Dead Silence (12 page)

“I don’t know, Boxer, you tell me. You plannin’ to keep her?”

Boxer’s glazed eyes wandered to her. With some effort, he licked his fat lips. “She’s real pretty,” he said, his words becoming lazy. And then to her, “Come here, girl.”

She didn’t move, didn’t even blink.

He decided to help Boxer out, because that’s what leaders did. That’s what
family
did.

Still on his knees, he crawled toward the girl. Behind him, he heard Kisha giggle—a real giggle this time. He waited for the vacant eyes in front of him to register that he was there at all, and he reached out and lifted her chin, more roughly than the way he’d handled Kisha, forcing the girl to at least face him.

“Hey, Butterfly,” he whispered, hoping he sounded comforting, reassuring. He knew that wasn’t her name, but to be fair, he couldn’t remember what her real name was. “You in there? You still with us?” He squeezed her cheeks, just enough to get her attention when she refused to respond. “Colton, hand me that shit.” He held out his hand impatiently. He didn’t like to be the one to give it to her, but she needed it. Otherwise they’d have to get rid of her, and Boxer seemed to have taken a liking to her.

It wasn’t hard to find a vein in her arm; hers were still fat and unblemished.

It also didn’t take much of their stash to get her to return to them.

After a few minutes, she met his gaze, as if noticing his presence for the first time. He smiled at her, silently welcoming her back.

“Here, Boxer,” he said, shoving the girl toward him. “Take her. She’s yours. But you need to take good care of her. She’s your responsibility now.”

“Come here, Butterfly,” Boxer cooed as the girl staggered into his arms. She curled into his lap, resting her head on his shoulder as he petted her, the way he might pet a kitten. She never seemed to notice the blood that was still on her hands.

Colton was lying on the floor now, staring up at the water-stained ceiling, wearing that same grin he always wore. The younger boy’s enthusiasm was irritating at times, but there were worse things than enthusiasm, he thought, feeling the throb of his swollen cheek pulsing.

Besides, that’s what families did, they put up with one another’s quirks and faults.

“What about me? When do I get a girl?” Colton asked into the dim space of the apartment.

He didn’t answer Colton right away; instead he settled down beside Kisha, letting his hand move slowly up and down her arm as she finally found a peaceful kind of sleep. The kind that wasn’t riddled with nausea and night sweats.

After several quiet minutes he whispered softly, his voice spinning the same tale he’d told them a thousand times before, “Be patient, man. Big things are comin’ our way. When I’m famous—when we have more money than we know what to do with—you can have all the girls you want.”

CHAPTER 6

“VIOLET, WAKE UP. UNCLE STEPHEN’S HERE.” IT was her dad’s voice, finding her in the darkness of her room. Automatically, she reached for her cell phone, checking the time and realizing it wasn’t even midnight yet. She hadn’t meant to fall asleep.

Still groggy, she nodded and rose up on her elbow. “I’ll be right down,” she managed to croak.

She waited till her dad left the room before throwing back her covers and grabbing a pair of sweatpants. She pulled her hair into a ponytail, not bothering to check the mirror. There was no point.

In the kitchen, the lights seemed too bright and Violet could smell the fresh coffee brewing in the pot. But more than that she could taste the presence of her uncle—his own unique imprint—the dandelion taste that coated her tongue whenever he was around. All eyes shot her way when she staggered in and she glanced around at them—her mother, her father, and her uncle—while the repeating music-box loop played in her head.

“So?” Violet asked, pulling up a chair at the table and joining the rest of her family. “Did you find her?” She leaned across the table expectantly.

There are pauses people take when you know that what they’ll say isn’t what you want to hear. For Violet, this was one of those moments. She knew, even before her uncle opened his mouth, the news wasn’t good. His pause was exactly that long.

“I’m sorry, Vi.” He shook his head woefully, and Violet wondered if he’d had to practice that expression, that look of patient sympathy. If this was the same look he gave others when he had to deliver bad news. Even his voice sounded too smooth, too practiced.

Violet turned to her dad, and then back to her uncle. She hated the knot of confusion that coiled in her gut, warning her there was more to this visit than just that denial. It was too late to drop by if he didn’t know
something
.

“Well,” Violet started, “if you don’t know where she is, then what do you know? What about . . .” She choked on the feel of his name, bitter on her tongue. “What about Grady? Did you talk to him?”

Her uncle’s expression cracked, just slightly, and he gave a slight nod. He glanced down at his coffee mug, staring but not drinking. He just watched the steam rising up from it. “We did. He didn’t know where she was either.”

“
And
. . . ?” There was definitely more. Violet’s Spidey senses were tingling off the charts. She knew her uncle was holding back.

“We found his prints all over their house,” her uncle admitted, still not meeting her eyes.

Violet relaxed a little. “So what? Is that so weird? Wouldn’t that make sense if they were dating or whatever?” She’d seen the picture. Most girls didn’t go to the prom with someone they hadn’t spent at least a little time with.

But then her uncle went on, “He also had some of her things in his possession. An iPod, a bracelet . . . things he admitted belonged to her. And we think there might more, things that were missing from the house, but we haven’t been able to get an accurate inventory just yet.”

“Again . . .” Violet hedged, thinking of all the things she’d left at Jay’s house, all of the things that were probably there now. “If they were dating, wouldn’t that kind of explain her stuff being there?”

Her uncle cleared his throat. It was strange to watch him shift and squirm in his chair, like a schoolboy who’d been caught cheating on a test.

“Violet,” her mom interjected. She cast a meaningful glance at Stephen, reproachful almost. “They think Grady might’ve had something to do with what happened to the girl’s family.” She continued, a heavy sigh buried behind her words. “They found some strange pictures at his place.”

