“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.