And yet how had I missed that she was there. She had arrived at the party. But somehow she’d ended up back on the cliffs behind her house, washing up on Breaker Beach. How?
I edged the car away from downtown, looping around the back roads to avoid the traffic, before cutting back toward the coast and the Sea Rose. All along, the night played over in my mind. The things I had told the police and the things I hadn’t.
Faith taking a swing at Parker outside, breaking the window. Connor arguing with Faith in the shadows after, by the time Luce came to find me. The bedroom door had been locked. I’d wanted to find the tape in the bathroom to secure the window, but someone else had been in there. I’d slammed my hand on the bedroom door, but no one had answered.
Had Sadie been in that room when I’d pounded on the door? I’d found her phone in the house—in that very room. Maybe no one had moved it there. Maybe it was Sadie all along who had lost it. Placed it. Hidden it.
But that didn’t make sense. How had no one seen her leaving? No one had seen her at all, not that they were saying. Someone would’ve noticed her—how could you not? Greg Randolph, surely. And we would’ve seen her if she’d left through the back patio, walking down the path, heading toward the B&B parking lot.
But. The lights had gone out, the commotion on the patio. Ellie Arnold falling—or pushed—into the pool. She insisted she was pushed. She was adamant about it, furious that we didn’t believe her.
We had all moved to the back of the house then. Had been drawn to the scream, the chaos, like moths to a flame.
Had Sadie sneaked out the front while we were distracted?
I tried to picture it. Someone needing to get her out of the house. Looking frantically for the best option. The back door, no longer a choice. The car at the B&B, too far. What would they do? A faceless person, looking through the bathroom cabinets, the dresser drawers—for anything. Looking through her purse, seeing the keys there. Finding mine instead.
The tire tracks in the grass I’d seen the next day when Faith’s father dropped me off—because my car had been blocked in.
I sucked in a breath. She had been there. What if she’d been in this very car.
I pulled over abruptly, at the curve of the road heading back into town, staring at the passenger seat. Looking for signs of injury. I ran my hands over the beige upholstery—worn and weary. I jerked up the emergency brake and looked under the seat. There was nothing but dirt, sand, debris—a year of memories.
But I remembered the next morning, when I’d returned for the car. How I’d sat in the seat, feeling a vague unfamiliarity to it. I’d thought, at the time, that it was my entire world, my perspective shifting at the loss of Sadie. But now . . .
My head spun, and I turned the car off. I walked around back, hands trembling, and slipped the key into the trunk lock. A dim light flicked on, and I peered into the empty space.
It smelled faintly of fabric, of gasoline, of the sea.
My hands shook as I ran my fingers across the material. The dark felt was slightly matted, covered with fragments of fibers. It had pulled away from the edges, peeling at the corners, from both time and use.
I took a deep breath to steady myself. Maybe this was just my imagination going three steps too far—forward and back.
I pulled up the flashlight of my phone and shone it into the back corners of the trunk—but it was completely empty. There was a darker spot in the corner, closer to the front, on the right. Just a slight discoloration—I ran my fingers across it but couldn’t be sure of what it was. Vodka, beer—half-empty bottles that could’ve spilled the night of the party. Or a leaking grocery bag in the months that followed. The car was old. It could’ve been anything.
I set the phone down so I could get a closer look, and the light shone up at the surface, catching on a groove on the underside of the metal roof. At the opposite end, on the left. I ducked my head underneath, ran my fingers over it. A dent, some scratches. Another dent beside it. My knuckle fit in the groove. I ran my hands against the cool underside of the trunk. A web of scratches near the seam.
It could be anything. It could be nothing. My mind, like Sadie’s, picturing all the ways death could be so close. My fingers smoothed back the felt peeling away from the corner, and a glint of metal caught in the beam of the flashlight at the corner. I leaned closer, body half tilting into the trunk as I picked it up.
It was a small piece of metal. Probably lost from a bag. Gold, and spiraled, and—
I dropped the metal. Stepped back. Looked again.
