Quiet in Her Bones

by Singh, Nalini

  Shifting her gimlet gaze to Lily, she said, “Keep an eye on him.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Only after the nurse was gone, and we were walking in the hallway, did Lily say, “What was that?”

  “I thought I was hallucinating you. But in my defense, I was poisoned by a maniacal killer.”

  When I turned left and began to head down the long and expansive hallway lit naturally by a row of windows, she said, “Where are we going?”

  “To visit Alice.” I wanted to see if the cops had told her anything they hadn’t told me.

  A buff man with light brown hair and golden skin was loitering outside her room, his hands shoved into the pockets of his jeans. “Aarav, hey man.” He held out a fist for a bump. “Crazy shit, huh?”

  “Hey, Adrian.” I touched my fist to his. “Cops in there?”

  “Yeah. I told them to leave Alice alone, but she said it was cool.” He rolled back and forth on the balls of his feet. “I never would’ve thought it of Calvin, of all people. Burying a body in Diana’s rose garden. Cold, just cold.”

  “What’re you doing here?”

  A flush of color on his cheeks. “Just wanted to see Alice.”

  Deciding I was too tired to beat around the bush, I said, “Adrian, satisfy my curiosity. Where did you get the money for your gym?”

  I thought he’d tell me to fuck off, but he shrugged and said, “My nan died and left me her house. She lived in this poxy wooden place that was falling down around her ­ears—­I did what I could to make sure stuff worked, but the place was a dump and she refused to even discuss moving.”

  “Yet it let you afford a gym?”

  “It was in goddamn Grey Lynn.”

  Lily sucked in a breath at the mention of the highly ­sought-­after ­inner-­city suburb that housed the city’s bankers and CEOs and other wealthy residents who needed to be close to the central business district without living in the city itself. No one would’ve cared for the state of the house; developable land in the area was pure gold.

  “How much did you get?”

  “Two million dollars. I would give it all back if it meant my nan was still alive. She was the only one who ever gave a shit about me.”

  “Yeah, I get that.”

  Our eyes met, and he gave a quiet nod.

  63

  The hospital finally discharged me two days later.

  The first thing I did was give Riki every single photo negative and video I had that would’ve allowed me to blackmail him.

  I also apologized and told him I’d deleted any original digital files.

  He said, “Would you do it again?”

  “Yes. Someone murdered my mother.”

  “You know what? You’re an asshole, but yeah, I’d have done it, too, for my mum.”

  And I knew we were never ever going to discuss this again.

  “Do you think it was you?” Riki asked, an odd ease to him.

  Because I knew his secret. Because he didn’t have to hide it. “What?”

  “The person who called the cops on Ana and Leo, do you think it was you? Since you were off your head?”

  “I don’t even know. What happened?”

  “Apparently, someone reported them anonymously for aiding in the abduction of a young woman. Turned out Leo’s cousin was just going on a road trip with her university buddies, and they decided to leave real late at night to avoid the traffic.”

  “Well, if it was me, that probably looked very weird.”

  Riki laughed, but it held a sharp edge. “What about Brett and ­Veda’s dog?”

  “I don’t hurt animals.” It was all the answer I had, and it was the only answer I could accept.

  Leaving Riki to destroy what I’d given him, I went to my father’s house to pack up my stuff. I found him sitting in his study, halfway to drunk, a photo of my mother on his desk. “Part of me kept hoping she’d crawl back.” Tears rolled down his face. “I loved her, that bitch. She’s still the most incredible woman I’ve ever known.”

  I walked away without replying, shutting the door on the past.

  EPILOGUE

  FOUR MONTHS LATER

  I sat on a large rock on a mountain in Udaipur, my mother’s ashes scattered to the winds. Beside me was the woman who’d become my friend, the two of us entwined by our broken pieces.

  “Did you read the article this morning?” Lily asked from beside me. “About Calvin?”

  “Yes.” All those years I’d known his family had died in a car ­accident—­I’d never thought to check the details. Who would? After all, how many car accidents were caused by a suicidal father driving his family off a bridge and into a massive dam?

