Page 42 of Girl, Remembered

Blood hammered in her temples. Her spine clammed up against the seats. ‘Are you kidding me?’

‘I’m not kidding. I’m sending backup.’

‘Mia, don’t. Please. I… need to do this by myself.’

Ripley resigned to breathing and not talking. Ella knew she understood. Sometimes, a strange request was more than just a strange request. If Dever had been sitting on this for months, if he’d known, this whole time, exactly what he was chasing and exactly why, then somebody else walking into that house first would only get Ella secondhand information filtered through somebody else’s read of his face.

She didn’t want a transcript. She wanted the two seconds before he composed himself. She wanted the flinch, if there was one. She wanted the little moment of hesitation before he found the right lie.

And there was a simpler truth. If this man had known who Doyle really was the entire time, then Ella wanted to be the one standing in front of him when he had to answer for it. If she wasn’t, she’d spend the rest of her life thinking about the what-if.

She’d earned that much.

‘Good luck,’ Ripley said, finally.

‘Thank you.’

‘Text me before you go in. Five minutes after that, I’m coming.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The GPS killed itself two turns early, and Ella found 1417 Coppice Way on instinct instead.

Terrance Dever’s house sat back off the road behind a stand of oaks. All but one window on the ground floor was dark. One light burned on the left hand side.

She killed the headlights before she turned in. The driveway curved once around a magnolia and opened out in front of a three-car garage, and it was there, easing the car forward on nothing but the parking lights, that she saw it. The land dropped away past the side of the house, gentle at first and then more than gentle, down toward a stretch of black water around fifty feet across. The moon put a long smear of white across the middle of it. Trees stood around three sides of it in a ring, tall and straight-trunked, nothing like the oaks out front. She didn’t need daylight to know what they were.

Her phone was still in her hand from the drive. She opened the text thread with Ripley and typed Here. Pond’s real and stopped with her thumb over send. If she sent it now, Ripley would give her the five minutes and not a second more, and five minutes wasn’t enough time to find out anything worth finding out.

She put the phone in her jacket pocket, unsent, and told herself she’d send it the second she was inside.

Ella exited the car. The porch light wasn’t on. Ella followed the path up to the front door and knocked before she had time to entertain the thought of sneaking inside.

After about five seconds, a light in the hallway came on. A silhouette from beyond the frosted glass floated towards the front door. It cracked open.

‘Hello?’

A woman stood there. She was wearing a thick, white robe despite it being a warm evening. Her blonde hair was tied up in a bun.

‘Hi, Mrs. Dever?’

‘Yes. Who are you?’

‘I’m Agent Ella Dark. I work with your husband. Is he in, by any chance?’

The woman glanced back into her house, as though to confirm if Terrance Dever was home or not.

‘Yes he is, but… he’s a little busy. He’s been on the phone non-stop since this afternoon.’

‘My visit most likely concerns the same reason he’s been busy,’ Ella said. ‘I need to see him, urgently.’

‘Okay, but can I just check with him?’

Most people, Ella thought, would have let a partner’s colleague into their house without such resistance, and it was in that moment that Ella realized Mrs. Dever knew her husband’s history with this fugitive in all its strange detail.

‘Why would you need to do that? I was with him this morning. I assure you, he knows who I am.’

Mrs. Dever gripped the door. ‘I don’t doubt that. He just told me to turn away any interruptions. Why don’t you-’