“Okay,” she says when she returns. “We’ve got somebody lined up. Just in case. Jack, don’t pull the flowers. Those are Mommy’s special flowers. Why’d you let him down?” she asks.
“Who cares about the flowers, Darby?” Griff snaps.
“I do. Or I will after this is over. I will be super sad that all the flowers that I planted are destroyed. You know what, I didn’t put sunscreen on the kids.”
Darby looks longingly back at her house, where all of her things—like sunscreen and bug spray—are shoved into drawers.
“Now where do you think they are?” Griff asks.
“I can’t tell.” She cranes her neck. “They must be toward the back, the laundry room or— Oh god, he’s coming. He’s coming. Look normal.”
Princep’s boots swish through the grass to where the family waits. Can they go back in? Was that it?
“Where is this pair of shoes?” Princep holds up a class photo and points. In it, Lola stands in the second row, body angled parallel with the other students, next to Zeke and Noelle.
Cautiously, Darby takes the picture from him and holds it up to her face. The shoes are a pair of hot-pink sparkly Crocs, hard to miss.
“I don’t know.” She shakes her head. “Did you check the laundry room? There’s a cubby in the laundry room where we throw everyone’s shoes,” she says. But she hasn’t seen those shoes in a while. For how long? A few days? A few weeks?
Princep pulls a radio on his shoulder over to his mouth. “Did we check the laundry room?” He waits for the answer. “We checked the laundry room. Is there anywhere else these shoes may be?”
“Lola’s room? Under her bed? Beneath the couch?” Darby ticks off places.
“All checked,” he says.
“Well, I don’t know, then.” Not that this is the time to worry about keeping up appearances, but Darby isn’t someone who likes to have people over unannounced. She requires a forty-five-minute window to get her home from total train wreck to livable conditions and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Things are constantly going missing in her household. She builds it into the price of purchase. Those shoes? They’ll probably show up, but there’s a 75 percent chance it will be after Lola’s already grown out of them. Can Officer Princep wait until then? If so, great. Sooner or later, one of her disorganized linen closets is bound to spit them up.
“Mrs. Morton, are you the primary caregiver for Lola?” he asks, and she has the distinct feeling she’s been called into the school principal’s office.
“Yes. I mean, what does that mean? I’m the mother, you do the math. Sorry, that came out sassy.”
“And did you pick Lola up from school on picture day, the day she was wearing these shoes?”
“Yes.”
“I’m going to be up front with you all. We’re going to make an arrest tonight.” Princep tucks the photograph into his breast pocket. Darby reaches for Griff. Oh my god. Oh my god. She can’t breathe. “And I want to explain to you what’s happening so that you understand. The investigators were able to take footprints of the students, Lola being one of them. The soles, however, did not match the footprints found at the crime scene. They do match the brand Crocs, specifically the ones the investigators were able to source from the photograph taken during class pictures. The same day Miss Ollie died.”
“What’s your point?” Griff’s nose twitches.
“Prints from these shoes were found at the crime scene in Erin Ollie’s blood. And now they’re missing.”
Jack nuzzles into Darby’s neck, his fingers toying with her earlobe. Her ears ring. She forces herself not to side-eye Griff. Choices made now may be permanent.
“Darby Morton, you’re under arrest for intent to interfere with evidence.” Officer Princep delivers the news calmly. “I’m going to have to ask you to come down to the station with us for processing and questioning.”
“What? What? Why me?”
“You can’t be serious.” Griff is still soft-spoken and she wants to scream at him to buck up, do something. “You’re not taking my wife,” he says. But he takes Jack from her anyway. “This is just a ploy to get more information. You’re using her. What does this have to do with Darby?”
Princep has already asked her to hold out her hands. She feels the cold metal bracelets click onto her wrists. The phrase standard procedure is thrown around some more and she feels how bizarrely unsurprising it is that she will make it to jail before she ever makes it back to the gym.
“That can’t be necessary,” Griff says. “These are scare tactics.”
“It’s for everyone’s safety. We’ll make sure she’s comfortable.”
Lola’s arms are around her legs, making it difficult to walk naturally in step with Princep. “Mommy!” Darby can’t look at her face. She won’t accept that her daughter will remember the sight of her mother getting arrested. No. She simply won’t. But so quietly, so only Darby can hear, Lola whispers, “Mommy? Should I bite him?”
Just as quietly, Darby breathes, “Maybe later.”
THIRTY-FOUR
“Can they do that?” asks Mary Beth from her kitchen. She opens the refrigerator, looking around for a suitable option to stress-eat.
Darby got one phone call, and since both her new lawyer and her husband knew where she was, she called Mary Beth to relay the terrible news.
Darby’s voice sounds tinny through the line. “They’ve got forty-eight hours before they have to formally charge me with anything. This is kind of a freebie, I guess. But they can question me.”
“What are you going to say?” Realizing that nothing in the refrigerator is going to cut it, Mary Beth goes for one of the three pints of Blue Bell ice cream stashed in the freezer door.
“Nothing. I don’t know anything. I wish I did. What do you know about the pastors at the church?” she asks. “Are they stodgy? Are they Satanic Panic types? Is Communion a thing? It’s not real blood or anything, is it?”
“What? No. It’s not even wine. It’s Welch’s grape juice. Why?” Mary Beth’s stomach feels like a sponge being wrung dry.
“I guess one of them has been talking about the kids, implying that there’s really something wrong-wrong with them.” So this is about the children, then. Rhea surprised them all with the mention of Griff and, Mary Beth is sad to say, she felt a flutter of hope. It would be awful for Darby. She would not abandon Darby under any circumstances. But Griff Morton is exactly the kind of guy who you might hear is a murderer and say, Oh, he was always so quiet, he kept to himself, but now that you mention it, there was something funny about him around the eyes. Griff Morton would make sense. Mary Beth wishes she could hug her friend right now.
“That’s not good.” Her knuckles whiten around the spoon.
Ben. It has to be Ben. But why? Why would he do a 180 like that? Because she didn’t welcome his advances? She’s almost forty years old, what did he expect? But then also, what had she expected? What had any of them expected? She asked him to look out for the children. And now this. She won’t stand for it.