Now
Nathan had gone out to the hardware store again. After the third visit they’d caved and opened a credit card there, since it was becoming clear they were going to need a lot more than a bit of paint remover and a mop. The stairs on the back of the house had rotted through. The screen door sagged. The paint was peeling, the toilets flushed at their own whim and not yours, and there was a proud dynasty of squirrels in the attic, their ancestors entombed in the insulation. Nathan had finally gotten the Wi-Fi going and was now spending hours on YouTube, doggedly determined not to pay anyone a cent for what “any real man could figure out on his own.”
Emma had just finished heaving up what little lunch she’d managed to get down and returned to spackling holes in the dining room. Her first batch had dried. She sanded them as smooth as she could, but there was still a slight bump where some vandal had put something through the wall. It wasn’t the only one. Here and there were patches where the texture of the wall changed or a slight dimple marked a patched hole. She set her fingers over one, then made a fist and pushed her knuckles against the spot. But her hands were smaller than her father’s had been.
Her phone rang. “Chris,” she said, answering it.
“Emma. Sorry I didn’t call earlier, things have been a bit hectic around here,” Chris said in his resonant baritone. In the background she could hear several small dogs barking.
“What’s going on over there?” Emma asked.
“I made the mistake of taking a little mutt in off the street. She gobbled down enough dinner to sate a pack of wolves and then gave birth on a five-thousand-dollar rug,” Chris said.
“That’s what you get for taking in strays,” Emma replied, laughing a little.
“At least you never whelped a litter in my living room,” Best said, with exaggerated gravitas. “You’re back at the house.”
Emma’s smile dropped. “Yes. Juliette was here, too, actually. She dropped by.”
“Ah,” Chris said. “That must have been difficult.”
“That’s one word for it.” Emma let out a breath, bracing a hand against her lower back. “I’m not sure why I even texted you, really. It’s just—being back here, and trying to explain things to Nathan, I’ve been wondering a lot about what happened. What really happened.”
“You never asked for answers about your parents’ deaths. I assumed there was a reason for that,” Chris said, voice free of judgment. For all that he’d done for her, she’d never told him the whole truth about that night. He had accepted that, and done his job.
“Chris, did my dad have enemies? I know he had affairs. Maybe there was an angry husband, or something,” she said, speaking too quickly.
“I promise you the police investigated those angles,” Chris said. “Emma. The investigation was never closed. Please don’t give the police or the DA a reason to start thinking about you again. You are safer forgotten.”
“It might be too late for that,” Emma said, thinking of Hadley’s hard stare. “Is there anything you can give me? A bad breakup, a business deal…”
Chris paused. The silence was a beat too long to mean nothing.
“Chris. What aren’t you telling me?” Emma said, pulse thrumming.
He sighed. “It’s probably not connected. I told the police all of it back then, and nothing came of it. But your mother approached me, a couple of months before her death. She told me that she had information about something illegal. She wanted to turn it over, but she was worried she might get in trouble as well. I got the impression it had something to do with your father, and so I told her I couldn’t be involved personally, but I gave her the contact information for someone else at my firm. She never contacted him.”
A memory shivered to the surface. Emma gripped the edge of the windowsill to steady herself. “Chris, did you write that number on a green Post-it note?”
“I have no idea. It was fourteen years ago, Emma.”
“But did she show you—was there a flash drive?” Emma asked.
“She didn’t show me anything. We just talked. Why? What flash drive is this?” Chris asked, concerned.
“It’s nothing,” Emma said. And it probably was nothing. A flash drive and a green Post-it note with a phone number scribbled on it, hidden away where no one would look for it. No one except a nosy teenager.
Something smacked hard against the back window. Emma startled, letting out a cut-off yell.
“Emma? What’s wrong?” Chris asked.
“I have to go,” Emma said. She hung up and dashed into the hall in time to see two figures sprinting into the woods behind the house, one of them giving a whoop. She caught an impression of a red shirt and a mop of blond hair.
