The Last House Guest(22)

I closed my eyes, trying to feel him there in my memory. The phone held to my ear, the sound of endless ringing. I had made only one call that night—the call to Sadie when she didn’t pick up.

“You know,” he continued, eyes narrowing, “I expected these questions from the police. Even from the Lomans. But this . . .” He trailed off. “She killed herself, Avery.”

Maybe the silence between us was better after all. Because the things we had to say were going to slide to places neither of us wanted to go.

He shook his head as if he realized the same thing. “Well, it’s been fun catching up.”

My arms were crossed over my chest as he made his way back outside to the delivery van in the drive. From the front door, I saw the sheer white curtains in the house across the street—Sunset Retreat—fall back into place. I could see the outline of a shadow there. A single figure, unmoving, watching as I locked the front door and made my way around the house toward the wooded path, disappearing into the trees.

The biggest danger of all in Littleport was assuming that you were invisible. That no one else saw you.





CHAPTER 7


I couldn’t tell if Parker was back home, but I didn’t want him seeing me, stopping me, following me. I practically ran from my car into the guesthouse, locking the front door behind me. My hands were still shaking with misplaced adrenaline.

Sadie and I had the same model phone. My charger should work. I connected her phone to the wire on my desk and stared at the black screen, waiting. Pacing in front of the living room windows. Hearing her words again, the last thing she said to me: What do we think of this?

This time the scene shifted until I saw a different possibility: She’d been planning to meet someone. The pale skin of her shoulders, the nervous energy that I had mistaken for anticipation, a thrumming excitement for the party that night.

Now I was walking through another potential version of events.

Somewhere in my phone, I had a copy of that list, the one Detective Collins had written out for me last summer. I scrolled back in time until I found it, slightly blurred, my hand already pulling away as I took the photo just when the detective turned back. I had to zoom in to see it, twist it to the side, but there we were. The list of names: Avery Greer, Luciana Suarez, Parker Loman, Connor Harlow. Our arrival times written in my handwriting.

There was something the police had been looking for in here. A story that didn’t add up. I tore a blank sheet of paper from the notepad on my desk, copying the list—now complete with the information Connor had given me:

Me—6:40 p.m.

Luce—8 p.m.

Connor—8:10 p.m.

Parker—8:30 p.m.

I tapped the back of my pen against my desk until the rhythm made me anxious. Maybe Sadie and Connor had plans to meet up. Maybe when she told Parker not to wait for her, it was because Connor was supposed to give her a ride to the party.

I had no idea what she’d been up to earlier in the day while I was working. She was dressed and ready by the early afternoon, while I had been reconciling the rental property finances all day, caught up in the end-of-season work. Luce said she thought Sadie was packing. Parker said Sadie told him not to wait for her.

But somehow her phone had ended up at the rental house across town while her body was washing up on the shore of Breaker Beach. Was it possible that someone had hidden it inside the chest recently? Or had it been there ever since the night she died?

As soon as the display of her phone lit up, prompting the passcode screen, I pressed my thumb to the pad. The screen flashed a message to try again, and my stomach dropped.

Sadie and I had just come out of a rough spot in the weeks before she died. Until then, we’d had access to each other’s phones for years. So we could check a text, see the weather, take a picture. It was a show of trust. It was a promise.

It had never occurred to me that she might’ve locked me out when things turned cold.

I wiped my hand against my shirt and tried to hold perfectly still but could feel my pulse all the way to the tips of my fingers. I held my breath as I tried once more.

The passcode grid disappeared—I was in.

The background of her home screen was a picture of the water. I hadn’t seen it before, but it looked as if it had been taken from the edge of the bluffs at sunrise—the sky two shades of blue and the sun glowing amber just over the horizon. As if she’d stood out there before, contemplating the moment that would follow.

Last I’d seen her phone, the backdrop had been a gradient in shades of purple.

The first thing I did was open her messages to see if she’d sent me something that never came through. But the only things in her inbox were the messages from me. The first, asking where she was. The second, a string of three question marks.

I was listed as Avie in her phone. It was the name she called me whenever we were out in a crowd, a press of bodies, the blur of alcohol—Where are you, Avie?—as if she were telling people that I belonged to her.

There was nothing else in there. No messages from anyone else, and none of our previous correspondence. I wasn’t sure whether the police could access her old messages, either with or without the phone, but there was nothing here for me. Her call log was empty as well. No calls or messages had come through after the ones I had sent. I had presumed that her phone had been lost to the sea, and that was the reason it had been offline when the police tried to ping it. But I looked at the crack in the upper corner again, wondering if her phone had been dropped or thrown—if the same event that had cracked the screen had knocked the power out, too.