  Calvin should’ve been in that car, but he’d been running late.

  So he’d been left behind.

  But Lily was interested in the lead point of the article. “Guess he never thought anyone would dig up his former lover. Or that the chemicals would still be in Dr. Mehr’s liver. Yay for accidental mummification.”

  “Yes.” Part of me had noted the mummification thing for use in a future book, while the rest of me had felt only a sense of quiet satisfaction that a woman I’d never known had been given justice.

  So had my mother.

  It turned out the police had been sitting on two pieces of evidence they’d never ­revealed—­the tip of a knife blade embedded in one of my mother’s ribs and, critically, foreign DNA found on a broken ­watch-­strap once drenched in my mother’s blood.

  I’d learned that under the right conditions, DNA could easily survive a decade. They’d found ancient DNA thousands of years old in caves, and my mother’s car had essentially become a cave. Despite the cracked windows, the position of the strap hidden under the seat meant the elements had never reached it.

  It had lain, cool and protected, as the seasons changed and the years passed.

  It was such an odd place to find it that I knew my mother had done it on purpose. In her last moments of life, she’d found the will to finger her murderer.

  But it had meant nothing until the police had a suspect.

  Calvin had never been on their radar.

  “Constable Neri called me this morning,” I said to Lily. “While you were in the shower.”

  We’d told my grandmother that we were going for a walk, would return soon. She wouldn’t worry if we took longer. She’d have forgotten us within minutes. The cruel disease that had taken her mind had given her this one ­gift—­she was always happy to hear that her Nina was on the way to the village, that she’d arrive soon.

  “What did she say?” Lily leaned forward, the short, sharp cut of her hair still a shock.

  I’d thought it’d remind me of Paige, but it didn’t. They were two different women, each a unique presence.

  “Calvin admitted everything a few hours ago, after Diana confronted him. He said he was protecting her. He hit on Sarah but she was horrified and planned to tell Diana.”

  “Did he admit to murdering Dr. Mehr, too?”

  “Yes. She’d asked her husband for a divorce because she thought Calvin intended to do the same with Diana.”

  “Let me ­guess—­when Calvin blew her off, she threatened to confront Diana. ­So … your mum. He found out that she knew about the affair with Dr. Mehr?”

  “The worst of it is that my mother wasn’t going to tell Diana, but Calvin couldn’t take a risk on that.” My mother had confronted Calvin privately, had railed at him to be a better man, to be the man Diana deserved.

  “It’s so controlling,” Lily muttered. “Killing to hold on to a woman you’re disrespecting the whole time. Because there had to be other affairs.”

  I’d been thinking about that since I read the article. “Calvin lost everyone he loved as a boy. I don’t think he has the emotional capacity to bear even the slightest threat to his current ­family—­it’s almost as if he’s trying to be the exact opposite of his father. Protecting where his father destroyed.”

  “So
unds like a cop-out to me. He wanted to have his cake and eat it, too.”

  I didn’t reply. Lily and I both knew that childhood pain dug deep craters into the soul, caused pathways to twist and mutate. For Calvin, it had morphed into a pathological need to create a perfect family no one was allowed to endanger.

  To say Diana was devastated was a vast understatement. She’d put Calvin on a pedestal, all but worshipped him. But the one thing Calvin hadn’t understood until now was that Sarah had been more child and less sister to Diana. And what Diana loved even more than Calvin were her children. She would never forgive him for what he’d done.

  I’d spoken to her more than once in the aftermath, and every single time, I saw the guilt that was eating her up from the inside, a corrosive acid.

  “Sarah came to me once because she was uncomfortable with how Calvin was looking at her,” she’d told me as we sat in the clearing where my mother had died. “She said she thought he’d spied on her while she was showering. I’ll never forgive myself for how I ­reacted—­I told her he was a good man and to never make such allegations.

