Open House(33)

“Congratulations,” I say, trying to do the math.

Josie beats me to it. “So that’s what, in nine months or so?” she asks, and my stomach drops. How can she be so cavalier? I try to breathe. So she knows it’s his, and the worst part is, she’s right about the timing: If I’m doing the math right, this baby would be due in September, so how’s Noah going to take it when I tell him there’s a baby due during the course of his dreamy semester abroad?

“I guess, yeah,” Noah answers Josie, his smile fading. He looks confused and annoyed, which is the way he gets when he senses we’re talking about something more than just what we’re saying out loud.

“Did you already put your deposit down?” Josie pushes.

Noah considers her. There’s no way he’d guess what she’s getting at. “Yeah,” he says blandly. “I did.”

“You’re going to have so much fun, Noah,” Josie says. “Australia. Wow. What a dream.”

I slink farther down my seat, the leather cold against my skin. Noah doesn’t say anything else. He just drives faster along the narrow road, plunging us deeper into the woods.





TWENTY-SIX

Priya

Priya clutched a Styrofoam cup full of coffee and nodded in response to one of Detective Salinas’s questions. The police station’s interview room was just big enough to fit a metal table and three chairs, and the empty chair made Priya worry that another cop would come in to join in the questioning. She was barely holding it together with just Salinas, and so far he only seemed to want a timeline of events.

“So, to review, you last spoke with Josie during the day yesterday afternoon, by phone?” he asked, his pencil poised in the air. The pencil and paper struck Priya as old-fashioned, but she loathed technology, so she appreciated it. There wasn’t a phone or laptop in sight.

“No,” Priya corrected, tapping her index finger against the table. “By text. I guess that’s by phone. I’m just trying to be accurate, sorry.”

“And what was the nature of your conversation?” Salinas asked, scrawling away on his paper in loopy cursive.

Priya cleared her throat. Another woman had been hurt, and Priya didn’t want to lie. There had to be a way to tell the truth without implicating her family. “Josie and I have known each other for years,” Priya started. “We’re connected by the disappearance of Emma McCullough. Emma and Josie were my students at Yarrow; and as you maybe already know, Emma and Josie were best friends. I was close with both of them.” This was an exaggeration, but not a lie. Priya was only thirty-one when she was teaching Emma and Josie, and she related well to all her students. “And during the past few years Josie and I sometimes met up.” It was obvious how interested Detective Salinas was in this part. Priya knew she needed to rein it back in. “Josie became a friend of mine as the years went by, even if we didn’t get to talk that often. I told her that Brad and I were looking for a new home, and she offered to keep an eye out for us. She wanted me to meet her at the house on Carrington.”

“Really?” Salinas asked, his round brown eyes steady. “A five-bedroom home for a family with one child?”

Priya’s heart pounded. What a fool she’d been to think she was in control of this conversation. She imagined Brad in another exam room, telling the same story, and tried to steel herself. “People with one child like big houses, too, Detective,” she said.

“Do they?” the detective asked. Priya willed her hands to stop trembling against the coffee cup, staring back but saying nothing.

“Let’s move on,” Detective Salinas finally said, glancing back to his loose-leaf papers. They seemed less quaint now and more incriminating. “What time did you and Josie arrange to meet?” he asked.

“She told me her open house started at eleven,” Priya said. Also true.

“And did you drive straight from your house, or from elsewhere?”

“From my house,” Priya said. She pulled her thick black hair over her shoulder and twisted it, a habit she’d had since she was a child. When her parents brought her to India at age ten, she saw her grandmother did the exact same thing, and it made her feel connected to something bigger, a line of blood that meant something more than what she could see.

“Did you stop off anywhere?” Salinas asked, which felt like the same question, but Priya answered anyway.

“No,” she said, letting her hair fall loose again.

“And when you arrived at the open house, who else was there?”

“Dean and Haley,” Priya said. It struck her that the way she said it sounded too familiar, like she’d known them before today. “Well, actually, they pulled in behind me. So Brad, Dean, Haley, and I were there the same time, I guess, and we all introduced ourselves.”

“How nice,” the detective said, putting a bad taste in Priya’s mouth, making her feel increasingly like she’d done something very wrong. “And did you approach the house together, or separately?”

“Together,” Priya said.

“How did you announce yourselves?” Salinas asked, and Priya paused at the odd phrasing.

“Um, well, Dean knocked on the door, and rang the doorbell once or twice. Is that what you mean?”

“Yes.” He scrawled something across the paper, and then asked, “How long did you wait before entering the house?”