Violet’s heart felt like it was jammed in her throat. “What . . . ?” She swallowed, trying to clear a space for her words. “What are you talking about? What kind of
strange pictures
?”

Her uncle nodded, as if he hadn’t just chickened out and had delivered the news himself. “Photos of the girl,” he said, sounding like himself again. “Veronica, by the way. Her name is Veronica Bowman.” He kept going, while Violet let the name sink in. She didn’t recognize it, not that she’d expected to. “The pictures were . . .” her uncle continued, stopping for just a moment to chew the inside of his lip. “Well, they were mutilated. The girl’s eyes had been gouged out, and he’d drawn horns on her—”

Violet interrupted then, trying to give them a rational explanation. Surely even that could be explained. “Okay, so maybe they broke up. Maybe he was pissed and he ruined some pictures. That’s not a crime—”

This time it was her uncle who interrupted her. “There were red slash marks drawn on her neck and wrists.”

Violet’s mouth was still open. She’d been ready to argue, to take up Grady’s defense, when her uncle’s words had caused it to go bone dry. She thought about the bodies of the girl’s—
Veronica’s
—family, of the way their throats had been sliced open.

She thought too about the way Grady had groped her last year at the party they’d been at, when he’d backed her against his car and tried to kiss her, putting his hands all over her. He’d been drunk and stupid, but he’d also been aggressive. “What did he say?” she finally managed to ask, her voice sounding far less confident. Far less outraged. “When you asked him about it, what did he say?”

Her uncle ran his hand through his hair, looking weary. Her mom put a hand on his shoulder.

“He said what you said, that they’d had a fight and he was mad at her. That the pictures didn’t mean anything.”

Violet wasn’t sure what to think now. “Maybe they didn’t. Did you find other fingerprints at the house?”

Stephen nodded, but it wasn’t a convincing nod . . . not to any one of them sitting at the table. “Of course we did. Several of them. Most are being processed now, but in the meantime Grady is a suspect.”

“
Grady
—” Violet sputtered. “Are you serious?” Even though Grady had made mistakes, and was probably a first-class jerk, that didn’t make him a killer. The idea made her stomach twist.

“What we’re sure of, Vi, is that we have a family who’s been murdered, a girl who’s still missing, and an ex-boyfriend who’s harboring a grudge. Right now he’s all we have, and until he can convince us that we
shouldn’t
be looking at him, we’re looking.” Her uncle’s chair scraped across the floor as he got to his feet. He looked like her uncle again, Violet thought, examining him more closely, only a wearier, more exhausted version. His eyes were red-rimmed, and his shirt was wrinkled and untucked. “Now, it’s late and I’m tired, and I’d like to get home.”

Violet wanted to nod, to give him some signal that she’d understood what he’d said, and that she was okay with his decisions. But she couldn’t . . . because she wasn’t. Because no matter how much time she’d spent avoiding Grady, she just couldn’t accept that he was the cold-blooded killer her uncle insinuated he might be.

Instead, she listened while her parents walked her uncle out . . . and then she heard the deadbolt sliding into place and the beeping of the new alarm system being set for the night. More reminders that there’d been a time she wasn’t safe in her own home.

After her mom came back in and kissed her good night, her dad lingered behind in the kitchen. He sat beside her at the table, in the seat her uncle had just occupied. “He did the right thing, you know?” he told her, his voice soft and comforting. “They’ll question your friend and they’ll figure out he didn’t do it. But they have to pursue every possible option. It wouldn’t be fair to the girl if they didn’t.”

Violet gritted her teeth. She knew her dad was right, that they all were, but it didn’t change things. It didn’t make her feel better that someone she knew, someone she’d once considered a friend, was the prime suspect.

Violet went back to her room, but couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t stop thinking about Grady.

She couldn’t stop thinking about the girl . . . and her family.

She thought about calling Jay, to see if he was still up. But she knew it was too late for that.

She glanced at the box, still on the floor, still filled with her grandmother’s journals. She settled down beside it and reached inside, pulling out diary after diary, trying to find where her grandmother had picked up writing again.

She began sorting them into chronological order as she drew each one out, flipping through the pages and searching for dates. She found entries from her grandmother’s later years, which she placed near the end, and those from her early married life—with mentions of her husband, Violet’s grandfather, whom Violet had never known—which she placed near the middle. Finally, after searching through several of the journals, she found the one she’d been looking for, from when her grandmother had started writing again.

There was a significant gap in time. There were no more entries from her grandmother’s high school years. They didn’t resume again until
after
she’d moved away to start college. She’d left home, Violet read, deciding to leave her parents in Michigan, where they’d settled after the incident with Ian, so she could start anew at the University of Washington, in Seattle.

It was a big change for her grandmother, being on her own, but as Violet flipped through the pages, she realized that she’d seemed happy then, maybe for the first time in her life. She was free from the parents who’d looked down on her, who had hidden both her and what she could do. She’d made friends in college. She’d taken classes in psychology, religion, art, and history, exploring worlds and ideas she’d never even considered before.

And she’d met a man.

Violet ran her finger over the page when she read his name. John Anderson. Such an ordinary name. If she were to look, there were probably hundreds of John Andersons in the phone book at this very moment.

But this John Anderson was different. This was Violet’s grandfather.

Violet awoke the next morning surrounded by her grandmother’s words. She smiled at the journals covering her bed as she stretched. Pushing them aside with her feet, she had to climb over them to get up. She quickly reorganized them, tucking them safely away in their box, careful to keep them in order now that she’d sorted them, and she gently placed the box in the bottom of her closet, like they were rare, irreplaceable treasures.