Page 21 of The Last House Guest
I swallowed nothing. “Yes and no.” I clenched my hands to keep them from shaking. “I wanted to ask you about Sadie’s note.”
He stopped rocking in his chair then.
“The note she left behind,” I clarified.
“I remember,” he said. He didn’t say anything more, waiting for me to continue.
“What did it say?” I asked.
After a pause, he sat upright and pulled himself closer to his desk. “I’m afraid that’s the family’s business, Avery. You might do better asking one of them.” As if he knew I’d already tried to find out and failed.
I looked at the walls, at his desk, anywhere but at his face. “I’ve been thinking about that night again. Is everyone sure the note was hers? I mean completely, totally sure?”
The room was so quiet I could hear his breathing, the faint ticking of his watch. Finally, he drew in a breath. “It’s hers, Avery. We matched it.”
I waved my hand between us. “To a diary, I heard. But, Detective, she didn’t have one.”
His eyes were focused on mine—green, though I’d never noticed before. His expression was not unkind, something bordering on sympathy. “Maybe you didn’t know her as well as you thought.”
“Or,” I said, my voice louder than I anticipated, “maybe the note was something else. Luciana Suarez was staying in the house, too. Or it could’ve been the cleaning company. Someone else could’ve left it.” They could’ve matched her handwriting in a rush because they wanted to. Making the pieces fit instead of the other way around.
I’d been too caught off guard by the news last year to ask questions. I’d been blindsided by the fact that I had misunderstood things so deeply. That there was something momentous I had failed to see coming once again.
He folded his hands slowly on the top of the desk, finger by finger. His nails were cut down to the quick. “Listen. It’s not just that the writing’s a match.” He shook his head. “It’s more like a journal—the inner workings of her mind. And it’s very, very dark.”
“No,” I said. “She didn’t mean it.” The same thing I had said to Parker. But wasn’t that the truth? The way she’d tallied the dangers off to me the day we met, as if she could see them, close to the surface, always ready to consume us. The casualness of death; something she was courting.Don’t hurt yourself,she’d said when I stood too close to the edge in the dark. As if, even then, she had imagined it.
He shook his head sadly. “Avery, you’re not the only one who missed something, okay? No one saw it coming. Sometimes you can only see the signs in hindsight.”
My throat felt tight. He reached across the table, his thick hand hovering near mine before pulling back. “It’s been a year. I get that. How things come back. But we’ve been through all of this. The case is closed, we gave Parker her old personal items today.” That must’ve been what Parker was looking at in his car when I surprised him in the garage—the items returned from the police station. “Everything fits. Write the article, come celebrate her life at the dedication, and move on.”
“Everything doesn’t fit,” I said. “She was supposed to meet us there. Something happened.” I reached my hand into my bag, placed her phone before him.
He didn’t touch it, just stared at it. A piece he had not anticipated. “What’s this?”
“Sadie’s phone. I found it today at the rental. The Blue Robin, where we all were the night she died.”
His eyes didn’t move from the phone. “Youjustfound it.”
“Yes.”
“One year later.” Incredulous, eyes narrowed, like I was playing a joke on him. How quickly his demeanor had changed. Or maybe it was me changing before him.
“It was at the bottom of a chest in the master bedroom. I found it when I was taking out the blankets to freshen up. I don’t know how long it’s been there, but she didn’t lose it when she died.” I swallowed, willing him to make the leap: that if they were wrong about this, they could be wrong about all of it.
He shook his head, still not touching the phone.
Once, several summers ago, Sadie had tried to get herself arrested. At least it seemed that way to me at the time. I’d taken her down to the docks at night, wanting to show her something. A world she never had access to herself, a way to prove my own worth. I knew how to get inside the dock office from when Connor used to do it—lifting the handle, giving the door a well-angled nudge at the same time—and then taking his father’s key from the back office inside, untying the boat and pushing it adrift before turning on the engine.
But someone must’ve seen us sneaking inside. I’d gotten as far as the front room when the flashlight shone in the window, and I darted in the other direction, toward the rarely used back door. Sadie had frozen, staring at the light in the window. I pulled her by the arm, but by then the officer was inside—I knew him, though not by name. Didn’t matter, because he knew mine.
He led us outside, back to his car. He didn’t ask me the question I’d grown to expect, about whom to call; he must’ve known the answer by then.
“What’s your name?” he asked Sadie, but she didn’t respond. Her eyes were wide, and she pressed her lips together, shaking her head. The man asked for her purse, which she had looped over her shoulder. He pulled out her wallet, shone the flashlight on her driver’s license. “Sadie...” and then he trailed off. Cleared his throat. Slipped the license back inside, returning her purse. “Listen, girls. This is a warning. This is trespassing, and the next time we catch you, you’ll be processed, booked, am I clear?”
“Yes, sir,” I said. The relief like that first sip of alcohol, warming my bloodstream.
He returned to his car, and Sadie stood there in the middle of the parking lot, watching him go. “What does a girl have to do to get arrested around here?” she asked.
