No One Can Know(73)

But she would be leaving Daphne behind. Six years where Daphne would have no Emma to draw their ire and no Juliette to placate them. Just Daphne alone, and she was so small and so strange and so unsuited for the games this house required of you.

There is no way out. There is only one way out. You’re trapped. You have to escape.

White grip.

She remembered the weight of it in her hand. It was a revolver with a white grip. A good size for a woman’s hand. She’d held it before. Logan telling her how to set her shoulders and point her hips.

“I know how to shoot a gun, Logan,” she’d told him, and nailed every shot. Cans in the woods, nothing fancy. She was better than him. A lot better. It made him laugh like a hyena, and he’d given her a playful bow, admitting defeat. “Rematch? Winner keeps the gun,” she’d joked.

Red hand.

“They deserved it,” Daphne said, and JJ’s head jerked up. She realized she’d been drifting, silent for long seconds. “They deserved to die.” Daphne’s lower lip trembled faintly, as if she was waiting for JJ to contradict her. “You always thought you were protecting me. You and Emma. But you couldn’t always be around. Dad was always soft with me, but Mom … She was happy with you and I think she was afraid of Emma. But I was always there, and she knew I wouldn’t tell. I never told anyone’s secrets.”

“What did she do to you?” JJ asked hollowly.

When Daphne spoke it was with a frank, factual tone. “She wanted me to admit that I wasn’t really sick. That my asthma was all in my head—panic attacks. She was right that I didn’t have asthma. But a panic attack—it feels like you’re dying. There’s nothing fake about it. She was convinced that if she could prove to me that it was psychological, I would get over it. So she would try to trigger a panic attack and then try to get me to stop. With all the malicious creativity she was capable of, as I’m sure you remember.”

“I had no idea.”

“Like I said. I’m good at secrets,” Daphne said, her lips bent in the faintest of smiles. Then she shifted, and JJ braced herself. “JJ. What happened after I called you?” Daphne asked, gentle but probing.

“You mean after you casually dropped that you’d hidden a murder weapon in the carriage house, and I’d just given the keys to our overly nosy brother-in-law?” JJ said with empty humor. “I panicked.”

“That much I figured from the way you hung up on me,” Daphne said.

“Can you blame me?” JJ asked. She raked a hand through her thick hair. Once upon a time she’d spent so much effort trying to tame these curls. “I went over there last night. I thought I’d make peace with Emma, talk to her about getting a few things from the carriage house. But she was gone. It was just Nathan. And I figured—this will still work. We opened the bottle of wine I brought. We talked.”

“And then?” Daphne asked, eyes hard.

“I left,” JJ said, as if nothing at all had happened in between. She thought of the splash of red wine, the rasp of insincere laughter in her throat.

“What happened with Nathan?” Daphne asked.

“Nothing.”

“JJ—”

“Nothing happened with Nathan,” JJ repeated, forcing herself to look Daphne in the eye.

“What time did you leave the house?” Daphne asked.

“I don’t know. Eight thirty, maybe,” JJ said.

“Well, hopefully he died well after that,” Daphne noted, and JJ stared at her.

“How are you so calm?” she asked.

“Panicking wouldn’t do us much good, would it?” Daphne asked. “So let’s assume you didn’t kill Nathan.”

“Yeah. Let’s assume that,” JJ said, sounding strangled.

“Well, someone did.”

“Why would anyone kill him, though? No one in this town even knows him,” JJ said. He’d seemed like such a normal guy. Certainly not someone to inspire a murderous vendetta in only a few days.

Daphne took a deep breath. “The thing is, the gun wasn’t the only thing in the carriage house.”





37

EMMA




Now



Emma sent Chris everything she and Gabriel had put together, and got a tired response telling her not to jump to conclusions. Looking through all the articles, Emma had been running on adrenaline, gripped with the certainty that they had found something vitally important—but with Chris’s message came the crashing realization that they didn’t really have anything. Nothing solid, at least. Whatever had been going on with Kenneth Mahoney and her father, they were both long gone.

Emma paced. Gabriel was sitting in a chair next to a small desk in the corner, slouched so far he was practically horizontal. “You need to take a break,” he told her. “Take a breath.”

“I need to figure out what I’m missing,” she said.

“Emma—”

“The phone call,” she said, remembering. “Nathan. He called someone.”

“Right after he found the flash drive and took a look at it. Is there any way to get your phone records, do you think? Call the company or something?”

She gave a wry chuckle. “Trust me, I know how to get them,” she said. Gabriel’s laptop was still at the desk. He stood up and shuffled out of the way to give her space, and she took his place in the chair. It was simple to pull up the account, and it was one of the passwords she knew by heart.