Steve’s mouth turned up at the corners. “I mean, even Miami drivers hate Miami drivers.” He was trying, whether to make an effort or provide a distraction, I didn’t know, but I didn’t want to be ungrateful. I just couldn’t do the back-and-forth right now.
I couldn’t sit here and not talk about what I knew anymore. Too much time had passed. Maybe one of them knew something about it that could help the police. It was time for us to all be on the same page.
I got up from the table, walked to my purse in the hallway, and pulled out the copy of my book. The Publix receipt I was using as a bookmark stuck out of the top, indicating the handful of chapters I had left. The ones I planned on reading tonight.
My mother was back at the table when I reentered the dining room. She looked up at me and stiffened when she saw the familiar neon cover clutched in my hands.
“Why do you have that?” she asked, her voice eerily faint. I could see the rage simmering as she tried to process why I would bring this book to the table. There were few things she hated more.
I had to keep calm. I wasn’t going to get anything across rationally if I got upset.
Everyone around the table had gone quiet, all looking in my direction. I took a deep breath. “I have to tell you all something.”
“If it’s about that book, I don’t want to know,” my mother said, her eyes moving back down to her plate. “I am focused on finding my daughter.”
“This isn’t my copy,” I said. ‘“It’s Hazel’s.”
“What?” My father put down his fork. He stared at the hardcover like it was a bomb about to detonate. “I forbade her to read it. Hazel and I had a great routine here. She respected the rules.” He paused. “Did you give it to her?”
It felt like he had slapped me. His automatic assumption of the worst. I had always respected his wishes to keep Hazel out of it. It was part of why we’d grown apart as sisters. I couldn’t talk to her without wanting to talk about Will and what happened. It consumed me.
“I found it in her locker at the McCulloughs’ , ” I continued. I flipped through the pages so they could see. “She’d been annotating it.”
My mom was shaking her head. “No, no, no,” she said plainly. “Why would she be doing that?”
I took a deep breath. “Because she was investigating it,” I said quickly. “Hazel was looking into Alex’s case. That’s what she was doing the last few weeks before she disappeared.”
“Excuse me?” my mother hissed.
“What?” my father demanded. Tommy brought his fingers to his temples in frustration. Suzannah reached for him, squeezing his arm comfortingly.
Steve got up from the table. He reached for his daughters. “Girls, let’s go into the other room,” he said, ushering them from the table and toward the bedrooms. They followed him without complaint.
I sat back down in my seat, reaching for my glass of wine and taking another sip, desperate for the liquid courage. My father stared at me.
“She was making notes and investigating leads,” I continued. “She’d called Will and was asking him about everything that happened. And shehad gone to see both Victoria and Sam Hopely. She was trying to narrow down suspects—”
“Do the police know about this?” Suzannah asked, her mouth hanging open in surprise.
“Pullman does,” I said, even though he didn’t know about the annotated book itself. I’d have to tell him now.
“Is this what you’ve been running around doing?” my father demanded. “Following a naive child’s investigation?” He spoke firmly, his face completely distraught. “Will killed Alex, Rose. It’s high time you acknowledged that.”
Across the table, my mother gave him a strained look. It was hard to forget that two days ago, she had been questioning that very thing herself. Had even considered the unthinkable. That my father was involved.
“You really don’t think her looking into all of this proves someone else was involved?” I asked, feeling the hot tears forming in my eyes. “They could have found out what she was doing! They could have tried to stop her!”
“And let’s say for a second that you’re right, Rose, and that’s exactly what she was doing,” my mother snapped. “Maybe she offended someone with her questions. Did you ever think of that? She could have gotten herself killed asking the wrong person the wrong thing.”
“Yeah, maybe the person who killed Alex!”
“Then it would be your fault, Rose! Is that what you want?” my mother reminded me tensely. “It would be one more life that your god-awful book took. It has tormented one man, andkilledanother. Or have you already forgotten about what you did to Mr. Hopely?”
She tossed the hardcover off the table and onto the floor, where it landed cover up.
The wine was rushing to my head. I couldn’t stop the words. “There was absolutely nothing good about Mr. Hopely. I know that firsthand,” I said.
Mom crossed her arms, her eyebrows raised in displeasure. “And what is that supposed to mean?”
