Now
The house had not changed—it had stagnated. Locked up away from the world, its wallpaper had yellowed, peeled. Its floors were grimy, its windows unwashed. The furniture lay under shrouds of thick plastic, and the plastic itself was coated with something gritty and strangely sticky under Emma’s fingertips.
She started with the ground floor, piling the plastic coverings in heaps in the corners. She moved through the sunroom, the wicker chairs faded to dingy gray, the damask pattern of the cushions nearly indistinguishable. She skirted around the piano in the great room, avoiding it for now, and drifted through the living room, where a massive and now worthless old TV dominated the space. Then there was the formal dining room, the kitchen and breakfast room, the library, the study.
She moved the rug from the foyer into the hall to cover up the stain. It looked incongruous, the wrong size and the wrong shape for the space, making it obvious that it was covering something up. After a minute of staring at it, she moved it again. At least there weren’t any stains in the study—the rug that had once sat under her father’s favorite armchair was gone, and so was the chair itself.
Nathan joined her as she went upstairs. The doors on the second floor were shut firmly, and she stood at the top landing, unmoving. Nathan’s hand rested on the small of her back.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“Not remotely,” she said. But she squared her shoulders. Her room first. That seemed easiest.
The door stuck, and she had to shove at it before it sprang open. She blinked in the dim light. She flicked the light switch. The bulb was out. Nathan walked past her to pull open the curtains, sending out a cloud of dislodged dust. Sunlight slanted over the white bedspread, the pale pink wallpaper, the delicate white vanity in the corner next to a matching dresser.
“Huh,” Nathan said, turning in a circle to take it in. He gave her a curious look. “I definitely thought I was going to learn something about your boy band preferences, but you don’t have a single poster.”
He was trying to keep things light, but she grimaced. “We weren’t allowed to put up posters. My mom chose everything in here,” she said. When she’d left, she hadn’t taken much. A suitcase full of clothes, a few odds and ends. The books lined up on the dresser were the sweet teen romances her mother bought for her. Emma had always preferred horror and science fiction, but her mother disapproved of anything violent or contrary to reality.
“Should we check out the master?” Nathan asked, somewhat unsubtly. Emma gave a stiff nod. Her parents’ sanctum. Opening the door felt like a transgression, but with Nathan at her back she didn’t feel she could stop.
Her mother’s taste suffused this room, like the rest of the house. Airy and light, sophisticated and classic. Only the bed broke the mood—huge, and carved out of dark oak that gave it a weight and intensity that so overpowered the rest of the decor that it was like a gravity well in the middle of the room.
She walked across to the bed and ran a palm over the bedspread. The fabric was cool to the touch. Her hand came away dusty.
“Should we … I mean, are we going to sleep in here?” Nathan asked doubtfully.
“It would be ridiculous not to, wouldn’t it? The rest of the beds are twins,” Emma pointed out.
“It won’t be too weird?”
She’d expected it to feel that way, but now that she was standing here, it felt more like walking into an unfamiliar hotel room than wading into the past. With a sudden surge of energy, she grabbed hold of the bedspread and yanked, pulling it off the bed and letting it fall in a heap.
“Help me, will you?” she asked. Together they stripped the bed. She marched to the hall closet, where she found a set of linens, stale-smelling but serviceable, and made up the bed again, fresh. She stared at it. Nodded once. Looked at Nathan. “This is our house now. Until we leave, it’s ours, not theirs. What happened here doesn’t matter. It can’t matter. That’s the only way this works.” The only way she could bear it.
“Okay,” he said immediately, though his eyes were troubled.
She walked back out into the hall. The sacred, forbidden places of her sisters’ rooms, she invaded, flinging open each one in turn. The soft yellow stripes of Juliette’s room and the pale green of Daphne’s. Chosen, of course, by their mother. Daphne’s closet was open and cleared out, and with a jolt Emma realized she must have come back at some point for her things.
