“Can you tell me what happened, Daphne? In your own words,” Ellis says.
She stares at the tabletop as she answers. It’s a fake wood veneer, the image of wood grain printed on cheap laminate. She bites her lip to focus. “Mom and Dad. They were—Mom was in the hall. There was blood on her shirt and on the floor, and—”
She’s practiced this in her head a million times, and still it’s coming out in sputters, like a hose with a kink in it. Ellis holds up a hand, stopping her.
“Start at the beginning. Where were you last night?”
“Right,” she says. “Sorry. We were—I wanted to sleep out in the tree house. We do that sometimes. When it’s warm. It was warm last night. We were out there.”
“All three of you? Emma and Juliette were with you?” Hadley asks sharply. Ellis gives him a look, which he ignores.
Emma screaming. The front door slamming.
Juliette pressing a finger to her lips.
Someone running through the woods.
Juliette stumbling in, dirty water dripping from her hair.
“Yes,” she says. “We were all together. We stayed up for a little while talking, and then we fell asleep.”
“Did any of you get up in the night?” Hadley asks. Ellis’s voice is exaggeratedly friendly; Hadley doesn’t bother to make it sound like anything but a demand.
She shakes her head.
“Are you sure, Daphne?” Ellis presses. “Maybe Juliette or Emma got up and you didn’t notice.”
“I would have noticed. I was sleeping in front of the door. They would have had to climb over me to get out,” she says, and then she thinks this is a mistake. Emma always sleeps by the door. Juliette is afraid of falling and Daphne used to roll around in her sleep, so it’s always been Emma. She stills, panicked, but Ellis just nods.
“All right.” He leans back in his chair. “When did you go back into the house?”
“I’m not sure,” she says. She frowns like she’s thinking. “What time did Emma call?”
“Five thirteen,” Hadley says impatiently, but she already knows. The number is burned into her memory.
“So maybe just after five,” she says. There is a split in the wood veneer; she can see the particleboard beneath. She digs her fingernail against the gap, pressing down, feeling the fake wood give.
“Why did you go inside?” Ellis asks.
“I had to pee,” she says, and her cheeks heat up.
“And what happened when you went back into the house?” he asks.
“I used the bathroom. The one downstairs,” she says.
“Your mother was in the hall. Not far away.”
She nods convulsively. “I didn’t turn on the light. I didn’t want to wake anyone up,” she says. “I didn’t see her until—until—” A sudden wave of queasiness rolls through her, and she whines, high-pitched, bending forward on herself.
“Hey, easy there,” Ellis says, reaching across the table to touch her shoulder. She whips away from him. She doesn’t want to be touched. His eyes crinkle again, but there’s no warmth in them. “You saw her when you came out of the bathroom?”
“Yes,” she whispers. Hadley is watching her intently. She’s certain she’s made a mistake already.
“What did you do then, Daphne?” Ellis prompts.
“I screamed, I think,” she says. “I ran over to her, and I called for my dad. And then I turned around and I saw him, too. Then Emma and Juliette were there. Juliette tried to help Mom but Emma stopped her, because she could tell—she didn’t think we should touch anything.”
“You could tell they were dead,” Ellis says.
She nods. “You could see things. In Daddy’s head.” She doesn’t mean to use the word, babyish, juvenile. She’s twelve, not four. But Ellis’s face softens.
“Look. You can see his brain.” A finger reaching toward the hole, smacked away.
She lets the shudder that she has been holding back ripple over her shoulders and pulls her knees to her chest. She likes to imagine that she can fold herself in half and in half again, over and over until she is a tiny speck drifting. Until she is nothing at all.
“And that’s when Emma called 911?” Ellis asks.
“Maybe not right away?” she ventures.
“Take your time,” he reminds her.
Daphne swallows, nods. “Juliette was freaking out. Emma was trying to calm her down. So not right away.”
“You weren’t freaking out?” he asks, eyebrows raising.
“Of course I was,” she says quickly. Too quickly. She sees the momentary softness hardening again. She doesn’t know how to act. What to say. What does a normal person do, when they find their parents dead? When they see bits of their father’s brain on the rug? She has no idea. She feels like an alien, every word and inflection skewed and wrong.
“So then you called 911,” Ellis says.
“Emma did.”
“That’s right. Emma called 911.” A nod. “And we pretty much know the story after that, don’t we?”
She doesn’t like that he calls it a story.
Ellis shifts a bit. His fingertips rest against the table. She looks over at the bag, inhaling the grease smell. He hasn’t said she can’t have it. He hasn’t said she can. He notices her looking, and his hand flattens against the table.
“Daphne, let’s go back a moment.” He uses her name a lot, she thinks. Like he wants it to sound like he knows her. “Now, you and your sisters spent the night in the tree house. And you didn’t hear anything from the house? Gunshots?”
“I don’t think so?” she says. “I woke up a few times, but I don’t remember it being because of a noise.”
“And you were up there all night. All three of you,” Hadley says intently, staring straight at her.
“Like I told you,” Daphne says, and can’t suppress the irritated snap to her words.
Ellis sighs. “That is what you told us,” he concedes. “But, Daphne, we know that isn’t true.”
4
DAPHNE
Now
Emma was going back to the house.
Daphne sat on the porch, a crocheted blanket around her shoulders, and watched a barn cat stalk purposefully across the yard. She liked this time of day. That liminal space between the end of work and the start of sleep, the few minutes when obligation eased enough to steal a moment to herself. A moment to take a breath.
In a way, the last fourteen years had been an in-between time like this. A rest. But if Emma was going back to the house, surely that couldn’t last.
“Daphne?”
The screen door creaked open, and Jenny leaned out, her dark hair slipping free of its messy bun to fall around her face. “He’s asleep. If you want to take off now, I can handle things.”
“Are you sure? He’ll need his meds in an hour,” Daphne said.
“I know the drill,” Jenny assured her. If it had been one of Dale’s other two children, she wouldn’t have considered leaving. Lisa always got flustered and worried she’d misread the dosage or mixed up the medications, and Drew wouldn’t have offered in the first place, was rarely here despite living only twenty minutes away.
“I wouldn’t mind an evening to myself,” Daphne admitted.
“You’ve certainly earned it. You’ve been such a godsend,” Jenny said. “Dad just adores you.”
“He’s a wonderful man,” Daphne replied warmly, though she didn’t have much of an opinion about him. She knew it was terrible, but she never really cared to get to know her clients. She worked better thinking of them not as people but as a series of problems to solve. It wasn’t to say that she was cold toward them—after all, emotional needs were another part of the puzzle. Being kind, listening, offering the gentle chiding voice or the joke to brighten their mood, it was all part of the work. She liked to be good at things.
And when, inevitably, her clients died—she refused, in her own mind, to soften that with phrases like passed away or moved on—she considered the project complete.
She gathered up her purse. Jenny walked her to the door, and there Daphne stopped, waiting an extra moment because she could see the strain in Jenny’s eyes, the need to speak.
“It’s not going to be long, is it?” Jenny asked, when the silence grew into enough of an invitation.