She growled a curse under her breath and, before she thought better of it, shoved her feet into her shoes. She stalked out the back door, still in her pajama shorts and T-shirt, and ran across the back lawn toward the trees, her phone still in her hand.
She angled toward the familiar path on instinct. She couldn’t see the kids anymore—if they were kids—but she didn’t slow. She passed under the tree house, which sagged, probably rotten through. Footsteps crashed up ahead. Still she ran after them, not sure what she was doing, not sure why, her pulse thudding through her and her breath coming hissed between her teeth.
Then she slowed. She looked around. The path had petered out. There wasn’t much undergrowth here, and it was easy to navigate, but she couldn’t tell where they might have gone.
A voice broke through the low chatter of forest sounds. It was high and excited, and followed by a lower voice that burbled with laughter. Off between the trees, Emma could make out the graying side of a building. The old Saracen house. Hadley had said kids still hung out there.
She crept forward slowly. As she drew closer, the house became visible. It was low and narrow, the roof gaping on one side and sagging on the other. Nothing about it looked structurally sound, but voices were coming from inside.
“Oh come on. You were scared. Admit it,” the higher-pitched voice was saying.
“I wasn’t scared! You’re the one who took off running.”
“Yeah, because I didn’t want to get caught.” Both voices were male and young. Through one grimed-over window, an upper pane knocked out entirely, she could see two boys sitting on the leaf-strewn floor, posed like they’d collapsed in exhaustion.
She kept moving, around to the front door, which was hanging off its hinges. She stepped right over the two rotten steps, not trusting them with her weight, and onto the spongy floor inside. The walls inside might have once been white but had faded to a grotesque yellow, covered liberally in scrawled graffiti. The frames around the doors were carved with more scratching, names and words and symbols—pentagrams and anarchy symbols and others she didn’t recognize but that looked vaguely occult. A moldering couch slumped in one corner, pale blue with the cushions chewed through. Another door led out the back, past a narrow galley kitchen, but given the way it was swollen in its frame, she doubted it was functional.
She walked toward the sound of voices, still congratulating themselves on their own daring. When she stepped into the doorway, one of the boys, the one with the mop of blond hair, yelped and jumped up to his feet. The other one was a second behind but quicker to realize there was nowhere to go, unless they wanted to try busting through the window.
“Hey, lady, we, uh, we weren’t,” the second boy said nervously, his Adam’s apple bobbing. He was Black, heavyset, wearing a red T-shirt with a dragon curled around a twenty-sided die. The other boy was white, and about the color of a sheet of printer paper at the moment, his hands opening and closing at his sides with nervous energy.
She imagined how she must look to him. Hair wild, shoes unlaced, wearing cotton shorts and a T-shirt that had clearly been slept in. The murderer, chasing them through the woods. “What were you doing at my house?” she asked. Her voice came out rough.
They glanced at each other. “We were just messing around,” the first boy said. “We didn’t mean anything by it.”
“Was it you? Last night?” she asked.
They looked at each other again, eyes wide. “No?” the second boy said. “I was at home last night. Swear to God. Whatever happened, we didn’t do it.”
“He’s telling the truth,” the other boy said desperately, and she laughed. Both of them looked startled. She combed her hair back from her face.
“Criminal masterminds,” she said. The Black boy smiled nervously. “So, what? You wanted to scare the evil murderess? Then what?”
“I dunno. It just seemed … fun?” the white kid suggested.
“What are your names?” she asked them.
“Travis,” the blond boy said immediately, and his friend gave him a dirty look. Travis didn’t notice. “And this is Abraham.”
“Travis. Abraham. Don’t throw any more rocks at my fucking house, okay?” she said calmly.
“No, ma’am,” Abraham said immediately. “Look, we didn’t really think…”
“Yeah, I gathered,” she said. She crossed her arms, looked around. “This where the cool kids hang out?”