  “I thought she was trying to cause trouble because Calvin insisted on discipline and had told her she couldn’t have her boyfriend in the house.” Sobs shattering her words. “That was the last proper conversation I had with my sister. She was so angry and hurt that I wouldn’t listen, and when she vanished, I thought she’d run off but would eventually come home. She knew I loved her, would always love her. But she never came home.”

  Instead, Calvin had kept Sarah alive through emails to and gifts for Mia and Beau. “Sarah” had sent only one message to Diana:

  I hate you. I never want to see you again.

  The cruelty of it was incomprehensible.

  “What about you?” Lily asked. “Did Calvin finally explain why he started screwing with your head?”

  “It was all because of a comment I made soon after they found my ­mother—­something about the rose garden. Apparently, I’d been looking at Calvin at the time.” I shrugged. “I can’t remember, but it made him see me as a threat. But what really pushed him over the edge and had him seriously upping the dosage was when Mia mentioned I’d been asking about Sarah.”

  Calvin’s guilty conscience had done the rest.

  Calvin Liu didn’t need much impetus. He killed anyone who might ruin his fantasy of the perfect family. As for my mother, it was as I’d theorized in the time since his arrest: Calvin had just returned home from a late surgery when he saw her walking groggily to her car. On any other night, Diana would’ve heard him arrive ­home—­but she’d been so exhausted from being sick all day that she’d slept right through it.

  He’d gotten my mother into the passenger seat by saying he’d take her to the hospital to get her head wound examined. My father’s handiwork. The glass shard that had hit her had done far more damage than he’d admitted. Then Calvin had taken her to that lonely spot and used the switchblade he kept on himself for protection on ­late-­night runs to stab her to death.

  My mother, already hurting and drowsy, had been a helpless victim.

  After pushing the car down the slope, Calvin had run back, using that marathoner’s body to make the trek at speed. He’d hidden in the trees at one point when he heard a motorcycle; according to him, the driver didn’t appear to have a good handle on the powerful machine, and had been traveling at a crawl.

  Me. Trying to find the woman Calvin had already murdered.

  It all fit, but I couldn’t confirm ­it—­my own memories of that night remained fragmented shards. “Cops found the knife Calvin used on my mother in his office at work,” I told Lily, “along with a chain that belonged to Dr. Mehr, and the name bracelet Diana gave Sarah for her sixteenth.”

  Ugly trophies of evil.

  “I bet you there was more.”

  “A ring that didn’t belong to any of the three, as well as a scarf.”

  Neri and Regan were digging through Calvin’s past for other suspicious deaths or disappearances.

  “I told Diana I suspected it was her. Going after women who she thought were showing an interest in her husband. Do you know what she said?” When Lily shook her head, I repeated Diana’s words: “ ‘I loved Sarah so much that I would’ve forgiven her even if she’d had an affair with Calvin.’ ”

  Her face far too thin, permanent bruises under her eyes, she’d hugged her arms tight around herself and added, “I’d do anything to have her back, but at least I’ve been able to bury her properly. And I’m glad I talked all the time to my roses. I used to talk about Sarah and about how much I missed and loved her.”

  Diana hadn’t planted new roses after they’d removed her sister’s body. She’d put up a For Sale sign instead.

  “I suppose he’s still pretending he donated the money anonymously to ­domestic-­violence charities.”

  “In small sums.” Part of me believed him. The rest wondered if the quarter million he’d found accidentally when he hit the wrong switch and the boot popped open had become his freedom when it came to his ­affairs—­no need to hide spending, no need to cover up a paper trail.

  “It’s done.” Lily looked out at the breathtaking alpine scenery that surrounded us in the mountains of a city that had once been the residence of kings.

  A fitting resting place for a woman as dazzling as any queen.

  But as I looked over this landscape, I couldn’t help but wonder if my mother’s spirit would linger on in the cold green place that had been her tomb for a decade.

