No One Can Know(15)

She reached to shut the fallboard. It slipped free of her fingers and fell with a resounding crack, and she jumped back, hand against her throat and heart thudding wildly. Her fingers ached, a sudden pulse of pain that vanished just as quickly. She rubbed them against the thigh of her jeans. Nathan was watching her with an uncertain look. He was nothing but uncertain looks.

“I need to go into town,” she said, speaking the words even before she’d consciously made the decision. “I’ll go by the hardware store. I can pick up cleaning supplies that aren’t over a decade old and something to deal with the graffiti.” They needed to look into renting a dumpster, too. Nathan’s black bag hoard was getting out of hand.

“I’ll go with you,” Nathan said immediately.

“Cool. Good,” she said, though the point had been not just to get away from the house, but also from him and his nervous energy. Like I’m the only one with secrets, she thought.

They took a few minutes to unhitch the trailer from the car, leaving it in the drive in front of the still-locked gates. She checked her email again. Still no response from Gabriel about the key.

At the hardware store, Nathan split off immediately to go look for bolt cutters, to get through the chain on the gate. Emma wandered, staring at aisles of doorknobs and hinges, sinks and countertops, lamps and painting supplies. There was so much to do at the house, so much to repair, and neither of them had a handy bone in their bodies. They should just sell it. But she hadn’t been able to bring herself to make the suggestion to her sisters yet. Not after the utter nonresponse she’d gotten when she’d told them about moving in.

All she had wanted back then was to have them with her. She didn’t know what had happened and it hadn’t mattered—the only thing she had cared about was keeping them safe. Keeping them together.

But Juliette had left the day after the funeral and hadn’t ever come back. Emma and Daphne had been split up. Then Emma aged out of foster care.

She’d had money from her parents—lots of it. That was, after all, one of the reasons the cops—and later the DA—had thought she killed them. The money was in trust until she turned eighteen, and on her birthday she donated all of it, choosing a charity almost at random. She’d thought that maybe that would finally convince everyone, but it hadn’t made a difference. It just became evidence of a guilty conscience.

She’d fallen apart. She hadn’t been able to take care of herself, much less anyone else, for months. Chris stepped in again, giving her a place to crash, finding her a job and an apartment. She put herself together piece by piece, and when she was close enough to whole, she went to find Daphne.

Daphne didn’t want to see her.

She hadn’t even come to the door.

Emma had gone to see Juliette after that, but the look on her face when she found Emma at her doorstep was enough to send Emma running back to the train station.

Her sisters had made it clear that they didn’t want or need her in their lives. Only the house still connected them. She thought with a pathetic, desperate kind of hope about calling them one last time, asking them to come, just to get the house ready to sell. To make peace.

To say goodbye.

But it was too late for that.

“Emma Palmer. I didn’t realize you were in town,” a voice said, low and alarmingly close to her ear. Emma spun. A man stood only a couple of feet away, a good six inches taller than her and broad in the shoulders. It took her a moment to place the crude angles of his face, now half-hidden beneath a thick gray beard.

“Officer Hadley,” she said. Her voice sounded scratchy. Her hand at her throat, she could feel the pulse in her neck, galloping.

“Emma,” he said, giving her an almost imperceptible nod. He wasn’t in uniform, just wearing a faded gray T-shirt and jeans. The memory of a cold gray room sprang up in her mind. Hadley’s hand smacking the table, making her jump. His voice raised to shout as she curled in on herself, tears running down her cheeks.

“What brings you back here?” he asked. She’d last heard that voice nine years ago. It had taken him that long to stop calling her on the anniversary and on her mother’s birthday, telling her that she would never be safe. He’d sent her letters, too. Unsigned, just vague enough that she couldn’t claim they were actually threatening.

She refused to quail in front of him as if she were sixteen again. She straightened up, lifted her chin. “We’re staying at the house for a while. Me and my husband.”

Hadley scratched the side of his neck. “That so? Well, it is your house. Though you ought to know—people around here still talk,” he said, like he wasn’t the reason for that.

“People can say what they want to. It doesn’t bother me,” Emma said, and realized that she was quoting her mother. It was something Irene Palmer had said many times, chin tipped up just like this, and it had been every bit as much a lie. “And if you have a problem with me being here, you should just say so.”

“It’s your house,” Hadley repeated with a shrug. “A nice early inheritance. Must be worth a pretty penny.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.

A grunt. “Just saying. If you wanted to sell, it wouldn’t be a bad time for it.”

“It needs a lot of work,” Emma said darkly.

Hadley leaned in toward her, voice dropping. “You’ve really got no problem sleeping in the house where your parents were murdered?” he asked. “Where your mother bled out on the floor?”