The charm bracelet was laid out in a little compartment all its own, ready to put on. The golden heart, the tiny golden house, glowing in the soft light drifting through the cream lampshade; the curly E, chips of diamond sparkling; the J, enameled in red; the diamond drop that must have been for Jenny’s twenty-first. There was plenty of room left on the chain, for all the wonderful things that had still been going to happen.
I left the bin-liner on the floor and took the bracelet into Emma’s room. I switched on the light—I wasn’t about to do this with the curtains open. The room was the way Richie and I had left it when we finished searching: tidy, full of thought and love and pink, only the stripped bed to tell you something had happened here. On the bedside table the monitor was flashing a warning: 12o. TOO COLD.
Emma’s hairbrush—pink, with a pony on the back—was on her chest of drawers. I picked out the hairs carefully, matching the lengths, holding them up—they were so fine and fair, at the wrong angle they vanished into the light—to find the ones with roots and skin tags still attached where a careless sweep of the brush had tugged too hard. In the end I had eight.
I smoothed them together into a tiny lock, held the roots between thumb and finger and wound the other end into the charm bracelet. It took me a few tries—on the chain, the clasp, the little gold heart—before it caught tightly enough, in the loop holding the enameled J, that a tug jerked the hairs free of my fingers and left them fluttering against the gold.
I put the bracelet around one hand and pulled till a link bent open. It left a red mark across my palm, but Jenny’s wrists had been covered with bruises and abrasions where Pat had tried to hold her off. Any one of them, blurred by the others, could have come from the bracelet.
Emma had fought; Cooper had told us that already. For a moment she had managed to pull the pillow off her head. As Jenny scrabbled to get it back into place, her bracelet had snagged in Emma’s whipping hair. Emma had grabbed hold of it, yanked till a weak link bent, then lost her grip; her hand had been trapped under the pillow again, nothing left in it but a few strands of her own hair.
The bracelet had stayed on Jenny’s wrist while she finished what she was doing. As she went downstairs to find Pat, the bent link had slipped loose.
Probably it wouldn’t be enough for a conviction. Emma’s hair could have snagged in the bracelet as Jenny brushed it before bed, that last evening; the link could have caught on a door handle as she rushed downstairs to see what the commotion was. The whole thing was dripping with reasonable doubt. But together with everything else, it would be enough to arrest her, charge her, to keep her on remand while she waited for trial.
That can take a year or more. By then Jenny would have spent plenty of time with various psychiatrists and psychologists, who would shower her with meds and counseling and everything else that would give her a chance of stepping back from that windswept edge. If she changed her mind about dying, she would plead guilty: there was nothing else she needed to get out for, and a guilty plea would take the shadow off Pat and Conor both. If she didn’t change her mind, then someone would spot what she was planning—in spite of what some people think, most mental-health professionals know their job—and do what they could to keep her somewhere safe. I had told Fiona the truth: it wasn’t perfect, far from it, but there was no place left for perfect in this case.
Before I left Emma’s room I pulled back one of her curtains and stood at the window, looking out at the rows of half-houses and the beach beyond them. The winter was starting to draw in; it was barely three o’clock, but already the light was gathering that evening melancholy and the blue had leached out of the sea, leaving it a restless gray streaked with white foam. In Conor’s hide, the plastic sheeting thrummed with the wind; the houses around it threw crazy shadows on the unpaved road. The place looked like Pompeii, like some archaeological discovery preserved to let tourists wander through it—openmouthed and neck-craning, trying to picture the disaster that had wiped it bare of life—for a brief few years, until it collapsed to dust, until anthills grew up in the middle of kitchen floors and ivy twined around light fixtures.
I closed Emma’s door behind me, gently. On the landing floor, next to a coil of power cable running into the bathroom, Richie’s precious video camera pointed up at the attic hatch and blinked a tiny red eye to show that it was recording. A little gray spider had already built a hammock of web between the camera and the wall.
Up in the attic, the wind poured in at the hole under the eaves with a high fluttering wail like a fox or a banshee. I squinted up into the open hatch. For an instant I thought I saw something move—a shifting and coalescing of the black, a deliberate muscled ripple—but when I blinked, there was only darkness and the flood of cold air.
The next day, once the case was closed, I would send Richie’s tech back out to collect the camera, inspect every frame of the footage and write me a report in triplicate about anything he saw. There was no reason why I shouldn’t have flipped up the little built-in monitor and fast-forwarded through the footage myself, kneeling there on the landing, but I didn’t do it. I already knew there was nothing there.
*
Fiona was leaning against the passenger door, staring blankly at the skeleton house where we had talked to her that first day, with a cigarette sending up a thin thread of smoke between her fingers. As I reached her she threw the cigarette into a pothole half full of murky water.
“Here are your sister’s things,” I said, holding up the bin-liner. “Are these what you had in mind, or would you like anything different?”
“That stuff’s fine. Thanks.”
She hadn’t even glanced over. For a dizzy second I thought she had changed her mind. I said, “Are you all right?”
Fiona said, “Looking at the house reminded me. The day we found them—Jenny and Pat and the kids—I picked this up.”
She brought her hand out of her pocket, curled as if she were holding something. I held out my palm, cupped close around the bracelet to shield it from watchers and from the wind, and she opened her empty one above it.
I said, “You should touch it, just in case.”
She clasped her hand around the bracelet, tight, for a moment. Even through my gloves, I could feel the cold of her fingers.
I said, “Where did you get this?”
“When the policemen went in the house, that morning, I followed them. I wanted to know what was going on. I saw this at the bottom of the stairs, like right up against the bottom stair. I picked it up—Jenny wouldn’t want it getting kicked around the floor. I put it in my coat pocket. There’s a hole in my pocket; this went down into the lining. I forgot about it, till now.”
Her voice was thin and flat; the ceaseless roar of the wind scudded it away, into the raw concrete and rusted metal. “Thank you,” I said. “I’ll look into it.”
I went round to the driver’s side and opened the door. Fiona didn’t move. It wasn’t until I had put the bracelet into an evidence envelope, labeled it carefully and tucked it into my coat pocket that she straightened up and got into the car. She still didn’t look at me.
I started the car and drove us out of Broken Harbor, maneuvering around the potholes and the straggles of wire, with the wind still slamming against the windows like a wrecking ball. It was that easy.
*