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?”
Emma wrapped her hands around the handles of the basket she was carrying, heavy with paint remover and glass cleaner and other odds and ends. “Stop,” she said. It was barely audible at all.
“Your dad was my best friend. I swore I would bring the person who killed him to justice. You should know I still intend to keep that promise.”
He’d never let it go. All these years later, he was still sure it was her. She felt the frantic need rise up in her, the urge to speak. She’d said so much back then, so many ways. She had started out trying to protect her sisters, but at some point fear had taken over. All that had mattered was convincing him that she wasn’t to blame, but she couldn’t absolve herself—not without condemning someone else. And so in the end she’d only been able to repeat the same things again and again. I didn’t do it. I don’t know. I wasn’t there.
“Hey there,” Nathan said, coming up behind her. He put a hand on her shoulder, his standard affable smile affixed to his face.
“You’re the husband, I take it?” Hadley asked.
“Nathan Gates,” he said. He put out his hand to shake. Hadley reached out, his own smile sharp.
“Rick Hadley. Officer Hadley, when I’m working,” he said. “Welcome to Arden Hills, Mr. Gates. Your wife and I were just chatting. I’ve known her since she was a baby, you know. Her father was a good friend of mine.”