I bend closer, my stomach crawling. The slot on the side of the camera is empty. I think of Cat’s words to Kennedy Claire yesterday morning:I have security footage.
“Dad,” I say hesitantly.
He turns from where he has moved on to check the windowsills, where the wooden dowels are still in place, the ones he cut and fitted himself weeks ago. To keep Cat safe. “Don’t touch anything, Mel,” he snaps.
“Sorry, yeah, I know. Cat said she had some videos from that party the kids threw at The Hollow. But I think the SD card is missing.”
His face tightens, and he joins me around the coffee table, leaning down over the trail cam. “Is that one of mine?”
“She must have gotten it from Mark,” I say.
He shines his flashlight down into the empty SD slot.
“Do you think someone took it?” I ask, hugging my arms around myself, nails biting crescents into my arms.
His head turns back toward where Cat’s body still lies on the kitchen floor. But I can’t bear to look again, to see her that way, the dusky blue of her hands, the dark, tacky stain of her blood.
“Could have,” Dad says slowly. “Could be that you found the motive, kid.”
We lock eyes, the storm rattling the windows around us. Anyone who would want that footage, anyone who would steal that card, is already back at the Amenity Center. Waiting for us.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOURINGRID
The Amenity Center buzzes like a disturbed beehive. Whispers are spreading fast. It started with Olivia, stumbling in with Emily’s arm clamped around her shoulders, her face blotched with tears. Mark pulling them into a side room, and then the sounds of muffled sobs.
The mothers still move through the motions—fussing with flowers, smoothing tablecloths—but there is a hum to the air. The collective instinct of a small town that knows trouble when they see it.
The flurry of snow outside has thickened to wool batting, the shift happening faster than anyone anticipated. A few parents press close to the doors, peering out into the blur. Someone murmurs, “We’ll never get home if it keeps up like this.”
Dad hovers, fussing over Mom, who keeps insisting she’s fine. I lean my shoulder into hers.
Then the doors open and Sheriff Ryan strides in, eddies of snow swirling after him, his white hair damp with sleet. Melanie is behind him, and forces the doors shut against the wind.
The hum of the room falters as the sheriff climbs the stage, looking every bit the lawman he’s been for forty years. His radio is clipped to his chest, static crackling faintly from it. “All right, folks. I’m going to need everyone to take a seat.”
Chairs scrape, and chatter dwindles to a hush. The room stills.
Sheriff Ryan clears his throat, scanning the rows like he’s studyingfaces. “There’s no easy way to say this, so I’m just going to lay it out straight. Cat Dennis was found dead today in the model home.”
A ripple breaks through the room—gasps, sharp cries, hands pressed to mouths. A girl sobs out loud. Mark steps from the side room, pale and stricken, closing the door softly behind him.
Dead? The word is so small and solid, so final. I feel it like a punch to the chest. It seems impossible—Cat dead—when we all just saw her alive. But, of course, I should know better than anyone how easy it is for someone to be here one day and gone the next. Pressed against my shoulder, I feel Mom trembling. I reach over and pull her shawl more tightly around her.
From the crowd come overlapping questions:
“What do you mean, dead?”
“What happened?”
“How?”
The sheriff puts up a hand. “It’s too early for me to say, but I do have to ask that everyone keep clear of the model home. It’s a crime scene now.”
“A crime scene?” one mother says, grabbing a little girl who looks about seven and holding her close. “So she was murdered?”
Every phone in the room erupts at once, that awful government-issued screech cutting through the air. I dig mine from my back pocket:WINTER WEATHER EMERGENCY.
Chairs squeak as people start to stand, grab coats, grab children’s hands. “We’re going home,” one man says.