Page 10 of You'll Be Sorry

“Back to work, then.”

She pulled away from him enough to peer at him directly. “What do you think of her suggestion to contact the cold case unit?”

His turn to contemplate. “I get the impression the local sheriff—”

“Police chief.”

“Police chief isn’t big on sharing with outsiders.”

“In other words, we just have to wait a couple hundred years?” Raquel arched a brow.

Fresh smile. “She was younger than I expected. Not to mention…”

“Prettier?”

He picked up a lock of her hair, ran it through his fingers. Not a slow caress, but the promise of one. Raquel felt it all the way to her toes. Again, he was good like that. So good like that.

“She must’ve been just a kid when it happened,” he commented.

“Growing up in the shadow of four other children who disappeared,” Raquel murmured. “No way she doesn’t know more than she’s telling. Not to mention…I’ll bet you anything her father kept his own personal files to work on on his own time. No self-respecting cop would stop seeking closure for his community.”

“We could invite her over to dinner.”

“Too obvious. Maybe…” Raquel worried her lower lip. “Let me think about it.”

“Certainly wouldn’t hurt to call the state cold case investigators,” Theo cycled back. “Given we’re the new homeowners, we have reason.”

She nodded, still thinking. The trick was to gain enough attention to assist their efforts, but not enough to arouse undue interest. A reporter from the local paper had already reached out asking for an interview. By now, Theo was well versed on his private wife’s private ways to decline on principle.

“Back to work?” Theo prompted softly.

“Back to work.”

She followed him inside the house, where they paused at the bottom of the stairs, peering up at the gloom as day slipped into night. So many things that could be happening in those shadows. So many things that had.

From the first moment Raquel had spied this house, she rarely pictured it as a brick-and-mortar structure. Mostly, she saw an old woman, well past her prime, hunched and enfeebled, and yet somehow still regal in her defeat. Raquel saw a caretaker who ached for her lost charges. Some nights, she swore she even felt her pain.

The house hurt. And Raquel could understand that. She hurt, too.

Her fingers crept toward the pendant around her neck, remembering at the last moment she’d left it off, not just to keep it out of sight of the neighbors, but to appease Theo.

Now she took a deep breath in, then exhaled slowly. Theo squeezed her shoulder lightly.

Together, they ascended into the darkness above.

Raquel knew the importance of appearance. She grew up with firsthand experience in the length of one’s skirt being the determining factor of your moral character while the address where you lived defined your place in the world. She understood it wasn’t enough to be pretty; you had to be the right kind of pretty. Walk too fast, and you had something to hide. Walk too slowly, and clearly you were as lazy as your good-for-nothing parent.

Clothes, makeup, accessories. Everything said something about you. In a small town, that could be especially suffocating as the queen bees spread their judgments in a buzz of gossip to the rest of the hive. And there wasn’t a damn thing you could do about it.

To think different, act different, aspire tobedifferent simply got you stung.

Especially when everyone knew exactly what went on behind closed doors. Not that they were going to do a damn thing to help, given it was so much easier to wag their tongues and tsk with their lips.

Raquel had always wondered what the neighbors had chattered about the morning after. Or had the sight of that much blood finally been enough to shut them all up?

She never returned home to find out.

Eventually, she’d bought a one-way bus ticket to the big city of Boston, where she didn’t know a single living soul, and better yet, not a single person knew her.