“Juliette. Juliette, stop,” Daphne says. She has her finger on the trigger. Daphne can see the bullets still in the gun, two chambers in the revolver empty. “Juliette, put down the gun, please.”
Juliette looks in seeming surprise at the gun in her hand. Daphne reaches for it, and Juliette doesn’t resist as she takes it. Her fingers wrap around the barrel. Her fingerprints are on it, she thinks. Juliette’s, too. They have to get rid of it.
Juliette is stumbling away. She makes choked sounds that are almost like sobbing but more animal. Daphne starts after her but then she stops. Her eyes drift across the room, to the drawer where her father put the flash drive.
She still doesn’t know what the files on the flash drive meant, but she knows they were dangerous. Could still be dangerous. She darts across the room. She snatches the drive from the drawer and turns. She is staring right into her father’s face. His eyes are open, bulging. There is a ragged hole at his temple. Even so, she half expects him to straighten up. To fix her with those hard, angry eyes and demand to know what she thinks she is doing.
She runs past him into the hallway. Juliette stands in the great room, eyes unfocused.
“They’re going to kill me,” she says, looking at Daphne.
“Stay here,” Daphne begs her. She grabs the key to the carriage house from its hook by the front door. Inside, she moves aside boxes until she finds a plastic toolbox abandoned at the back of the building. She grabs a rag, wraps the flash drive in it, and shoves it inside. She takes the gun to the corner of the building, where the floorboards have rotted through—another thing their father is always about to get around to—and the dirt underneath is visible. She digs down with a spade fetched from a table. Six inches deep, she buries the gun, and then pulls a crate over the hole to hide it. She runs back into the house.
Juliette is gone. There are bloody boot prints leading to the back door but no Juliette. Daphne runs outside. She opens her mouth to call for Juliette, then shuts it. Juliette’s gone. She’s alone. Her parents are dead inside and no one is here to tell her what to do.
“Juliette?” she whispers into the dark. There’s no answer.
She doesn’t know what to do. And so she does what she always does when things get to be too much. She climbs into the tree house, and curls on her side. She squeezes her eyes shut and she doesn’t cry, though she thinks probably she should.
She drifts off to sleep.
45
JJ
Now
Yellow wallpaper. White grip.
Red hand.
If she closed her eyes, she could remember the weight of the gun. The charcoal and sulfur smell. The deafening crack.
She remembered the bits of bone and hair and pink tissue in the hole through her father’s skull. Heard, echoing in her mind, her mother’s scream, and felt the heat of her blood as JJ knelt down and put a hand against the gushing wound on her chest. Her mother’s hand had closed briefly around her wrist as her breath gurgled in her throat, and then it went slack.
She had tried so hard to think of any explanation but the obvious one.
“Something changed that night,” she said. The others were silent, giving her time to find her words. “I realized I couldn’t keep doing it—pretending. Eventually they were going to find out what I was up to. I kept thinking that they’d kill me. And I kept thinking about how much I hated them. I’d taken something and had too much to drink—I was out of it. I had Logan’s gun, and…”
“How did you get the gun?” Emma asked.
“It was Logan’s,” JJ repeated.
“Right. But how did you get it? Did he give it to you? Why?” Emma asked.
“Does it matter?” Daphne asked.
“She’s asking whether I planned to do it. Whether it was premeditated,” JJ said, and Emma gave her a nod. It would matter if it came out. “I honestly don’t know, which I assume means it wasn’t—at least, it wasn’t a plan I made while I was in my right mind. I didn’t have the gun when I left the Saracen house. I must have gotten it after, but I can’t remember much. Just Mom and Dad, and then—then the next thing I remember is you.”
Emma’s look was bewildered. “What about your clothes? Your hair?”
“According to Logan, he and another friend found me out of my mind and completely soaked through. I have no idea why,” JJ said. “They gave me the clothes I was wearing and got me home.”
Emma didn’t say anything for a long time, sitting with her fist pressed against her stomach.