Chapter Thirty-Two
I stared at the bloodied rock in shock.
Among the pretty sea glass and smooth stones, the rock looked even uglier. There were hairs stuck in the dried blood. Several glossy black hairs, chin-length. No one else had hair like that. Only one person, one girl. Leah Cho.
Horror filled me. I couldn't bring myself to touch it. Couldn't bear the thought of feeling its weight, the texture of dried blood beneath my fingertips.
How long had it been sitting in her bedroom, bleeding quietly into the air, while I made dinner and interrogated teenage girls and dug through my friends' trash cans?
Images unspooled in my mind: the bluff at night, the black outline of rock against water, the dull thud of something heavy connecting with a human skull. Leah's head wound, in the coroner's description. An impact with something hard. Blunt force trauma.
Was this rock the object Leah's skull had struck that night when she fell?
My skin prickled with sweat even though the window was cracked. My pulse whooshed too loudly in my ears. Why did Mia have this? Why was it here, among her things? What did this mean?
I half-turned toward Mia on the bed. The rock sat on the sill, low in my peripheral vision, an obscene centerpiece.
Did she know what I had found? Could she see the terrible knowledge in my eyes?
"What is this?"
The question hung in the air between us, loaded with unspoken accusations. I stared at my daughter, searching her face for something—guilt, fear, recognition, shame—anything that might tell me what I needed to know.
Mia sat up on her bed. Her brow furrowed with concern. "What's going on?"
"This rock." I pointed to the windowsill. "Where did it come from?"
Mia's gaze followed my gesture. Her eyes widened with alarm as they registered what had changed in the landscape she knew as well as I did. Her body went very still. "I don't know what that is. I didn't put that there."
"Mia. Please don't lie to me. Not now. Not about this."
" I didn't… that's not… what is it?"
Mia looked from me to the rock and back again, her lips parting but no sound emerging.
I fought to keep my voice steady. Speaking the words aloud tasted like ashes on my tongue. "I need you to tell me the truth. Did you... Is there something you still aren’t telling me?"
"No!" The word burst from her with such force that Apollo startled. "No, Mom, I promise I didn't try to hurt her. I would never."
"Then why is this here? How did it get here?"
"I don't know!" Mia's eyes filled with tears. Her knees were pulled up to her chest, arms wrapped around her legs. Apollo leapt onto the bed and curled up next to her. She dug her fingers into his fur and clung to him. "That rock… that's what killed Leah?"
I crossed the room and squatted in front of her. "I don't know for certain, not until the police test the blood on it. I think so. When she fell, her head must have hit this rock somewhere on the bluff."
Mia shrank back, horrified. She looked so young, so vulnerable. All I wanted to do was pull her into my arms and hold her, rock her all night long like when she was a baby, and I could keep her safe.
"I don't know how it got there. I didn't put it there. I—I've never seen it before." A tiny hitch in her throat. The slightest hesitation. Her gaze darted to the rock and then away.
Everything seemed distant, unreal. My thoughts skittered through my head, slippery and hard to grasp. My eyes stung.
Was I seeing things? Or was she lying to my face? Or was I projecting? Reading guilt into grief? She was traumatized and terrified. Of course, she'd hesitate. Of course, she'd stare at the thing that might send her to prison.
I fought to steady my breathing, to slow my racing heart. I desperately wanted to believe her, to cling to this other possibility, this other killer, this ghost. "You think someone did this? Took the rock from the bluff and put it here in your room, among your things?"
"I didn't! Why would I crawl down there after and…
and take the rock that she hit her head on and bring it back with me?
And put it in my room, like a… like a trophy?
" She looked at me with desperation. "Someone stole my camera.
They came into our house and slashed Leah's painting.
Whoever really killed her did this stuff.
They hate me. They want me to go to jail forever, not them. "
Guilt speared me. How could I have doubted, for even a second? What the hell was wrong with me? How could a mother doubt her own daughter? What kind of mother was I?
I took a breath. I had to think clearly.
This was Mia. This was my daughter.
No, I would not believe this of my child. I could not. I must not.
Because I couldn't lose Mia, too. Not after Marcus.
"Could the rock have been here before tonight? Yesterday? Over the weekend?"
Mia shrugged helplessly. "I haven't collected anything on the beach since... since it happened. I haven't looked closely at anything. I dunno. Maybe."
I felt the presence of the rock behind me. Pulsing with a dark sinister energy. "Think, Mia."
Her voice rose in panic. "I don't know!"
The locks had been changed on Friday morning. Yesterday. So, the rock had been placed before then, by someone who used the spare key. Or someone had put it here whom we had invited inside ourselves.
This was intentional.
The slashed painting with GUILTY painted across it. The stolen notebook. The break-in when nothing was taken, just moved, just wrong.
My breath came faster.
The rock wasn't evidence Mia kept. It was evidence that someone planted. Evidence timed perfectly. Sitting here for hours, for days possibly, waiting to be discovered by police with a search warrant.
Or by Mia, so she'd touch it, move it, contaminate it further. To leave her prints in the grooves where blood had dried.
Or by me, so I'd think exactly what I had. That my daughter was guilty.
This was a plan.
Someone wanted my daughter in prison.
What if the rock had fingerprints on it? What if it had Mia's prints on it? The thought sliced through my mind like a blade. "You're sure you never touched this?"
"I never touched it. I promise, Mom."
I sucked in a deep breath and forced my frazzled thoughts to clarify. "Okay."
"Should we call the police?" Mia asked.
"I'm not sure."
"What if the police come here and look in my room? That's what whoever did this wants to happen, isn't it? The police will think I went down the bluff and took it, for some kind of sick trophy or whatever." Mia looked like she wanted to throw up.
What would happen if I called Detective King right now and invited him in?
Attempted to explain the bloodied rock among my daughter's things.
It would go about as well as the slashed painting incident had.
I hadn't heard an update from the police.
I doubted reporting it had done anything but make them more suspicious of us.
It wasn't ours. We didn't do it. It just appeared tonight. She's innocent, Officer, I swear. She just looks guilty as hell.
I didn't have faith that the police would realize someone must be trying to frame Mia. Because she was right. Why would she place it on the windowsill like a prize? Unless she was a sociopath? Or stupid.
But perhaps the police wouldn't care. They were already building a case against her. They already had her DNA, the scratches, the blood on her dress. This would be the final straw.
"Should we hide it?" Mia asked. "Or, like, get rid of it?"
"No." Although that was my first instinct. To destroy evidence would make us culpable. It was a dangerous step in a direction I did not want to go, taking us to a place we could never return from. I thought of the sandy slippers that Mia had washed. "I'll think of something."
Mia started to cry.
"Oh, honey." I sat on the edge of the bed, opened my arms, and pulled Mia to me.
She crumpled against my chest. I held her there on the bed, leaning against the peeling headboard I'd meant to paint sage-green but hadn't yet.
Her body curled over my thighs as I stroked her tear-damp hair back from her face.
Apollo gazed at us with concern, his snout on his paws. His tail thumped on the comforter. He raised his head and nudged my hand with his wet nose, but I barely felt it.
What was I going to do? The bloodied rock might have evidence that pointed to the real killer. Or the real killer might have tainted it, implicating Mia even further.
My options were limited, the choices narrowing like we were trapped in a tunnel with a train racing toward us at the other end.
"Do you believe me?" Mia whispered, her breath warm against my neck. "Say you believe me."
I stroked her hair, feeling each silky strand between my fingers. "I believe you."