Page 81 of If Anything Happens To Me

“Matt, if not for you, the girls would still be in the attic,” Fitch said. “You turned everyone against me. And if the cops catch me, you’re going down, too. I’ll lie, I’ll tell them you were part of it.”

“Go ahead,” Matt said. “As long as you’re in prison, it will all be worth it.”

Fitch muttered something under his breath and bent back into his work, digging faster. It seemed that he was done listening and talking, and he wanted to bury his material.

I heard Matt talking, trying to convince Fitch to give up, telling him that he had no hope of avoiding the police. But I tore my hand away from Matt’s, running as fast as I could, flying toward Fitch in a tackle. Fitch had barely a second to turn around, but it was just enough time to raise the shovel over his head and bring it smashing down toward me.

“No!” I heard Matt shout.

I ducked just in time, and the shovel’s blade missed my head and hit rock instead. Fitch tried to scramble away, but I grabbed hold of him and held on. My fists clenched his shirt so tightly, it tore as he tried to wrench himself away. The harder he tried to get me off him, the tighter I held on. He knocked me off for a second, but I jumped onto his back, and we rolled to the edge of the crevice.

“Let go, Oli,” he yelled.

“No, this is it, Fitch,” I said, out of breath.

He tried to hit me, but I ducked again and he barely caught my shoulder. He used the moment to wriggle away. I wasn’t going to let that happen—it just made me more determined. Matt came running and grabbed Fitch. I still had hold of Fitch’s arm; the momentum of Matt’s running jump and my yanking Fitch’s sleeve sent Fitch tumbling into the crevice.

I stared down, saw him lying in the dirt.

My heart skipped. For a moment, I thought he was dead. But then I saw his eyes open. He had thrown girls into that fissure, and it had become their graves. It wasn’t his, though. I saw his chest rise and fall. He was still breathing.

“Oli,” Matt said, putting his arm around me. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“You got him, Oli,” Matt said. “You did it.”

“For Eloise,” I whispered.

Fitch sat up, looking toward me and Matt. There he was in that crevice where he had hidden as a child, where he had thrown my sister and Iris as if they were trash. There was no way he was going to climb out with me and Matt guarding him. There was no way he’d ever hurt another girl.

Matt handed me his cell phone, and I texted Detective Tyrone’s mobile number. She had given it to me last October, when she first started investigating my sister’s murder.

I told her where we were. And I knew she would come right away.

While Matt and I stood watch over Fitch, I looked up at the sky.

Hardly any time passed before we heard sirens. A stream of police cars drove into the Braided Woods, up the road past our birding blind, the owl trees, all the way to this place that had become my sister’s grave.

The officers surrounded Fitch, hauled him onto his feet. I heard the click of handcuffs go around his wrists. I watched Detective Tyrone come toward me, concern in her eyes, as if she knew what this moment meant to me.

But she couldn’t know, not really.

“It’s over,” I said out loud, and Detective Tyrone nodded.

“It is,” Matt said, but I wasn’t talking to him.

I was talking to Eloise, who had been buried here in this very spot, who had seen me through, who had brought us to this moment. I think Matt understood. Because he put his arms around me.

And I heard him whisper, as if he felt her spirit just as strongly as I did:

“Eloise Parrish, you have the best sister in the world.” And then, “Oli, that’s you. That’s you.”

He was wrong, though.

Eloise was the best sister in the world.

No contest.

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