Rachel tapped a finger against her knee as if she were counting days. “I suppose Wednesday afternoon. I had come back from the Dawsons’ place around two. She had . . . She had been coming out of the shed, actually.”
“Even though she’d said she hadn’t been feeling well?”
“She had chores and such,” Rachel murmured, but her eyes had gone a little distant, staring beyond Lucy.
“Do you keep anything in there?”
Josiah coughed and Lucy cut her eyes to him. “Pastor Cook?”
“No, no.” His denial rasped against his freshly irritated throat, his eyes watering just a touch. “Sorry. Just the usual. Shovels, gear to fix the fence. Things like that.”
Something to check out when she was done inside. “You have a shed . . . as well as a barn, yes?”
“Correct.”
“And anywhere else she could have hidden something?”
“We have an underground shelter, as well,” Rachel said. “As most people do.”
So many nooks and crannies. Had Eliza brought Noah back to the ranch to kill him? She hadn’t kept him alive for long after taking him, not if the coroner’s TOD was accurate. But there would have been ample places to hide the body if she had planned on moving it at a more opportune time than in the middle of the evening.
The thought brought her back to the logistical nightmare of getting Noah into the woods. “Do you have any spare cars that Eliza had access to?”
Josiah shook his head. “We only have the two. And we’d taken them both over to the Dawsons’ place both Tuesday and Wednesday.”
That didn’t rule out the possibility that she’d had a car to use. But that meant that if she did, at least one other person had seen her during those two days.
The accomplice? Maybe.
“Can I take a look at her room?”
They caught each other’s eyes once more, but they must have known she could get a warrant without even breaking a sweat. If they really were sticking with their show of cooperation, it would be easier for them to control the experience.
“Of course,” Rachel said as the two of them stood in unison.
The hallway back toward Eliza’s room was dark and narrow, and Lucy understood what they’d meant when they’d said she’d hid herself away. It would be easy to do. “Did you ever suspect that she was sneaking out?”
Rachel didn’t stop walking. “We’d poke our heads in for one reason or another a few times a night. There’s always an excuse to pop in on her.”
Which was a nonanswer cloaked like a real one. A teenage girl could get up to a lot in the time between check-ins.
Lucy glanced back toward Josiah. “Noah Dawson, he was a member of your . . . congregation?”
The concern he’d been wearing on his face since she’d arrived didn’t waver, but it wasn’t as if he wouldn’t have been braced for the question from the minute he’d heard Eliza had confessed. “Yes.”
“Did they cross paths at all?”
“His father, Liam, helps out around the farm,” Josiah said as they came to a stop in the mudroom just outside Eliza’s bedroom. Lucy eyed the back door, thought about how secluded this part of the house was. There was no doubt in her mind that Eliza had been able to leave as she’d pleased. “Other than that, no, of course not. She’s seventeen, he’s middle-school age. There would be no reason for them to interact.”
Yet here they were, with Eliza being held for his murder. The wide-eyed denial could get these two only so far before it became disingenuous.
“But your Church is rather small, wouldn’t you say?”
Josiah shifted, and when he spoke, it was hesitant. “Yes, I suppose.”
“Would it be safe to assume then that they knew each other somewhat?”
At that Josiah’s posture relaxed, and Lucy wondered what path of questioning he’d been braced for her to take. “Of course, of course. But they didn’t seek each other out, is what I mean.”
“Would Noah have felt comfortable going off with Eliza? Alone, that is.”
Rachel stepped closer to Josiah, laying her hand against his shoulder blade. “If you’re asking if Eliza would have had to use force to lure him away, the answer is no. He trusted her, like he trusted all of the members of the Church.”
Lucy studied the shadows that clung to their features, hiding their expressions. “Do you have any idea why she would have wanted to attack him?”
A small but audible inhale met the blunt question, but Lucy couldn’t tell which one of them it had come from. After a beat of silence, it was Josiah who spoke.
“I have spent every waking hour of the past few days wondering that very thing, Agent Thorne,” he said, slow and solemn. A preacher’s voice. “But who are we to question God’s plan?”
The platitude sparked something in her blood—anger, hot and quick like a flame. It extinguished before it could build into anything potent, though. She wasn’t here to change minds. She turned away from both of them, anyway, in case any residual disgust lingered on her face.
Rachel stepped up beside her and gestured toward the doorway. “We haven’t touched anything.”
Light poured into the room from a window against the back wall. It offered up a view of sprawling land meeting an endless bluebird sky, the thunderstorm long passed. In the distance Lucy could make out the tangled metal wires that signaled the edge of the property. “Is that your son’s land over there?”
The question was careless, more just trying to get a sense of her surroundings than anything else. She hadn’t expected it to throw them.
But it did.
Turning, Lucy caught the tail end of an exchanged glance, Josiah’s face having lost some of its ruddiness.
“No, Aaron is on the other side,” Josiah finally said.
Okay. “And who is on this side?”
“That’s Frank’s place,” Rachel answered. “He and his family moved here from Oregon a handful of years ago.”
“Four years,” Josiah supplied, seemingly helpful. But Lucy was starting to get a hang of their rhythms. She doubted that nugget of information would actually be relevant.
“Frank,” Lucy repeated, more to herself than anything, the name catching against something in her memory as she shifted to take in Eliza’s room. The quilt on the bed offered the only burst of color in otherwise bare and drab surroundings. Lucy hadn’t exactly expected heartthrobs taped to the wall, but she hadn’t expected this nothingness, either. A desk stood in the corner, its top free of clutter; a single standing lamp cast a weak glow onto the beige carpet; plain clothes hung in a neat row in the open closet.
This wasn’t a teenager’s room. “You haven’t touched anything?”
“No,” Rachel said from right behind her, closer than she had been before. “Eliza is very tidy.”
Lucy circled the room, peeked in drawers to find carefully organized pens and unused paper. No doodles, no locked journal. Not even a picture of the mother.
Lucy’s eyes touched each corner, each possible hiding space that turned into nothing, each shadow cast by bland inanimate objects.
Where do you hide your secrets, Eliza?
Because if Lucy knew nothing else, she knew this girl had plenty of them.