“Well, we’re here. So … no?” Abraham said.
“We’re cool,” Travis said, a touch sulkily.
Emma raised an eyebrow. He scuffed the floor with his toe. What had she expected? Kids with mohawks and nose rings, bullies out of a high school movie? “You hang out here a lot?” she asked. They both wanted to bolt out of there, she could tell, but she was still blocking the door.
“Sometimes,” Travis acknowledged with a bob of his head.
“There are parties here, that sort of thing?”
Abraham shook his head. “Used to be, I think? But with the roof caved in and everything, I don’t think so. When we found it, it was pretty fucked-up.” They were still nervous, but starting to settle down. Convinced Emma wouldn’t unhinge her jaw and devour them whole, maybe. She turned back to look at the living room. Feet shuffled behind her. One of them cleared his throat, but neither spoke.
“Kids used to come here,” she said. “When I was your age, they were out here all the time.”
“Yeah, we heard about that,” Travis said, almost eagerly. “We heard there were, like, Satanic rituals and shit.”
“There are occult symbols on the wall. There’re pentagrams and that’s called a leviathan cross?” Abraham said, pointing. “I looked it up. But, like, that stuff’s not real. Just people messing around, right?”
“Probably,” she agreed.
“We heard you came out here a lot. That you were one of the ones that…” Travis gestured at the wall. Emma snorted.
“I was too antisocial to be part of a cult,” she assured him. She walked back into the living room, sticking close to the wall to read the graffiti. There were names—people who had been there, people they wanted to cuss out. Questionable reports of lewd activity.
The fireplace was filled with trash. Crumpled cans, shattered glass bottles. That was where they’d found the bloody clothing. Just a few centimeters of cotton fabric that had escaped the flames, no more than a few drops of blood on them. Enough to match the DNA to Irene Palmer. Not enough to identify who the clothes might have belonged to.
“We heard…” Travis started, then grunted. She looked over her shoulder. Abraham had elbowed him in the ribs, judging by how Travis was rubbing his side.
“You want to know if I’m a psycho? A killer?” she asked, idly quoting the words scrawled on the dining room wall.
“Yeah. I guess,” Travis said. Abraham looked stricken. “I mean, obviously you didn’t, like … sacrifice them to Satan. But there’s the theory that you did it because they didn’t approve of your boyfriend. Or, like, a thrill kill? Or you were doing a bunch of drugs and…” He seemed to realize at last what he was saying and swallowed. His eyes were shining with excitement.
This was … different. She blinked slowly. “Would you be disappointed if I told you I didn’t do it?”
“No,” Abraham said immediately. Travis’s shoulders climbed toward his ears. Emma just shook her head, turned away.
There were more words, more names carved in the doorframe that led into the kitchen. Her fingers moved over the grooves. KC+TM. That weird S everyone inexplicably became obsessed with drawing in middle school. A flower.
She paused, fingers under the simple carving. She knew this flower. She’d seen it doodled in margins, in fogged-up windows. A daisy.
It had to be a coincidence. It wasn’t that distinctive. And yet there it was. Juliette had left those little flowers like a signature everywhere she went. Scattered behind her, symmetrical and sweet. Juliette Palmer, with her perfect hair and perfect grades and perfect manners, would never have been in a place like this.
But Juliette hadn’t been home that night, either, had she?
Emma’s fingernail scratched across the lowest curve of the bottom petal. Emma had left first that night. But Juliette hadn’t been home when she returned. Had walked in the front door with bare feet, wet hair, wearing clothes that weren’t hers.
“Where did you go, Juliette?” Emma whispered.
“What did you say?” Travis asked.
Emma turned. Narrowed her eyes at him. “Don’t come near my house again,” she said. She stalked past them. Both boys jumped out of the way. As she walked she took her phone out of her shorts pocket and pulled up a rarely accessed phone number.
I need to talk to you about Juliette, she wrote, and sent the text to Gabriel.