Page 89 of Snow Creek

“But she failed,” I say instead. “Just a few minutes, okay?”

He gets out and I slide into the driver’s seat. I look at her only through the rearview mirror. Her face is a grid through the steel mesh that separates us. She doesn’t acknowledge my presence.

I pull the phone from my pocket and turn it on. Without turning around, I hold it so the screen faces her. The wallpaper is a picture of Joshua. Most of his face is hidden by the small tiles of her collection of apps. Near the center left of the screen is the unmistakable “M” from the beer logo shirt he wore the first day we were out here.

And she wore it the next time. It stuck in my mind and I might have figured out their relationship without the phone.

And without Bernie’s discovery.

Her eyes flicker a little, but she betrays no discernible emotion.

“Techs will unlock it and we’ll follow your text trail, Ellie. It will lead us to Josh, and you know where else it will go, don’t you?”

She’s stone.

“You killed your parents.”

“You don’t know anything, Detective. You’ll see.”

She’s defiant. She’s playing tough, but I see behind the mask. I see a sociopath who knows she’s undone. She knows that there will be no way to wriggle out of it.

“Where’s Sarah?”

Her eyes meet mine directly for the first time.

“I wouldn’t know. They were all gone when Joshua took me.”

“Took you?”

She releases an impatient sigh to let me know she’s frustrated.

“That’s what I said, Detective. He held me captive. He raped me. I was a prisoner.”

She’s sticking to her story. A flimsy one at best.

“The phone, Ellie. What you’re saying won’t hold up. You know that, right? We’ll follow the trail you left on this phone.”

She watches as Mindy’s van pulls away. Next, the ambulance pulls out.

The officer taps on the window.

“I really don’t care what you think or what you find,” she says as I turn around to face her. “I’m glad it’s over.”

“It’s far from over, Ellie. For you, this is only the beginning.”

Forty-One

My hand needed five stitches. I’m grateful that I wasn’t injured elsewhere. I don’t want the doctors at the hospital to see the other marks on my body, scars that were waypoints on my fight for survival. It’s the same reason I don’t go to the beach. I wonder if anyone has noticed that and assumes that I have some kind of body dysmorphia or am a cutter.

I would actually love for either of those to have been my problem.

At least those would have been options of my own doing.

Very little evidence was recovered from the Wheaton residence and outbuildings. Bernie’s belief that Joshua and Ellie were having sex, however, was backed up by DNA collected from Josh’s bed. It appeared that Ellie brought nothing from her old life when she arrived in Snow Creek. A burn barrel in the yard, however, was filled with some of the remains of Ida and Merritt’s clothing. The wedding photo that had been reframed was there too.

“Ellie’s got a lawyer from Bellevue,” Sheriff says as he scoots into my office with the daily paper and a couple of blueberry muffins his wife made.

“She says it’s the lemon that makes them.”

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