Chapter Sixty-One. Melanie
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
MELANIE
The girls’ dressing room is windowless. So when the power goes out, we are plunged into a black so absolute, it feels heavy on the eyes.
Girls shriek. Compacts clatter to the floor.
Hannah’s “Mom?” finds me in the dark, a thin plea that tugs on a cord tied directly around my heart. I grope for her hand, but find nothing.
Then the lights blink back on, hum above the mirror like nothing happened. I feel the collective exhale in the room before the girls scramble twice as fast, laying out makeup kits and plugging in curling irons, as if hurrying can hold the power steady.
I don’t say it out loud, but I know better. Lights don’t just flicker once. Not in weather like this.
I check my phone to find another text from Waylon, checking on us, making sure we made it safely.
He says the drizzle out there has started freezing on the roads, and even sent a picture of a car that slid right through the intersection by the H-E-B.
He’s already been called out—downed lines somewhere south of town.
You and the kids just stay up there until this blows over, he wrote.
Or I’ll come get you in the truck. The van can’t handle this kind of ice.
Olivia is getting wound up, in that way she does sometimes, not mean or snappy. She just sort of nudges the panic up in notches like she’s slowly turning up the burners on a stove.
“I can get your hair started, sweetheart, until she gets here,” Emily says, picking up a brush.
“No, she has all my stuff,” Olivia whines. “Mom’s supposed to do it. We practiced. She knows how I like it now.”
Emily turns, setting the brush back down, but I can see the hurt in her face.
She’s been mother to that girl since she was eight years old.
Every ballet recital, every competition, every rehearsal—it’s been Emily with the brush and bobby pins, buns tight enough to hold through hours onstage.
It’s been Emily in the school pickup lines and at parent-teacher conferences, Emily packing lunches and cheering from the audience.
Now she’s expected to step aside, to let Cat swoop back in and claim the spotlight. And I can’t help but feel for her—how hard it must be to love a child like your own, only to be reminded she isn’t.
Silence hangs a beat between us, and I clear my throat to break it. “I’ll go get Cat,” I say.
Dad wants to come with me. Today was supposed to be his day off, but he’s been sheriff of Anhalt for thirty-one years, elected eight times because this town trusts him.
It isn’t a switch he flips on and off. He’s been on the radio all morning with his deputies, watching the weather, people’s safety always his first concern.
And right now, he’s not too happy with Kennedy Claire.
Pushing this pageant forward goes against his code of being responsible and doing the right thing even when it’s hard.
Forcing families to brave icy roads? Putting people in jeopardy like this? He doesn’t like it one bit.
When we open the Amenity Center doors, we’re both misted with a freezing sleet.
It’s already colder than when we arrived, the kind of cold that cuts to the bone, and sunset is just a few hours away.
As we walk down to the model home, Dad rubs his toe against the concrete, frowning at the slick shine.
We don’t get ice or snow often, but Dad knows these roads, knows how they can go from safe to sheet glass in minutes. He’s seen families trapped in their homes when rescue vehicles had to turn back. “This ain’t good,” he mutters, and I zip my jacket tighter.
We march ahead to the model home. I see the flags outside whipping wild in the wind, hear the ropes clanking their warnings.
Then we hear Emily’s voice behind us in the distance. “I told you not to come out here. It’s freezing.”
We turn to see Olivia rushing to catch up with us. She’s wearing nothing but a tank top and leggings. “Come back inside, young lady. I don’t want you out there.”
“I want to see Mom,” Olivia yells without looking back or heeding her warnings of the cold.
Just as Emily catches up, snow begins to fall. “Just what has gotten into you?” She throws an oversized zip-up hoodie over Olivia’s shoulders, masking her bare arms from the cold.
At first it’s just a few flakes floating down, but by the time we make it to the yard, large clumps of snow land on my eyelashes and blur my vision.
Through the white, I see lights are on inside the model home, glowing warm behind the blinds, but when Dad knocks on the door, there’s no response. He tries again. Nothing. The four of us shiver in sweaters and jackets too thin for this weather.
He tries the handle, but the door is locked.
“Have you heard from Cat?” he asks me.
I shake my head.
“Put the code in, honey.” He steps aside, clearing space for me at the door. I punch in the numbers, my fingers clumsy from the cold. Beep-beep-beep, and then a long trill, the keypad glowing red.
“Mom changed the code,” Olivia says, shifting around me to press the numbers, and the door unlocks. I watch her hand, watch her thumb depress the lever on the oil-rubbed bronze handle, and push the door open.
There is a sound, like a billiard ball rolling across a pool table.
I see one of the artificial green apples from Cat’s dining room centerpiece, which was nudged by the opening door.
It trails slowly down the entryway, getting caught in the groove between two stones.
Across the floor, more apples are scattered.
Discordant in their chaos, out of order and unsettling against the backdrop of this magazine spread of a home.
Outside, ice pelts the windows like pebbles. The eaves groan from the force of the wind, a low moan that sounds almost human.
I shoot out an arm to stop Olivia, like when I brake hard at a red light and one of the kids is in the front seat. I push past her so I can be the first in the house.
As I make my way slowly through the entryway, Dad calls out from behind, “Catherine?” his voice a blend of frustration and worry, but it’s met with an eerie silence, broken only by the whistling of the wind.
I glance back to see one of his hands on his radio, the other hovering above the holster at his belt.
Aside from the apples, the house is staged for a showing. A lamp and a potted plant arranged just so on the console table. A plush blanket folded neatly over the back of the sofa. My throat tightens as I force myself forward.
And then—Cat’s feet, one bare, the sole facing me, and on the other, twisted at an odd angle, a house slipper.
When Cat was drinking, she’d pass out. She always drank until she couldn’t feel anything, until she’d drowned her guilt, until her body shut itself down. I was always worried about her. Always. Every second of every day. What she would do when she drank. What she would say.
Once, the Austin cops arrested her because they’d found her passed out in Zilker Park.
I’d had to travel back and forth to the Travis County Jail, bringing her socks and shampoo, getting together money we didn’t have to post bail, to hire a lawyer.
The truth was, I was impossibly tethered to her addiction, having to ride the turbulent waves of her ups and downs, always working to get her back to solid ground. To start again.
I want to stop, to turn back, but my body drags me on. One step. Another. Until I see the rest of her.
Cat lies face down. The heavy marble bowl that used to hold the apples sits beside her, broken into two large pieces.
Blood pools around her head, matted in her blond curls, staining them red.
The blood is clotted around the wound, which is a canyon, deep and long.
The back of her skull is cracked open, so deep I can see past the bone, so deep I can see her brain.
I turn away, sickness bubbling up inside me quickly and violently.
I turn and watch Emily, already with her arms around Olivia, pulling up the large hoodie that she threw over her shoulders to shield her. “Mama,” Olivia says with such desperation that I break inside, that I have to steady myself on the counter.
Cat is dead, and a piece of me is dead with her.
Dad steps forward, his hand brushing the grip of his gun before lifting his radio. “This is Sheriff Ryan at the Sherman Ranch model home. I need units and the medical examiner on scene. Possible homicide.”
The words hang in the air, and I feel them settle in my chest, heavier than the storm outside.
This wasn’t an accident. Cat was murdered.