“After my mom died, my dad was sad for a long time, and Danielle made him happy again.” His voice shakes. “When we came here from Canada, I was sad, because I couldn’t go visit my mom’s grave. But hey, I can go visit Danielle’s. She wasn’t my mom, but she was gonna try. Do you understand that? She was gonna try.”

The pain in Peter’s voice is real, and Grant doesn’t know what to say at first. “Peter, I can’t believe my dad would hurt her. And all the stuff that’s happened, I haven’t made that up. I wouldn’t even know how to start.”

“I know you deleted that email that talked about the bad thing your dad did. I found it. You can’t really delete stuff if I’m looking for it. It’s not gone; it’s just hidden. You want to tell me what that was?”

“If we go check the camera down by the tree right now, we’ll have our answers,” Grant pleaded. “Please.”

Peter turns and walks out of the backyard and down the trail. Grant follows, catching up to him. They get to the tree. Lying in the trail is Peter’s little camera with its USB drive, smashed, the adhesive tape that secured it to the tree in tatters.

“Oh no,” Grant says. “Oh no.”

He steps forward, and Peter stops him. “Don’t touch it. Even if it’s damaged, maybe I can get an image off of it.”

Peter starts to step around the debris, toward the tree, and he gestures at Grant to stay back. “I’ll check the tree, if you don’t mind.” He kneels and looks into the cleft. From here Grant can see a flash of color.

Peter pulls something out, and he audibly gasps. Grant can see it’s a book bag, quilted, imprinted with the logo of the Lakehaven Library. His mom has a similar bag. This one has Danielle’s name stitched on it.

Peter looks inside and freezes. “Oh, no, no,” he says.

Grant looks inside, too. He sees blood splattered in the lining of the book bag and a metal pipe.

There’s blood on the end of the pipe.

45

Iris

Julia has just finished telling Iris about Ned, the drugs, Marland, and Iris is staring at her daughter as if she’s a stranger, someone who slipped into her daughter’s straight-A skin.

“Mom?”

“OK. We’ll deal with it. That’s what we do.” She has to extricate her daughter from this mess. A plea deal, turn evidence against Ned and this Marland person.

“Where is this phone of Ned’s that has the threat to Danielle in the text?”