Page 12 of No One Can Know

She would be alone again. It was only a matter of time, unless she could make him believe.

But how could she, when there was still so much she’d kept from him?

The morning after they arrived in Arden Hills, Emma sat across the kitchen table, in the seat that had once been her mother’s. She’d sat there each morning with her reading glasses at the end of her nose, doing the crossword puzzle in pearls. It is important, she always said, to keep one’s mind sharp.

She said it that way, too.One’smind. She always talked like that, with a stiff precision she believed elevated her. She did not believe that achieving a certain station in life meant she could relax her standards,and shook her head at the women she called her friends who wore sweatpants in public despite the diamonds on their wrists.

Nathan was opening drawers in the kitchen, determined to sort and catalog every item in this place. She was reluctant to get rid of anything, but he insisted that rusted can openers and ancient packs of sandwich bags, at least, could go. She had taken charge of a box of papers, sitting at the kitchen table and searching for any documents that might prove important.

The windows set in the back door were filthy. She could barely make out the trees in the back. She couldn’t see the tree house at all. If it was still there. Go far enough past the tree house, and you got to the old house in the woods, its roof long rotted, its walls home to countless generations of small animals. Stark photographs of the graffiti-covered walls and the refuse-choked fireplace had been splashed all over the papers, after what the police found there. Some kid had drawn a pentacle on the wall at some point in the past, and suddenly Emma had a “known association with Satanism.”

“Why did people suspect you?” Nathan asked, startling her. He was frowning at the paperwork. “There must have been a reason, right?”

“It’s complicated.” She wetted her lips, looking away. Her eyes fix on a discolored patch of crown molding. She wondered if it was water damage. She had no idea what shape the house was in. Gabriel hadn’t said anything about there being major damage, but he hadn’t mentioned the graffiti, either. Though the last time he’d sent any kind of update was at least a year ago. The emails were always short, impersonal. She never replied. She assumed he preferred it that way. “It’s okay. You can wonder. Everyone does. If it matters, I didn’t do it.”

“If it matters? Of course it matters if you killed your parents,” Nathan said, appalled.

“I mean if it matters that I say so. I’ve said it all along, and it hasn’t stopped people from assuming that I’m lying. No, I didn’t kill my parents. No, I wasn’t in the house when they died. No, I don’t know who killed them.”

“Then why do people think you did?” he asked insistently. He shut the drawer he had been sorting through. The black trash bag beside him bulged already.

She spread her hands. “Lots of reasons. It makes a good story, for one. And people knew I’d been fighting with them. Juliette was the golden child. I couldn’t compete. So I rebelled. I was the bad daughter, so it made sense I turned on them, right? People said I had an older boyfriend and the two of us plotted together to murder them. Or that I was friends with Satanists and it was a human sacrifice to the devil.”

He snorted. “Seriously?”

She made a face. “The Satanic Panic was alive and well in Arden Hills.”

“And were you friends with Satanists?” he asked, and it took her a beat to realize he was joking.

“No. That would require having friends at all.” She chased it with a brittle laugh, but Nathan didn’t look amused.

“They never arrested you, though,” Nathan said.

“I had a good lawyer,” she said. “He stepped in, did what he could to protect me. You met him, actually. Christopher Best. He was at the wedding.”

“You said he was a family friend.”

“He was. One of my dad’s friends,” she said. They’d been close in high school, and “Uncle Chris” had come by the house now and then, always with a kiss on the cheek for Irene and gifts for the girls. When he’d shown up after the murders, the first thing he told her was to stop talking. Then he’d gotten rid of the lawyer the state had given her, who seemed mostly interested in getting her to say the whole thing had been Gabriel’s idea. If it hadn’t been for Chris, she might still be in prison.

“They never found out who really did it?” Nathan asked.

“No.” She set aside a phone bill, picked up an invoice for detailing on her father’s car—it went on the stack with the telephone bill.

“I don’t care what other people think. Or what they say,” Nathan said, nobly enough. She knew it wasn’t true, but she imagined hebelieved it. Few people cared as much about what other people thought as Nathan Gates. He wanted to be liked—or rather, he was desperate not to be disliked. So much that he whittled down every edge that he had, in case someone should find them distasteful.

She had never before thought she could be another piece of him that needed to be carved away.

“If you didn’t do it, who did?” Nathan asked, musing out loud.

“I have no idea,” she said, not looking at him. She picked up another bill. Doctor’s visit for Daphne. Memories eddied through her mind.

Daphne with her wheezing breath, face pale, eyes panicked. Her mother, face like stone, holding the inhaler out of reach.

Daphne with her sleeves soaked in blood, blinking away sleep.

Daphne seizing Emma’s hand, and whispering four words.

“No one can know.”

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