The Last House Guest(71)

“I’m not working for them anymore. Believe me, I—”

“And you.” She stepped closer, fixing her anger on me. Walking down the front porch step, forcing me back in the process. “You, this complete fuck-up . . .” She cringed, then shook her head to herself. “I’m sorry, but you were. This complete nobody. Now you’re running the show? When people like me, who do everything right, get the degree, serve their time—we come back here to nothing? Excuse me for doing something about it. I’m just trying to reclaim what’s mine.”

“By what?” And then I understood. She was trying to spook the visitors. Hit the Lomans’ bottom line where it hurt. Our bottom line, as far as she was concerned. I didn’t know whom she was angrier with—them or me. Or maybe everything was all tied up together, feeding off one another. Me, the person who had hurt her physically; Parker, the one who had broken her heart; the Lomans, destroying her future. Everything broke here.

“Have you been up there? At the Lomans’?”

She threw her hands in the air, as if it were all so obvious. “I’m just trying to find something. Anything. I just want something I can use. I want them out of here.” She was trembling then. “I wanted you out of there. It isn’t fair.” Her voice broke on the last word.

The nights when the electricity had gone out and I’d believed myself alone. Footsteps in the sand, the back door left open, and the feel of someone in the house with me. The flashlight on the bluffs. “You could go to jail,” I whispered. “They could ruin you.” The truth, then. They could ruin anyone.

She sat on the first step, looking down the undeveloped street, legs stretched out in front of her and crossed at the ankles. “Are you going to tell the police?”

I had come here to ask Faith about Sadie, thinking that if I looked her in the eye, I’d know. Instead, she was confessing to something else. Something perhaps unconnected. Meanwhile, I’d given the police the phone, told them everything I knew, and all it had done was turn their focus on me. I didn’t know what else I owed them. Or her.

“I don’t know,” I said. That, at least, was the truth.

“What about them, then?” she asked. “Are you going to tell the Lomans?”

“I’m not speaking to them right now. They’re not speaking to me. I don’t work for them anymore. I was fired.” I didn’t owe the Lomans anything. Maybe I never did.

Her eye twitched with some emotion I couldn’t understand. “I want him to know it was me,” she said.

She had no idea, the depths of my own anger. Or maybe she did. She tipped her head to the side, watching me closely.

“No one’s stopping you,” I said. “Do what you want. But the Lomans, they think they control everything. People, properties, this entire town. They think they’ve earned that right. They think they deserve to know everything. Maybe they don’t.”

If it were me, I’d let them wonder. Let them wake up to footsteps and not be sure. Let that fracture split their night, their lives.

“You need to leave,” I said. “You need to get out of here. Please, just stop. You almost . . . This place, it was full of gas. Someone could’ve gotten hurt.”

“No, no one was supposed to get hurt. Just—no one was even noticing. You didn’t, even, until the candles. No one was doing anything.”

A chill ran through me. All these invisible lives, hidden just out of sight. Even that night at the party, when she was right there, she remained out of frame, hidden behind shadows and broken glass.

“Did you see what happened that night?” I asked.

She looked at me out of the corner of her eye. Then pressed her lips together. What did she think had happened? Did she, like the police, believe I could’ve been involved in Sadie’s death?

“No. Connor told me to leave. I wasn’t about to hang around after that.”

Had those been the footsteps I’d heard that night in the woods? When I called Sadie’s name? Forgetting how so many of us could move like a ghost, undetected and invisible—as we were taught to do.

Still, it was her word. Her word that she’d left the party, gone back home. I stared at her face, trying to see—

The sound of a car engine in the distance pulled my focus. I peered down the road but couldn’t see past the trees.

“Faith, let’s go back to your place.” I pulled her by the sleeve, trying to get her to stand, but she was staring at my hand, clenched in the fabric of her shirt. “The police have been keeping an eye on the house across the street.” I nodded toward the Blue Robin. I wondered if it was the detective even now. If he would find us here and know.

She stood then, her gaze following mine down the road. “I don’t see anyone,” she said.

“Still. We need to go.”

We walked quietly, side by side, around the side of the Blue Robin, back through the path of trees, like two friends. To anyone else, it probably looked like a friendly hike. I waited until we were out of view of the Blue Robin, until I was sure we were alone again, to ask. I kept my voice low. “None of this—the candles, the damage—it’s not about Sadie?”

She stopped walking for a second before continuing. “Sadie? No. No. You thought I could hurt her?”

Could she? I closed my eyes and shook my head, but that was a lie, and she knew it. Anyone could do it. That wasn’t the question here. “If I was going to hurt someone,” she said, not breaking stride, “she would be the last Loman on my list.”