Liam’s wife, Darcy, sat on the other side of two of their children, her arm always wrapped around the daughter as if she could pull her tightly back into her body. She was a quiet woman who often made an effort to become one with the wallpaper at any Church gathering. Darcy didn’t sing anymore unless there were eyes on her, and if the sermon veered toward particularly fiery rhetoric, her expression would pinch in.
Eliza liked watching Darcy sometimes when she could, drinking in the reactions in a way that was the closest Eliza would ever get to showing her own.
But Darcy Dawson was the outlier even when it came to the women. Most of them had simply been shifted from their fathers’ household to their husbands’ and had started producing their own children to fill the pews.
Even most of the teenagers bought into everything Josiah preached. Molly, of course, had doubts. Eliza’s attention drifted once more to her closest friend. Sometimes Eliza wondered if Molly would have those thoughts if she hadn’t moved to Knox Hollow. If her family had never bought the ranch next to Eliza’s, would the idea of escape have ever even crossed her mind? Or would she simply have fallen in line with what was expected of her?
Eliza had learned to tune out the actual words of the sermons, and often did as she dreamed of the day she could leave this lifestyle behind. Not God or worship, no not that. But this Church for which the elders only played at religion when it suited their purposes.
Those had been fruitless dreams, she realized now. But at the time they’d been the only thing that had kept her moving from one day to the next.
The pianist struck three wrong notes in a row as the voices faded into the quiet reverence that always followed a hymn. No one tittered at the mistake, though. They were all too well trained, even the little ones, and besides it was Noah Dawson’s first time playing at a Saturday evening mass. Everyone knew those drew the biggest crowd, were the most nerve-racking for the kids involved in the sermon.
Darcy Dawson watched him, her hand gripping her daughter’s arm still, her lips pressed tight and worried. She always looked so worried these days.
Eliza could relate.
Uncle Josiah leaned down to whisper in Noah’s ear on his way to the pulpit. Josiah slapped the boy’s shoulder a few times before moving on, and Noah all but crawled beneath the secondhand piano, wearing his mortification in the pink that bloomed against his neck and spread into his cheeks. Josiah liked to tease, thought it was good-natured. But during the exchange, Darcy had gone quite still over in her pew. Josiah threw a wink in her direction, but the woman didn’t relax an inch.
Then without any warning, Darcy turned to meet Eliza’s eyes across the small space that separated them. Eliza’s pulse tripped and then sped up as Darcy stared at her without blinking, without smiling, without any acknowledgment, for one, two, three seconds, before turning back to where Josiah was speaking.
Eliza exhaled, shaken but not sure why. There had been nothing malicious in Darcy’s eyes. Maybe she’d simply felt the weight of Eliza’s gaze. That heavy stare lingered in Eliza’s memory, though, as she shifted her own attention back to Josiah.
It wasn’t a fancy church—never had been, never would be. The podium where Josiah stood was cheap, the nails twisting loose at its joints, which sagged beneath the pastor’s weight. The walls of the church, although always freshly painted, were unadorned. The pews were old and scarred. Although Eliza doubted anyone would dare carve anything into them, the normal friction of everyday use wore on the wood.
Luxuries, ornaments, anything that wasn’t stripped down to its barest parts—none of that was allowed. It was sin; it was temptation.
That line of thinking was so closely echoed in Uncle Josiah’s sermon that Eliza wondered for a strange moment if the words had been written on her skin for him to read. Eliza prayed her thoughts were not as apparent as ink, though. She prayed they could not be deciphered as easily.
Because Eliza had a secret. And if anyone found out, it would get her killed.
CHAPTER THREE
LUCY THORNE
Thursday, 7:00 a.m.
“It’s a closed case,” Vaughn said for the third time since they’d set up in her office an hour ago. “A confession, a body, and a murder weapon.”
“Easiest investigation of my career,” Lucy murmured, too tired and too frayed to hide the anxious twist in her voice.
Lucy’s muscles ached with fatigue, but she fought the desire to sink into the chair in front of Vaughn’s desk. Instead, she kept her post by the window, watching the city wake up as she struggled to make sense of the night.
Eliza had stopped talking once she’d given her confession, had simply shut down, her chin tilted up as if heading into battle, those dark blue eyes of hers determined. Lucy had spent another two hours trying to pry anything else loose, but her efforts had been for naught.
Soon after Lucy and Vaughn had finally given up on Eliza, they’d received confirmation from the Spokane team that Noah’s body had indeed been where Eliza had said it would be.
“You’re upset,” Vaughn said.
“Wrong word.”
Vaughn sat back in her chair. “Disturbed.”
Lucy ran a hand through her messy hair and finally crossed the room to sit as she thought of that pale, bloodless face and the stark interrogation room. “Better.”
“Because she asked for you?”
The more Lucy thought about it, the less importance that detail took on. It wouldn’t have been hard for Eliza to look up agents online. Maybe she’d even seen Lucy in the news—sure, it was rare for one of her cases to get national media attention, but it did happen. “No.”
“Then why?”
There was no real surprise in the question, and Lucy knew this was Vaughn poking at her to see just how she would twitch. So she poked back. “Are you not?”
Vaughn tapped her nail on the desk, mouth pursed. “A young boy was murdered by a teenager. I’m not so unfeeling as to be unaffected.”
The way she said it was perfectly detached, stripped of any curiosity, any doubt.
Maybe that would have worked on Lucy when she’d been a fresh-faced recruit, intimidated into deferential silence at the mere idea of Special Agent-in-Charge Grace Vaughn. But they’d worked together for too long now for Lucy to buy the act. At least entirely. There were still days Lucy wondered if she knew Vaughn at all. This wasn’t one of them. “Don’t pretend otherwise. You don’t think it’s as open and shut as it seems.”
“You’re projecting,” Vaughn chided softly. “The girl confessed.”
Lucy rolled her eyes, now convinced more than ever that Vaughn was playing devil’s advocate. “Right, because there’s never been a false confession before.”
Vaughn lifted her brows at the tone but didn’t verbally slap Lucy on the wrists like she probably deserved for the sarcasm. “There was no coercion here.”
“From us,” Lucy corrected, then looked away out the window, toward the sky that was splashed with the lingering pinks and golds of dawn. She didn’t know why she felt so raw, why she couldn’t meet Vaughn’s eyes for a second longer.
“You’re reading a lot into a closed case,” Vaughn commented idly. But here they were, still talking about it.