Now
Three days after her husband’s death, Emma walked through the door of her house once again.
Gabriel drove her. She had her phone back, too. Apparently it hadn’t taken that long to scrape every crumb of her life off the device to sort through. Her car had been taken in, searched for evidence, and she had instructions on how to retrieve it. There was still crime scene tape fluttering here and there, and heavy shoes had tramped their way through the flower beds.
“You’re sure you want to be here?” Gabriel asked her.
“I always end up back here,” she answered. He looked puzzled, but she didn’t explain as she walked in, leaving him to close the door. Thick drifts of dust floated through the light, and she lifted a hand, stirring eddies through them.
“You can go,” she told Gabriel. He stood in the foyer, hands in his pockets, clearly reluctant to obey. She gave him a steady look. “I’m okay here. Really. You’ve been a huge help, but right now I just want to be alone.”
“You’re sure?”
“Please stop asking me that,” she said.
“Call me if you need anything,” he told her.
Gabriel closed the door behind him. Emma walked to the great room and stood there with her arms crossed, letting the scents and sensations of the house settle against her skin.
Hadley wanted her to believe that her mistake back then had been covering for her sisters when they didn’t deserve it. He was wrong. Her mistake had been covering for them without understanding what had happened.
She took out her phone and made a call. JJ picked up on the second ring.
“Emma,” she said, in a tone that suggested she had been dreading this call.
“I’m back at the house,” Emma said. “We need to talk. All three of us.”
“I know. We’ll come over,” JJ said.
“We?”
“I’m with Daphne. She called me. We had some things to talk about. I think you need to hear them, too. I think it’s time.”
Emma shut her eyes. She’d expected a fight. Without one, she wasn’t sure exactly what to do. “I’ll be here,” she said. The line went dead.
Emma waited on the porch for her sisters to arrive. They pulled up in separate cars. JJ got out and tucked her hands in her back pockets, coming up to the house with her eyes scuttling left and right nervously. Daphne approached at a steady gait, seemingly unbothered by the strange circumstances of their reunion.
This Daphne was far closer to the version she’d met at the wedding than the one on the cameras. She wore a sharp blazer over a crisp white top and rust-colored skirt, lace-up boots clinging to her calves. Her sunglasses flattered her face, and so did the pixie cut—no more blunt bob or brown hair, no more shapeless tunic. The transformation made the hair on the backs of Emma’s arms stand on end.
The three of them stood spaced a few feet apart, no one quite moving to greet the others. Only Daphne managed a smile. “Here we all are. I wasn’t sure this would ever happen,” she said, upbeat.
“Why don’t you both come in,” Emma suggested, to spare either her or JJ the need to formulate a response. She walked in, and the others trooped after her. She brought them into the living room. “If you want coffee or water or anything, you’re going to have to get it yourself.” She sat down, arms crossed, on one end of the couch.
“Oh, I’m fine,” Daphne said, with a determined kind of pleasantness. She set her purse down next to her on the floor as she took a seat in one of the armchairs. JJ walked to the other but perched on the arm instead of sitting in it, shoulders stooped inward defensively.
“So,” JJ said.
“So,” Emma echoed. She had tried to plan this moment, but every time she imagined it, the pieces fell apart in her mind. Her imagined conversations were braided fragments of words and anger and blame and confusion that didn’t add up to anything. “Where have you been?” she asked.
“You’re the one who took off,” JJ pointed out.
“I didn’t trust you,” Emma said.
JJ’s chin dipped sharply. “Yeah. I got that.”
“Let’s not start out being angry at each other,” Daphne said. She fidgeted with her sleeve.
“How long have you been in town?” Emma asked, looking to Daphne. “I know it’s been at least a week.”
“About that long,” Daphne acknowledged.
“You were spying on me.”
“Checking on you,” Daphne corrected. “I didn’t know if you’d want to see me. Or if I was ready to see you.”
Emma grunted. JJ’s rejection she’d always understood, in a way. Daphne’s was the one that broke her. She’d thought that the two of them understood each other. They didn’t like to get noticed, didn’t know how to play along. She’d been able to bear it, knowing that Daphne and Juliette had been estranged from each other, too. That all three of them had cut themselves adrift—or been cut. She’d been able to convince herself this was just the way that things were always going to be.
