Then
Daphne kneels beside her mother and stares at Juliette, standing in the doorway to the study.
Juliette has the gun.
She holds it at her side with a strange ease, so relaxed that it’s almost as if she’s forgotten she’s holding it. There is a streak of blood on the side of her thumb and a speckling of it on her shirt and her face, fine glistening drops that smear when she raises her hand to wipe her cheek. “What are you doing, Daph?” she asks, her voice oddly toneless.
“I—I was—” Daphne says. She looks down and realizes her mother has stopped breathing. The pulse at her neck has gone still. Out of her misery, Daphne thinks.
“Come look,” Juliette says. She gestures with the gun. Its barrel sweeps over Daphne and she cringes.
“Juliette, please don’t—”
“Come on,” Juliette says, impatient. Daphne lurches to her feet, balling her hands into fists and forcing herself to approach. Juliette doesn’t quite have the gun pointed at her, but it isn’t pointed very far away, either. None of it makes sense. Juliette shouldn’t be here. Juliette shouldn’t have the gun.
In the study, their father’s body is slumped in his chair. There is no misery for him. No way he is still alive, or lived for more than a moment after the bullet smashed through his skull. Juliette approaches and Daphne follows.
“Look. You can see his brain,” Juliette says, pointing, her finger so close to the wound that it almost touches.
Daphne slaps it away with a sound of horror.
Juliette stares at her. “Is this real?” she asks. Her face crumples. She looks like she’s going to cry. What’s wrong with her? “No, no, no, no,” she’s saying, and she puts her hands to her head, the gun still gripped in one of them.
“Juliette. Juliette, stop,” Daphne says. She has her finger on the trigger. Daphne can see the bullets still in the gun, two chambers in the revolver empty. “Juliette, put down the gun, please.”
Juliette looks in seeming surprise at the gun in her hand. Daphne reaches for it, and Juliette doesn’t resist as she takes it. Her fingers wrap around the barrel. Her fingerprints are on it, she thinks. Juliette’s, too. They have to get rid of it.
Juliette is stumbling away. She makes choked sounds that are almost like sobbing but more animal. Daphne starts after her but then she stops. Her eyes drift across the room, to the drawer where her father put the flash drive.
She still doesn’t know what the files on the flash drive meant, but she knows they were dangerous. Could still be dangerous. She darts across the room. She snatches the drive from the drawer and turns. She is staring right into her father’s face. His eyes are open, bulging. There is a ragged hole at his temple. Even so, she half expects him to straighten up. To fix her with those hard, angry eyes and demand to know what she thinks she is doing.
She runs past him into the hallway. Juliette stands in the great room, eyes unfocused.
“They’re going to kill me,” she says, looking at Daphne.
“Stay here,” Daphne begs her. She grabs the key to the carriage house from its hook by the front door. Inside, she moves aside boxes until she finds a plastic toolbox abandoned at the back of the building. She grabs a rag, wraps the flash drive in it, and shoves it inside. She takes the gun to the corner of the building, where the floorboards have rotted through—another thing their father is always about to get around to—and the dirt underneath is visible. She digs down with a spade fetched from a table. Six inches deep, she buries the gun, and then pulls a crate over the hole to hide it. She runs back into the house.
Juliette is gone. There are bloody boot prints leading to the back door but no Juliette. Daphne runs outside. She opens her mouth to call for Juliette, then shuts it. Juliette’s gone. She’s alone. Her parents are dead inside and no one is here to tell her what to do.
“Juliette?” she whispers into the dark. There’s no answer.
She doesn’t know what to do. And so she does what she always does when things get to be too much. She climbs into the tree house, and curls on her side. She squeezes her eyes shut and she doesn’t cry, though she thinks probably she should.
She drifts off to sleep.