Chapter 46 Before
Before
The hammer only clips my skull, but still, it’s almost enough to end me.
It feels like an instant and an eternity that I lie on the ground, aware of my body but not in it. Pure black gives way to a seething mass of light, and reality returns just in time for me to roll to the side as another blow swings down. The hammer impacts the ground, throwing up bits of dirt.
“Emily!”
Emily whips around. It’s Melinda’s voice, but I can’t see Melinda herself.
I pull myself away, but I’m too dizzy to push to my feet.
Run, run, run, my dead girls scream. Melinda calls again. Emily turns back toward me.
I shove to my feet and bolt. Instantly I stagger to the side, shoulder impacting a tree, but I use it to claw myself forward.
There’s blood in my eye, half blinding me.
I used to be fast. I used to run until I couldn’t breathe, until I collapsed laughing on the sun--soaked grass, but now I’m so slow, and she’s right behind me.
My foot hits a slick patch of rotten leaves. Already off-balance, I can’t correct. My shoe shoots out from under me and the rest of my body follows, sending me rolling down a short slope. I hit the bottom hard. I can’t draw in a breath. Can’t get my muscles to move.
Emily runs toward me, hammer in hand. I’m never going to get away.
I seize a fistful of rotten leaves and dirt and stones, and in the instant she swings, I fling it, twisting on the ground at the same time.
The blow hits my shoulder, sending an instant burst of pain through my left arm.
Emily staggers. I kick out with both feet, catching her in the shins.
The slick ground gives her no purchase. She falls.
She lands awkwardly. I don’t give her time to recover. She’s never had to fight for her life before. It’s all I’ve known for months.
My left arm isn’t working. Dead weight. But I plant my knee on the hammer and slam my right fist into her face again and again. She gropes at the hammer, gives up, throws both hands up to protect herself.
It gives me half a second. I stop swinging. Shift my weight. Grab the hammer.
The rest is quick.
I sit kneeling beside her, the hammer, now slick, gripped in my good hand. The other drags in the dirt, the pain elemental, held at bay only by sheer adrenaline. Only then do I remember the voice. Only then do I turn and see Melinda behind me, holding the rifle.
“She knew,” I say, my voice a croak. “She knew we were down there.”
Melinda steps forward. The gun isn’t pointing at me, but she keeps it at the ready, finger on the trigger. “I know,” she says softly. “She told me. I called her after . . . She wasn’t surprised. She already knew.”
“Called her? Called her after what?” I ask.
Melinda’s eyes are bright in the moonlight. A tear slips down her cheek. “I didn’t realize he’d already found someone new. I swear.”
“What are you talking about?” I demand.
She swallows. “I came home. I wasn’t supposed to.
He always wanted us to call first. He wasn’t at the house, so I went out to look for him.
He was . . . he was burying her. I’ve been thinking it through.
I think I’ve figured it out. The ground had just thawed.
I think when she died, the ground was too frozen to bury her, so he stored her all winter.
And found you in the meantime.” She says it like figuring it out means something. Like it’s important.
Her father murdered a girl. And he kept her body all winter, and all the while he had me to keep him company.
“What did you do?” I ask.
She twitches, like she’s forgotten I was there.
“I know I should have called the police. But I called Emily. And she said—-she said not to do anything. She tried to convince me it was better just to leave it alone, and I realized she’d known all along.
She’d—-” There’s more that even now she can’t say.
She swallows it down. “If that got out . . . I had to stop him. But I had to protect her. So I killed him.” She gives a little laugh, like she can’t believe it.
“I had a spare key to the neighbor’s place.
I took some of his heart medication and I put it in Dad’s drink.
I poisoned my own father and then I left and I let him rot here for weeks. ”
“He’s not the only one you left to rot,” I growl. My hand tightens on the hammer. I wonder whose reflexes would be quicker.
“I didn’t know,” she wails. “And then we found you and I panicked. I thought—-they’d find out what I did, they’d find out about Emily, and I know I shouldn’t have said anything, I put the idea in Andrew’s head and then—-I was going to get you out of here.
I have the documents. I have a bus ticket in my purse. If I’d only had one more day . . .”
There are voices from the direction of the house. Liam and Andrew, calling for their sisters. “What are you going to do, Melinda?” I ask quietly. “Are you going to kill me, too?”
She doesn’t want to. I can see it in her eyes. But she doesn’t know how to get out of it.
“Melinda.”
More shouts. The boys are getting closer.
“She was trying to kill you.” Melinda lets out a shuddering breath and speaks to herself with cold logic. “She was trying to kill you. She knew about them all along. She was—-there was something wrong with her.”
She looks to me as if for confirmation. I nod once, and a shiver goes through her.
“Give me the hammer,” she snaps. She walks toward me. I flinch back. She sticks out her hand impatiently, all her hesitation gone in an instant. “If the boys think it was you, you’re dead. It has to be me.”
I hesitate. But if she was going to kill me, she could have just shot me.
“You killed her,” I agree. I let her take the hammer.
She grabs my hand, smearing her sister’s blood over her own palms. She tosses the gun, as if it were dropped in a scuffle, and paws at her clothes and face quickly.
It won’t stand up to scrutiny, but maybe in the dark—-
In the dark, she can say anything she wants. She can say she thought it was me when she swung the hammer. An accident. A mistake. We look so alike, after all, Emily and me.
She stares at me as the voices draw nearer, as if she’s having the same thought. Because if Emily Hill is dead, there will be an investigation. All these secrets will come tumbling out, and all the things Andrew feared will come to pass, and worse, far worse.
But if Emily Hill is alive and well, there are no questions to be asked.
Which means there is one very good reason to keep me alive.
“Let me do the talking,” Melinda says. She turns away from the body of her sister and walks toward the others.