I pull my robe on over my pajamas. I split the last of the cereal and milk among the three kids. I call them to the table to eat and then I pour myself more coffee and stand in the kitchen with my back to the countertop, watching them peck at their food, swirling the cereal around in the milk like tiny ships on the lake. They’re all despondent, and I want to say something comforting or uplifting, but I don’t have it in me. The energyisn’t there. The words aren’t there either, and even if they were, they would lack conviction. The kids would know I was lying.
The kitchen is silent, the only sound the occasional ding of the metal spoons striking the ceramic edges of the bowls. There is a fly in the cottage with us. Occasionally it will buzz, quietly thumping against a closed window to get out, drawn to the glass by the light and warmth. In the corner of the room hangs a ribbon of twirly flypaper with at least a dozen gnat and fly carcasses on it. In a different life, I would catch the fly and let it out of the cottage before it can get stuck to the paper and die. But not now. Now I watch it thrash against the glass, unable to find the energy to steer it into a jar and let it out.
The sense of being watched is sudden but strong. I turn to find Wyatt staring at me.
“Do you need something?” I ask, my voice unsteady, my heart thrashing in my chest like the fly against the glass.
I’m going to kill you if I’m late for school.
He lowers his eyes to his bowl without answering. I watch him for a long time, and then I gaze up and out the window just in time to see Detective Evans pull up to the cottage. I set my coffee on the counter and I leave out the front door, grateful for the reprieve, to be able to get away from Wyatt and the deathly quiet of the kitchen.
Detective Evans and the other officer are talking when I come outside, Detective Evans leaned down and speaking to him through an open car window, their laughter like a thousand knives. “Did you find anything?” I ask, interrupting, not waiting for a reply before I ask, “Like Daniel Clarke? Did you find him?” Detective Evans sobers. He stands up, turning to face me as I stand on the deck, far enough away that he can’t see the swollen handprint on the side of my face, using my hair to hide it.
Detective Evans cocks his head and says, “I don’t remembertelling you his name.” When I say nothing, he says, “But, to answer your question, we went by his house. He wasn’t there. We’re still looking for him.”
I let my gaze go around the property, which is now desolate. “Everyone in the resort has checked out and left. We’re the only ones here. Why did you let them leave? How do you know one of them, another guest, didn’t do this?”
“We spoke to everyone who was here. No one had motive and everyone had an alibi. We told them they could leave.” He crosses his arms. “Forensics has finished their investigation next door. There are a few things I wanted to update you on.”
“Such as?”
He looks at Emily and Nolan’s cottage, and then he looks back at me, matching my energy. “Such as that they found a knife in the cottage.”
“Where?”
“In a nightstand drawer on the porch. There was blood on the blade that didn’t belong to either of the victims.”
My heart pounds. I picture this knife, though I’ve never seen it and I don’t know what it looks like. Still, I picture a long, honed blade with crimson blood dripping from the tip. “Is it Reese’s?” I ask, and then, without giving him a chance to respond, I ask again, clarifying my question, “Does the blood belong to Reese, Detective?”
“We don’t know. We’re comparing the blood to hair samples we found on a brush in the cottage, to see if the DNA matches. There were two sets of fingerprints on the knife,” he tells me. “Again, neither belonged to the victims. There were prints found elsewhere in the cottage, some made with blood,” he says, giving me a minute to let that sink in, to process it, to envision bloodied fingerprints all over the cottage walls. “We’ll need the five of you to come to the station today, to get your fingerprints taken.”
“Ourfingerprints?” I ask, unable to hide my disbelief. “Why would you need those?”
“So we can eliminate your prints from the ones we found in the cottage,” he says, though I wonder if that’s the only reason.
Maybe this other police officer hasn’t been here all night to keep us safe, but to keep us under surveillance.
“You think one of us did this. Are we suspects, Detective?”
“I didn’t say that, Mrs. Gray. I said for elimination prints.”
“You haven’t made any progress at all then,” I decide. “You’re no closer to finding my niece or the person who killed my brother and sister-in-law than you were a day ago.”
He stands taller, squaring his shoulders and putting his hands on his hips. “We are making progress. We have Mr. and Mrs. Crane’s phones now, which we found in the cottage, and we’re searching them for information.”
“What kind of information?”
“Text messages, emails, call history, browsing history, location data. Cell phones,” he says, “can be a wealth of information.”
“What about Reese’s phone?”
He shakes his head. “No. I’m sorry. Without her phone, it’s harder to get information from it. We’ve tried pinging the phone,” he says, explaining to me what that means, how the cell phone carrier sends a signal to the phone, asking it to reply with its location. “But if the phone is off or dead, then it’s not useful to us. It’s just a dead thing in her pocket.”
“But what if the phone isn’t off or dead?” I ask, thinking how she appeared the other night on that Snap Map, though that was thirty-six hours ago now, so any charge she had left at that point would be gone by now, if she isn’t in a position to charge it.
“The results can still be imprecise. We can track phones to a broad area, and not always an exact location. I promise you,Mrs. Gray, we’re doing everything we can to find her and bring her home.”
I nod, my heart sinking.
