The Last House Guest(86)

I ran. Stumbling out of the room with Ben Collins steps behind me. He called my name, and the smell of smoke followed. He’d catch me too easily on the stairs—the open, airy spiral. I dove into the nearest room, slammed the door behind me.

Sadie’s room.

There were no locks. And nowhere to hide, everything designed to show the clean lines of the place. The bare wood floor under the bed. The open space. No place for secrets here.

The fire alarm started blaring, an even, high-pitched cry.

Maybe the fire department would come. But not soon enough.

I pulled open her glass balcony doors, let the fabric billow in. It was too far to jump. The only room you could jump from safely was the master bedroom, with the slope of grass beneath their balcony—which Connor, Faith, and I had climbed through years ago.

It was all I could do to flatten myself against the wall by her bedroom door before it flew open again. Ben Collins walked straight for the open doors to the patio, leaning over—peering out. And I took that moment to dart down the hall in the other direction.

He must’ve heard my steps—everything echoed here—because he called my name again, his voice booming over the sound of the fire alarm.

But I was at the other end of the hall, smoke spilling out of the office between us.

Slamming the door to the master bedroom, I raced for the balcony. One leg over the railing, hanging from my fingertips, imagining Connor below, my feet on his shoulders. A six-foot drop. I could do it.

I heard the door open as I let go, the impact from the ground jarring me. I stumbled, then righted myself and ran for the cliff path. I was already calling for help, but my pleas were swallowed up by the crash of the waves.

“Stop!” he called, too close—close enough to hear not only his words but his footsteps. “Do not run from me!”

Witnesses. All I could think was witnesses. Sadie had been behind a locked door, inside a locked trunk. No one had been there to see her go.

I was not a criminal running from the cops. I was not what his story would make me.

The outline of a man emerged near the edge of the cliff path, and I almost collided with him before he came into focus. Parker. “What’s going—”

I reeled back, and Detective Collins froze, mere steps away from the both of us. The water crashed against the rocks behind us. The steps down to Breaker Beach were so close, within sight—

“He killed her!” I yelled. I wanted someone else to hear, someone else to see us.

“What?” Parker was looking from me to the detective, back to the house—where the blare of the fire alarm just barely reached us.

“She knows about the crash,” Detective Collins said, breathing heavily. Deflecting, refocusing. I looked between the two of them, wondering if I had only doubled the danger. What each would do to keep his secrets. The detective’s hands were on his hips as he strained to catch his breath, his arms pushing his coat aside, revealing a gun.

Parker turned to me, his dark eyes searching. “An accident,” he said, the words barely formed. Barely falling from his lips. The same thing Detective Collins had said, that Parker’s parents must’ve said—the lines Parker clung to. Still, I noticed, the thing he didn’t say. Neither he nor his sister ever capable of an apology.

Parker looked at the detective. “You told her?”

“Sadie knew,” I said before he could answer. No one had told me. Sadie had led me there. My steps in her steps. But now it was just the three of us here, and the violent sea below, all the terrible secrets it kept. “She found out the truth, and he killed her.”

The detective shook his head, stepping closer. “No, listen . . .”

Parker blinked as a wave crashed below. “What did you say, Avery?”

But I never got the chance to respond.

The detective must’ve seen it in Parker’s eyes, the same as me. The sudden burst of rage, the anger gathering, until something else was surging through his blood. Detective Collins reached for his gun just as Parker lunged.

I couldn’t say who moved first. Which was the action and which the reaction. Only that Parker was on him in the moment his gun was in his hand—but he never got a grip on it, never pointed it wherever it was intended to go.

The surge in the marrow of his bones, the fulcrum on which his life balanced, as he pushed Ben Collins backward and the gun fell from his grip, hitting the rock.

A shot, ricocheting up. A sound that split the silence, that gave us all pause. A flock of birds rising at the same time as all our lives shifted—the tipping point. I saw it first in the widening of Ben Collins’s eyes. The desperate reach of his empty hands toward me. His feet stumbling once, twice, as the momentum carried him backward, into the air.

I watched. The color of his shirt disappearing over the edge. And then nothing, nothing, nothing more. Just the sound of the water colliding with the rocks below.

And that was when I heard the scream.

And saw all the people of Littleport, gathered below on the beach, turn our way, to bear witness.





CHAPTER 30


In the distance, a buoy bell tolled. A hawk cried, circling above. The water crashed in a surge against the rocks. Time kept moving.

“It was an accident,” Parker said, sliding to the ground as the people came running.

All these accidents.

The first officer arrived on the bluffs, racing from the road, calling for others to get back.