“I am so sorry. Danielle…” He can’t say the words, even as he’s hurrying toward her backyard.
“What? What is happening?” Mike’s deep voice, lightly accented, rises in fear.
“Danielle is dead. She was found dead in Winding Creek Park this morning.”
Mike makes a noise of sheer shock and pain. It’s half gasp, half scream. “That can’t be right.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“It cannot be. Where is Ned?”
“He’s with the Lakehaven police. Iris is with him.”
“Is Ned all right?”
“Physically he’s fine.They’re talking to him about who might have wanted to hurt her.”
“Hurt her. Wait. Are you saying she was murdered?” Mike’s accent, a weird mix of his childhood in his native Slovakia and then long years in Canada, thickens in a way Kyle has never heard before.
This was not how he wanted to tell his friend. “Yes. I am so sorry, man.”
Mike Horvath takes several long, gasping breaths. “Why was she in the park? She never goes there.”
“We don’t know.”
“I have to talk to the police.”
“The station is off Old Travis. On Raymond Road.”
“I’ll find it.” Then another long pause. “They don’t think Ned hurt her, do they?”
Is that a possibility? Why would Mike think that of his girlfriend’s son? Ned Frimpong likes to play video games. He watches a lot of English soccer. His grades are average, not great. He had gotten drunk last year at a party with some older kids who’d been expelled from Lakehaven High and the Lakehaven police brought him home and Danielle took his car away for a month. That was his worst offense, at least that Kyle knows about. Kids like that don’t kill their mothers. Do they?
Kyle uses the cover of the dense growth of trees along the winding greenbelt to move down to Danielle’s house. “No, I’m sure not,” he says.
Mike, sounding now like he is crying, hangs up just as Kyle goes into Danielle’s backyard. He knocks on the door; he’s got a story ready in case someone is there, but no one is.
He tries the knob, using the hem of his shirt. It’s unlocked. He listens for the ping or soft hum of an alarm system being activated, but there’s only silence. He walks across the den; he heads into her first-floor bedroom.
If there is anything to tie them together in this house, it will be there, he thinks. He has to know. He is nearly drunk with fear at the idea of the police arriving at any second.
He hurries into her closet. Organized on a shelf are boxes—ones for hats, more for sweaters, even though the weather has turned cool by Austin standards. He searches the boxes. Nothing. There are also photo albums there, placed in plastic storage bins. He takes them out, looks through them.
Where would she keep anything that could hurt him? He puts them back on the shelf, thinking.
He pushes aside a rack of coats—she had more coats than a woman in Austin might expect to, given her travel to cold climes such as China, Russia, and the Baltic states. And behind them, hidden simply by their bulk, are a couple of jewelry boxes. He opens one. Snakes of silver bracelets intertwine. He digs through them. Maybe she hid it in a safe-deposit box. He opens the second jewelry box. Rings, here, bracelets. A string bracelet, the kind children make in school. He recognizes the weave of colors—Grant made this for Danielle in art class, for helping his parents find him in Russia. A child’s THANK YOU, carefully written in red and purple crayon. His breath catches.
And beneath it, a flash drive.
This. Here.
He pockets the flash drive—then hears what sounds like the slow crawl of tires on pavement. Her closet is near the front of the house. What if the police are arriving? He tucks the flash drive deep into his shoe, under his foot. Unlikely to be patted down there. He puts everything back where he found it. He tries to remember if the closet light was already on. He uses his shirt to wipe the light switch, the jewelry boxes. He heads out of the master bedroom and is halfway across the den when something heavy slams into the back of his head.
Kyle staggers. Strong hands grab him and put a cloth bag over his head; he can’t see.
Then he feels the weight of a gun barrel pressed against his neck. He freezes.
“You’re not going to give me trouble, are you?” a voice says. Low, hissing, harsh.
And then blow after blow to his head, shielded only by the cloth bag. He feels blood on his face, a hard cut on his ear, a hammering blow beneath his eye. Dazed, he feels himself draggged across the den, the gun pressed against his head, out the patio door, across the yard. The gun. This person is going to shoot him. Kill him. He climbs to his feet, but he’s rushed along and then he’s standing in the cool of the creek.
His brain is spinning, his ears ringing with the blows. The barrel of the gun is a burning constant against his throat. “Please!” Kyle says, crouching into the water, cringing. He feels a hand groping his pockets, the top of his socks. It finds nothing. He freezes. But the fingers don’t dig into his shoe.
“Why are you here?” the voice says again, a harsh forced whisper.
“I just wanted something of hers. Something to remember her by. Please.” He can feel his own blood on his face. He’s never been hit like this in his life.
Four hard punches, brutal and unyielding, smash into his face. The cloth bag protects him, but not much. He falls into the creek, stunned, the bag still over his face.
“If you talk about this,” the voice says, “I’ll kill one of your kids.”
Kyle can’t speak. He can hardly make out the words due to the cinematic guttural whisper, but he nods.
Then there is only the sound of someone moving through the woods and the water against him. Everything hurts. He’s too scared to take off the bag; the faces of Iris, Grant, and Julia dance in front of his closed eyes. Whoever that is, he knows who I am. And that I have children. Finally he does, and there’s blood in the bag. Blood from his nose and mouth and ear. He can hardly breathe for fear. The cloth bag is from the Lakehaven Library. He doesn’t know what to do with it. He can’t leave it in the creek. It might be found.
He remembers Grant’s tree, his old hiding place in the greenbelt. He goes there, stuffs it into the cleft at the roots, and decides he’ll come back later. His face, his jaw, are seriously aching now.
He needs a story. An explanation. Because the truth is not an option. He’s going to have bruises; his nose and lip are bleeding. The back of his head aches; he feels a bit of blood in his hair.
He decides on a plan. He scrabbles up the creekside, slips, falls, crawls back up. Mud and blood on his hands, his face. He makes his way toward home, piecing it together, hoping the story will work. The flash drive is still in his sock, maybe ruined from the creek water, maybe not.
Everything has gone horribly wrong.
Before he goes into his house, he peers in the space between his house and the neighbors’, and he sees the Sheriff’s Office cars pulling into Danielle’s driveway to secure the house. They have no idea that they’re too late.
And as Kyle reaches his own back door, bloodied and bruised, ready to embark on the latest series of lies, afraid for his children, he wonders: Who was in Danielle’s house with a gun, and why?