Her gold shoes that had been in the box of evidence—missing a piece of the buckle. I’d thought because they’d been worn down, the holes of the strap pulling, the stitching showing, the bottoms scuffed. But the missing piece of her buckle—here, in the trunk of my car.
I looked at the indentations and scratches again.
Like she’d kicked her shoes against the roof of the trunk. Over and over again.
Oh God. Oh God oh God. I dropped the light, dropped my hands to the bumper to steady myself.
Sadie had been in this trunk, alive. Sadie had been here, trying to fight. Trying to live.
I slid to the ground. The cool pavement beneath my knees, my hands braced on the bumper, the bile rising in my throat. The only light on the dark road was from the trunk, a sickly yellow, and I couldn’t get a full breath. Sadie. Sadie had been there. Inches away at the party. And she had been here. In my car, waiting for me to find her. To save her.
The scratches on the trunk—she had wanted to live. All those years courting death, joking about it, and she had fought it. Given it everything she had. Sadie, who I once believed could overcome anything.
I couldn’t breathe. Just a wheeze as I struggled for air.
The headlights from another car shone down the road, and I pulled myself up on the bumper to steady myself. The wheels came to a stop behind me, and the car door opened, but the engine continued running, the lights illuminating the empty road.
“You okay there?” A man’s voice.
I turned to face him, but I had to raise a hand to shield my face from the blinding light, and my eyes watered, picturing Sadie. Sadie alive and then dead. Somewhere between here and there.
I blinked to focus the image before me, and the tears escaped.
“Whoa, whoa.” The shadow in front of the lights grew larger. Broad shoulders, hands held out in front of him. Detective Ben Collins stood in front of me. He placed a hand on my elbow, another on my shoulder, and guided me away from the car to the curb.
The trunk gaped open in front of me, and my stomach heaved again, so I had to rest my head on my arms, folded across my knees. He crouched down so his gaze was level with mine, and I shook my head, trying to focus.
“Have you been drinking?” he asked gently. Close enough to smell the mint on his own breath.
“What? No, no.” I took a deep breath, slowly raised my head.
He looked back at the car, then at me. I finally understood how Sadie had gotten from the party to the bluffs that night. The absolute horror of the thing.
Finally, I had a piece of evidence that proved what I had believed, that everyone would take seriously—a place to point the investigation. My car, with the trunk open, where Sadie had been—except everything circled back to me.
I couldn’t say anything without implicating myself.
He couldn’t search that car without a reason—unless he thought I was drunk or high. I had to get ahold of myself.
“Carsick,” I said, hand to my stomach. “And . . .” I waved my hand around uselessly, searching—
“I know, I know,” he said, patting my knee. “The dedication tomorrow. Everything coming back. I know you two were close.” He let me sit there in silence, looking over his shoulder. “Did you need something from the trunk?” He gestured to the car, the sickly dim light, beckon
ing.
“No. I thought I had some water, something to drink, in there. I don’t, though.” I didn’t want him to look. Didn’t want him to see what I had seen, discover what I had just discovered. I sucked in a breath, and it sounded like a sob.
“Sit tight,” he said, and I was powerless to stop him. Powerless to prevent him from looking if he wanted to. That piece of metal, still in view—how obvious would it be?
But he headed for his own car, parked behind mine. It wasn’t his police vehicle, I realized now, but a sedan, blue or gray, hard to tell in the dark. He turned off the engine, so it was just me and him and the crickets and the night.
He came out with a water bottle, half empty. “Sorry, this is all I have, but . . .” He poured the rest of the water onto a hand towel, then placed it on my forehead. The crispness of it helped settle my stomach, focus my thoughts. He moved it to the back of my neck, and when I opened my eyes, he was so close. “Better?” he asked, the lines around his eyes deepening in concern.
I nodded. “Yes. Thank you. Better.”
