Chapter Twenty-Six
The new keys the locksmith pressed into my palm looked wrong in my hand. Too clean. Too bright. The locksmith had arrived just as we returned from the precinct, shell-shocked and devastated.
I shut the door behind him. And locked it.
Apollo bounded in from the kitchen, then stopped short.
His tail went up, stiff. He paced a tight circle near the base of the stairs, his nose working.
He whined in the back of his throat, a high, anxious sound.
He looked back at me, ears pricked, then up toward the second floor. His whole body was tense.
"What's wrong, buddy?"
He paced restlessly, circling me, then Mia, then back to me. He whined again.
Mia stood in the foyer, dazed. Her eyes were unfocused, like she was still in that interrogation room we'd left only thirty minutes ago, still trapped beneath the glaring fluorescent lights, staring at the glossy photos of Leah's broken nails.
Apollo trotted to her and urgently shoved his nose into her hand. She didn't react. He tried again, nudging her thigh, his tail wagging harder, not playful but almost frantic.
He'd picked up on the tension in the room. As if he could sense Mia's palpable distress and was trying as best he could to offer comfort.
"They said she was alive." Mia's words were toneless. A recitation. "They said she was alive for hours."
She stared past me, past the stairs, at the far wall. Her pupils were huge, eating the green of her irises. Her skin had taken on a gray pallor.
The strain of everything overwhelmed me. My chest was tight, a headache beating dully against the front of my skull. The sorrow reared up and threatened to pull me under and suffocate me.
For Mia, it was even worse. I could see it in her face, how she was drowning right in front of me, and I didn’t know how to save her.
"Mia." I tightened my grip on the keys, the metal biting into my palm. "Come sit down. Let's talk."
"If I'd just gone back out…" The sentence frayed. She blinked once, twice, her face contorting. Then she bolted. She staggered up the stairs and into the bathroom.
My body moved before my brain. I followed the sound of her feet. Apollo scrambled after us, whining anxiously.
As I reached the top of the stairs, the bathroom door slammed. The lock snicked.
I hurried down the hall and placed my hand on the door. "Mia, open up. Please."
Nothing.
I couldn't leave her like this. She was devastated. She needed me. "Mia. Open it, or I'm calling the locksmith back to remove it from the hinges. I mean it."
A moment later, there was the click of the lock turning. I pushed the door open.
Mia was on the tile floor, her back against the old cast iron tub, her knees up, arms wrapped tightly around them. Her whole body shook. The light overhead bleached her face, made her look colorless, half alive, half ghost.
"I didn't know. I didn't know she was still alive…" Her voice dissolved. She folded forward, forehead dropping to her knees. A raw, keening wail tore out of her.
Apollo stiffened in the doorway, his ears laid back. He whined in alarm, then lay down in the doorway with his snout resting on his paws, as if to protect us from whatever horrors lay outside the bathroom door. He didn't know the horror had already reached us.
I stepped over him into the cramped bathroom. The yellowed ceramic tile was cold beneath my feet. I knelt beside Mia. "Hey, honey. Hey."
I reached for her. She flinched, then collapsed into me all at once, like something inside had given way. "I didn't know. I swear, I didn't know she was—they said she was breathing, Mom. Crawling, trying to get help. Still alive. They said—"
I held her tighter. She was too light. Too hot. "Listen to me. You didn't know. You couldn't have known."
"If I'd gone back… if I'd—if I'd checked, if I'd just—I left her there, Mom. I left her!"
"You didn't know she was down there. You didn't see her fall. You told them that. You told me."
Mia sagged against me. Her tears soaked the front of my T-shirt. Her breath came too fast, shallow and ragged.
I rocked her in my arms, like when she was three and convinced the monsters in the closet would open the door and eat her face. Back when Marcus and I could vanquish anything with a nightlight and a story.
Now the monsters were real. They were pretty girls with white teeth.
I held her because it was all I could do. I held her and listened to her weep. Her head was against my breastbone, great sobs wracking her body. I kissed the top of her head and stroked her back. Eventually, her sobs dwindled to hiccups.
She raised her head, swiped at her swollen, tear-dampened face with the back of her arm, and twisted to face me. "Am I going to jail?"
"You're not." I forced my voice to remain calm. "I won't let that happen."
It was a lie, and we both knew it. I couldn't protect her from this, just like I couldn't protect Marcus from a horrific act of random violence. The truth was, the world was pure chaos. We couldn't control any of it.
"Let's get you off the floor and upstairs. I'll bring you lunch in bed. How about tomato soup and grilled cheese, your favorite?"
"Okay." Her voice was hoarse, stricken.
I swallowed the knot in my throat. I got my feet under me and hauled her up. She was lighter, thinner than I remembered. She moved like she was underwater. Apollo stood, circling our legs in tight anxious loops.
We made it to her room. The curtains were mostly closed, but a small seam of sunlight poured through the crack. I crossed to the window and yanked the panels shut, covering the collection of sea glass and beach stones. The room dimmed.
"Lie down, honey. You need to rest."
Mia crawled onto the bed without protest. She didn't reach for her phone. Didn't ask for it. She curled onto her side, knees tucked up, clutching Flash the sloth to her chest. Marcus's red cap sat on the nightstand.
I sat on the edge of the mattress and tucked the blanket around her. "Try to sleep. Your brain needs a break."
Her eyes slid closed. Opened. Closed again. Her breathing evened a little. It wasn't rest, not really. More like her body shutting down to conserve power.
I watched her face, searching for something. A tell. A crack that would let me see the things she was still hiding from me.
All I saw was a kid who'd just learned that her best friend had spent hours dying alone in the dark.
