“Where’s Nick?” I ask, still nearly breathless.
“I’m not sure,” Ash says. “Are you okay, Summer?”
I shake my head. “We just found Hannah’s body down by the stream.”
“What?” he exclaims.
“She’s dead, I’m almost positive. Her head . . .”
Marcus’s face goes white before my eyes, and Gabe steps toward me, grasping my arm.
“Good love of god,” their father exclaims.
“We need to call 911,” I say. “And someone needs to find Nick. To tell him.”
“Tell me what?”
Nick steps into the room from the front hall, dressed in jeans and a lavender polo shirt.
I take the deepest breath I can. “Nick, I’m so sorry,” I say. “Hannah’s—Hannah’s dead. And, god, it looks like someone’s murdered her. With some kind of blow to the head.”
His face wrinkles, but in confusion instead of horror.
“What in the world are you talking about?” Nick says.
“Bonnie and I—” Before I can say another word, I hear footsteps in the hall, and a second later, Hannah enters the room.
All five foot eight of her. She’s dressed in jeans and a short-sleeved yellow turtleneck, her hair and makeup freshly done.
As Bonnie lets out a scream of shock, I feel the blood rush from my brain. It’s like I’m in one of those nightmares all actors have, in which you’re about to go onstage and realize you’ve never even read the play you’re performing in.
“I—We were down at the stream,” I say. “We saw her . . . the body.”
Hannah locks eyes with me. “Is this some kind of a sick joke?”
“Summer, what in the hell is going on?” Ash demands. Gabe is looking at me as if my hair’s on fire. I gesture toward Bonnie to back me up.
“Just like she said, there’s a body at the stream,” Bonnie says, her voice tremulous. “A woman with dark hair—we thought it was you.”
“Keira,” Marcus exclaims, his voice strained with panic.
“It can’t be her,” I blurt out. “She was in the house when I left.”
“No,” Ash suddenly roars, and he tears out of the room into the main hall and from there into the foyer. We follow him, watching as he flings open the front door, and charges down the steps of the house.
“Dad, what is it?” Gabe calls out, running down the driveway after him, with Nick, Marcus, and me sprinting behind.
“Where’s Henry?” I shout to Gabe.
“In the kitchen. With Jake.”
When we catch up with Ash, he’s just beyond the circular part of the driveway, in the long section that connects the house to the road, and he’s staring at a blue BMW. His hands are laced through his thick gray hair, fingers digging into his scalp. “Jesus Christ, it must be Jillian,” he says.
That makes no sense, but . . . her car is definitely sitting here. An image muscles its way to the front of my mind: the dark matted hair; the long slim fingers with painted nails. Like Hannah’s. Like Jillian’s, too.
“Jillian was here?” I say tentatively.
“She was helping me,” Ash says. His eyes bounce with agitation. “We’ve got to get down there.”
“Are you sure she’s dead?” Marcus asks, pulling me aside and keeping his voice low so his father can’t hear.
“Yes, unfortunately. The back of her head’s open, from a blow—or a shot maybe—and there were vultures around, like she’d been dead for a little while at least. It also looks like someone might have tried to sexually assault her.”
Or, it occurs to me for the first time, wanted to make it look that way.
Grimacing, Marcus turns back to Ash. “Dad, you can’t go down there. It’s a crime scene.”
“Marcus, you had one fucking year of law school,” his father snaps. “That doesn’t make you an expert.”
“Dad, he’s right,” Gabe says. “We have to all stay put and call 911.”
“I’ll do it,” I say. “Since I can describe what I saw.”
We hurry together back toward the house, where Bonnie’s waiting on the front stoop, clearly doing her best not to fall apart. And Hannah? Nowhere to be seen now.
“Have you got your phone?” I ask Gabe in a rush.
“No, it’s in the cottage.”
“Mine, too. I’ll use the landline in the den.”
He nods limply, as if he’s still trying to absorb what’s unfurling. Before we take off down the hall, he asks Bonnie to check on Henry.
“Sure thing,” she says.
The landline’s on one of the small antique side tables in the room. I grab the receiver but before calling, I turn to Gabe. “I’m just—”
“Just what?”
“Worried. What if I say something that backfires?”
He presses his finger across his lips and eyes me expectantly, as if waiting for me to elaborate.
“Gabe, she was murdered,” I say. “And what if it wasn’t by a stranger, but by someone in this house?”
He flinches. “Tell them what you found. And leave it at that.”
Steeling myself, I tap 9–1–1. After giving my name, I describe the situation, my voice trembling as I speak. The dispatcher runs through some questions, calmly and efficiently, and at the end I assure her that, yes, we’ll remain in the house and await the arrival of the police.
“Did they say how long it would be?” Gabe says once I disconnect. He’s been standing next to me the whole time, his brow furrowed.
“No, only that the police are being dispatched immediately . . . . Gabe, what could Jillian have been doing down there?”
“God knows.”
But maybe I know. Or I could posit a theory. What if Jillian and Ash really were having an affair, and she came to the house today to see him, pulling her car into the lower part of the driveway so it wouldn’t be so obvious? What if the two of them had arranged to meet in secret by the stream?
And then what? Did they agree to leave separately so as not to be seen together, and then Jillian, the last to depart, was attacked by a stranger? Or, oh god, did Ash kill her? But what would his motive be? It couldn’t have been that she was threatening to tell his wife. Could she have been making demands now that Claire was out of the picture?
I realize that I have to tell Gabe about what Marcus and I witnessed. “Gabe, there’s something I need to—”
He raises a hand, palm forward. “I know what you’re going to say. Marcus told me last night on the phone—about Dad and Jillian.”
I feel a millisecond of relief, but his knowing changes nothing about the current situation.
“Should your dad be calling a lawyer?” I ask. “I’m not accusing anyone of anything, but shouldn’t there be someone guiding us?”
Before he can respond, Marcus appears in the doorway.
“Did someone say lawyer?” he asks.
“Yeah,” Gabe tells him. “That’s a priority.”
“Dad’s tracking one down now, a guy who does criminal cases,” he says, looking pained as he says the word criminal. “You called 911 already?”