The Winter Sister(89)

I spun away from him then, and in the fraction of a second before I’d fully turned around, I saw his eyes widen. When I yanked open the front door, I could feel him just behind me, his shoes thudding against the hardwood floor. I stumbled down the steps, fumbling for my keys in my coat pocket, and ran toward my car, his fingers brushing my coat as he tried to grab me.

“Sylvie, stop! Wait. Stop!”

I was almost there—just about to open the driver’s side door—when he grabbed me by the shoulder and spun me around. His fingers dug into my arms like dead bolts locking into place, and he pressed my back against the car, his breath erupting in bursts against my cheek.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

I stared up at him. His eyes were blacker than I’d ever seen them, even with the light from his front door shining toward us. His pupils looked wildly dilated, like an animal about to pounce. I tightened my muscles, tried to wriggle free of him, but I couldn’t move—his grip was that hard. Now, I could only stand there, helpless as Persephone once was, shaking.

But then, just as suddenly as he’d clasped onto my arms, he glanced down at his hands, and his mouth fell open. He let go.

“Sorry, I—” he started. Then he shook his head. “You’re scared of me?”

“You killed her,” I said, my voice husky with tears.

“What? Why would you say that? You know that’s not true.”

“You have her necklace. She was never without it. Ever.”

“I—I know that, but—”

“She wasn’t wearing it when they found her body. Which means that the person who has it was the last person to see her alive.”

“No,” Ben said, snapping his head back and forth. “No, no, no. You don’t understand. I found the necklace. I didn’t take it from her.”

I heard a surge of voices then, not too far away from us. There were people, it seemed, just beyond the turn in the driveway back toward the main house. They were saying words I couldn’t make out, words that sounded sharp and contentious. But I didn’t care about that. Whatever it was, whoever was arguing, didn’t matter to me then.

“You found it on her dead body!” I cried. “After you killed her!”

“No,” he protested, looking back toward his father’s house, the source of the sudden commotion. “No, I—” He thrust his eyes back onto mine. “I found it in my driveway. Right after she went missing. I was shoveling and I found it there, under the snow. I almost—”

“—and your secretary’s been giving me the runaround all fucking day.”

“I almost shoveled it away.”

“I won’t be ignored like this!” the voice insisted. It was louder now, practically shouting, the boom of it echoing toward us.

“Why would it be in your driveway?” I demanded.

“I don’t know.” He glanced toward the voices again. “But I told you how we were fighting, how she was kicking all around, going nuts. It must have fallen off her then. And I don’t know, I guess it fell out of my car some point after that.”

“But—the police,” I said. “I told them to check to see if you had it.”

“They did.”

“And?”

“And,” Ben said, “I lied to them.”

“I need more. I didn’t sign up to be harassed like this. People knocking on my door.”

“They didn’t ask me about the necklace until a couple weeks after her body was found,” Ben continued. “And she was my girlfriend, Sylvie. It was her necklace. I wasn’t just going to give it to them so they could—I don’t know—hold it as evidence forever, or somehow use it as evidence against me. But, listen, if I’d known how much it meant to you—and I should have, I should have known—but I was nineteen and so stupid and I was only thinking of myself, of what I’d lost. So I kept it.”

“Get off my property right now or I will call the police,” a second voice shouted.

“Yeah, you do that. Go call the police. I’d love to have a chat with them.”

My head was reeling, the sky whirling in circles above me, but I couldn’t ignore it any longer.

“What’s going on?” I asked, looking toward Will Emory’s house. It was a couple hundred feet away, beyond the bend in the driveway. From where we stood, all I could see was the glow from the spotlight over the garage.

“I don’t know,” Ben said. “But that’s my dad, and the other one sounds like . . .”

He started walking down the driveway, and despite how I’d just run away from him, how I could still feel the grip of his fingers on my arms, I followed him.

“Look, I’m willing to make an even trade. Just like old times. They left this stuff at my house yesterday. Then they hauled ass out of there and—”

“They?”

“Haven’t you been listening to me? They were harassing me, asking me all these questions. I need more money if I’m gonna have to deal with shit like that from now on.”

As we crept down the driveway, we stayed close to a row of evergreen trees, careful not to crunch too loudly over the snow with our feet. When we drew near enough to make out their faces—Will’s face, Tommy’s face—I was about to take another step forward, but Ben held his arm in front of me. He put his index finger to his lips, then gestured for me to follow him to one of the larger evergreens a few feet closer to where they stood in the driveway. We crouched down behind it, my heart thumping.