She opened Juliette’s closet, but most of her clothes were still there—all pale pastels and whites, delicate filmy dresses and cashmere cardigans. They all had clothes like that, but Juliette was the only one who would have picked them out on her own. She patiently straightened her hair each morning, taming its wild waves, or braided it into an orderly plait. She dressed in skirts and white stockings and used only the soft shimmer of lip gloss their mother approved of, tiny silver studs in her ears that she had waited for her thirteenth birthday to get. She practiced piano dutifully for an hour every day, two hours on Sundays, and never made excuses to get out of going to church.
Juliette had been the perfect daughter. Everything that Emma couldn’t be. It wasn’t that she hadn’t tried. For years she’d contorted herself to fit into the mold that her mother wanted, but she’d failed. No matter how hard she worked at it, she was scrappy and sloppy and sharp-tongued and devious and unladylike, and finally she’d broken. If she was going to be the bad daughter no matter what she did, then she’d do whatever she liked.
And all the while, Juliette had yes, Mother-ed and no, Mother-ed her way into the golden light of her parents’ approval. Never strayed a step out of line.
Except …
Emma stared at the orderly line of Mary Janes and ballet flats in the closet, and she thought of that night. Juliette stumbling through the door, her feet bare, her hair soaked, her clothes dry. Not her clothes. Clothes that Emma had never once seen her wear—a black tank top, an oversize red flannel button-up, black jeans that clung to her like a second skin.
“Your sisters,” Nathan said from the doorway. She looked up, her mind scrambling for purchase, reorienting to the here and now.
“My sisters?” she repeated.
“Is this why you’re estranged?” he asked. He hesitated. “Do they think that you…?”
He was an easy man to read, Nathan. It had always comforted her. But now, she wished she could believe his lie. Believe that he believed. But it was there in his eyes, that glistening doubt. The maybe of it all, the what if.
Maybe she did do it.
What could she say? I don’t know if they think that I did it. She thought Daphne must. When Emma had come for her, riding in on her white horse—well, a twenty-year-old sedan that coughed and rattled—meaning to whisk her away from her foster home, Daphne had refused to even come to the door. Emma had sent the wedding invitation in a fit of vain hope—the same reason she sent birthday and Christmas cards every year, only giving up when she started getting Juliette’s back with No Longer at This Address written in her sister’s perfect handwriting.
But Daphne had shown up, she and Christopher Best—“an old family friend,” she’d told Nathan, which was technically true—joining an anemic trickle of friends to fill out Emma’s side of the church. Daphne had spoken to no one, and at the end of the evening had fixed Emma with a look and said, “I’d hoped for more from you.” And then she’d left.
Maybe they thought she’d done it, and that was why they had abandoned her.
Or maybe it was not because of blame, but guilt.
Blood drying on the hallway floor.
Juliette in a stranger’s clothes.
Daphne, her sleeves soaked with blood, sleeping soundly in the tree house.
She hadn’t known what happened. She hadn’t wanted to know. She had taken care of it. She had accepted the suspicion, had even leaned into it at times, to pull the attention away from her sisters.
They had paid her back by abandoning her. And now Nathan was looking at her with that quavering light in his eyes. With all the questions that she had choked on all those years ago. He wouldn’t ever say it. But he would think it, every day. And eventually, he would walk away, just like Juliette. Just like Daphne.
She would be alone again. It was only a matter of time, unless she could make him believe.
But how could she, when there was still so much she’d kept from him?
The morning after they arrived in Arden Hills, Emma sat across the kitchen table, in the seat that had once been her mother’s. She’d sat there each morning with her reading glasses at the end of her nose, doing the crossword puzzle in pearls. It is important, she always said, to keep one’s mind sharp.
She said it that way, too. One’s mind. She always talked like that, with a stiff precision she believed elevated her. She did not believe that achieving a certain station in life meant she could relax her standards, and shook her head at the women she called her friends who wore sweatpants in public despite the diamonds on their wrists.
