twenty-six

When we pulled into my driveway, I breathed a sigh of relief. The Explorer was gone, and the house sat dark and empty. No parents to face. At least for now.

“Stay,” I breathed, pulling the file from my under my coat. “I want you to look at this with me.”

I thought Grant’s eyes were going to pop out of his head when he saw the manila file in my hands. “Did you—did you take that from Seth’s office?”

I chewed on the corner of my lip. The last thing I wanted was to get Grant in trouble—or worse, fired—but I had to know the truth. I nodded and tipped the file into a patch of sunlight so he could see the initials. “I think Seth’s keeping a secret file on my dad, and I want to know why.”

Grant blinked at the file and then looked back up at me. The way the sunlight hit his face made his lashes look like tiny matchsticks. He squeezed my hand. “Well then, open it.”

I took a deep breath and turned to the first page inside.

It was a picture. Not of my dad, but of a cornfield. I recognized it from the newspaper articles I’d seen. It was the makeshift backyard behind Sarah Dunnard’s house, part of the clearing near Lark Lake. This was where the police had reported finding the pinpricks of her blood, staining the base of the cornstalks.

It wasn’t news. I flipped to the next page.

Another picture, and for a second I thought it was a duplicate. But then I saw the blood.

A cluster of stalks just beyond the back porch, splattered in angry slashes of blood. It pooled into the snow like a liquid halo.

Grant saw it too; he reached over me to turn back to the first picture, and then laid them side-by-side. In the newspaper picture, the blood-stained stalks were gone, and so was the clump of snow in front of them. It was almost like they’d never existed.

“But how—” I started, wrinkling my eyebrows.

“There’s only one explanation,” Grant said slowly. “Someone must have tampered with the evidence before the reporters came.”

So the rumors were true—someone had tampered with the evidence in the Dunnard case. “But why?” I asked. “And why would Seth think it was my dad that did it?”

Grant shook his head. “The only thing I can guess is that because your dad was the first on the scene, Seth thought it was most likely him.”

I flipped over the pictures and kept going. There were three more images: one of a mutilated print in the snow, something oval-shaped with blurry edges, and another of a small depression in a snowdrift.

I squinted at the photo of the print. “Animal?”

“Maybe,” Grant said, taking the picture from me. “It does kind of have that triangle shape to it, like a paw print. But it’s too messed up to tell for sure.”

“What’s this one?” I asked, holding up the second photo. There was definitely some kind of shape in the snow, like something had been nestled in it, but I had no idea what. It almost looked like two shapes: a perfectly round depression, and a larger, lumpier one beneath it.

“No clue,” Grant said. “But Seth must have thought it was important.”

I moved on to the third photo: another depression, but this one long and thin and stained with blood at the very tip. My heart stopped and suddenly the air in the truck’s cab became very, very still. Grant swallowed and cleared his throat. He didn’t have to say anything; I knew what he was thinking.

“A knife,” I said slowly. “This looked like it was made by a knife. And it’s the same shape and size of my dad’s hunting knife.” Never mind the blood in the snow where the tip must have fallen.

Grant breathed. “So that’s why Seth’s hellbent on proving your dad did this.”

I snapped my head up to look at him. “He could have just been carrying the knife that day. It could have fallen out of his pocket. It doesn’t mean anything. And the cornstalks and paw prints—who knows what that was.” I took a breath. “And anyway, if Seth had all this evidence against him, why didn’t he just take it to the crime unit in Toledo and have Dad thrown in jail? Why hide it?”

Grant didn’t say anything; I could tell he was thinking. Frantic, I flipped through the remaining pages. There had to be something else here, something that screamed “wolf” instead of “murderer.”

There were only two pages left. The first was a small slip of paper the size of an index card. It read, Abbreviated Medical History of M. Graham across the top.

This was the kind of card you find stapled to the file in your doctor’s office, the kind they update every year when you go in for a check-up. Seth had been digging deep to find something, anything, to prove Dad’s guilt.

I scanned over it. It looked pretty standard, from what I could tell. There was a list of recent check-ups and cholesterol tests; one visit listed for a sprained wrist over five years ago. Nothing out of the ordinary. I looked at the bottom of the card, where the word Prescriptions was neatly printed. Under it, there were two words—one I’d heard of and the other I hadn’t.

The first was Paxil, an anti-anxiety medication. I remembered the tiny pills from when they’d been prescribed to me in the days following Ella’s attack.

The second was something called Clozapine.

“Do you know what Clozapine is?” I asked Grant, but he just shook his head. I bit my lip. “Maybe it works with that anxiety medication, like a mood booster or something.” I slipped the card back into the folder and pulled out the last page, an enlarged photo of the house currently looming in front of me.

But in this photo, the side of the house near Dad’s shed was still charred and hollow, and the angry black words still screamed across the siding. This time, they were blown up enough so I could read one of them.

