Page 90 of No One Can Know

“I only saw one. It was taken from a distance, like through a car window. There were three men. One of them was facing away and it was dark, so you couldn’t make him out at all. But Dad was there. He had a gun. I think it was at the old quarry,” Daphne said.

“What about the other man? You said there were three,” Emma asked.

Daphne shook her head. “I didn’t recognize him. All I remember was that he was white. Dark hair, I think? And he had a birthmark. Like a port-wine stain,” she said, pointing to her jaw.

Emma’s stomach twisted.

“That sounds like Kenneth Mahoney,” she said. She swallowed. “He disappeared. A couple of months before—before our parents died.”

That flash drive was evidence of her father’s misdeeds. Smuggling, yes. And a photo of Kenneth Mahoney. Of her father. Of a gun.

Kenneth had accused Randolph of smuggling, and then he’d disappeared. No one questioned it, because Kenneth Mahoney was a drunk. He’d disappeared before. And then there was his mother saying she knew for a fact he’d come back months later.

Daphne’s mouth opened a little, surprise and realization. “There was this man who came by the house a few times. I think he was a private detective. Mom must have hired him to get photos of Dad cheating or something, but he got more than he bargained for. I think he took those photos. He gave them to her and told her never to contact him again.”

“Okay,” Emma said slowly. “Okay. But what I don’t understand is why you needed the flash drive so badly. If what you’re saying is true,there’s nothing on there that would incriminate either ofyou.” She waited. JJ spoke first.

“It wasn’t just the flash drive.”

“JJ,” Daphne said, almost warningly.

“That night,” Emma began. Her voice failed. She tried again. “That night, I didn’t know what had happened, but I thought—I assumed—that one of you had killed them. Juliette was acting so strange, and she was wearing the wrong clothes. Daphne had blood on her. I thought the best way to protect you was to hide everything.”

“You made me change,” Daphne said. “You washed my hands. Under the fingernails, too. There was blood in my hair and you trimmed it off.”

She’d taken the clothes and sneaked back to the Saracen house, which by then was empty. She burned them in the old fireplace. Not quite well enough to obliterate them, but enough that no one ever connected the clothes to Daphne. The ashes in the fireplace and the graffiti on the walls were enough to start the Satanic rumors—and link the crime to the teens who used the Saracen house as their crash pad. Including, occasionally, Gabriel.

The hair, just a half inch from the end and enough to even it up and make it look natural, she’d scattered here and there in the woods as she went, letting the wind catch it and carry it away.

She’d checked Juliette’s clothes for any sign of blood, but she hadn’t been able to find anything. She’d debated burning them, too, but in the end she simply folded the clothes and put them away in the bottom of Juliette’s drawers. She supplied them each with fresh pajamas, changed her own clothes—leaving her discards in the hamper. And she’d told them what they should say.

They’d been sleeping in the tree house. Daphne had to go inside to use the bathroom. Emma figured Daphne was the least likely to be suspected. People always thought she was just a little girl, treated her like she was six instead of almost a teenager.

She kept it simple. The lie didn’t need to be complicated, it justneeded to be consistent. But it had still fallen apart. Tiny mistakes that added up. Then the police finding out about Gabriel, combined with Hadley’s vendetta.

“I thought one of you must have done it,” Emma repeated carefully. She couldn’t quite look her sisters in the eye. “I didn’t want to know who. I didn’t want to know for sure.”

JJ’s teeth bit down on her lower lip until it blanched white. She looked like she was about to speak, but Emma cut her off.

“It doesn’t matter who killed them.” Her voice shook, but her words were clear. “We wouldn’t have all survived. We wouldn’t have all made it out of that house alive. This way we did. So it doesn’t matter who did it. It had to be done.”

“They didn’t deserve to die,” JJ said, but she didn’t sound like she believed it.

“Plenty of people die who don’t deserve it. They at least deserved it more than most,” Daphne said with a shrug. “They were abusive. The things they did, maybe they weren’t—maybe we never would have been taken away from them. We had everything we needed. Food and a good house and money and healthcare, and it’s not actually illegal to hit your children, as fucked-up as that is. But I wanted to—not die, but—”

“Disappear,” Emma said, hollow.

She’d never really had the chance to grieve her parents. The investigation had swallowed up any opportunity to pause and feel what was happening, and now it was like all that emotion had been stitched up inside of her and the seams were coming loose.

Did they deserve to die? She didn’t know. She’d hated them in a way that was indistinguishable from love, loved them in a way that might have been hatred. She had feared her father and resented her mother and wanted to leave forever, but there were good memories, too, there must be, she would remember them soon. A good birthday, a day at the park, a kind word. She knew they existed, but they skittered away from her groping mind now. All she could remember of her parents was thesound of a blade tearing through canvas and the darkening shade of red against her mother’s pale skin.

“I hated them,” JJ said. Her fingernails dug into the meat of her arm. “I thought that I could keep pretending to be Perfect Juliette until Daphne got out of school. But eventually they were going to find out what I was up to.”

“I never told anyone. Never,” Emma said. “Not about the blood, Daphne. Or your clothes, JJ. I kept quiet because I’d never been able to protect you. Not from Mom and Dad. But from the police… I could do that. But then you left me. Both of you.” She didn’t mean to sound so pathetic. “Did you think that I did it? Did you think—”

“I was afraid,” Daphne said, and Emma fell silent. “There were letters. Anonymous notes. They would say things like ‘I know’ and ‘You’ll never be safe.’ So I thought I had to keep quiet, or my sisters would die. I thought I could keep you safe by staying away.”

JJ looked startled. “I got the same kind of letters,” she said.

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