Dead Silence

by Kimberly Derting

  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 consider
ed 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?”

  “I . . . I just wanted to see if you’re okay.” She wondered how many times she’d been asked that very thing. It felt strange to be standing here, practically begging for his response.

  Grady watched her, and for a moment Violet thought he wasn’t going to answer at all. Then his face softened, transforming into the old Grady, the boy she’d climbed trees with in the fourth grade, as he smiled at her. A slow, wistful smile. “I’ll be okay, Violet,” he said, his voice low and rough. “Thanks for . . .” Emotion choked his words. “Thanks for coming by.”

  After dinner, which was takeout from her favorite Thai restaurant, and dessert, cupcakes that her dad had picked up from the bakery in town, Violet retreated to her bedroom. It wasn’t that she didn’t appreciate the extra effort her parents were making in the wake of what had happened at the lake house . . . especially their attempts to bribe her with baked goods. But it was too much like a flashback of the days following her return home after the kidnapping, when every conversation had had an edge of forced cheer, and when an almost endless stream of neighbors and acquaintances had come to the door, bringing with them cookies and pies and casseroles.

  Like she’d died rather than survived.

  Even her friends had been awkward around her at first, not sure how to act when she’d finally relented and invited them over for a girls’ night to watch a movie. Like everyone else, Chelsea seemed to think that food solved everything and had shown up with a grocery store cake decorated with pink and yellow roses, and pink piping that spelled out the word Congratulations on it.

  Congratulations. Violet had stood there staring at the cake Chelsea had thrust out to her, wondering what she was being congratulated for exactly. Congratulations on being the lone survivor of a serial killer? Or just your average, everyday congratulations-for-killing-a-guy?

  If it hadn’t been for Jules, who’d shoved Chelsea and called her an “inconsiderate A-hole,” and then scooped up a piece of the pretty white cake with her bare hand and smooshed it in Chelsea’s face, it probably would’ve stayed awkward. As it turned out, it’s not food that fixes things, it’s food fights.

  Violet had been more than happy to stand in the corner of her kitchen and watch as Jules and Chelsea, and even Claire, had demolished the cake, smashing and shoving and squishing it all over one another, until they’d all had to change clothes, and had spent the rest of the night digging frosting out of their ears and noses.

  That had been the first time Violet had laughed—really laughed—after coming home.

  This wasn’t quite the same, but there was still that strange awkwardness about it. So, for now, she much preferred the less awkward peace of her bedroom.

  The first soft ping blended in with the sounds of her imprint, and was easy enough to ignore. But it persisted—the pinging that struck the side of her house—once even hitting her window with a sharp crack.

  Violet didn’t have to look to know who it was, or that if she didn’t stop him, her parents would.

  She opened her window, leaning over the windowsill on her elbows. “You’re either going to break the window,” she whisper-shouted down to
Jay, whose arm was cocked behind him, ready to launch another pebble, “or get arrested for being a nuisance.”

  He wiped his hands on his jeans and grinned up at her, a grin that was equal parts wholesome and predatory. “Come down here and I’ll stop throwing rocks at your house,” he taunted.

  She didn’t answer, just shut her window and stole out of her room. Jay was probably the only person who could’ve coaxed her out tonight, the only person she actually wanted to see.

  Violet shook her head as she hopped down her front steps. “What are you doing here?” She stopped just before she reached him and put her hands on her hips. She didn’t tell him that perched against his car like that, he took her breath away, or that she was thrilled to see him. Instead, she tried to glare. “It’s kinda late, isn’t it?”

  Jay grinned, looking for all the world like he had no place better to be than standing there, in her driveway, waiting for her. He shrugged at the same time, his easygoing stance never shifting. “Violet,” he explained, reaching out and looping his finger into the top of her jeans. He tugged, dragging her the rest of the way to him. The feel of his chest beneath hers made it even harder to breathe. “It’s only nine.”

  “But it’s a Sunday,” she offered.

  “Mm-hmm . . .” he responded, his voice distracted as he leaned down and nuzzled the side of her neck. His lips brushed playfully over her earlobe, as the soft stubble on his chin grazed the sensitive skin of her shoulder.

  “It’s a school night.” She almost didn’t get the words out as she stopped caring what she was saying. As she stopped caring about anything but his touch. She closed whatever space remained between them, and her fingers curved up to his shoulder and around his neck, slipping into the back of his hair so she could anchor herself. Everything inside of her reacted to him, like he’d flipped a switch, awakening her in all the right places as she ached for more. The evening air was thick and warm, and smelled like grass and cedars and Jay.