The police had never searched the carriage house thoroughly after their parents died. There had been no reason. The carriage house had been locked, left undisturbed. Nothing but tools out there. A cursory check, that was all. But of course, now that would change. They would search.
Daphne had thought that she could take her time. Make the arrangements she needed to. She would tell Emma everything, but only once the pieces were in place.
She hadn’t anticipated Nathan dying. In the grand plan, the one that was more fantasy than intention, he was removed from the picture, of course. He was no good for Emma, and Daphne had thought about ways to ensure that she was free of him. Not like this, though.
Tigger bounced at the end of his lead. She walked him back to his home, handed him off to his very blond and very distracted owner, and walked to her car. She pulled up her older sister’s number. Her last four calls had gone to voice mail, but this time, JJ answered.
“Daphne,” JJ said in a strangled voice.
“Is Emma with you?” Daphne asked.
“Daphne, Nathan’s dead,” JJ said. She sounded like she was barely holding things together. Daphne pinched the bridge of her nose.
“I know. Where’s Emma?”
“She just left the hospital with Gabriel Mahoney,” JJ said.
Daphne blinked, unsure how to react to that. Optics aside, she supposed that wasn’t the worst place for Emma to be right now. “What happened last night?” she asked.
Silence. Then, “I fucked up.”
Daphne sighed. “I’m going to send you an address. Meet me there in an hour.”
“What are we going to do?” JJ asked, sounding lost.
“Just be there,” Daphne said, and hung up.
34
EMMA
Now
Emma walked into the police station with Christopher Best beside her and tried to calm the galloping pace of her heart.
Detective Mehta was a round-faced woman with a stocky frame and a button on her shirt that was on the verge of falling off, hanging loosely in its hole with a stray thread sticking out.
“I want to state for the record that my client is here of her own accord, and is free to go at any time, but has chosen to cooperate with this investigation,” Chris said.
“And we appreciate that,” Mehta said, without looking at Chris at all. “Emma—can I call you Emma?—we have the statement you and Mr. Best have provided, of course, but I’d like to go over things one more time to make sure that we have all the details.”
Emma nodded. They weren’t looking for additional details, they were looking for inconsistencies. She went over things again, from the time she got home the night before to when the police arrived. Mehta had a good poker face, but Emma didn’t think that anything she said had made the detective relax or trust her more by the time she was done.
“You came home around nine o’clock,” Mehta said. “Is that correct?”
“Around then. I don’t know exactly,” Emma said. “I didn’t come straight back from the bar. I sat in the park for a while. There were a few other people around.”
“Any particular reason you went to that bar?” Mehta asked.
Emma hesitated. She didn’t want to lie, but going too far down this road wouldn’t be good for anyone. Not her, not Logan, not JJ. “I knew Logan worked there. I wanted to talk to him. You know what happened to my parents the last time I was in town, obviously. And you know…” Mehta, mercifully, nodded without making her spell it out. Emma shifted in her seat. “I wanted to talk to Logan a bit, about being back and what happened all those years ago.”
“You and Logan Ellis were friends?” Mehta asked.
“Our parents were friends, I suppose. We knew each other, that’s all,” Emma said. “I thought he’d probably talk to me. We chatted briefly, and then I left.”
“And you saw your husband in the carriage house,” Mehta said, and then they were going back and forth over the timeline again. Emma stumbled only once, stating the wrong time and then quickly correcting herself, and Mehta looked up but didn’t seem bothered. Best looked unhappy, but not enough to put a stop to things.
“Ms. Palmer, there were a number of firearms found in your house. Are they yours?”
“They belonged to my father,” Emma said. “They’d been in storage, but Nathan went and got them. I didn’t want them in the house. I told him as much.”
“Any particular reason he wanted them?”
“Protection,” Emma said, all too aware of the irony.