It isn’t homework. She isn’t sure what it is. Files and files. Images, mostly. Photos of pages in a notebook, columns of numbers. Other papers, typed up neatly, with more numbers. Dates and amounts. The paperwork is for Palmer Transportation. It is not the least bit exciting, and Daphne is disappointed. Then she opens another image file and she’s looking at a photograph. It’s taken through the window of a car at night. Three men are standing amid a landscape of gray rock, beside a car. One of the men is her father.
One of the men has a gun.
She is about to open another image file when a hand falls on her shoulder. She doesn’t jump or make a noise—she goes instinctively still, frozen as a rabbit as a wolf stalks by.
“What do you have, Daphne?” her father asks. Steady and quiet.
“I found it,” she whispers. “I think it’s from your work. I was going to give it back to you.” She unplugs the drive. Hands it to him. He’s standing behind her with a blank expression, the most dangerous kind. She holds out the drive, her expression guileless. “Is it for taxes?”
“Yes. That sort of thing,” her father says. He takes the drive from her but doesn’t take his eyes off her face.
She smiles a little. “It looked boring enough to be taxes,” she says.
Another long moment of silence as her insides quiver like Jell-O and her expression stays cheery. Then he gives her a pat on the shoulder. “You should get back to bed.”
“I’m sleeping outside today,” she says.
“Back to the tree house, then,” he says, and nods his chin toward the door. “Go along.”
She is rarely on the receiving end of her father’s punishments. She’s better than even Juliette at understanding what he wants. Juliette thinks it’s only obedience, but really it’s devotion. So she wraps her arms around his waist, and he puts a hand on the back of her head fondly before she skips away. Before she turns the corner to the kitchen she sees him walking back down the hall to his study, his fist tight around the drive.
She creeps along the side of the house, those needle claws still tickling at the back of her mind. She fits her small body against the house below the study window.
He’s on the phone. “I don’t know. One of the girls had it. No—I don’t know how much she saw,” he’s saying. Then, “There’s no need for that. I’ll handle it.” Another pause, and now his voice is angry. “Stay home. I told you I would handle it, and I will. You don’t need to be here.”
He hangs up. She peers over the sill, watches through the crack in the curtains as he opens a drawer in his desk and tosses the flash drive inside before pacing over to the liquor cabinet. He pours himself a hefty measure of whiskey. He stands, staring at nothing, for a long time.
His stillness frightens her. She falls away from the window.
Juliette is Mom’s favorite. Daphne has always been puzzled by the knowledge that she is Dad’s. Maybe it’s because she was so small and quiet—he calls her dainty. Their mother is frequently horrified by Daphne’s macabre interests, but they amuse Dad.
She suspects, though, that what amused him in a preteen will become less and less amusing as she gets older. That one day, it won’t be any protection at all.
“I hate knowing you’ve got to grow up,” Dad told her once, and something about it made her very afraid. Afraid like she is now.
She doesn’t know what to do. Emma is the one who makes plans.
Something has to be done, she thinks. In the house, the light in the study stays on, and Daphne doesn’t dare sleep.
30
EMMA
Now
When Emma was next aware, she was sitting on the couch in the living room, holding a glass of water. Her mouth tasted of vomit. Her hands were red and pockmarked with the impressions of gravel, grit clinging to her skin. She was alone, though she felt like she hadn’t been a moment ago, had the vague memory of a woman’s voice and gentle hands steering her inside.
Because she’d fainted. Because …
Because Nathan was dead. She drew in a long, steadying breath. Her stomach heaved again, but this time she gritted her teeth and kept it down, and took a slug of water as soon as it settled.
Nathan was dead. He had been shot, and she needed to do something. But for all of her what-ifs, she had no plan now, only the yawning impossibility of what she was facing.
She needed to call the police. Except that here, Hadley and Ellis were the police. And this was all too familiar. But what was the alternative? Pretend she hadn’t seen? Hide the body? That was ridiculous. A notion born entirely of panic, of her sixteen-year-old self in the interrogation room.