotch on the oak hardwood flooring. By the time she had seen it, the blood was no longer a vivid splash of red. There was no chance to imagine, even for a moment, that there was anything she could do to help her mother.
“This is where I found her,” Emma said.
“Who?” Nathan asked.
“My mother. This is where she was killed,” Emma said, meeting his eyes, because she needed to see every moment of his reaction. She needed to know where she stood.
His face creased with discomfort. He swallowed, Adam’s apple bobbing. “Right,” he said. A syllable to fill the silence. “And your father…”
She nodded past him. Nathan twisted, as if there was something lurking behind him, but it was only the empty hall. The study door was closed. “He was in his study, in his chair. He was shot in the head.” These were facts. They were cruel but clear, and she could speak them without breaking.
“They thought you did it,” Nathan said.
“The theory was that I had an older boyfriend my parents didn’t approve of, and we conspired to murder them. To get them out of the way, or for the money, or just because,” Emma said. Facts.
“Obviously it wasn’t true,” Nathan said.
“Obviously.” Endless rooms, alternately freezing and sweltering. Adults who tried to comfort her, frighten her, befriend her, threaten her. By the end they had given up on asking her any questions except, when they were done explaining to her what they were so sure had happened, to ask “Isn’t that right?”
But she’d never confessed.
And she’d never told.
3
DAPHNE
Then
The day after her parents are killed, Daphne sits alone in a police station. There is a clock on the wall, but it’s broken. The room is not an interrogation room, not like the gray brick boxes on TV, on the shows she’s not supposed to watch (they’ll rot your brain). There’s a table against the wall with an old coffeepot, a crust of burnt brown at the bottom. A minifridge sits beside it, and a bulletin board on the wall advertises the weekend church potluck and a dog walking service.
She is not supposed to feel like she is in trouble, she thinks, but that doesn’t mean that she isn’t.
The door opens. Officer Hadley walks in, looking grim. Rick Hadley is tall and lean, with brown eyes and a face that looks hastily assembled, the contours of his cheekbones and jaw and brow rough and jutting. He’s her father’s best friend, and she’s known him all her life, but today he looks at her like he’s never seen her before.
“Daphne,” he says by way of greeting. His voice is rough. She would say it sounds like he has been crying, but men like Rick Hadley and her father don’t cry.
“Hi, Mr. Hadley,” she says softly.
Chief Ellis comes in behind him. He’s a solid man, muscular, with thick fingers and broad hands. He shaves his hair down to the scalp, and today it’s pink with a fresh sunburn. He’s carrying a white bag shimmery with grease, a paper cup that steams. He sets them both in front of her, the corners of his eyes crinkling, though his mouth hardly bends enough to call it a smile. He takes a seat across from her. Hadley takes the other chair, off to her left where she has to turn her head to see him.
“Thought you might be hungry, Daphne,” Chief Ellis says. She nods. She twists her thumb against the hard plastic of her chair, as she has been doing for—how long? She doesn’t know. She looks again at the broken clock. Long enough that the skin is raw. She reaches for the bag; he pulls it back an inch. She freezes. She is in trouble, after all.
“I’d like to talk to you about what happened, Daphne,” Ellis says with all the gentleness in the world.
“You haven’t said much since this morning,” Hadley adds.
Daphne hasn’t said anything. She’s afraid she’ll say the wrong thing. Forget what Emma told her to say.
Ellis leans forward, folding his hands. The smell of whatever is in the bag, greasy and rich, makes her mouth water. “Daphne?” Ellis prompts. “You’ve got to talk to us, honey. We need your help to figure this out.”
He is not a kind man, but he can pretend at kindness adequately enough, and she’s as hungry for that as the food right now. She’ll let him lie to her. It’s only fair. Lies are all she has to give him, too.
“Okay,” she says. Her voice is a croak. He smiles like she has performed a miracle and pushes the cup toward her. She drags it the rest of the way across the table and hangs her head over it, inhaling the steam. Hot chocolate.