Chapter 8
"I read your statement. The one you gave my predecessor, Sheriff Cole." He paused, tapping his fingers against the leather of his holster. "You told Cole that on the night of October fourteenth, you were at your father's hardware store on 4th Street from nine in the evening until after midnight. Doing the quarterly inventory."
"I was," I said firmly. "Father had taken ill that week, and the books were behind. You can check the ledger. My entries are signed and dated."
"Cole checked the ledger back then," Miller agreed. "He took your word for it. Why wouldn't he? You were nineteen years old, straight-A student, the pride of the county."
He took half a step closer. The floorboards groaned beneath his boots.
"What Cole *didn't* follow up on was a supplementary field report filed by Deputy Gidley. Gidley passed away five years ago, so I can't ask him about it. But he wrote a note in the margins of his midnight patrol log."
A sharp, electric coldness flared at the base of my neck.
"What note, Thomas?"
"Gidley ran a speed trap off Route 9 between ten-thirty and eleven that night," Miller said, his voice flat, monotonous, like a judge reading a dry preamble. "He logged an older brown Ford Country Squire—identical to your family’s car—turning off the blacktop onto the unpaved access road heading toward Blackwood Ravine. He didn't pull it over because he thought it was just local kids sneaking out to the quarry. But he noted the squealing alternator belt."
The kitchen seemed to expand and contract, the walls breathing like wet lungs.
"Oakhaven had dozens of station wagons back then, Thomas," I said, my tone perfectly even, though my tongue felt thick and dry as sawdust. "Are you really suggesting that I had something to do with whatever happened to my sister? After ten years of sacrificing my entire life to keep this house standing?"
Miller looked at me for a long, terrible moment.
He wasn't an idiot. He had lived in this county for fifty years. He knew that the cleanest houses often hid the rot beneath the baseboards. But he also knew the standing I held in this community. If he accused Saint Clara Vance without ironclad proof, the town council would have his badge by morning.
"I'm not accusing you of anything, Clara," Miller said softly. "I'm telling you that Daisy’s memories are coming back. Fast. The district attorney is already looking at reopening the inquiry. If her memory sharpens enough to give us a vehicle description, a license plate, or a specific location... we’re going to follow it wherever it leads."
He turned toward the swinging door, then paused, his hand on the brass push plate.
"If there’s anything you forgot to tell Sheriff Cole ten years ago... now would be the time to clear the slate, Clara. Before the water gets too deep to swim."
He pushed through the door and was gone.
A second later, the heavy front door clicked shut. The house plunged back into that suffocating, rain-drenched quiet.
I stood by the sink, staring down at my hands.
They were perfectly still. No tremor. No sweat.
The machine inside me had taken over. The human part—the part that felt panic, or remorse, or the faint, ghostly ache of sisterly affection—had been cut away long ago.
*The water gets too deep,* Miller had said.
He didn't know the half of it. The water had closed over Daisy ten years ago, and she wasn't coming back up.
The creature in the den was playing a high-stakes gambit. She was feeding Miller just enough breadcrumbs to point the gun at my chest, forcing the police to circle closer and closer. She didn't need to produce Daisy’s body herself; she was manipulating Miller into building an indictment against me out of thin air, using her own surgically altered face as the star witness.
*She wants me to confess,* I thought, my mind racing through the angles like a chess engine computing fifty moves ahead. *She wants me to break down under the pressure of Miller's questions and give it away.*
"Never," I whispered aloud to the empty kitchen. "Never."
To break me, she needed proof. Real proof. Not fragmented memories of headlights and lavender cream. In a court of law, a trauma victim's recovered memories of an attack ten years ago would be shredded by any competent defense attorney within twenty minutes. Without physical evidence—without the body, the weapon, or forensic traces linking me to the site—Miller had nothing but ghost stories.
And the only physical evidence on earth was buried six feet under the slate foundations of the Blackwood Ravine reservoir.
***
Night fell like a black velvet curtain soaked in ice water.
By nine o'clock, the storm had escalated into a full autumn gale. The wind shrieked through the gables of the old house, rattling the storm windows and sending cascades of rain drumming against the siding. Downstairs, Arthur had surrendered to his evening dose of blood pressure medication, snoring heavily in the master bedroom. Eleanor, emotionally shattered by the girl's afternoon testimony, had taken two sedatives and collapsed beside him.
The girl had retreated to her bedroom early, claiming an exhausting headache.
I waited in the kitchen until the grandfather clock chimed ten. I methodically checked every window lock, turned off the porch light, and checked the deadbolts on the front and back doors.
Then I climbed the stairs to the second floor.
The hallway was pitch-black save for the narrow line of yellow light bleeding from beneath Daisy’s door.
As I approached, the floorboard beneath my socked foot creaked faintly.
Instantly, the yellow light beneath Daisy’s door went out.
A soft, mocking silence settled over the corridor. She was in there, awake, sitting in the darkness, waiting for me to make a sound.
I didn't give her the satisfaction. I walked past her door without slowing down, entered my own bedroom at the end of the hall, and shut the door behind me.
I turned the heavy brass deadbolt until it clicked.
My room was an austere sanctuary of order. White walls, a single iron-frame bed made with hospital corners, a writing desk with pens aligned in parallel rows, and a small antique mahogany vanity table where I kept my silver-backed mirror and my jewelry box.
I took off my wool cardigan and hung it neatly in the wardrobe.
My head pounded with a dull, rhythmic ache behind my eyes. I walked over to the vanity table to take two aspirins from the porcelain tray.
Beside the tray sat my jewelry box.
It was an 18th-century burl-walnut box with an intricate brass lock, passed down to me by my maternal grandmother. It was where I kept my few pieces of real jewelry: my high school graduation ring, a string of freshwater pearls Arthur had given me for my eighteenth birthday, and a pair of diamond studs.
The box was always locked. Always.
I carried the tiny brass key on my personal keychain, tucked between my car key and the master key to the hardware store.
I glanced down at the box.
The brass lid was open by a fraction of an inch.
