Then
The day after her parents are killed, Daphne sits alone in a police station. There is a clock on the wall, but it’s broken. The room is not an interrogation room, not like the gray brick boxes on TV, on the shows she’s not supposed to watch (they’ll rot your brain). There’s a table against the wall with an old coffeepot, a crust of burnt brown at the bottom. A minifridge sits beside it, and a bulletin board on the wall advertises the weekend church potluck and a dog walking service.
She is not supposed to feel like she is in trouble, she thinks, but that doesn’t mean that she isn’t.
The door opens. Officer Hadley walks in, looking grim. Rick Hadley is tall and lean, with brown eyes and a face that looks hastily assembled, the contours of his cheekbones and jaw and brow rough and jutting. He’s her father’s best friend, and she’s known him all her life, but today he looks at her like he’s never seen her before.
“Daphne,” he says by way of greeting. His voice is rough. She would say it sounds like he has been crying, but men like Rick Hadley and her father don’t cry.
“Hi, Mr. Hadley,” she says softly.
Chief Ellis comes in behind him. He’s a solid man, muscular, with thick fingers and broad hands. He shaves his hair down to the scalp, and today it’s pink with a fresh sunburn. He’s carrying a white bag shimmery with grease, a paper cup that steams. He sets them both in front of her, the corners of his eyes crinkling, though his mouth hardly bends enough to call it a smile. He takes a seat across from her. Hadley takes the other chair, off to her left where she has to turn her head to see him.
“Thought you might be hungry, Daphne,” Chief Ellis says. She nods. She twists her thumb against the hard plastic of her chair, as she has been doing for—how long? She doesn’t know. She looks again at the broken clock. Long enough that the skin is raw. She reaches for the bag; he pulls it back an inch. She freezes. She is in trouble, after all.
“I’d like to talk to you about what happened, Daphne,” Ellis says with all the gentleness in the world.
“You haven’t said much since this morning,” Hadley adds.
Daphne hasn’t said anything. She’s afraid she’ll say the wrong thing. Forget what Emma told her to say.
Ellis leans forward, folding his hands. The smell of whatever is in the bag, greasy and rich, makes her mouth water. “Daphne?” Ellis prompts. “You’ve got to talk to us, honey. We need your help to figure this out.”
He is not a kind man, but he can pretend at kindness adequately enough, and she’s as hungry for that as the food right now. She’ll let him lie to her. It’s only fair. Lies are all she has to give him, too.
“Okay,” she says. Her voice is a croak. He smiles like she has performed a miracle and pushes the cup toward her. She drags it the rest of the way across the table and hangs her head over it, inhaling the steam. Hot chocolate.
“Can you tell me what happened, Daphne? In your own words,” Ellis says.
She stares at the tabletop as she answers. It’s a fake wood veneer, the image of wood grain printed on cheap laminate. She bites her lip to focus. “Mom and Dad. They were—Mom was in the hall. There was blood on her shirt and on the floor, and—”
She’s practiced this in her head a million times, and still it’s coming out in sputters, like a hose with a kink in it. Ellis holds up a hand, stopping her.
“Start at the beginning. Where were you last night?”
“Right,” she says. “Sorry. We were—I wanted to sleep out in the tree house. We do that sometimes. When it’s warm. It was warm last night. We were out there.”
“All three of you? Emma and Juliette were with you?” Hadley asks sharply. Ellis gives him a look, which he ignores.
Emma screaming. The front door slamming.
Juliette pressing a finger to her lips.
Someone running through the woods.
Juliette stumbling in, dirty water dripping from her hair.
“Yes,” she says. “We were all together. We stayed up for a little while talking, and then we fell asleep.”
“Did any of you get up in the night?” Hadley asks. Ellis’s voice is exaggeratedly friendly; Hadley doesn’t bother to make it sound like anything but a demand.
She shakes her head.
“Are you sure, Daphne?” Ellis presses. “Maybe Juliette or Emma got up and you didn’t notice.”