I pushed myself to standing, and he reached a hand down to help me. “All right, I’ve got you.” Compassion, even from him, in this moment. “Listen, I’ve been looking for you. Hoping to talk to you. Can I follow you back? Or swing by sometime later? There are some things we need to clear up first, before Sadie’s dedication tomorrow.”
“Is it . . .” I started. Cleared my throat, made sure I sounded lucid, in control. “Is it about the investigation? Is it reopened?”
He frowned, but it was hard to see his face clearly in the dark. “No, it’s something we found on her phone. Just wondering who took some of the pictures. Whether it was Sadie or you.” He smiled tightly. “Nothing major, but it would help to know.”
I couldn’t tell, then, whether this was a trap. Whether he was luring me in under false pretenses, ready to strike. But I needed to hold him off. “I can’t tonight,” I said. Not yet. Not right now, with the car. Not until I had a direction to point him instead. His face hardened, and I said, “Tomorrow morning?”
He nodded slightly. “All right. Where are you staying?” And I knew, right then, he’d heard what had happened with the Lomans. That I wasn’t supposed to be living there. That I had been kicked out and abandoned. Every single thing happening right now was telling him to look closely at me.
“With a friend,” I said.
He pulled back slightly, like there was someone coming between us. “Does this friend have an address?”
“Can we meet for coffee in the morning? Harbor Bean?”
His mouth was a straight line, his face unreadable in the night. “I was hoping for a bit more privacy. You can come by the station, if you’d prefer . . . or I can pick you up, we can chat on the way to the dedication.”
I nodded. “I’ll send you the address tonight when I’m back.”
“Great,” he said. “You sure you’re okay to drive?”
“Yes,” I said, shutting the trunk as I spoke, swallowing dry air.
His headlights followed me all the way into downtown, until I circled the block and he continued on, up toward the station. I parked one block up from the Sea Rose, walking back. I couldn’t shake this feeling that nothing was safe here. Not Sadie and not me. Someone watching in the dark. Something waiting for me still.
That there was something toxic at the core here—a dark underbelly happening in the gap between us all, where no one else was looking.
BACK INSIDE THE SEA Rose, I took the list of arrival times from my purse. Added one final name: Sadie.
Had I been talking with Luce and Parker when she sneaked inside? Had she slipped through the front entrance, heading straight down the hall for the bedroom?
I tried to feel her there, place her in my memory. Find the moment when I could turn around and see her, call her name and intervene. Change the course of everything that followed.
Someone had brought her there. Anyone could’ve hurt her, but someone else knew she had been there, and had kept silent. A house full of faces, both strange and familiar. Luce had summed it up when she stumbled out of that room upstairs: I have never seen so many liars in one place.
A YEAR AND A half after my grandmother died, Grant Loman bought her house, helped with my finances. He took control when I was barely keeping afloat, and he made sure I stayed upright. But at some point, I remembered how to read a ledger, how to track my finances.
So I knew that by the time my grandmother died, any supposed large regular payment she had once received no longer existed. After her death, I had transferred the small amount left in her account to my own. That old account no longer existed. There was no easy way to find the deposit that Sadie had discovered.
But maybe it existed elsewhere, in another form—maybe evidence of it lived on.
Everything I had left of my grandmother was in the single box that I’d moved with me to the Lomans’ guesthouse—with a slanted K for Keep, which Sadie had labeled herself, years ago. Now I pulled it out onto the kitchen counter, emptying the contents: the photo albums, the recipe book, the bound letters, the clipped articles about my parents’ death, the personal folder with all the paperwork transferring assets.
I couldn’t find any receipts, anything extravagant.
The only large asset in her possession was her house.
After I sold that house, I kept all my real estate details, organized every one of them—a paper trail, as Grant had taught me.
It was the first file I had created, data I’d never looked at too closely, because why would I need to? But I had it, our payment history, stored in my computer files.
I scrolled through the mortgage history now on my laptop with a fresh eye. It seemed that in the years before her death, my grandmother had paid a low monthly sum on automatic withdrawal. But earlier, she used to pay more. There was a line in the timing, a before and after, when the mortgage payment had dropped significantly.
