Then
Juliette’s hands shake. They haven’t felt warm since last night. She pulls her white cardigan tighter around her, but it’s no match for the air-conditioning overcompensating for the muggy air outside. On Chief Ellis’s desk, a paper flutters in the breeze the AC kicks up.
The door opens; Rick Hadley comes in. She smiles at him politely, a well-trained reflex. He smiles back, but the expression seems forced. “Thanks for waiting, Juliette.”
“Of course,” she replies, all sugar. “Are my sisters all right?”
“As well as can be expected, I think,” Hadley says. She nods gravely. Her fingers twitch. She folds them in her lap to hide it.
“Officer Hadley—”
“Juliette, I’ve known you since you were a baby. You can just call me Rick,” he says. She doesn’t want to. She hates calling adults by their first names. Her mother always says—said—it’s disrespectful. More than that, it’s disorienting, skewing the lines between adult and child, disrupting the clear and easy rules of what she ought to say and do.
But she needs Hadley to like her. She needs him to keep smiling at her and tell her what to do, because there are no rules for what’s happened, and no Mom to tell her what’s right. Only an infinite number of potential mistakes.
Instead of walking around the back of the desk, Hadley leans against the front. Juliette blinks up at him, trying to look attentive, but she’s sure she looks the way she feels—exhausted. Broken. Her mind snags on the image of a sharp fragment of bone, a single hair stuck to it with a smear of drying blood.
“I know this has been a hard day,” Hadley says. He’s trying to sound gentle, but he’s bad at it. Anger glints in his eyes. Not anger at her, she thinks. At least, not yet. His finger taps the front of the desk. “We’re doing everything we can to figure out what happened to your parents, Juliette. But we need your help. We need you to tell us the truth.”
“Of course,” she says immediately, eyes wide. What does he know?
“I asked Chief Ellis to let me talk to you myself first. So you could talk to a friend.”
A friend. She supposes she has always given Mr. Hadley the impression that she likes him. She’s good at convincing people of that. It’s instinctual. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that he thinks she’ll trust him.
She tries to arrange her face into an expression of sufficient gratitude. She’s cried so much in the last few hours that her whole face feels puffy, her skin oddly stretched. She’s sure she looks like a wreck. Her mother would be ashamed.
“Now, you and your sisters all claim that you spent the night in the tree house,” Hadley says.
“That’s right,” she confirms. This is easy. This is what they agreed on. The story is simple, and they will all tell it the same way every time, and everything will be all right.
“Could one of your sisters have left at any point?”
“No,” she says immediately, but he gives her a skeptical look.
“Are you sure? One of them couldn’t have climbed down while you were asleep, without you noticing?”
“I … I don’t think so,” she says.
“Who was sleeping nearest the door?”
“Emma. She always sleeps by the door,” Juliette says immediately, and something about the look of satisfaction in his eye makes her afraid.
“Could Emma have left after you fell asleep?”
“No. I would have noticed,” Juliette insists. “Probably,” she adds softly, and hates herself for it. He glances over at the desk, flipping up the top page of a legal pad to look at something written beneath, as if he’s reminding himself of something.
“Right,” he says. “Okay, Juliette, let’s change subjects for a moment. What can you tell me about Emma’s boyfriend?”
She stares at him blankly. “Emma doesn’t have a boyfriend,” she says. Emma with a boyfriend? The thought is almost funny. Emma with her black clothes and sulky attitude and the way she snaps at everyone constantly. Emma who taunted Juliette the first time she went out on a date, and rolls her eyes at every hint of romance, real or fictional? No, Emma doesn’t have a boyfriend.
“So you weren’t aware that she was seeing anyone.”
She thinks of a name, of a knowing look exchanged between her parents. She wonders if this is the reason for the fight last night—the reason Emma took off.
“I didn’t know Emma has a boyfriend,” Juliette says. And then she does something that she will regret for the rest of her life. She bites her lip, looks up at Hadley, and says guilelessly, “I do know Emma was fighting with Mom and Dad. And I think it was about a boy. I think his name is Gabriel Mahoney.”