Courtney
Elliott takes the car, driving around town to see if there is vacancy in another resort, despite Ms. Dahl’s telling us there
wouldn’t be any. I’d be lying if I didn’t say I felt marginally relieved for him to leave, feeling unsure about many things,
but none more than the picture of Reese on his iPad. I want to ask him about it, to know why he took this picture of our niece,
but then I see him last night, rolling me briskly over on my back in bed, asking What do you think, Court? That I killed them?
Of course he didn’t, I tell myself. Elliott wouldn’t do that. There’s another reason for it.
Cass wakes up after he’s gone, emerging from the bedroom in a daze. When she sees me for the first time today, she pauses,
asking again what happened to my face and I have to say the same lie about how I ran into the door in the dark, watching Wyatt
out of the corner of my eye to see if he has any reaction to it, but he doesn’t.
I pull my robe on over my pajamas. I split the last of the cereal and milk among the three kids.
I call them to the table to eat and then I pour myself more coffee and stand in the kitchen with my back to the countertop, watching them peck at their food, swirling the cereal around in the milk like tiny ships on the lake.
They’re all despondent, and I want to say something comforting or uplifting, but I don’t have it in me.
The energy isn’t there. The words aren’t there either, and even if they were, they would lack conviction. The kids would know I was lying.
The kitchen is silent, the only sound the occasional ding of the metal spoons striking the ceramic edges of the bowls. There
is a fly in the cottage with us. Occasionally it will buzz, quietly thumping against a closed window to get out, drawn to
the glass by the light and warmth. In the corner of the room hangs a ribbon of twirly flypaper with at least a dozen gnat
and fly carcasses on it. In a different life, I would catch the fly and let it out of the cottage before it can get stuck
to the paper and die. But not now. Now I watch it thrash against the glass, unable to find the energy to steer it into a jar
and let it out.
The sense of being watched is sudden but strong. I turn to find Wyatt staring at me.
“Do you need something?” I ask, my voice unsteady, my heart thrashing in my chest like the fly against the glass.
I’m going to kill you if I’m late for school.
He lowers his eyes to his bowl without answering. I watch him for a long time, and then I gaze up and out the window just
in time to see Detective Evans pull up to the cottage. I set my coffee on the counter and I leave out the front door, grateful
for the reprieve, to be able to get away from Wyatt and the deathly quiet of the kitchen.
Detective Evans and the other officer are talking when I come outside, Detective Evans leaned down and speaking to him through
an open car window, their laughter like a thousand knives. “Did you find anything?” I ask, interrupting, not waiting for a
reply before I ask, “Like Daniel Clarke? Did you find him?” Detective Evans sobers. He stands up, turning to face me as I
stand on the deck, far enough away that he can’t see the swollen handprint on the side of my face, using my hair to hide it.
Detective Evans cocks his head and says, “I don’t remember telling you his name.” When I say nothing, he says, “But, to answer your question, we went by his house. He wasn’t there. We’re still looking for him.”
I let my gaze go around the property, which is now desolate. “Everyone in the resort has checked out and left. We’re the only
ones here. Why did you let them leave? How do you know one of them, another guest, didn’t do this?”
“We spoke to everyone who was here. No one had motive and everyone had an alibi. We told them they could leave.” He crosses
his arms. “Forensics has finished their investigation next door. There are a few things I wanted to update you on.”
“Such as?”
He looks at Emily and Nolan’s cottage, and then he looks back at me, matching my energy. “Such as that they found a knife
in the cottage.”
“Where?”
“In a nightstand drawer on the porch. There was blood on the blade that didn’t belong to either of the victims.”
My heart pounds. I picture this knife, though I’ve never seen it and I don’t know what it looks like. Still, I picture a long,
honed blade with crimson blood dripping from the tip. “Is it Reese’s?” I ask, and then, without giving him a chance to respond,
I ask again, clarifying my question, “Does the blood belong to Reese, Detective?”
“We don’t know. We’re comparing the blood to hair samples we found on a brush in the cottage, to see if the DNA matches. There
were two sets of fingerprints on the knife,” he tells me. “Again, neither belonged to the victims. There were prints found
elsewhere in the cottage, some made with blood,” he says, giving me a minute to let that sink in, to process it, to envision
bloodied fingerprints all over the cottage walls. “We’ll need the five of you to come to the station today, to get your fingerprints
taken.”
