Open House: A Novel

by Katie Sise

  PRAISE FOR OPEN HOUSE

  “Katie Sise has outdone herself with Open House, her latest ingenious addition to the world of domestic suspense. A sly, stirring whodunit with an ending that’s nothing short of perfection. A must-read!”

  —Mary Kubica, New York Times bestselling author of The Other Mrs.

  PRAISE FOR WE WERE MOTHERS

  “Sise offers an astute glimpse into tragic loss, the innermost lives of women, and the highs and lows and societal expectations of motherhood . . . This compelling character study will resonate.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Propulsive . . . compelling.”

  —Booklist

  “Sise displays a sly sense of pacing; nearly every chapter unveils a new plot twist, keeping readers hooked. Fans of Liane Moriarty will eat this title up with a spoon.”

  —Library Journal

  “Taut and suspenseful, We Were Mothers will keep readers on the edge of their seats until the very end.”

  —Bustle

  “Katie Sise’s We Were Mothers expertly snaps readers to attention with its grandiose opening . . . Timing, inner discourse and believable fiascos blend together producing fantastic scenes . . . Her observations and vulnerability carry the read.”

  —Associated Press

  “If you can’t resist a sharp, suspenseful novel, then We Were Mothers by Katie Sise deserves a spot on your reading list.”

  —POPSUGAR

  “A close-knit community in a seemingly idyllic town is torn apart when a pretty college student goes missing and the first of many dark secrets is uncovered. We Were Mothers is a twisting tale of small-town complicity and deceit with some astute insights into marriage and motherhood. The escalating tension and the many surprises will keep readers urgently turning pages. An engrossing read!”

  —Mary McCluskey, author of Intrusion and The Long Deception

  ALSO BY KATIE SISE

  We Were Mothers

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2020 by Katie Sise

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Little A, New York

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Little A are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542092654 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1542092655 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781542092678 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1542092671 (paperback)

  Cover design by Kimberly Glyder

  First edition

  For Brian, Luke, William, Isabel, and Eloise, always.

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  PART I

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  PART II

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  PART III

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  FORTY

  FORTY-ONE

  FORTY-TWO

  FORTY-THREE

  FORTY-FOUR

  FORTY-FIVE

  FORTY-SIX

  FORTY-SEVEN

  FORTY-EIGHT

  FORTY-NINE

  FIFTY

  FIFTY-ONE

  FIFTY-TWO

  FIFTY-THREE

  FIFTY-FOUR

  FIFTY-FIVE

  FIFTY-SIX

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PROLOGUE

  It was January, and the bucolic town of Waverly was covered with snow. Fires were lit; coffee was sipped; and the library at the University of Yarrow was filled with students. Most yearned to be somewhere else, their hearts pulsing with big ideas and plans for after graduation, or at least for Friday night. On the library’s third floor, a junior named Oscar Mendez could no longer take the musty stacks, so he zipped his parka and headed outside in the late afternoon.

  A few hours later, Oscar would tell the police that he had no idea where he was going when he left the library. He certainly never planned to descend into the gorge behind campus, but that’s exactly what he did, snow crunching beneath his feet as he trekked down the frozen earth toward the vast, churning river. Besides a few brave hikers and runners, Yarrow students mostly avoided the woods and the cliffs overlooking the river because of Emma McCullough’s disappearance a decade before. But Oscar didn’t believe in ghosts. And it felt good to skid down the snowy trail, the incline so steep it made him feel alive and far enough away from the gleaming gothic architecture of the university. Oscar hated it at Yarrow, he really did; he hated the smug, self-satisfied professors and the preppy classmates mingling with the alternative ones, everyone a happy, bubbling mix on the surface. But what could he do? Transfer? He didn’t have the energy. Quit? He was too smart for that.

  The cathedral’s clock tower chimed four times, warning Oscar that there wasn’t long before darkness fell completely and obscured the path back to campus. He hurried farther upriver, turning around just once to take in the rocky cliffs that towered over the gorge. The cliffs were four stories tall on both sides of the river, and depending on where you were perched, it was either a straight drop into the water or onto a dirty beach made of mud and snow. The frozen ground was hard for Oscar to navigate, and he was careful not to get too close to the water’s edge. A recent downpour had made the river even more furious, and Oscar watched the white-tipped current for a long time, wondering, as always, if he was going to be all right. The sun’s final strips of light filtered through branches and illuminated a flash of silver near his feet. He bent to pick up a chunk of earth with a bracelet lodged inside.

  For Emma, it read in scripted calligraphy, my love.

  Oscar’s sullen mood was suddenly forgotten, his mind sharpening. Could it have belonged to her—the elusive, mysterious Emma McCullough?

  Probably not, he thought, but he pocketed it anyway, his heart thudding inside his chest as he retraced his footprints and climbed toward safer ground.

