Page 1 of In the Bones
Prologue
Molly
Nine months ago
Nothing good happens after midnight. Isn’t that what they say? Midnight had come and gone, but we were still there. A haze of smoke and liquored breath hung over the room like a veil, suspended above the heads of strangers. There were too many people, lips and hands fluttering fast, and the effect was dizzying, like a strobe light pulsing close to my eyes. A ribbon of cool air slithered across my feet, turning the skin to gooseflesh. Someone, somewhere, had propped open a door, and my body responded as though I’d been touched by icy fingers in the dark.
When was the last time I saw her? An hour ago? More? She’d been talking to a man I didn’t know, one of many. Where were they now? The muttering in my brain told me this was bad.Enough. Get out.My skeleton hummed, keen to move. But still, I couldn’t see her.
Why didn’t I shout her name? Make a scene? Shake the truth out of everyone in that house? I should have tried so much harder to reach her, wherever she was, because that expression isn’t right. It doesn’t tell the whole story.
Nothing good happens after midnight when you find yourself alone.
ONE
Nicole
When Nicole Durham heard that renovations on the house were nearly complete, she did what any enterprising person would do and took her old eighteen-foot Grady-White on the water. It wasn’t stalking if she wore a sun hat and a smile as she coasted by. The late spring air was an embrace delivered with cold hands, the waves that jumped the boat’s gunwale to freckle her skin like needles, but her easy stance and rollneck sweater said she was simply another woman on a leisure cruise along the St. Lawrence, where the river met the lake. A summer person, maybe. Just like him.
She’d been keeping an eye on the house for weeks, monitoring the progress. In March, a crew had erected a six-foot privacy fence along the property line. At first, the work had all been indoors. Trucks and vans came and went carrying custom windows, sheet rock, tile. The landscaping was next, an army of masons shaping serpentine stone walls that now brimmed with fat-bloomed roses. Last week, a hulking appliance truck had parked adjacent to the front door. That was when Nicole knew he was close to moving in.
“Think he’s single?” she’d asked Stacy on the phone that same morning. “Bachelorhood would be convenient.” Especially since Nicole knew the guy had money to burn.
“He’s not married, I know that.” It was Stacy Peel who’d sold the man the waterfront farmhouse that he’d poured a fortune into renovating, adding countless upgrades to make it his own. When Nicole had exhausted her friend’s stores of knowledge, she’d turned to Google.
“There isn’t much about his personal life,” she’d reported. “It’s all just hockey stuff.”Ex-NHL player with the WashingtonCapitals.Well-respected winger, if a little rowdy on—and off—the ice. Nicole clocked every fine, suspension, and media controversy she found online, forging new neural pathways just for him. He’d purchased the house the previous September with plans to move in May, before Memorial Day.
“I need this,” she’d told Stacy when she saw that truck.
“It’s different this time,” Stacy had replied. “He isn’t your average seasonal resident.”
Nicole had pleaded then. “Come on. For me.”
It wasn’t the first time she’d looked to her friend for help. Every now and then, Nicole would blow out her hair, put on a nice dress, and tag along on one of Stacy’s showings. Masquerading as an interested party required cunning, and that—so different from her everyday life—was something Nicole enjoyed. That, plus the food. What was it about those tiny cubes of cheese and plastic cups of room-temperature chardonnay? The fresh-baked cookies intended to make the place smell homey for the open house? Nicole could make a meal of those visits, sometimes did, and in exchange she’d talk up Stacy’s real estate listings. “This is exactly what I’ve been looking for,” she’d tell prospective buyers. “You don’t see places like this every day.” And when an offer was made and accepted, Stacy would repay Nicole by recommending her services. Most of the time, the scheme worked in both their favors. The new owners never remembered Nicole, once she’d shed her costume in favor of a ponytail and sweats. She’d gotten good at pretending.
This client would be her biggest challenge yet.
Now, as she bobbed on the waves in search of stray construction vehicles—she saw none—Nicole spotted someone in the water. Slick-haired and shirtless, he ascended the ladder at the end of the dock with water sluicing off his taut skin. The peninsula homes in Cape Vincent, New York were separated from the river by a dead-end road leading northeast to the village and southwest to Tibbetts Point, but the dock was directly across from the house. It had to be him.
Nicole’s dark hair whipped her cheeks as she watched the man shake off droplets of water and reach for the towel thatwaited on the decking. The wind was sharp, the lashing violent. Her teeth chattered. Where she wasn’t covered up, her skin was coarse with goosebumps. Nicole barely noticed.
It was finally time to meet Mikko Helle.
TWO
Tim
New York State Police Investigator Tim Wellington tapped the tip of his pen against the notebook with his eyebrows yanked toward his nose. The page before him was mostly blank, the white space herding out three lines of neat print. “Two pairs of jeans. Is that right?”
“Yes,” the woman answered, her expression grim. “Two—plus the bikini, don’t forget the bikini. And the tops. Three tees, one jean jacket. White denim with indigo cuffs.”
Tim glanced back down at what he’d just written, which looked more like a birthday wish list than an itemized inventory of stolen items. “And there’s nothing else missing? Artwork? Valuables? Electronics?” His voice verged on hopeful.
“Nothing at all. As far as I can tell, everything else is just how we left it.”
The woman cut her gaze to the shouting in the back room, which gave Tim a chance to trade a dubious look with Jeremy Solomon. Sol scratched the stubble that caked his jaw, and gave a helpless shrug.
They’d been called to the house for a suspected break-in, met at the door by the homeowner, twin toddler boys in matching nautical sweaters, and a barking black Lab. The woman, whose name was Annalise Greene, had come up from the suburbs of Boston to open the house for the summer, her husband set to make the trip in time for the upcoming long weekend. The North Country was as far north as you could get without landing in Canada, but like so many others, the Greenes would be staying all season. Here to enjoy the fresh river breeze, the yacht they’d paid someone to take out of dry dock, and an extravagant second home. Theirs was one of the bigger properties in Cape Vincent, three cedar-clad storieslooming over a wrap-around porch, but by September the Greenes would be gone again, this majestic mansion scrubbed clean and locked up tight for fall and winter. Until Mrs. Greene arrived last night, no one had set foot in the place for months.
