The Winter Sister(71)
“It’s in a letter,” Ben said. “But you’ll have to read it yourself, or you won’t believe me.”
“A letter from who?”
He paused. “From Persephone.”
My breath snagged on the back of my throat. A letter from Persephone?
After she died, I tried so hard to resurrect her voice, scouring my room for notes she’d once written me. All I managed to find, though, were my two most recent birthday cards from her—one still on my desk, where it had been propped since October, and one I’d tossed into a drawer. The font of the words inside each card was so distinctly hers, and I stared at the series of too-short paragraphs, memorizing the curves of each letter. A couple days later, when the detectives returned and asked for samples of Persephone’s handwriting, I was reluctant to hand the cards over, even though Falley and Parker had assured me they’d return them.
As Ben and I stood in front of Tommy’s trailer, I remembered that moment—“We just need our guy to examine them,” they told me, the only explanation they offered—and I found myself staring at Ben’s face, my lips slightly parted. When I’d spoken to Falley and Parker over the last week, they’d both said that evidence had emerged that led them to not press assault charges against Ben. Was it possible that this “proof” Ben wanted to show me was the evidence that neither of them had been willing to discuss with me? And if that evidence was a letter from Persephone, wouldn’t they have needed something, all those years ago, to verify its authenticity?
“Did they—” I tried. “Did the police ever do, like, a handwriting analysis of this letter you’re talking about?”
Ben cocked his head to the side. “You knew about that?”
“No, I . . .” Despite the cold, my palms felt sweaty. “The detectives—they asked me for samples of Persephone’s handwriting once. But they never said why.”
“Oh,” Ben said. “Yeah, this was why. I showed them the letter—to explain about the bruises—and they had to make sure I didn’t forge it.”
My eyes widened, my breath shaky between my lips. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll do it. I’ll go back to your house and read Persephone’s letter.”
? ? ?
The Emorys’ driveway was steep, flanked on either side by evergreens that stood in lines like soldiers on guard. It could have been the shade those trees provided, or the fact that the afternoon was quickly slipping toward evening, but I could have sworn that everything grew darker the higher I drove up the hill.
I followed Ben’s car past the main house, that brick monstrosity I’d never seen up close before, and I tasted something bitter on the back of my tongue. Will Emory, the man who had so thoroughly unraveled my mother, could have easily been inside there somewhere, drinking a cup of coffee or scrolling through his tablet, completely indifferent to the pain he’d caused—not only to Mom, but to all the other women whose hearts he’d unstitched throughout the years.
A couple hundred feet past the mansion, Ben veered off into a circular driveway and pulled up in front of a small cottage that looked remarkably different from the main house. The guesthouse, as he’d called it, had immaculate white siding and pale blue shutters. For a moment, the setting sun winked through the trees and glazed the house with a glow resembling candlelight.
I parked behind Ben, leaving a few feet of space between our cars in case I needed to leave quickly. When I stepped outside, my muscles stiffened against the cold. My breath flared out before me, frosting the air, and I saw that Ben was already at the front door of the cottage.
“Thank you for coming,” he said, as if I were a guest at a party he was throwing. He opened the door and crossed the threshold. “I know this was a lot to ask.”
He gestured for me to come inside, and if it weren’t for the heat I could feel from within the house, I might have paused a bit longer before following him in. As he closed the door behind me, my eyes swept across the house. There was a bedroom to our left through a set of French doors, a dining room to our right, and in front of us a hallway that led to a shiny white kitchen. Off of the kitchen there were two closed doors—a bathroom, I supposed, and maybe a closet as well—but from where I stood, I couldn’t see an exit other than the door I’d just come through.
“It’s not much,” Ben said, seeming to notice that I was studying the layout. “And actually, most of it’s a dumping ground for stuff my dad doesn’t want in the main house anymore. But I don’t know.” He shrugged. “I like it.”
I turned to him, my gaze as sharp as I could manage. “So where’s the letter?”
“Right,” he said. “In here.”
He opened one of the paneled glass doors to our left and stepped into his bedroom, flicking on the light switch as he moved toward a dresser in the corner. I followed him in but stayed near the doorway, my eyes creeping over his navy comforter, the silver laptop on his nightstand, the retainer box propped against an alarm clock. In front of the window overlooking the driveway, there was a cluttered desk holding up stacks of textbooks, and the back of its chair was draped with clothes.
“Sorry about the mess,” Ben said as he bent down to open the bottom dresser drawer. “This is actually supposed to be the living room, you know. But I like the French doors.” He chuckled. “My dad says I’m compromising the integrity of the guesthouse—his exact words, by the way—because I don’t have a real living room and I’m just using the back bedroom for storage.”