“I would have noticed. I was sleeping in front of the door. They would have had to climb over me to get out,” she says, and then she thinks this is a mistake. Emma always sleeps by the door. Juliette is afraid of falling and Daphne used to roll around in her sleep, so it’s always been Emma. She stills, panicked, but Ellis just nods.
“All right.” He leans back in his chair. “When did you go back into the house?”
“I’m not sure,” she says. She frowns like she’s thinking. “What time did Emma call?”
“Five thirteen,” Hadley says impatiently, but she already knows. The number is burned into her memory.
“So maybe just after five,” she says. There is a split in the wood veneer; she can see the particleboard beneath. She digs her fingernail against the gap, pressing down, feeling the fake wood give.
“Why did you go inside?” Ellis asks.
“I had to pee,” she says, and her cheeks heat up.
“And what happened when you went back into the house?” he asks.
“I used the bathroom. The one downstairs,” she says.
“Your mother was in the hall. Not far away.”
She nods convulsively. “I didn’t turn on the light. I didn’t want to wake anyone up,” she says. “I didn’t see her until—until—” A sudden wave of queasiness rolls through her, and she whines, high-pitched, bending forward on herself.
“Hey, easy there,” Ellis says, reaching across the table to touch her shoulder. She whips away from him. She doesn’t want to be touched. His eyes crinkle again, but there’s no warmth in them. “You saw her when you came out of the bathroom?”
“Yes,” she whispers. Hadley is watching her intently. She’s certain she’s made a mistake already.
“What did you do then, Daphne?” Ellis prompts.
“I screamed, I think,” she says. “I ran over to her, and I called for my dad. And then I turned around and I saw him, too. Then Emma and Juliette were there. Juliette tried to help Mom but Emma stopped her, because she could tell—she didn’t think we should touch anything.”
“You could tell they were dead,” Ellis says.
She nods. “You could see things. In Daddy’s head.” She doesn’t mean to use the word, babyish, juvenile. She’s twelve, not four. But Ellis’s face softens.
“Look. You can see his brain.” A finger reaching toward the hole, smacked away.
She lets the shudder that she has been holding back ripple over her shoulders and pulls her knees to her chest. She likes to imagine that she can fold herself in half and in half again, over and over until she is a tiny speck drifting. Until she is nothing at all.
“And that’s when Emma called 911?” Ellis asks.
“Maybe not right away?” she ventures.
“Take your time,” he reminds her.
Daphne swallows, nods. “Juliette was freaking out. Emma was trying to calm her down. So not right away.”
“You weren’t freaking out?” he asks, eyebrows raising.
“Of course I was,” she says quickly. Too quickly. She sees the momentary softness hardening again. She doesn’t know how to act. What to say. What does a normal person do, when they find their parents dead? When they see bits of their father’s brain on the rug? She has no idea. She feels like an alien, every word and inflection skewed and wrong.
“So then you called 911,” Ellis says.
“Emma did.”
“That’s right. Emma called 911.” A nod. “And we pretty much know the story after that, don’t we?”
She doesn’t like that he calls it a story.
Ellis shifts a bit. His fingertips rest against the table. She looks over at the bag, inhaling the grease smell. He hasn’t said she can’t have it. He hasn’t said she can. He notices her looking, and his hand flattens against the table.
“Daphne, let’s go back a moment.” He uses her name a lot, she thinks. Like he wants it to sound like he knows her. “Now, you and your sisters spent the night in the tree house. And you didn’t hear anything from the house? Gunshots?”
“I don’t think so?” she says. “I woke up a few times, but I don’t remember it being because of a noise.”
“And you were up there all night. All three of you,” Hadley says intently, staring straight at her.
“Like I told you,” Daphne says, and can’t suppress the irritated snap to her words.
Ellis sighs. “That is what you told us,” he concedes. “But, Daphne, we know that isn’t true.”