Chapter 6
"Do you remember the sound of the rain hitting the rusted corrugated roof, Clara?" she whispered. Her voice dropped to a terrifying, guttural hush. "Do you remember how the iron felt in your hands? Heavy. Cold. Wet with grease."
The room seemed to tilt beneath my feet.
"Shut up," I whispered.
"She begged you, didn't she?" The girl’s lips curved into a sick, knowing smile. "Right there on the broken cement. She asked you why you hated her so much. And you told her... what was it you told her before you brought the tire iron down?"
The memory flashed behind my eyes with blinding, violent agony:
*Rain pouring into the drainage ditch. Daisy on her knees, her face smeared with mud and mascara, sobbing hysterically. The heavy steel of the four-way lug wrench slick in my leather gloves.*
*'Because you get to leave,'* I had told her. *'And I have to stay.'*
"You don't know anything," I choked out, my fingers tightening on her wrist until her skin turned ghostly white.
"I know she didn't die on the first strike," the girl whispered, leaning so close her eyelashes brushed my cheek. "I know she dragged herself three feet toward the pipe. I know you had to hit her twice more. *Crack. Crack.* And then... silence. Just the rain. And the smell of wet cedar and copper."
The world seemed to drop into freefall.
The air in my lungs tasted like vomit. My vision swam with dark, pulsating spots.
She wasn't guessing. These weren't generic details gleaned from old newspaper clippings or police files. The coroner had never seen the body. No report had ever described the multiple blunt force impacts to the skull. No one on earth knew about the second and third strikes except me.
And the person who had watched from the shadows.
"Who are you?" My voice broke, reduced to a dry, horrified rasp. "Who the hell are you?"
The girl reached up with her free hand.
With unbearable, gentle mock-tenderness, she patted my cheek, her cool fingertips lingering against my burning skin.
"I'm your little sister, Clara," she murmured, her voice dripping with venomous sweetness. "I've come home to put our family back together. And soon... very soon... I think my memory is going to come back completely. I think I'm going to remember the exact path through the pines. And I'm going to take Sheriff Miller for a little walk."
She twisted her wrist smoothly out of my grip.
She turned toward the door, paused with her hand on the brass knob, and looked back over her shoulder.
"You should get some sleep tonight, Clara," she said softly, the childlike cadence returning to her voice as though someone had flipped an electric switch. "You look so tired. The vigil is in three days. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we celebrated it at the reservoir instead?"
She pulled the door open and stepped out into the hallway.
A second later, I heard her calling down the staircase, her voice bright, sweet, and trembling with manufactured delight:
"Mom! Mrs. Gable brought those wonderful lemon bars! Can I have one with my tea?"
Eleanor’s ecstatic, weeping laughter drifted up from the living room.
I stood alone in the center of the bedroom, clutching the edge of the vanity table to keep from collapsing onto the floorboards.
My hands were shaking violently. My breath came in shallow, ragged gasps that rattled inside my chest.
*Headlights. Three strikes. The rusted corrugated roof.*
Someone had seen it all. Someone had stood in the blackness of Blackwood Ravine ten years ago and watched me end Daisy’s life.
And that someone had spent ten years waiting.
Planning.
Reconstructing a human face, carving out the scars, studying the mannerisms, memorizing every single micro-detail of Daisy Vance until they could walk right through the front door and sleep in her bed.
I closed my eyes, pressing my palms against my temples as my mind raced through the possibilities like a machine on fire.
Was it a syndicate? A private investigator? A wealthy benefactor backing Maya Lin?
Maya’s family had been penniless immigrants, living in that run-down rental house at the end of the block before her aunt vanished into the South Side of Chicago. How could a destitute, traumatized teenage girl afford hundreds of thousands of dollars in plastic surgery, private intelligence, and voice coaching?
Who was paying for this?
Who was pulling the strings?
*It doesn't matter,* a cold, venomous voice whispered from the darkest corner of my mind.
I opened my eyes.
In the mirror of the vanity, my own reflection stared back at me. Pale, hollowed-out, but burning with a fierce, lethal determination.
It didn't matter who was financing her. It didn't matter how many plastic surgeons had touched her skin.
They didn't have the body.
If they had the body, the police would have kicked the door down yesterday.
The match and the soil in the drawer were not proof of discovery—they were an invitation. A psychological cattle prod meant to make me crack. They were trying to panic me. They wanted Saint Clara to lose her composure, to make a frantic run for the woods, to lead them straight to the grave so they could catch me with dirt on my hands.
*They need me,* I realized, a chilling wave of calm washing over the panic, slowing my racing heart back to a steady, predatory rhythm. *They don't know the exact spot. The reservoir ruins cover twenty acres of collapsed concrete and shifting mud. They know the general area, but they don't know where the chest is buried.*
The chest was six feet down, beneath the roots of the fallen western cedar, covered by three slabs of discarded foundation slate. Without a guide, without me, they could search the ravine for ten more years and find nothing but rotting leaves.
I reached into my pocket.
My fingers brushed past the plastic bag containing the hairs. I pulled out the small specimen bag, looked at it for a second, and then quietly tossed it into the small wastebasket beside the desk.
I didn't need a DNA test.
A DNA test would take three days. Three days was an eternity when a viper was sleeping across the hall from my parents.
If this girl wanted to play games with ghosts, she was going to learn what happened when you disturbed the dead.
I walked out of Daisy’s bedroom and pulled the door shut behind me, the latch clicking with finality.
I walked down the hall to my own room, locked the deadbolt, and pulled my heavy work boots from the back of the closet.
I wasn't going to run to Indianapolis.
I was going to wait. I was going to watch her every move. And the moment the rain began to fall again, I would ensure that whatever she was planning to dig up stayed buried forever.
By Saturday morning, the rain had returned to Oakhaven, not as a gentle autumn mist, but as a relentless, slate-gray sheet that battered the gutters and turned the front lawn into a swamp of rotting leaves.
Sheriff Thomas Miller arrived just after eleven, his damp uniform reeking of stale tobacco and wet wool. He didn't come alone this time; he brought an audio recorder, a black leather notebook, and a younger deputy named Harris, who stood awkwardly in our foyer in a rain-slicked jacket, clutching a clipboard like an acolyte waiting for church service.