But now they were here together. They’d been talking. Sharing secrets. She was in the dark, and maybe she always had been.
“And was that what you were doing here?” she said, looking at JJ. “When you brought a bottle of wine to the house, were you checking up on me?”
JJ’s throat bobbed. “No,” she said.
“Then what?” Emma demanded.
“I didn’t know you wouldn’t be home,” JJ said. “I came to talk.” But she couldn’t look Emma in the eye.
“She went because we needed to get into the carriage house,” Daphne said.
“You needed to get the flash drive,” Emma guessed. Daphne looked almost pleased that Emma had figured it out.
“You dropped it that night—it was you, wasn’t it? I picked it up,” Daphne said. “Dad found me with it. I hadn’t seen much—at least nothing I understood—but he was angry, in that quiet way of his. The dangerous way. I overheard him talking on the phone, afterward. He told someone that one of us had seen, and that he’d take care of it. I didn’t know who he was talking to, but I knew it sounded dangerous, so after I found the bodies, I took it. And I hid it.”
“In the carriage house,” Emma said, and Daphne nodded.
“What was Dad up to?” JJ asked.
“I think I know. Some of it, at least,” Emma said. They looked at her quizzically. “He was involved in some kind of cargo robbery scheme. Moving the stolen goods. Mom knew about it. She was going to turn him in, I think. Or use it as leverage to get away from him.”
“I guess she finally got tired of him cheating on her,” JJ said.
“She was cheating on him, too,” Daphne said flatly.
“Are you sure?” JJ asked.
Daphne laughed a little. “Trust me. I’m sure.”
Emma thought of the bracelet. The makeup hidden away in her private drawer. Forever yours.
“Wait—Dad said one of us had seen. Did you look at what was on the drive?” JJ asked.
“Yeah. It was mostly numbers—ledgers, I think. It looked like two sets, maybe one real one and one fake? I couldn’t make heads or tails of it, but there were photos, too.”
“What kind of photos?” Emma asked.
“I only saw one. It was taken from a distance, like through a car window. There were three men. One of them was facing away and it was dark, so you couldn’t make him out at all. But Dad was there. He had a gun. I think it was at the old quarry,” Daphne said.
“What about the other man? You said there were three,” Emma asked.
Daphne shook her head. “I didn’t recognize him. All I remember was that he was white. Dark hair, I think? And he had a birthmark. Like a port-wine stain,” she said, pointing to her jaw.
Emma’s stomach twisted.
“That sounds like Kenneth Mahoney,” she said. She swallowed. “He disappeared. A couple of months before—before our parents died.”
That flash drive was evidence of her father’s misdeeds. Smuggling, yes. And a photo of Kenneth Mahoney. Of her father. Of a gun.
Kenneth had accused Randolph of smuggling, and then he’d disappeared. No one questioned it, because Kenneth Mahoney was a drunk. He’d disappeared before. And then there was his mother saying she knew for a fact he’d come back months later.
Daphne’s mouth opened a little, surprise and realization. “There was this man who came by the house a few times. I think he was a private detective. Mom must have hired him to get photos of Dad cheating or something, but he got more than he bargained for. I think he took those photos. He gave them to her and told her never to contact him again.”
“Okay,” Emma said slowly. “Okay. But what I don’t understand is why you needed the flash drive so badly. If what you’re saying is true, there’s nothing on there that would incriminate either of you.” She waited. JJ spoke first.
“It wasn’t just the flash drive.”
“JJ,” Daphne said, almost warningly.
“That night,” Emma began. Her voice failed. She tried again. “That night, I didn’t know what had happened, but I thought—I assumed—that one of you had killed them. Juliette was acting so strange, and she was wearing the wrong clothes. Daphne had blood on her. I thought the best way to protect you was to hide everything.”
“You made me change,” Daphne said. “You washed my hands. Under the fingernails, too. There was blood in my hair and you trimmed it off.”
She’d taken the clothes and sneaked back to the Saracen house, which by then was empty. She burned them in the old fireplace. Not quite well enough to obliterate them, but enough that no one ever connected the clothes to Daphne. The ashes in the fireplace and the graffiti on the walls were enough to start the Satanic rumors—and link the crime to the teens who used the Saracen house as their crash pad. Including, occasionally, Gabriel.
