Now
It took Emma three tries to remember the password, but then she was looking at camera feeds. Gabriel had brought a laptop into the guest room and sat beside her on the bed as she pulled up the footage from the night Nathan died. Emma watched with her heart in her throat, but if she had hoped for a smoking gun, a perfect image of a killer stalking toward the carriage house, she was disappointed.
There were two cameras. One above the front door, which captured the courtyard drive but didn’t show the carriage house itself; and one at the back of the house, overlooking the woods. The back door camera hadn’t caught anything more interesting than a deer picking its way across the lawn. The front was what Emma had been more interested in anyway. She plugged in 7:30 P.M., the night of the argument, and sped up the footage.
There she was, walking out to the car. Her shoulders were stiff, her gait tense. She got into the car and drove away.
About fifteen minutes later, another car pulled in. The memory of the wineglasses in the dishwasher flashed through her mind, and for a moment she thought of Addison—but the car was JJ’s. JJ walked up to the front steps carrying a bottle of wine and knocked.
Emma caught her breath as Nathan emerged from the house. The camera only showed the back of his head—it didn’t show his face at all. But still her heart squeezed, and she only realized she had made a sound when Gabriel put his hand on her shoulder.
“We don’t have to watch this,” Gabriel reminded her. “I could do it, or you could give it to your lawyer.”
Emma shook her head. “No. It’s fine. It doesn’t show the carriage house. It won’t show the murder.” She made herself finish the sentence, refusing to trail off into the mercy of silence.
On the screen, JJ and Nathan had disappeared inside. “Did JJ tell you she was there last night?” Gabriel asked.
“No. She failed to mention that,” Emma said, voice brittle.
“You don’t think that she and Nathan…”
“No,” Emma said immediately, but what did she know? She remembered the way Nathan had looked at her. JJ said she was gay, but that didn’t make it impossible.
It was only twenty-five minutes later that JJ emerged, striding out to her car with her hands cupped around her elbows. She threw herself in and sat there a moment. Emma couldn’t see her face from this angle, but JJ suddenly slammed her palm against the wheel and then peeled away, kicking up gravel as Nathan stepped out on the porch. He watched her go with a frown. His head turned, as if he was looking toward the carriage house. He stepped off the porch.
Nathan walked to the carriage house and left the view of the camera. There was nothing for a long time, just the lengthening of shadows, the dimming of the light. An occasional car driving past. Maybe the police could at least track those people down and ask if they saw anything odd.
The car pulled back into the drive. Emma returning. She walked back toward the house, stopping to look toward the carriage house. Emma tried to remember what she’d been feeling, but her grief was superimposed over it. When she tried to remember looking at the carriage house, what she felt was desperate agony, the need to go inside. She willed the Emma in the video to turn. To walk over there and knock on the door.
But instead, the Emma on the video walked into the house.
Stillness. Seconds streamed by, minutes ticking over. Then an hour. Emma would have been in bed by now, grateful for once for the fatigue that dragged her so inescapably into sleep each night.
Then, suddenly, Nathan veered into the frame again, moving at comical speed, and vanished inside. It happened so fast that he was gone before Emma could scramble to pause, rewind, slow the footage down.
When she played it back at regular speed, he came jogging toward the house with an intense expression on his face, and he was carrying something. Holding it up like he’d been examining it.
“Is that a flash drive?” Gabriel asked, squinting. Emma’s stomach dropped. She rewound frame by frame and paused on the clearest image. The object was the length of a thumb, squared off at the end like a USB drive. The resolution wasn’t good enough to see anything better than that.
“I think so,” Emma replied. She tried to keep her voice neutral. There was no reason it would be that flash drive. And no reason that if it was, it meant anything, she told herself.
“That’s interesting,” Gabriel said.
Emma thought of Nathan’s laptop, all his gear splayed out across the table. The compressed air. The USB adaptor. “I think he was trying to see what was on the drive.”
“Sure. That makes sense. Find a weird flash drive, the first thing you want is to know what’s on it,” Gabriel said, nodding. “It just seems a little odd that he would act so urgent about it.”