  PART I

  ONE

  Haley

  One week later

  Haley McCullough stared down at Susie’s dead body. She tapped her gloved fingertips against Susie’s cold, white-blue skin—tap, tap, tap, one, two, three.

  The tapping was a compulsion Haley had developed to cope with the waves of sadness and obsessive thoughts about her sister, Emma. Haley mostly tapped her right index finger against her left hand and counted. Sometimes she tapped objects that felt interesting to touch—the edges of a staple, or the scratchy fabric on the old armchair where
she studied, or Susie even. If she was in public, she tried to conceal her compulsions. If she was alone, she closed her eyes and soaked up the sensation of the tapping.

  Haley had been doing it for nearly ten years, ever since her older sister vanished at age twenty-one, and it worked, actually. Every time fury swelled inside her, the tapping calmed her body until she could function again. Fury was the most succinct word to describe it, but it wasn’t only anger; it was a surge of regret, despair, and so many other things she didn’t dare name, followed by a quickening of her heart and a thick swirl of blood in her ears. It was where her body went every time she thought of Emma.

  That morning as Haley tapped Susie’s shoulder—tap, tap, tap, one, two, three—her mind went to the clavicle and scapula that lay beneath, and she tried not to think about the things the young woman had done when she was alive, but she couldn’t always help it. Had Susie used this shoulder to pitch a ball? Haley guessed the odds were that yes, at some point she had, so she imagined Susie’s slight frame in a softball uniform, her skeleton of bones very much erect and alive, a sly smile playing on her lips as she considered her batter. Would she be wearing lipstick? No, no. Haley’s mind quickly canceled that out. But her hair: it would be in a ponytail, most likely. Haley could see it now, trailing over the delicate curve of her spine.

  Tap, tap, tap. Hello, Susie.

  It wasn’t Susie lying there dead that had Haley so worked up that she needed to tap; it was the phone call she’d received on her way to her Saturday-morning anatomy lab. This has to be fake, this must be a prank, she thought as Detective Hank Rappaport introduced himself. After assuring her there hadn’t been any kind of emergency, he’d asked in a raspy voice, “Could you come down to the station later this afternoon, Ms. McCullough?”

  “Of course,” she’d told him, because that was the only appropriate response to a question like that. And ever since his call she’d only been able to think of Emma, her body like a live wire as she wondered why a detective was calling her in.

  Susie’s toes were painted, and she was pretty, too. Maybe it was wrong to notice her cadaver’s looks, but Haley felt Susie was different. Special, even. And not just because of how much she reminded Haley of her disappeared sister, but because Susie and Haley were both in their midtwenties and each had small tattoos on their ankles. Haley sensed they’d be friends if Susie were alive, but maybe that was taking it too far. She was just so on edge lately. People had warned Haley medical school would do this to her. Every day after classes she raced down the University of Yarrow’s halls, dying to get to a bathroom so she could scrub her hands, her dry, red fingers never feeling clean enough.

  “Observe the aortic arch,” their anatomy teacher, Dr. Brad Aarons, was saying, his voice echoing through the lab. (Call me Brad, he’d told them all at the start of the semester, and they did.) Twenty cadavers lay on stainless steel tables across the room, and the overhead lights were as bright as any operating room. They’d already sawed through the sternum and cracked open the rib cage, and now they were following the ascending aorta as it became the aortic arch and looped over the heart to become the descending aorta.

  That first day in anatomy when Haley had been assigned to cadaver station number four, she gasped when she pulled the sheet from the body and saw the resemblance to Emma: perfectly pale skin, high cheekbones, long lashes, and a top lip with a deep cupid’s bow. She’d glanced up at Brad and raised her hand as if to protest the match, but then lowered it, feeling utterly ridiculous. What would she even say? She renamed cadaver #347 Susie to humanize her, and as the first weeks of the semester wore on, there was this part of Haley—and she knew how damaged she was to even be thinking this way—that relished the similarities. She looked for her sister everywhere. Why not here, too?

  “Identify each branch,” Brad went on, changing the picture on the screen so that it showed a simulation of a gorgeous, pulsing heart. Haley loved the human body; she always had. She cut around the brachiocephalic artery, carefully moving aside tissue to expose its course, losing herself in the dissection. She didn’t look up again until Brad said, “Eyes here for a moment,” and changed the slide to an illustration of the heart, the veins and arteries curving in bright reds and blues.

