“I have plenty of evidence.”
“What? Some belladonna in Evelyn’s system? That’s circumstantial. You can’t prosecute—” Jack broke off as the detective opened a file on the table. She assumed it was her file. She’d been to this station before. But when he pushed the clear plastic baggie toward her, containing a familiar scrap of paper, that surety slipped away. Everything slipped away as Jack read the words scribbled in bleeding, faded ink:
Recipe for the Perfect Murder
One petal of belladonna
One petal of poppy
Drop into a teacup and stir three times.
“This was lying on the table in Evelyn’s kitchen,” the detective said, his voice quiet now. Tentative. He was trying to coax a confession out of her, but the confession wasn’t about her. “There are two names on it: Poppy and Belladonna. But I don’t think you’re responsi—”
“Someone’s setting Belle up,” Jack interrupted. She forced herself to take slow, deep breaths. “Look at the handwriting! It looks like it was written by a fourteen-year-old.”
“I’ve already found a match for the handwriting,” the detective said, glancing at the clock on the wall. It was 12:37. If he’d been up all night, he’d had more than eight hours to investigate the evidence found at the scene of the crime. “Some of your teachers were nice enough to let me borrow your school essays this morning, and it didn’t take long to figure out which one of you wrote this.” Resting his elbows on the table, he looked into her eyes. “Anything you want to tell me?”
She met his gaze, unflinching. “I didn’t do this.”
“I know you didn’t, Jack. But the girl who did was alone last night, wasn’t she? You’re just pretending you slept over at her house.”
“I’m not pretending.”
“You think you’re looking out for her, like you always looked out for Raven. Yeah, I remember you,” he added, his gaze softening. “Your hair was wilder three years ago, and you called yourself Poppy, but I remember your visit to the station. I remember every story you told.”
“I wasn’t telling stories,” Jack snapped, sinking farther into her jacket. “Everything I told you was true.”
“You told me Raven had a wicked stepmother. You told me she was hurting him. But when I brought Raven down to the station, we couldn’t find any evidence of abuse, and he swore his stepmother never touched him.”
“She didn’t have to touch him! She made him want to lie down in the dirt. She made him want to die.”
“How?”
“We didn’t figure that part out.” Jack’s heart pulsed against her ribs. She hated talking about Raven, and how sick he’d gotten after his stepmother had moved in. She hated thinking about it. “We just knew that she was scaring him. Making him want to hurt himself. A few weeks after she moved into that house, he started to hear his mom’s voice in the middle of the night.”
“It’s not uncommon for victims of loss to experience hallucinations. Especially someone so young.”
“He wasn’t hallucinating. One night, I snuck over to his house to see what was happening. I climbed up the ivy that led to Raven’s bedroom, and I looked through the window, and…”
“What?” the detective asked, his eyebrows knitting together. A wrinkle formed between them. “What did you see, Jack?”
“It isn’t what I saw. It’s what I heard. Her voice was trickling through the room, soft as a whisper. I’d recognize it anywhere. It was Raven’s mom, who’d died a year earlier. She was asking him to join her. She was saying she couldn’t do this alone, and she needed her little boy.” Jack swallowed, taking a breath. “It scared me so badly, I fell into the rosebushes underneath Raven’s window. I still have the scars,” she added, pulling up the sleeve of her jacket.
The detective frowned, eyeing the thin slashes that laced their way up her arm. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” he asked.
“So you could recommend psychiatric help for me, too? Ship me off to a mental hospital on the other side of the country?”
“Jack, you told me Raven was in danger of hurting himself. I had a professional obligation to order a psych evaluation, and after spending seventy-two hours with the boy, Dr. Grimaldi thought it would be best to send Raven to a place where he could process his grief. The Seven Brothers Academy isn’t a mental hospital. It’s a boarding school for boys who’ve experienced trauma. Raven has had round-the-clock doctors at his disposal, and some of the best educators in the country.”
“I guess I should thank you then,” Jack said bitterly. “Except Raven’s going to rot in that place until he’s eighteen, and then he’ll never come back here, since his father threw him away so easil—”
“You don’t know?” Medina’s eyes narrowed, and Jack’s heart stuttered like the wings of a dying butterfly. “Raven’s been given a clean bill of health from the Seven Brothers Academy. As of three days ago, he was cleared to come home.”
“He… What?” Her eyelids fluttered closed, and behind them she could see soft hands and ebony curls. Bright eyes. “Raven’s coming home?”
“His flight gets in this afternoon. He was supposed to arrive last night, but his original flight was canceled, thank God. If he’d arrived when he was scheduled to, he might’ve been the one to find his stepmother. How terrible would that have been, after finding his mom the way he did? Lying in the snow…” The detective kept talking, but Jack didn’t hear a word. The phrase his flight gets in this afternoon kept trickling through her mind. It should’ve brought her joy. Should’ve made her hands tremble in anticipation, but instead, dread settled into her stomach, heavy as a rock.
“Does Belle know he’s on his way home? Did she know he was coming home?”
“We’re working on getting her phone records, to see if she and Raven were in contact around the time of his release. But we have her on film entering the Holloway estate the day Evelyn was killed. There’s a camera over the front gate, and Belladonna entered the grounds at five twenty-three in the evening.”
“That was hours before Evelyn was…” Jack trailed off, her mind reeling. “Why would she sneak over so early? Did you ask her?”
“Her lawyer’s got her clammed up,” the detective said, frowning. “But her father says they had dinner together later that night, so I’m guessing she cased the joint earlier to make sure Evelyn still drank tea.”
“Is there video of her leaving?”
He shook his head. “She must’ve snuck out the back gate, then snuck back in the same way hours later.” Medina took a breath, leveling Jack with a stare. “Now do you want to recant your statement about spending the night with her?”
“I…” Did she? Once upon a time, she’d have had no trouble believing Belladonna Drake was capable of murder. Fourteen-year-old Belle had been a scrawny, feral creature, likely to scratch out the eyes of anyone who got close to Raven, whether that person was a friend or a foe. But over time Belle’s sharp edges had softened to curves, and her anger had softened too, into calm, quiet patience. Someday her beloved boy would return to her. Someday it would be safe for him to live at home.