Nathan was opening drawers in the kitchen, determined to sort and catalog every item in this place. She was reluctant to get rid of anything, but he insisted that rusted can openers and ancient packs of sandwich bags, at least, could go. She had taken charge of a box of papers, sitting at the kitchen table and searching for any documents that might prove important.
The windows set in the back door were filthy. She could barely make out the trees in the back. She couldn’t see the tree house at all. If it was still there. Go far enough past the tree house, and you got to the old house in the woods, its roof long rotted, its walls home to countless generations of small animals. Stark photographs of the graffiti-covered walls and the refuse-choked fireplace had been splashed all over the papers, after what the police found there. Some kid had drawn a pentacle on the wall at some point in the past, and suddenly Emma had a “known association with Satanism.”
“Why did people suspect you?” Nathan asked, startling her. He was frowning at the paperwork. “There must have been a reason, right?”
“It’s complicated.” She wetted her lips, looking away. Her eyes fix on a discolored patch of crown molding. She wondered if it was water damage. She had no idea what shape the house was in. Gabriel hadn’t said anything about there being major damage, but he hadn’t mentioned the graffiti, either. Though the last time he’d sent any kind of update was at least a year ago. The emails were always short, impersonal. She never replied. She assumed he preferred it that way. “It’s okay. You can wonder. Everyone does. If it matters, I didn’t do it.”
“If it matters? Of course it matters if you killed your parents,” Nathan said, appalled.
“I mean if it matters that I say so. I’ve said it all along, and it hasn’t stopped people from assuming that I’m lying. No, I didn’t kill my parents. No, I wasn’t in the house when they died. No, I don’t know who killed them.”
“Then why do people think you did?” he asked insistently. He shut the drawer he had been sorting through. The black trash bag beside him bulged already.
She spread her hands. “Lots of reasons. It makes a good story, for one. And people knew I’d been fighting with them. Juliette was the golden child. I couldn’t compete. So I rebelled. I was the bad daughter, so it made sense I turned on them, right? People said I had an older boyfriend and the two of us plotted together to murder them. Or that I was friends with Satanists and it was a human sacrifice to the devil.”
He snorted. “Seriously?”
She made a face. “The Satanic Panic was alive and well in Arden Hills.”
“And were you friends with Satanists?” he asked, and it took her a beat to realize he was joking.
“No. That would require having friends at all.” She chased it with a brittle laugh, but Nathan didn’t look amused.
“They never arrested you, though,” Nathan said.
“I had a good lawyer,” she said. “He stepped in, did what he could to protect me. You met him, actually. Christopher Best. He was at the wedding.”
“You said he was a family friend.”
“He was. One of my dad’s friends,” she said. They’d been close in high school, and “Uncle Chris” had come by the house now and then, always with a kiss on the cheek for Irene and gifts for the girls. When he’d shown up after the murders, the first thing he told her was to stop talking. Then he’d gotten rid of the lawyer the state had given her, who seemed mostly interested in getting her to say the whole thing had been Gabriel’s idea. If it hadn’t been for Chris, she might still be in prison.
“They never found out who really did it?” Nathan asked.
“No.” She set aside a phone bill, picked up an invoice for detailing on her father’s car—it went on the stack with the telephone bill.
“I don’t care what other people think. Or what they say,” Nathan said, nobly enough. She knew it wasn’t true, but she imagined he believed it. Few people cared as much about what other people thought as Nathan Gates. He wanted to be liked—or rather, he was desperate not to be disliked. So much that he whittled down every edge that he had, in case someone should find them distasteful.
She had never before thought she could be another piece of him that needed to be carved away.
“If you didn’t do it, who did?” Nathan asked, musing out loud.
“I have no idea,” she said, not looking at him. She picked up another bill. Doctor’s visit for Daphne. Memories eddied through her mind.
Daphne with her wheezing breath, face pale, eyes panicked. Her mother, face like stone, holding the inhaler out of reach.
Daphne with her sleeves soaked in blood, blinking away sleep.
Daphne seizing Emma’s hand, and whispering four words.
“No one can know.”