  Oh, Ari. Laughter on the breeze, a ghost’s kiss on my cheek. I was never trapped, mere dil ka tukda. That was always you.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A very special ­thank-­you to my parents, Usha and Vijay, for checking on my Hindi. Any mistakes are very definitely mine. (A note about transliteration: Since Hindi has its own alphabet, there are often variant spellings for things in the English alphabet. I tried to choose the most common spelling where I could, but otherwise just picked one and went with it.)

  The Te Reo Māori in this book is from my own ­knowledge—­most of the words are in everyday use in New Zealand.

  A huge ­thank-­you to the incredible team that worked on this ­book—­and the equally incredible people who have helped spread the word about it. I can’t name you all, but I hope you know how much I appreciate you.

  Thank you to Ashwini for being my sounding board even when I drive you up the wall. And to Rene, thank you for taking me on all those long and winding drives to find locations for fictional dark deeds.

  Last but never least, my thanks to you, for picking up this book.

  Nalini

  Auckland, New Zealand

  CREDITS

  Nalini Singh and Gollancz would like to thank everyone at Orion who worked on the publication of Quiet in Her Bones in the UK.

  Editorial

  Rachel Winterbottom

  Brendan Durkin

  Editorial Management

  Charlie Panayiotou

  Jane Hughes

  Alice Davis

  Audio

  Paul Stark

  Amber Bates

  Contracts

  Anne Goddard

  Paul Bulos

  Jake Alderson

  Marketing

  Tanjiah Islam

  Design

  Lucie Stericker

  Joanna Ridley

  Nick May

  Helen Ewing

  Clare Sivell

  Finance

  Jennifer Muchan

  Jasdip Nandra

  Afeera Ahmed

  Elizabeth Beaumont

  Sue Baker

  Production

  Paul Hussey

  Fiona McIntosh

  Publicity

  Alex Layt

  Sales

  Jen Wilson

  Victoria Laws

  Esther Waters

  Rachael Hum

  Ellie Kyrke-Smith

  Frances Doyle

  Ben Goddard


  Georgina Cutler

  Barbara Ronan

  Andrew Hally

  Dominic Smith

  Maggy Park

  Linda McGregor

  Sinead White

  Jemimah James

  Rachel Jones

  Jack Dennison

  Nigel Andrews

  Ian Williamson

  Julia Benson

  Declan Kyle

  Robert Mackenzie

  Operations

  Jo Jacobs

  Sharon Willis

  Lisa Pryde

  ALSO BY NALINI SINGH

  Guild Hunter Series

  ANGELS’ BLOOD

  ARCHANGEL’S KISS

  ARCHANGEL’S CONSORT

  ARCHANGEL’S BLADE

  ARCHANGEL’S STORM

  ARCHANGEL’S LEGION

  ARCHANGEL’S SHADOWS

  ARCHANGEL’S ENIGMA

  ARCHANGEL’S HEART

  ANGELS’ FLIGHT

  (SHORT STORY COLLECTION)

  ARCHANGEL’S VIPER

  ARCHANGEL’S PROPHECY

  ARCHANGEL’S WAR

  Psy-Changeling Series

  SLAVE TO SENSATION

  VISIONS OF HEAT

  CARESSED BY ICE

  MINE TO POSSESS

  HOSTAGE TO PLEASURE

  BRANDED BY FIRE

  BLAZE OF MEMORY

  BONDS OF JUSTICE

  PLAY OF PASSION

  KISS OF SNOW

  TANGLE OF NEED

  HEART OF OBSIDIAN

  SHIELD OF WINTER

  SHARDS OF HOPE

  ALLEGIANCE OF HONOR

  WILD INVITATION

  (SHORT STORY COLLECTION)

  WILD EMBRACE

  (NOVELLAS COLLECTION)

  Psy-Changeling Trinity Series

  SILVER SILENCE

  OCEAN LIGHT

  WOLF RAIN

  ALPHA NIGHT

  Thrillers

  A MADNESS OF SUNSHINE

  QUIET IN HER BONES

  Copyright

  First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Gollancz

  an imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

  Carmelite House, 50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