Now
They went back to the house. They always ended up back at the house. It was like a gravity well, a black hole from which nothing could escape, not even light. JJ hadn’t been back here since the river. The accident. Hadley. She’d stayed at the hotel or the hospital. With Christopher Best at her side, she’d sat again in a cold room and recounted what had happened the night her parents died.
Most of it, at least.
She’d told them about the pills and the drinking, Logan Ellis and the Saracen house, the strange state she’d been in when she wandered back into the house. She’d told them about the gunshots and picking up the gun from the ground. She hadn’t killed her parents.
It should have been a relief.
Remembering that night was like seeing light bend through water. The angle kept changing when she moved her head. She remembered the water, the bridge, the blood, the gunshots, the gun. And if she held still, and tilted her head just the right way, she remembered the moment she turned toward the hallway.
Her mother is holding a gun. Juliette sees her, but despite the fact that she is standing only a few feet away, her mother doesn’t seem to see Juliette. She doesn’t seem to see anything at all.
Irene Palmer lifts the gun, turning her hand to rest the barrel against her sternum. Juliette steps forward. Reaches out for her, letting out a wordless cry. Her mother pulls the trigger. Hot flecks of blood burst across Juliette’s cheeks.
Like a glimmer of light, it fractured as the water rippled. She couldn’t be sure of it.
But she knew.
She sat in her childhood bedroom. The yellow wallpaper was the color of pus.
She had watched her mother shoot herself in the chest. Part of her had preferred her own guilt.
Irene had told Hadley she was afraid of Randolph. That she was getting ready to leave him. And then he’d found out she was preparing to turn him in. She must have thought she had no choice but to kill him.
Or maybe he had told her that one of the girls knew. Maybe she had realized she had to act, to protect her daughters.
JJ wished fervently that she could believe that was why.
Maybe she couldn’t face what she’d done afterward. Maybe it had always been the plan—maybe she had always known that there was no true escape.
It was strange to realize that she hadn’t known her parents enough to even guess why they’d done what they’d done. She’d spent so long trying to map her parents’ moods, but in the end they were mysteries to her.
She knew one thing for sure. All these years, she had struggled to tease apart her guilt and her grief, unable to tell one from the other. Only now that her guilt had been lifted away did she realize that there was nothing else there.
She might have grieved once. But there were no more ghosts in this house.
JJ was done being haunted.