I want that with Bella. Is that why I’m seeing her so vividly in dreams and hallucinations?

Julia gasps and her eyes fly open. “Tell her,” she says.

“What?” I lean closer. “Tell who what?”

Her eyes are glazed and unfocused. “Tell Bella to be careful. Tell her to watch out for him. She doesn’t know…” Her voice drifts off and her eyes close again. I glance up at Sean and he’s watching his mother, white-faced.

“She doesn’t know what she’s saying,” he says in a low voice, but it sounds to me like Sean knows exactly what Julia meant.

Jack comes slamming into my room, the door banging behind him. “Is it true?”

I step away from his anger and bump into the wall. “What? What are you on about?”

“Lena told me about your little gardening dates with my dad.”

It stings. I don’t think I really expected her to keep quiet about it, but still…

“I used to help out with weeding and stuff—so what?”

“So what? So my father has been murdered and you’ve been claiming you barely knew him. You’ve been lying—and not just to me and Sean.”

“I never mentioned it because it’s not important. It was a…an after-school job for a couple of months, that’s all.”

He steps closer, close enough that I can feel his breath on my face. “Do you know what? I’m beginning to think the whole fucking lot of you were in on it. You, your dad, your dead sister.”

“Really? Where’s your proof? What are you going to tell the police? That I helped your dad in the bloody garden?”

His hands clench into fists and for a moment I think he’s going to lunge at me. Then he seems to get himself under control, shaking his head and letting out a long breath. “Damn you and your family,” he says. “I swear, if I ever find out any of you had something to do with my father’s death…”

My heart’s pounding, but I don’t let myself look away from him. “Are you threatening me? Because I’ll tell you something, Jack, it’s not my gardening activities the police seem to be interested in, it’s the relationships your beloved father had with Bella and Nicole and God knows how many other teenage girls. Maybe you should ask yourself if the reason he ended up dead is anything to do with that.”

He goes pale and, in the absence of his usual big fake grin, I realize with a shock that he knows. He knows the stories about his dad and teenage girls. And if he knows, maybe Lena wasn’t making up stories and Julia did leave Greg because of it. And if Julia knew…

My heart thumps harder. If Greg killed Bella and those other girls and Julia and Jack knew about him…