What had happened to the drive that night? It had been in her pocket, and then …
It hadn’t been there later. She was sure of it. But how had it ended up in the carriage house?
Nathan was inside for almost an hour. When he emerged again, he had his phone out. He was calling someone. Putting it to his ear. He looked agitated. His hand rubbed the back of his head. Then he nodded. He hung up and went back inside. The conversation had lasted less than two minutes. He was inside for another three, and then emerged, the flash drive in his hand again, his phone sticking out of his back pocket. He walked toward the carriage house and out of sight.
“It looks like he found something on the drive,” Gabriel noted. “Who did he call?”
“I have no idea,” Emma said.
Gabriel reached over to speed up the footage yet again, but the time flew by and Nathan never emerged. There was no more movement at all. Not until the sky lightened into morning and Emma walked out of the house. Emma went to stop the recording, but Gabriel restrained her with a gentle hand. “The woman who helped you,” he reminded Emma.
The footage kept playing. Emma walked into the carriage house.
Now Emma shut her eyes. She tried not to play it in her mind again. Stepping inside. Walking forward, knowing what she was going to find, thinking that knowledge somehow made it impossible. That what she feared couldn’t come true. She was anxious. She was paranoid. Her fears were not supposed to be real.
“Damn,” Gabriel said. Emma’s eyes popped open. She was looking at an empty courtyard.
“What is it?” Emma asked.
“Here, look.” Gabriel rewound, and Emma watched as her mirror self appeared at the edge of the frame, supported by a woman in a baggy teal shirt and black leggings. They skittered backward, the woman lowering Emma to the ground before gliding back out of the frame. Gabriel played it forward, and Emma watched the scene unfold properly, with the woman helping her to her feet and up the stairs.
“You never see her face,” Emma said. “Maybe when she comes out?”
But when the woman emerged from the house, her face was turned slightly away and down as she dug in her purse. Then she walked across the drive, out of the gate, and out of sight. Emma sat back with a sigh.
“Maybe someone in the neighborhood would recognize her,” Gabriel suggested.
“Maybe.”
“Hold on,” Gabriel said, frowning. He reached over and pulled the laptop toward her. His fingers tapped on the keys and the touch pad. “There. Look.” He spun the laptop around so Emma could see the screen again. It was paused on a view of the courtyard. Empty. The time stamp indicated that it was right after Emma left for the bar.
“What am I looking at?” Emma asked.
“There, on the street,” Gabriel said. He pointed. There was a woman on the sidewalk, walking by with a terrier at her heels.
“That’s the same woman,” Emma said. “Okay, so we know she has a dog and she likes to go on walks.”
“Totally normal. Except look at this.” Gabriel skipped forward. It was night now, and dark. And the woman was there again. Or at least, it looked like the same woman—no dog this time, though, and it was hard to tell from this distance, with only the streetlights to illuminate her.
Emma scrubbed through the footage again, eyes fixed on the space beyond the gates. She watched police cars arrive.
Watched the woman walk past, leading a black lab on a red leash. “Different dog,” she noted. This time, the woman was looking at the house. The camera caught her full-on, in daylight, and Emma’s mouth dropped open.
“Emma?” Gabriel asked, looking concerned.
“I think that’s Daphne,” Emma said. “When I saw her at the wedding her hair was blond and much longer, but … yeah, I think that’s her.”
Daphne had been watching them. Daphne had been there, when she found Nathan’s body. Daphne had been in the house.
Daphne had been in the tree house, covered in blood.
Emma stared at the frozen image. That night, after she’d found the money—she’d run. She’d tripped. The flash drive had been in her pocket, but it must have fallen out. She hadn’t seen Daphne in the tree house—she’d assumed she was asleep. But what if her little sister had seen her? It was the only way she could think that the flash drive would have gotten back inside. Assuming it was the same flash drive.
She needed to know what was on that thing. “Gabriel, I think I know where that flash drive came from,” she said. “If it’s the same one I’m thinking of, my mother had it hidden away. I think … I think it might have had something to do with what your dad found out. About what my father was doing.”