I stood. My knees popped. I stepped to the door and eased it mostly shut. The hallway was too bright. The house hummed with its usual sounds: the fridge, the furnace, the faint ticking of the hallway clock.
I went downstairs on autopilot, barely conscious of even moving. Apollo followed. I made coffee because it was something to do. Like Mia, I had little appetite. I took a mug I didn't want and carried it out to the patio.
The lake threw the sun back at me in a thousand hard glints. The sky was a flat pitiless blue.
I stepped to the edge of the cracked, sloping patio and looked toward the bluff.
Another section had gone sometime in the night. Fresh earth gaped halfway down the slope, a raw wound against the darker, older soil. Crumbled chunks of sod clung to the edge of the bluff like torn scabs. A few roots jutted into the air, exposed.
Yesterday, that piece of ground had been part of my yard.
Today, it wasn't.
The bluff was eroding, coming for us inch by inch. Gravity and water and time, doing what they always did, stripping away the illusion of permanence. Of safety.
I set the mug on the metal table. I wrapped my arms around myself and thought of Marcus, his contagious laughter, his easy smile. I longed for his steady presence, his reassuring words. Marcus would have known what to say to our daughter. How to reach her, even now.
He would have believed in Mia without question. Without the gnawing doubt that was eating away at me from the inside.
The truth was a knife with two edges: I believed my daughter hadn't killed Leah. I also knew she wasn't telling me everything. It was the space between those secrets, those sharp shards, that could truly hurt us.
That was where the danger lay.
My restless mind kept returning to the precinct, the interview, the evidence. What everything meant, or could mean, for Mia's case. The police wanted to arrest her. I had to give them another, better suspect before they did.
DNA under Leah's fingernails. A match to Mia.
Scratches on Mia's arms. From Leah, accidentally, according to Mia. Another secret she'd kept from me, and from the police.
The scream Alexis and Zara heard at 12:40 a.m.
The sounds Zara heard at 3:30 a.m. Leah, still alive in the dark.
Zara and Leah's plan to expose the LakeshoreTea account.
Alexis's testimony that she’d seen Mia's sleeping bag empty at 12:30 a.m.
The sandy slippers hidden in Mia's closet.
The missing camera.
Who had had the opportunity to harm Leah?
Alexis at the gazebo. Zara on the beach.
Mia, out of her sleeping bag at 12:30 a.m. Chloe at the midnight photoshoot, who'd lied about being there, just like Mia had.
Peyton's whereabouts were more unclear. No one had seen her leave, but that didn't mean she hadn't.
The ground under my feet felt less solid. I curled my toes against the concrete lip of the patio.
Motive was messier. Alexis had abuse to hide, and Leah's knowledge threatened her family. That was reason enough. Alexis had a history of violence. I wanted to believe Alexis wasn't a killer, but that didn't mean she was innocent.
But why would she act now? Leah had known about Brooke's abuse for months.
Chloe was one of the last people to see Leah alive, along with Mia, but what reason would she have to hurt Leah?
Peyton was pretty, popular, and athletic. She's hurt girls before, Zara had said. What did that mean?
Zara had already lied to the police once. She'd agreed to help Leah expose her friends, but what if Zara had changed her mind? What if she'd outed Leah first?
Whoever ran that LakeshoreTea account had everything to lose if Leah exposed them.
And then there were the break-ins. Whoever stole my notebook and slashed the painting had access to my house.
The key had passed through too many hands: Brooke, Alexis, Whitney, Peyton.
Anyone who'd been in their houses could've copied it, would've seen the key with the familiar Isle Royale keychain and known whose home it belonged to.
My frenzied thoughts hit a wall. I pressed my fingers to my temples.
Even if Zara came forward now, it wouldn't help. It might make things worse. Mia was out of her sleeping bag minutes before the scream Zara had mentioned. And the later sounds Zara had heard at 3:30 a.m. had been Leah herself, not some unknown killer lurking on the bluff.
I needed something else.
Leah's diary burned in my mind.
How I missed Vivienne. Her warm smile, her kind eyes, her soft laugh. The way she'd put her hand over mine, always encouraging.
Now my daughter's DNA was under her dead daughter's fingernails.
I dug my phone out of my back pocket. The screen flared too bright. My text to Vivienne from last night stared back at me. Call me. Please.
No response.
Can I come over? I typed.
I hit send before I could regret it. The message thread showed the little gray delivered label underneath. For a second, nothing. Then the three dots appeared. Blinked. Disappeared. They didn't come back.
It was time to go see her. I just hoped she'd accept my apology.
The patio door slid open behind me. "Mom?"
Mia stood in the doorway, one hand on the frame. A crease ran along her cheek. Her eyes were swollen, her lids puffy.
Apollo slid between us, pushing his head under her hand. She scratched absently behind his ears, not really seeing him.
"I was planning to visit Viv."
She perked up. "I want to go."
Part of me wanted to bundle her back to bed. Pull the blankets over both of us and pretend the outside world didn't exist. Leaving her alone here felt worse.
"If you're sure."
"I'm sure."
"First, I'm getting some food in you. Let's make that grilled cheese and tomato soup I promised, okay? Then we'll go."
She gave a tremulous nod.
Thirty minutes later, we'd both eaten. Mia had only managed half of her sandwich, but it was something. Everything had tasted like cardboard, but I'd forced it down.
Once we finished, I retrieved the new keys from the counter. Old habit made me walk the circuit, checking every new lock, the deadbolts I knew I’d already locked. Still, I checked.
I felt the press of Mia at my shoulder. The weight of the keys in my fist. "Let's go."