The hair, just a half inch from the end and enough to even it up and make it look natural, she’d scattered here and there in the woods as she went, letting the wind catch it and carry it away.
She’d checked Juliette’s clothes for any sign of blood, but she hadn’t been able to find anything. She’d debated burning them, too, but in the end she simply folded the clothes and put them away in the bottom of Juliette’s drawers. She supplied them each with fresh pajamas, changed her own clothes—leaving her discards in the hamper. And she’d told them what they should say.
They’d been sleeping in the tree house. Daphne had to go inside to use the bathroom. Emma figured Daphne was the least likely to be suspected. People always thought she was just a little girl, treated her like she was six instead of almost a teenager.
She kept it simple. The lie didn’t need to be complicated, it just needed to be consistent. But it had still fallen apart. Tiny mistakes that added up. Then the police finding out about Gabriel, combined with Hadley’s vendetta.
“I thought one of you must have done it,” Emma repeated carefully. She couldn’t quite look her sisters in the eye. “I didn’t want to know who. I didn’t want to know for sure.”
JJ’s teeth bit down on her lower lip until it blanched white. She looked like she was about to speak, but Emma cut her off.
“It doesn’t matter who killed them.” Her voice shook, but her words were clear. “We wouldn’t have all survived. We wouldn’t have all made it out of that house alive. This way we did. So it doesn’t matter who did it. It had to be done.”
“They didn’t deserve to die,” JJ said, but she didn’t sound like she believed it.
“Plenty of people die who don’t deserve it. They at least deserved it more than most,” Daphne said with a shrug. “They were abusive. The things they did, maybe they weren’t—maybe we never would have been taken away from them. We had everything we needed. Food and a good house and money and healthcare, and it’s not actually illegal to hit your children, as fucked-up as that is. But I wanted to—not die, but—”
“Disappear,” Emma said, hollow.
She’d never really had the chance to grieve her parents. The investigation had swallowed up any opportunity to pause and feel what was happening, and now it was like all that emotion had been stitched up inside of her and the seams were coming loose.
Did they deserve to die? She didn’t know. She’d hated them in a way that was indistinguishable from love, loved them in a way that might have been hatred. She had feared her father and resented her mother and wanted to leave forever, but there were good memories, too, there must be, she would remember them soon. A good birthday, a day at the park, a kind word. She knew they existed, but they skittered away from her groping mind now. All she could remember of her parents was the sound of a blade tearing through canvas and the darkening shade of red against her mother’s pale skin.
“I hated them,” JJ said. Her fingernails dug into the meat of her arm. “I thought that I could keep pretending to be Perfect Juliette until Daphne got out of school. But eventually they were going to find out what I was up to.”
“I never told anyone. Never,” Emma said. “Not about the blood, Daphne. Or your clothes, JJ. I kept quiet because I’d never been able to protect you. Not from Mom and Dad. But from the police … I could do that. But then you left me. Both of you.” She didn’t mean to sound so pathetic. “Did you think that I did it? Did you think—”
“I was afraid,” Daphne said, and Emma fell silent. “There were letters. Anonymous notes. They would say things like ‘I know’ and ‘You’ll never be safe.’ So I thought I had to keep quiet, or my sisters would die. I thought I could keep you safe by staying away.”
JJ looked startled. “I got the same kind of letters,” she said.
Emma frowned. “I never…” she started, but then she realized she was wrong. “I thought they were from Hadley. He used to call me all the time, I assumed the letters were him, too, trying to get me to talk.”
Daphne’s head tilted. “So you thought it was Hadley trying to get you to confess, and I thought they were someone trying to get us to keep quiet?” she asked. “Seems like whoever it was had a messaging problem.”
Emma barked out a laugh, startling all of them, and she clapped a hand over her mouth. She stood, pacing a bit, needing the movement.
She’d missed them. Her sisters.
They hadn’t always liked one another. They hadn’t always helped one another. But they’d been in this house together, and together, they’d stayed alive. They’d survived, and they’d needed one another to do it.
She didn’t want to know. She just wanted to be with them again. To be home. And for all the rest of it not to matter—their parents and Nathan and all of it.
“Emma,” Daphne said. She folded her hands in her lap, her expression apologetic.
She couldn’t avoid it. She couldn’t have her sisters and her ignorance, and let the rest of the world fade.
She had to know.
“Tell me,” she said, and they did.