“You think he was actually right about something going on,” Gabriel said, and Emma nodded. He rubbed his hand over his chin and mouth.
“You’re sure you don’t know anything more about what he thought he’d found?” Emma asked.
“No, but—hold on.” Gabriel stood and walked out without explanation. Emma sat, feeling adrift. The still image of the driveway glowed at her. She shut the laptop with a shudder.
A few minutes later Gabriel returned carrying a cardboard box, which he set on the bed. “Dad’s stuff,” he said. “This is everything he left behind. Nana’s held on to it, for when he comes back.” Disdain and sadness mingled in his voice. “He said he’d figured it all out. He claimed he had proof. I remember he had … Here we go.”
He pulled out a palm-size spiral notepad. The cover was battered, the pages bent up at the end. He flipped through it, and Emma’s eyes swam at the dense sets of numbers, scribbled without apparent regard for readability or the orientation of the lines. It was like he’d been trying to get it all down as fast as possible. Some of them looked like they might have been dates or weights or maybe tracking numbers, but she couldn’t say for sure.
“I thought maybe looking at it again would make it comprehensible,” Gabriel said with a helpless shrug. “I never could make heads or tails of it. You?”
Emma took it from him. “I have no idea what I’m looking at,” she admitted. Maybe an expert would be able to tease some meaning out of this, but it was so chaotic she doubted it. Damp had gotten inside the box at some point, and the ink had bled, rendering whole sections unintelligible.
She turned to the last page with any text on it. Instead of the wild bramble of numbers, there were six dates written out. The earliest date was in 2008; the last one, early 2009. “Do these mean anything to you?” Emma asked.
Gabriel shook his head. Emma grabbed the laptop again. She opened the lid and quickly minimized the open window, pulling up another. She plugged the first date in, but the results were too broad. A thousand things happened on any given day.
“Try to filter by local stuff?” Gabriel suggested.
She tried Arden Hills, then went statewide. She’d crawled through five of the dates without anything popping up that seemed significant and was ready to give up when the final date brought up a result that stopped her in her tracks.
ONE DEAD IN TRUCK ROBBERY
Emma clicked through with her heart beating wildly. Her eye caught on fragmented phrases—string of robberies—state task force—before she calmed down enough to read through the whole thing. The article described the latest in a string of cargo thefts—both of goods and of trucks. None of the previous robberies had been violent. This one was different. Cargo had been stolen off a truck in New Hampshire; its driver was found nearby with a head injury, and died several days later. It looked like some kind of scuffle had resulted in him falling and hitting his head. Unintentional, maybe.
Still murder.
“Try those other dates again,” Gabriel said, but she was already nodding, typing them in. This time, she added robbery and cargo, and there they were. Each of the dates corresponded to a cargo theft somewhere within about a hundred miles of Arden Falls.
“Palmer Transportation almost shut down at the beginning of the recession,” Emma said raggedly. “Dad wasn’t as good at managing the business as his father. But things evened out. Good luck, he said.”
“He was moving stolen goods.”
“Or he was the one arranging the thefts in the first place,” Emma said.
“But then someone died. So they stopped,” Gabriel said, filling in the blanks.
“But then your dad noticed something weird with the weights,” Emma continued. “So he confronts my father. Maybe that’s how my mom found out about it. She started collecting her own evidence.”
“And Dad took off,” Gabriel said. He straightened up. “Jesus. I didn’t believe him.”
“My dad didn’t like to be challenged,” she said quietly. “Your dad disappeared. What if he didn’t just leave?”
Gabriel shook his head. “He came back, though. You heard Nana. He was in town right … right when your folks were killed.” He swallowed.
“You don’t think—”
“He blamed your dad for ruining his life,” Gabriel said.
“You think he’d be capable of it?”
“Honestly? I have no idea. One of the things I’ve realized as I’ve gotten older is that I really didn’t know the man at all,” Gabriel said, voice laced with old pain that she understood, bone-deep.
The older she got, the less she thought she knew anyone at all.