The Last House Guest(41)

My heart plummeted, but I clung to his words. “Are you reopening the case?” I asked. Maybe he believed me after all.

Detective Collins stood back, assessing the house—quaint and unassuming, like a birdhouse hidden amid the trees. “I was trying to see how someone might leave without notice. There’s a path behind the house, right?” Not answering my question but not denying it, either. He believed it was possible, then, that something else had happened that night.

“Right. To the bed-and-breakfast.” You could walk it in five to ten minutes. You could run it much faster.

“Show me inside?”

I led him in the front door, watched as he peered around the vacant space. He hadn’t been one of the officers who’d come to get Parker that night. But he’d taken the call from the Donaldsons about the break-in earlier this week.

“Show me where you found the phone,” he said.

I opened the door to the master bedroom, pointed to the now closed chest at the foot of the bed. The pile of blankets sat beside it, untouched. “In there,” I said. “I found it in the corner. Seemed like it had been there a long time.”

“That so,” he said. The lid creaked open as he peered inside. He stared into empty darkness, then closed it again. “Here’s the thing, Avery,” he said, pivoting on his heel. “We got a good look at her phone, and it’s really nothing we didn’t know.”

“Other than how it ended up here?”

He paused, then nodded. “Exactly.” He paced the room, peering into the bathroom where I’d once cleaned the floor alongside Parker. “There was one thing I noticed, though. In all those pictures on her phone, you weren’t there.”

I froze. Sadie and Luce; Sadie and Parker; Connor; the scenic shots. Everything but me.

“I thought you were her best friend,” he said. “That’s what you told me, right?”

“Yes.”

“But you’re not in her pictures. She didn’t respond to your text that night. And we got a lot of conflicting information during the interviews.”

I felt something surging in my veins, my fists tightening of their own accord. “She didn’t respond because something happened to her. And I’m not in the pictures because I was busy that summer. Working.” But I could feel my pulse down to the tips of my fingers as I wondered if there had been rumors—about the rift, about me, about her. I thought no one had known—I thought Grant had kept it quiet.

“About that. Your work,” he continued, and my stomach dropped. “Luciana Suarez provided us with some interesting details. This was her first summer in town, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. She’d started dating Parker the fall before.”

“Is it true that you took over Sadie’s job?” And there it was. Luce. I should have known.

“Luce said that?” I asked, but he didn’t respond. Just held eye contact, waiting for the answer. I brushed the comment away with a wave of my hand in the air, like Sadie might do. “They didn’t need two people to do it. She was reassigned.” Not fired.

“But, to be clear, you have her role.”

I pressed my lips together. “Technically.”

“You know what else Luciana said?” He paused, then continued like he didn’t expect me to answer. “She said she’d never heard of you before.” A twitch of his mouth. “Said that she didn’t know anything about you until she arrived. No one had seen fit to mention your existence. Not even Sadie.”

“Because Luce was Parker’s girlfriend,” I snapped. “There was no reason I would’ve come up.” I was being blindsided yet again. This was an interrogation, and I’d walked right into it.

“She told us she’d been a friend of the family first.”

“So what? That doesn’t mean she and Sadie were close.”

He looked at me closely, steadily. “Rumor has it you and Sadie were on the outs.”

“Rumors are shit here, and you know it.”

He smiled then, as if to say, There you are. That girl they all remembered. “I just think it’s odd, is all, that Sadie never would’ve mentioned you.”

Luce. She had complicated everything. Always with a quizzical look in my direction—something dangerous that kept me second-guessing myself. Luce became the unwitting wedge that summer, leaving everything off balance. If anyone understood what had happened in that house, it was her. Always there when I thought we were alone. I had no idea what she’d told the police during her interview. It hadn’t mattered then, because of the note.

Detective Collins paced the room again, the floorboards creaking under his feet. “If I had to make a professional assessment, I’d say the friendship was a little one-sided. If I’m being honest with you, it seems a little like you were obsessed with her.”

“No.” I said it louder than I meant to, and I lowered my voice before continuing. “We were growing up. We had other responsibilities.”

“You lived on their property, worked for their family, ran around with her crowd.” He held up his hand, even though I hadn’t said anything. “You considered them family, I know. But,” he continued, lowering his voice, “did they consider you the same?”

“Yes,” I said, because I had to. I trusted them because they chose me. Taking me in, welcoming me into their home, into their lives. What other choice was there? I had been adrift, and then I was grounded—