Dead Silence

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.

All but one. The one she’d fallen asleep reading. The one in which her grandmother wrote about falling in love with her grandfather.

Violet knew it was cheesy, but she couldn’t help herself, it was better than any romance novel ever written. Her grandmother wrote so eloquently about him, and Violet found herself feeling sorry that he hadn’t lived long enough for her to know him in person. She was certain she would have loved him as much as she’d loved her grandmother.

She set that particular journal aside, not yet ready to tuck it away.

And then the memories of the day before settled over her, crushing her chest and making it suddenly hard to breathe.

The family at the lake. The missing girl.

Grady . . .

She knew what she had to do. It was the only way to clear his name.

Violet rapped softly on the front door, mentally preparing herself for the possibility that she’d been wrong about all this. That Grady was responsible for killing that family after all, and that he’d be wearing the imprints that would condemn him—the stale coffee grounds, the menagerie of colors, and the missing echo that belonged to the boy.

His mother answered, looking like she hadn’t slept all night.

“Violet Ambrose?” She sounded as surprised as she looked. “I’m afraid Grady’s not really up for visitors, dear.”

As if on cue, Grady appeared in the hallway behind his mother. There was a time when Violet had believed Grady was handsome—in a goofy, boyish sort of way. They’d spent enough time together over the years that she hadn’t always noticed it, the way friends sometimes did, but it was there all the same. Now, however, he looked pale and tired and skittish.

“Violet?” He blinked as he realized who had come to see him. “What are you doing here?”

Violet started to rush toward him, not sure whether she should hug him . . . or hit him for making her care. But even after everything he’d done, she did care.

He wasn’t a killer. That much she knew.

That much she was 100 percent certain of.

“How are you?” she asked, cringing to be asking such a stupid question. She could see just by looking at the dark circles beneath his eyes how he was.

Grady just stared at her, as if she’d grown a second—or third—head. “I don’t get it. What are you doing here?”