Right then the rain stops.
Abracadabra.
Like magic.
And the wind stills.
It’s suddenly dead calm outside my broken window.
And dead quiet inside my bedroom.
I hear the crunch of broken glass under Hart’s knees.
“And that’s when I found her. On the dock.” His voice is barely a whisper now. “Beat all to hell. Skull bashed in. Just crushed. Face nothin’ but pulp.” He gags on the words. “You couldn’t even recognize her.” I slump against the wall. “Somebody tore into her with one of those old anchor chains. Blood everywhere. All slippery and red in the rain.” I’m trying not to picture it the way he says. “And she was gone, Greycie. She was already gone.”
I can’t be in the room with him. With that image. I unlock my bedroom door and head for the porch. But Hart gets up and follows me. Outside, a thick tangle of brambles smothers the front of the bookstore and the weathered front steps slouch against each other, trying to catch their breath.
Nothing moves. There isn’t so much as a ripple on the surface of the river.
Even Evie’s wind chimes are silent.
Then moonlight breaks through the thick clouds, and the bugs start to sing again. And the frogs. They think it’s all over.
But it isn’t over.
Not by a long shot.
We’re inside the eye.
“I’m the one who put her in the trunk, though.” Hart’s voice barely manages to cut through the thick air. “I’m the one who put her in the pond.”
“Why?” I turn around to face him, and I’m looking at a stranger.
Someone I don’t know.
“Hart, why? If you didn’t kill her? Why?”
It’s the ultimate betrayal, stuffing her in that dark box and leaving her there to rot in that filthy pond outside her own bedroom window. While all the rest of us lost our minds with worry. Wondering.
It’s worse than killing her, maybe.
Hart sinks down to sit on the ruined steps, but I just stand and stare at him.
“Why?” I demand again.
“I panicked,” he says. “I wasn’t thinking straight. I didn’t think at all. I just did it.” He looks bewildered. Like he’s talking about something someone else did. “I figured if it all came out – the two of us being together – like that – I’d be the first one they’d come after.”
“Why?” It’s the only word my brain still knows.
“Nobody’d ever believe she was alive when I left her and dead when I came back, not fifteen minutes later. They’d all think I did it.” He looks toward the big black barrels out on the dock. Doesn’t seem to notice that there’s one missing now. “And I guess I knew where I’d end up.”
“Why wouldn’t anyone believe you?” Nothing he’s saying makes sense.
“Because I’m the son of a killer.”
“Stop saying that. Your mama isn’t a killer, Hart. She was defending herself. And you.”
He shakes his head. “I’m not talkin’ about my mama. I’m talkin’ about my daddy.”
I take a few stunned steps backward.
“Ember and Orli.” I breathe their names into the silence, and Hart nods.
“He drowned ’em. In an old bathtub out behind our place. All filled up with rainwater. And then he left ’em there to rot in the heat. Covered up with a blue tarp.” He wipes at his face with bloody hands. “Till he had a chance to get rid of ’em.”
The sudden stillness is suffocating. My brain stutters. Stalls. Like a car engine that won’t turn over. “Why?” It’s the only word I can get my mouth to form any more.
“I guess he’d got bored torturin’ my mama. And me. Needed some new blood, maybe. Somethin’ he could take a little further. He was on the hunt that summer, I think.”
“How long have you known?” I ask him.
“Since the day he did it,” he admits. “I saw ’em. Right after. He made me look at ’em. Eyes wide open. Starin’ up at nothin’。 Said if I ever told, he’d do the same to me.”
“Why?” That kind of cruelty is impossible to imagine. “Why would he want you to see that?”
Hart shrugs. “Same reason he killed ’em in the first place, I guess.” He takes a deep breath. “So he could feel my fear. So he could get off on it.”
“He was an empath, too,” I say. “Like you.” And Hart nods.