Page 116 of The Only One Left

Detective Vick shakes his head. “Not for another six months.”

A shock.

I’d assumed Virginia died the same night her parents did. Instead, she clung to life for six more months. I’m not sure which is worse—going instantly like her mother and father or lingering at death’s door that long before finally slipping through.

“Why did no one suspect Ricardo Mayhew?”

“They did,” Detective Vick says. “Once everyone realized he was gone and not coming back, he was the prime suspect. Especially when it was discovered that one of Winston Hope’s Packards was missing from the garage. It was possible he killed them, stole the car, and drove as far away as he could. But there was nothing to prove that’s what happened—or that he was even in the house at all.”

“Did someone at least ask Lenora about Ricardo?”

A car pulls into the parking lot, its headlights skimming the Ocean View’s façade before landing on the weathered face of Detective Vick. Usually, he looks flinty. Tonight, he just looks tired.

“As a matter of fact they did,” he says. “She claimed she didn’t know who he was. One of the cops had to clarify that he was the head groundskeeper at Hope’s End. The cop made a note that she genuinely seemed to not know the man’s name.”

“How many times did they talk to her?”

“Multiple times over several weeks,” Detective Vick says. “Her story was always the same. She didn’t see anything, didn’t hear anything, never saw a soul inside that house other than her family.”

That’s at least one lie on Lenora’s part. She saw Berniece, who caught her in the kitchen with blood on her hands as she grabbed a knife.

Yet that doesn’t make sense. If Lenora was indeed guilty, how could there be blood on her handsbeforeshe fetched the knife? That’s only possible if more than one knife had been used.

“What about the weapon?” I say. “They never found it, right?”

“Correct.”

“Were the police certain only one knife was used?”

“As certain as they could be,” Detective Vick says. “No other knife seemed to be missing from the kitchen, and the stab wounds on both Winston and Evangeline Hope were roughly the same width, suggesting only one weapon was used.”

“Did they notice anything out of the ordinary about the place? Anything at all?”

“Just that Virginia Hope’s room had recently been cleaned. One of the cops smelled floor polish when they brought her upstairs.”

I touch my temples, the headache growing. It’s so bad I’m surprised my skull hasn’t fractured yet, forming a crack as big as the one now running across the terrace at Hope’s End. “Since they couldn’t prove—or disprove—that Ricardo did it, and since they couldn’t do the same with Lenora, the case just stalled?”

“Correct,” Detective Vick says. “Sound familiar?”

Anger flashes through me like lightning. Electric. Searing.

“Fuck you,” I tell Detective Vick, which might be illegal. I’m not up to date on laws against swearing at police detectives. If it is a crime, Detective Vick makes no move to do anything about it as I yank open the door to my Escort and slide behind the wheel.

“I don’t blame you, you know,” he says before I can slam the door shut. “Your mother was suffering. I understand that. My own parents suffered when their time came. But I didn’t break the law to try to end it.”

“Neither did I.”

I’m on the verge of tears, and I don’t know if it’s from rage or grief or the fact that everything about the past six months has been too damn much. When I got to Hope’s End, I threw myself into learning Lenora’s story because I was desperate to change my own pathetic existence by focusing on someone else’s. But then I found Mary dead, and things have only spiraled since then.

“I didn’t make my mother take those pills,” I say, swiping at a tear before it can fall because I’ll be damned if I cry in front of DetectiveVick. “She killed herself. Mary didn’t. And someone smarter than you would understand that.”

The detective’s nostrils flare. The only sign I’ve gotten to him. Unlike me, he knows how to keep his emotions in check.

“Kit, for the last time, Mary Milton wasn’t murdered.”

“How can you be so sure of that?”

Detective Vick removes a piece of paper from inside his jacket. A photocopy of a page made ragged and faint from water damage. Thrusting it at me, he says, “Because of this.”

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