Watching.

I threw the image back into the folder and slammed it shut.

“What is it?” Grant asked, worry etched in the lines around his eyes.

I shook my head. How could I explain the way that word curdled in my throat like sour milk; how whenever I read it, I read it in Ella’s hurried print.

They’re watching you, Claire.

I looked up at the house, at the off-color patch of paint along the side. A web of snowflakes stretched across the windshield; the snow was coming down faster now, smothering everything in tufts of white.

“Can you help me with something?” I unbuckled my seat belt. “I need to see what’s on the side of the house. Can you help me do that?” I looked steadily at him. “Can you help me figure out the truth?”

Grant leaned over then and kissed me, warm and determined, and pulled the key from the ignition. I led him through the snow, even though it soaked our jeans up to the knee. When we reached the back of the house, I grabbed his hand and pressed it to the fresh coat of paint. “Feel that? This is where the new paint starts. I scraped off a little of it the other day.”

“I remember when this happened,” he said as he ran his fingers along a ridge in the siding. “It was big news for Amble. Practically everyone in town came here as soon as they heard about it, but your dad had already painted over it. He was in the middle of painting when the reporters showed up.” He scratched at the paint. “This should come off pretty easy.
He didn’t have time to prime it.”

I touched the edge of the letter left behind, the one that looked like it could have a curve. “What do we need to do?”

“I have some paint thinner and a wire brush in the back of my truck. I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to give it a shot.” Grant wedged his thumb under a crack in the paint and a chip fluttered to the ground. “Yeah, see? It might work.”

I laughed, an awkward sound I wasn’t used to. “Who drives around with paint thinner and a wire brush in the back of their truck?”

Grant smirked. “The deputy trainee program has many perks, Claire. Besides my paper-filing and coffee-making duties, I also get to scrub graffiti off of Amble’s important landmarks in the summer. Such as the elementary school. And the dumpster in the back of the diner.”

Then he kissed my cheek so gently that it felt like the memory of a kiss instead of the real thing. “Be right back,” he said, his lips lingering on my skin. And then he was gone, while I waited with my hand cupping my face, like if I held it there long enough I could keep his kiss forever.

We started to smooth the paint thinner over the spot with a couple of massive sponges that Grant also apparently needed to complete his deputy duties. It made the layer of paint watery, and soon it began to drip into the snow. I cringed as I watched the flecks of red turn to pools. It almost looked like blood. I hadn’t really thought about what I was going to do after I stripped the house down to its secrets.

Grant barely needed to use the wire brush; the paint practically melted away, as if it had wanted us to know what was hidden beneath it all along. I wiped off the last of the paint that hid the curved letter. It turned out to be a U. My eyes ran over the rest of the word it belonged to: you. I started to feel sick all over again.

Grant stepped back from the wall, pulling me with him. He squeezed my hand as he strung the crooked words together.

We’re watching you, Graham.

A wave of nausea washed over me. I clenched my stomach as I bent into the snow. I didn’t even feel the cold seeping through my jeans.

They’re watching you, Claire.

Another warning. Another threat of something deadly lingering ahead, waiting. Watching. Another set of eyes—human or animal—waiting to hurt us.

Breathe. Grant’s voice was in my head and suddenly I was out of the snow and in his arms and wrapped in a blanket on the couch.

I closed my eyes as I listened to his heart beating in his chest. Real. Solid.

Safe.

After a few minutes, the rhythmic thumps began to warp into a low-pitched groan. And then they slowly stretched into something like a howl.

“Grant,” I whispered.

He pressed his finger to my lips. “Shhh.”

I gently pulled my ear from his T-shirt, but his heart kept howling.

No. The wolves kept howling.

“Grant.” I threw off the blanket and ran to the kitchen window. Another howl ripped through the cornfield.

I felt his breath on the back of my neck as I stared out the window.

The stalks at the edge of our yard began to shiver, and I thought for sure I was seeing things. I rubbed my eyes until they burned and looked again. Now I could hear them snapping, even through the window. Grant’s hand clasped my shoulder and squeezed.

Nothing in the entire universe could have prepared me for what I saw come staggering out of that cornfield.

Dad stumbled through the snow, wiping the snow off the sleeves of his jacket. He started to make his way toward the back door, and for or a second I thought he saw the graffiti. But I quickly realized he wasn’t even looking at the house.

Dad hesitated in front of his shed, staring at the door. He circled it—once, twice—like a wolf analyzing its prey. Then he bent down to inspect the lock, turning it over in his hand.

My pulse raced.

Could he tell I’d tried to open the door, that I’d tugged at the lock? No, he would have said something before.

Right?

Slowly, Dad stood up, still staring at the door. And then he turned and stared straight at me through the window.