Where was the woman who had helped her? Emma looked around, but the room was empty.
The room was empty, and Nathan was dead.
It still didn’t feel true. She took her phone out. Nathan was dead and she needed to call the police. They’ll think you did it.
The doorbell rang. The sound was so incongruous, the cheerful three-tone chime ringing out through the house, that for a moment she didn’t process it at all. She stared through the doorway to the foyer, mouth slightly open. After a long pause, the bell rang again.
Now Emma forced herself to move. She stood, walking jerkily to the front door.
JJ was standing on her front steps. Her mouth was pulled into a frown when Emma opened the door, and her hands were jammed in her back pockets. When she saw Emma, she shifted her weight from foot to foot. “Emma. Hey,” she said, not quite meeting Emma’s eyes.
“JJ,” Emma said, and then wobbled alarmingly. JJ made as if to reach out and then snatched her hand back, rethinking it. Emma grabbed the doorframe. She needed to sit down. “What are you doing here?”
“I came to talk to you. To tell you—shit,” JJ said, and tucked her hair behind her ear. “I don’t know how to—”
“Nathan is dead,” Emma said, cutting her off, because it was suddenly unbearable that JJ could be talking and not know. That anyone could be talking about anything other than that fact.
“What?” It wasn’t a question but a statement of shock. Emma gestured behind her.
“He’s in the carriage house. He’s been shot. My husband’s been shot and I haven’t called the police yet because they’re going to think that I did it, because why shouldn’t they? I’m the girl who killed her parents in this house, and now my husband is dead.”
JJ looked back at the carriage house. Then at Emma, eyes wide with shock. “But you didn’t,” she said slowly.
Emma stared past her at nothing in particular. “It doesn’t matter. Maybe I’ll just tell them I did it. That way it’ll be over with faster.”
Her vision strobed at the edges. Her shirt was stuck to her chest, soaked through with sweat. JJ reached for her arm again. Emma wrenched it away.
“My husband is dead. I need to—I need to—” Her voice cut off in a sob, and this time when she swayed, she let her sister catch her.
* * *
JJ was the one who called the police in the end. They arrived with lights and sirens, filling the courtyard, along with paramedics who came purely to confirm they weren’t needed. They’d have to wait for the coroner now. Emma sat in the kitchen, feeling so disconnected she could barely feel the weight of her own body.
“Emma. Emma,” Rick Hadley was saying. He snapped his fingers, and she jolted. “You need to tell us what happened, Emma.”
When he’d come to the house fourteen years ago, his face had been full of sympathy. There was none of that, now. His expression was hard, with an edge of something like vindication, maybe even a touch of excitement.
“Emma. Who shot your husband?” Hadley asked.
“Hey,” JJ snapped. She was standing over at the side of the room, talking to the uniformed officer who’d come about the fireworks. “She’s in shock. Leave her alone.”
“Get her out of the room,” Hadley said, jerking his head, and the woman put her hand out to usher JJ away. Then Emma was alone with Hadley, who pulled a chair around and sat so close his knees nearly knocked into hers. He braced his elbows on his legs as he leaned in to look at her. “Okay, Emma. Let’s try this again.”
She tried to keep track of what he was saying. She tried to answer, as best she could, but her words kept getting tangled up, and it was like his voice was dipping in and out. She’d seen Nathan in the carriage house last night around eleven. No, she wasn’t sure it was him, but she’d assumed it was. She went out this morning and found him there. No, she hadn’t gone in more than a few feet. No, she hadn’t touched him. Yes, she had the key to the gun case. In the pocket of her other pants, probably.
Her words felt slushy in her mouth, like their edges had gone soft, and she kept losing the ends and beginnings of sentences.
She tried to tell him about the woman, the dog, but she couldn’t make him understand. He kept asking her where the gun was; she kept shaking her head. Which gun? There were so many of them, and none of them had ever saved anyone.
“Rick,” Ellis said. He was standing in the doorway, hand on his belt. “Look at her. She’s barely conscious. Have the paramedics looked at her?”