“That we wouldn’t find anything.”
He says nothing to that. Instead, he says, “We asked around about that boy you mentioned. The one Reese made friends with, with the snake tattoo.”
“And?”
He stops walking and turns to face me. “That boy isn’t a teenager, Mrs. Gray. He’s twenty-four. And he hasn’t shown up for work in two days.”
My jaw slackens. Twenty-four. He’s an adult. A grown man. Reese is seventeen. I don’t know what the age of consent is in Wisconsin, and I don’t know that they did anything more than flirt, but I do know that that seven-year age gap is almost half of Reese’s lifetime. By the time I was twenty-four, Elliott and I were dating, if not engaged. I had gone to college and graduated and started my career.
Reese is in high school still.
“There’s something else,” he says.
“What?”
“The medical examiner determined a cause of death.”
My body grows stiff. I tie my arms into a knot against my chest, bracing myself. I want to know, but I’m afraid to know. “What is it?” I ask. “How did they die?”
“Blunt force trauma,” he says. “We found multiple skull fractures and crush wounds on both Mr. and Mrs. Crane’s heads. Mrs. Crane had a severed spinal cord, and Mr. Crane’s aorta had been lacer—”
“Stop,” I say. “Please. Just stop.”
I close my eyes. It’s too much. Too many details. I don’t want to know anymore. I press my hand to my mouth, trying not to picture someone hitting Emily in the back so hard it severed her spinal cord—cutting off contact between her brain and the lower half of her body, meaning that if she had lived, she wouldhave been paralyzed—or Nolan so hard that his aorta, the largest blood vessel in his body, tore.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “If it helps, we can assume their deaths were relatively painless. The disruption of brain function means that Mr. and Mrs. Crane didn’t feel pain, even if they didn’t die right away. They would have lost consciousness quickly.”
It doesn’t help.
I imagine them dying a slow death.
Of them lying on the cottage floor, paralyzed and bleeding out.
“Did someone break into the cottage that night or were they let in?”
“The door wasn’t broken,” he says. “It appears that someone either let the killer in or that the killer was already there, in the cottage.”
I nod, my throat tightening. “What killed them?” I ask. “The object,” I say, when he says nothing. “What is the blunt object that killed them? Do you know?”
He nods, though it takes a second for him to tell me.
“A baseball bat.”
I wince as he says it, seeing someone, some shadowy, ambiguous shape standing behind Emily that night on the screened-in porch, the bat hoisted over a shoulder. I see him hitting her so hard with the bat—putting his whole body into it—that Emily’s spinal cord severed, that her legs gave completely out, losing function; I see her buckle and collapse onto the floor, and I wonder if the injury to the head came next, after she was already incapacitated and lying on the ground, or if that came first, and if she was already bleeding and losing consciousness when she was hit in the back.
There is a bad alkaline taste on my tongue all of a sudden.
It doesn’t matter how it happened. Either way she’s dead.
“How do you know it was a bat? How can you be certain?” I ask.
“We found the bat,” he tells me. “It was just outside the cottage, a black and teal alloy bat. A Louisville Slugger. It had blood on it still.” He’s quiet a minute, letting me process that. Then he says, “We compared the blood to Mr. and Mrs. Crane’s blood. It was a match. There were prints on it as well. We’re running those now.”
I nod, despite knowing the bat will have all sorts of prints on it. Wyatt’s, Reese’s, Elliott’s, mine. The police won’t be able to glean anything from it, because every single one of us touched the bat that night.
It’s dusk by the time I get back to the cottage. Over the last few minutes, the sky went from a medley of colors to a dark, saturated inky blue. As it did, a million glittery stars came out to dot the night sky, which is clear and moonless.
We don’t see skies like this back home. Under different circumstances, it would be magical. I’d stand in marvel, taking it all in, never imagining there could be so many stars in one sky.