When she’d paid it down with one large lump sum.
Here. Here it was. Money going out. A piece of evidence left behind after all.
I traced the date, finger to the screen.
It was the month after my parents had died.
I sat back in the chair, the room turning cold and hollow. I’d thought we had gotten a life insurance payment—that’s what Grant had mentioned when he helped me organize the records. I was in good shape because of that.
But I looked again. An even one hundred thousand dollars. The same amount that Sadie had discovered, sent from the Lomans to my grandmother. Not a life insurance policy at all. Not an inheritance, either. Money, suddenly, where there had been none.
My stomach twisted, pieces connecting in my head.
I pulled up the images from Sadie’s phone—the photos she had taken. The picture of the winding, tree-lined mountain road. And I finally understood what Sadie had uncovered. The thing tying me to the Lomans. The cash payment she had found.
It was a payoff for my parents’ death.
CHAPTER 27
Here’s a new game: If I’d known the Lomans were responsible for my parents’ death, what would I have done?
All night, I played this game. In the dark of the house, with nothing but shadows and ghosts for company. What I would say, what I would do—how I would corner them into the truth. No: What I would take from them instead.
I felt it as I sat there—not the creeping vines of grief, pulling me down. But that other thing. The burning white-hot rage of a thing I could feel in the marrow of my bones. The surge gathering as I stepped forward and pushed.
I wanted to scream. Wanted to scream the truth to the world and watch them fall because of it. I wanted them to pay for what they had done.
But there was a flip side to that knowledge. Because here was what else that payment provided: a motive. My motive. All of the evidence fell back on me. Th
e phone that I had found. Her body, with signs of a struggle, in my trunk. Me, wandering around the back of the Lomans’ house that night, looking for any piece of evidence left behind. And the note on the counter. It was my handwriting. My anger. My revenge. It was mine.
THERE WAS A KNOCK at the front door, and I peered out the gap between the front curtains, expecting that Grant or Parker had somehow found me. Or Bianca, come to tell me to leave again. But it was Connor. I saw his truck at the curb, so obvious on the half-empty street. “Avery? You in there?” he called.
Shit, shit. I unlocked the door and he strode inside as if I’d invited him.
“How did you know where I was?” I asked as he looked around the unfamiliar house. His eyes stopped on the stacks of family albums and letters on the counter.
He paused a moment, staring at the article on top of the pile, a black-and-white photo of the wreckage—Littleport couple killed in single-car wreck.
“Connor?”
“She told me what happened,” he said, dragging his eyes back to me. “Faith.” He was breathing heavy, wound tight with adrenaline.
“How did you know I was here?” I repeated. I thought I’d been so careful, but here he was, unannounced. I didn’t like the way his gaze lingered on my things. I didn’t like the way he was standing—on edge.
“What?” He shook his head, like he was trying to clear the conversation. “It’s not hard to find out if you know what you’re looking for.” I took a step back, and he frowned, his eyes narrowing. “You told me you weren’t living at the Lomans’ anymore. But you’re not at Faith’s, most of the hotels are still full . . . Plenty of people mentioned seeing you around. I checked a couple of the rental properties until I saw your car downtown. This was the closest one.” He started pacing the room again, like there was nowhere else for his energy to go. “Faith didn’t hurt Sadie, I told you. You believe her, right?”
“Wait.” My eyes were closed, my hand out. I couldn’t follow both conversations at once. “People told you they’d seen me around?” I’d noticed it recently, hadn’t I? The way people looked at me, the way they watched. How they seemed to recognize something about me. I thought it was because of the investigation, new rumors that might be swirling. But maybe it had always been there. And like the Lomans, I’d become desensitized, unaware of the gazes. “Right,” I said, hands gripping the counter in front of me, spanning the distance between me and Connor. “The girl fucking around with the Lomans up there. Is that the talk?”
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