That’s an optimistic name, I think. It’s an apartment complex, full of the kind of cheap, boxy places you can’t find in Echo Ridge but that are all over Solsbury. Mom and I checked out someplace similar right before she and Peter got together. If they hadn’t, we weren’t going to be able to hang on to our house for much longer. Even if it was the smallest, crappiest house in all of Echo Ridge.
“Is she moving out?” Mia wonders. Daisy inches through the parking lot, angling the gray Nissan in front of number 9. There’s a blue car to her right, and I pull into an empty spot next to that. We all scrunch down in our seats as she gets out of the car, like that’ll keep us incognito. All Daisy would have to do is turn her head to catch sight of my mother’s Volvo. But she doesn’t look around as she gets out, just strides forward and knocks on the door.
Once, twice, and then a third time.
Daisy pulls off her sunglasses, stuffs them into her bag, and knocks again. “Maybe we should leave before she gives up. I don’t think they’re ho—” I start, but then the door to number 9 opens. Somebody wraps his arms around Daisy and swings her halfway around, kissing her so deeply that Mia lets out a gasp beside me.
“Oh my God, Daisy has a boyfriend,” she says, scrambling out of her seat belt and leaning so far left that she’s practically in my lap. “And here she’s been so Mopey McMoperson since she moved home! I did not see that coming.” We’re all craning our necks for a better view, but it’s not until Daisy breaks away that I catch sight of whom she’s with—along with something I haven’t seen in years.
My brother grinning like his face is about to break, before he pulls Daisy inside and shuts the door behind her.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Ellery
Monday, September 30
“So,” Malcolm says, plugging tokens into one end of a foosball table. “That was interesting.”
After leaving Declan’s apartment, we stopped at the first place we came to that we were pretty sure he and Daisy wouldn’t show up on a date. It happened to be a Chuck E. Cheese’s. I haven’t been to one in years, so I’ve forgotten what a sensory assault they are: flashing lights, beeping games, tinny music, and screaming children.
The guy letting people in at the door wasn’t sure about us at first. “You’re supposed to come with kids,” he said, glancing behind us at the empty hallway.
“We are kids,” Mia pointed out, holding out her hand for a stamp.
Turns out, Chuck E. Cheese’s is the perfect location for a clandestine debrief. Every adult in the place is too busy either chasing after or hiding from their children to pay us any attention. I feel weirdly calm after our trip to Pine Crest Estates, the dread that came over me at Mia’s house almost entirely gone. There’s something satisfying about unlocking another piece of the Echo Ridge puzzle, even if I’m not yet sure where it fits.
“So,” Mia echoes, gripping a handle on the other end of the foosball table. Ezra is next to her, and I’m beside Malcolm. A ball pops out of one side, and Mia spins one of the bars furiously, missing the ball completely. “Your brother and my sister. How long do you think that’s been going on?”
Malcolm maneuvers one of his players carefully before smacking the ball, and would have scored if Ezra hadn’t blocked it. “Damned if I know. Since they both came back, maybe? But that still doesn’t explain what they’re doing here. Couldn’t they hook up in New Hampshire? Or Boston?” He passes the ball to one of his own men, then backward to me, and I rocket a shot across the field into the open goal. Malcolm gives me a surprised, disarmed grin that dissolves the tense set of his jaw. “Not bad.”
I want to smile back, but I can’t. There’s something I’ve been thinking ever since we pulled away from Pine Crest Estates, and I keep weighing how—or whether—to bring it up.
“I don’t think they can hook up anywhere,” Mia says. “Can you imagine if one of the reporters who’ve been prowling around Echo Ridge got wind of this? Lacey Kilduff’s boyfriend and best friend, together five years later? While somebody’s making a mockery of her death by writing bullshit all around town and another girl’s just gone missing?” She shudders, managing to nick the ball with the edge of one of her men. “People would hate them.”
“What if it’s not five years later?” The words pop out of me, and Malcolm goes still. The foosball rolls unchallenged down the length of the table and settles into a corner. “I mean,” I add, almost apologetically, “they might’ve been together for a while.”
Mia shakes her head. “Daisy’s had other boyfriends. She almost got engaged to the guy she was dating at Princeton. And she went to the Bahamas with a guy in her office. My parents practically had a coronary over that.”
“Okay, so not all five years,” I say. “But maybe … at some point in high school?”
Malcolm’s jaw has gone tense again. He braces his forearms on the table and fastens his green eyes on me. Both are disconcerting at close range, if I’m being honest. “Like when?”
Like while Declan was still dating Lacey. It’d be the classic deadly love triangle. I have to bite the inside of my cheeks to keep from saying it out loud What if Declan and Daisy fell in love years ago and wanted to be together, but Lacey wouldn’t let him go? Or threatened to do something to Daisy in retaliation? And it infuriated Declan so much that he lost control one night and killed her? Then Daisy broke things off with him, obviously, and tried to forget him, but couldn’t. I’m itching to expand on my theory, but one look at Malcolm’s frozen face tells me I shouldn’t. “I don’t know,” I hedge, dropping my eyes. “Just throwing out ideas.”
It’s like I told Ezra in the library: You can’t spring a your-siblings-might-be-murderers theory onto people all at once.
Mia doesn’t notice the subtext of my back-and-forth with Malcolm. She’s too busy savagely jerking her rod of blue players without ever touching the ball. “It wouldn’t be an issue if Daisy would just talk to me. Or to anyone in our family.”
“Maybe you need to pull a little-sister power play,” Ezra suggests.
“Such as?”
He shrugs. “She tells you what’s going on, or you tell your parents what you just saw.”
Mia goggles at him. “That’s straight-up evil.”
“But effective, I’ll bet,” Ezra says. He glances at Malcolm. “I’d suggest the same thing to you, but I just saw your brother, so.”
“Oh yeah.” Malcolm grimaces. “He’d kill me. Not literally,” he adds hastily, with a sideways glance at me. “But also, he knows I’d never do it. Our father wouldn’t care, but our mom would lose it. Especially now.”