“Our fingerprints?” I ask, unable to hide my disbelief. “Why would you need those?”
“So we can eliminate your prints from the ones we found in the cottage,” he says, though I wonder if that’s the only reason.
Maybe this other police officer hasn’t been here all night to keep us safe, but to keep us under surveillance.
“You think one of us did this. Are we suspects, Detective?”
“I didn’t say that, Mrs. Gray. I said for elimination prints.”
“You haven’t made any progress at all then,” I decide. “You’re no closer to finding my niece or the person who killed my brother
and sister-in-law than you were a day ago.”
He stands taller, squaring his shoulders and putting his hands on his hips. “We are making progress. We have Mr. and Mrs.
Crane’s phones now, which we found in the cottage, and we’re searching them for information.”
“What kind of information?”
“Text messages, emails, call history, browsing history, location data. Cell phones,” he says, “can be a wealth of information.”
“What about Reese’s phone?”
He shakes his head. “No. I’m sorry. Without her phone, it’s harder to get information from it. We’ve tried pinging the phone,”
he says, explaining to me what that means, how the cell phone carrier sends a signal to the phone, asking it to reply with
its location. “But if the phone is off or dead, then it’s not useful to us. It’s just a dead thing in her pocket.”
“But what if the phone isn’t off or dead?” I ask, thinking how she appeared the other night on that Snap Map, though that
was thirty-six hours ago now, so any charge she had left at that point would be gone by now, if she isn’t in a position to
charge it.
“The results can still be imprecise. We can track phones to a broad area, and not always an exact location. I promise you, Mrs. Gray, we’re doing everything we can to find her and bring her home.”
I nod, my heart sinking.
The world feels suddenly so vast and, in it, Reese so small. I feel scared for her, but then, in the next breath, I think
of the girl in that picture on Elliott’s iPad, the gritty, unafraid look on her face, flicking Elliott off, and wonder if
I should feel scared for her, or if I should feel afraid for everyone else.
I hate you. I wish you’d die.
I see the answer on Elliott’s face when he comes back to the cottage an hour or so later. “They all say they’ve been booked
for months,” he tells me, looking chastened—as if it’s somehow his fault that there isn’t vacancy in the other resorts—tossing
the car keys onto the kitchen counter with a clang.
“There was nothing?”
“No,” he says. “Not quite nothing. There was one place. A motel. It had vacancy, but it looked like a rathole, Court. I don’t
think you want to stay there. We may just have to make do here.”
“How much longer do we have to stay?” Cass asks, hearing him, her voice whiny in a way that gets under my skin. “I want to
go home.”
Wyatt looks up from his phone with such suddenness that I hold my breath, worrying about what he might say or do to Cass.
I speak first, before he can. “We all want to go home, honey. As soon as we find Reese, we can.”
“Then why aren’t we looking for her?” she whines. Beside her, Mae is quiet, her face puffy from another night of crying herself
to sleep.
“The police are, Cass. They’re looking for her.”
I glance around the room. This cottage is small, musty.
Now that the windows are always closed and locked, the air suffocates me until all I can think about is the dank, stale smell, knowing there must be mold in here somewhere.
The cottage is seven or eight hundred square feet at best with a single bathroom; it was on the small side when we first checked in, but now there are five people living in it, and nothing about it is homey or inviting anymore. It’s our prison.
I reach for my coffee, which has no doubt gone from lukewarm to cold, but is still caffeine. I lift it to my lips, but before
I can sip, I see the fly from before, dead and floating in it, its black body bobbing on the surface like a buoy.
My stomach roils. I set the mug down, feeling physically ill at the idea of staying here in this cottage any longer. But we
can’t leave, and there’s nowhere to go, not until we find Reese and the police find Nolan and Emily’s killer.
I curl my fist around the car keys lying on the countertop. “I’m going to run out for a few things.”
“Where?” Elliott asks, looking sharply up, surprise in his eyes. “For what?”
I hold his eye. “I used up the last of the cereal and milk this morning for the kids. I’m going to run to the store and stock
up on a few things.”
I don’t like lying to him. But if he knew where I was going, he wouldn’t want me to go.