A flare gun? Sighing, Chris massaged his aching temples and let himself sink more deeply into the bed. What the hell had Penny been thinking?
He was alone again, Hannah having locked him in almost a half hour ago, according to the old clock. He could hear her moving around in the kitchen downstairs, caught the chatter of plates and chinks of glass as she put together food to take out to Isaac in the lambing barn. His own lunch still waited. He should probably eat, but the prospect of dragging himself off the bed made him groan and pull a pillow over his eyes to blot out the bright afternoon light. After two weeks spent dreaming, he’d have thought he would never want to lie down again. Yet the creep of a deep weariness was too powerful to ignore, the bed very inviting—and he needed some time to digest all this.
Having burned so bright and hot, Peter’s boat sank fast in water over five hundred feet deep. Neither it nor the dead girl were ever recovered, and so they joined the litter of wrecks at the bottom of the largest and deepest of the Great Lakes. Which meant that Peter’s story—an engine room fire ignited by an electrical short—never could be investigated. According to Hannah, the Coast Guard and then the police questioned them but got nowhere. Simon was the only eyewitness who hadn’t been drinking, and he backed up Peter.
“I knew what I’d seen,” Hannah had said. “But it all happened so fast, I kept thinking I might be wrong. I didn’t know it was even a flare until Simon finally told me. Can you believe Penny still had the gun? After she shot it off, she crammed everything into her pockets.”
From below came the muted thump of a door: Hannah, leaving for the barn. The silence settled. His clock ticked off the seconds.
Why Hannah kept in touch with Simon was a mystery. All she said was, We got close. Even so, Simon’s suicide attempt was a shock. But Chris could see it. He understood the impulse.
Your father kills his girlfriend. Chris hugged the pillow to his eyes. You—the little kid—help him hide the evidence. You lie to the police because your dad says it’s the only way.
He remembered that, too. His father, reeking of booze, the smell of blood wreathing him like a fog: They’ll split us up, boy. Put you in a home where there won’t be no one to give a shit about you. You want to be safe? You don’t want boys and old men doing filthy things to you? You want a roof over your head? Then this is what you’re gonna say. This is what you’re gonna do.
“Shut up, Dad,” Chris muttered. “It was never about me. It was always about protecting you.” And keeping secrets until you wake up one day to find you live with two monsters, the one with your dad’s face and the thing rotting inside—
“Chris.”
The sound of his name felt unreal, like the slash of an exclamation point at the end of a sentence you hadn’t realized you’d written. The sound was short and sharp, like knuckles on a door, and knocked him from his thoughts. Before he could reply, he heard the doorknob rattle.
“Come in,” he said, not moving from the bed. Probably Hannah, back from the barn, wanting his dishes. When he didn’t hear the hinges complain, he waited a moment. “Hannah?”
The knock came again. This time, he tossed the pillow with a groan. “Hang on,” he said, swinging his feet to the floor. That was when he remembered. “I can’t unlock it from my side.”
Hannah said something he didn’t catch. “What?” he called. She said something else, but her voice was muffled. There was another rattle, followed this time by the scrape of the bolt. Without thinking much about it, he turned the knob and pulled open the door. “Sorry, I was—”
Everything in him—his brain, his breath and blood, the thump of his heart—stopped.
There, her lime-green scarf still twined around her neck, was Lena.