  Brad Aarons was a cardiothoracic surgeon at the end of his fellowship at Waverly Memorial Hospital. He was somewhere in his late thirties, and half the female students fawned over him, but Haley had no interest in that. He’d been teaching at the University of Yarrow ever since he graduated from its medical school, and Haley didn’t know much else about him except that he was married to a woman named Priya, who’d once been a successful artist. “Note the way the brachiocephalic artery splits into the right subclavian artery and the right common carotid artery,” Brad was saying. His messy red-blond hair was an inch too long and a shade lighter than the stubble blanketing his face, but even doctors could get away with a mussed look in a town like Waverly, because here they valued ideas, academia, and compost piles. Maybe it was because of the university hovering on the wooded outskirts, but Waverly didn’t preoccupy itself with the kinds of things most wealthy New York City commuter towns did, and Haley wasn’t sure whether that made it better or worse. Elitism was still elitism, even when you packaged it as being smart and noble.

  As Haley moved on to the right subclavian artery, she thought about how much her sister would have hated this class. Emma would have barfed at least a dozen times by now. She probably wouldn’t have even liked to know the cadavers existed on Yarrow’s campus when she went to school here. But even though there wasn’t a scientific bone in Emma’s body and she never would have taken one of Brad’s classes, Haley was sure Brad knew exactly who Emma was, and who she was, too: the sister of the undergrad who went missing. Everyone knew. Haley remembered the way Brad’s eyebrows lifted when he read her name aloud the first day in class, and the way he’d taken off his black reading glasses to glance up and see her face, searching it for similarities. She knew he’d found the similarities when his eyes widened, and part of her enjoyed it. Emma’s sister: if she was anything, it was that. Brad had tried to cover up the awkwardness by quickly resuming his roll call, barking out names, taking a few moments to get back on track. He’d been weird with her ever since, but that was nothing new. So many people were.

  Emma went missing her junior year at Yarrow, when Haley was a sophomore at Waverly High School. There was no official explanation for her disappearance. The police had closed the case after investigating for months, interviewing everyone who was at the party that night in the woods with Emma, and sweeping the river—Never a guarantee to find a body that way, they kept reminding Haley and her parents. They never did find Emma’s body, and they were convinced, just like most people in Waverly, that Emma had flung herself into the river from the cliffs behind Yarrow, where she’d last been seen.

  But Haley knew in her bones that that was impossible. Emma had her dark side, but she wasn’t suicidal. Haley believed Emma had been killed and that the police were too naive to figure it out, and once she realized her theories were falling on deaf ears in Waverly—including at the police department—she had to get out of there. She chose Stanford for college, far away from the dark and cold East Coast that had claimed her sister, and a plane flight from the parents who were trying so hard to keep it all together. At the airport Haley’s parents warned her over and over to stay safe, but their warnings were hollow. Emma’s disappearance made it too obvious that they didn’t have control over anything.

  It didn’t take long for Haley to realize that California had been a mistake. She missed her parents and felt too removed from Waverly and where she’d lost Emma. Some magical-thinking part of her was certain she was the only one who could get to the bottom of her sister’s disappearance, so after undergrad, Haley moved back east, to New York City, to be closer to her parents. That’s where she met Dean, her fiancé, the only person besides her mother who’d ever believed her theories that her sister had been killed by s
omeone else who was at the party that night. Her own father was convinced Emma might have just run away or been taken alive, and even Haley’s friends at Stanford had nodded along when she got drunk enough to talk about Emma, clearly feeling very sorry for her, but also seeming not to believe her. You’re too close to see things clearly, one of her roommates had said late one night, and Haley wondered if she just didn’t have the right language. Disappeared, missing, dead: words Haley used interchangeably about what could have happened to her sister that night, the truth existing somewhere in the dark spaces between them.

  Dean had supported Haley when she accepted an offer from Yarrow’s medical school, and now here they were, back in Waverly where it had all started. Haley knew it was crazy. To want to live in the town she’d grown up in, where her parents still lived, and to walk the campus where they’d experienced their worst nightmare. To fall in love with Dean, who’d also attended Yarrow. But her grief was like a part of her body now, and she felt a visceral need to stay connected to her roots and her pain, and to her sister.

  Haley looked down at the slim platinum ring she could just make out beneath her rubber gloves. An engagement. Dean had proposed a few months ago, and Haley knew something needed to change if she was supposed to start a new family. Because how could she move forward when the person she loved could be stuck, buried somewhere underground, her disappearance still a mystery?

  TWO

  Priya

  Priya stared down at her phone to see Josie’s text. Need to talk. She knew that she absolutely, positively shouldn’t reply. She could practically hear Dr. Baker’s voice telling her that it was time to put the phone down . . . break the pattern . . . do something else . . . but the phone was so warm and inviting in her hand, and she couldn’t seem to keep herself from typing.

  Please, stop contacting me, she wrote, but then she deleted it. She tried to breathe, to get the air all the way into her lungs like Dr. Baker had taught her to, but wouldn’t Josie already know she’d started a text response because of those ellipses that phones displayed when the other person was replying?