She stayed calm, allowing the water to hold her as she moved through her lane.

And as she knew they would, with her goggled eyes wide open, letters came at her like a swarm of bees.

Atone.

Buffy.

Kinin.

Taylor held on to the first two words, convinced her observation was correct. But the last one? It didn’t seem like a real word. Maybe it was a name? Buffy Kinin? No one at Kingston had that name. Atone for what?

Taylor held the words in her thoughts.

Atone Buffy Kinin.

Gasping for breath, Taylor shot through the water’s surface and pulled herself up and out of the pool. Tracking water all over the pool deck, she hurried back to the locker room. The warmth of her body instantly fogged the mirror. The teenager wrote the phrase with her index finger. Her eyes reflected in the two Fs staring back at her.

She didn’t need a Scrabble board to mentally unscramble the letters:

KNIFE BY FOUNTAIN

Taylor didn’t even bother to shower. She didn’t care if the chlorine turned her hair green. She hastily dried off and dressed. There was no doubt about what knife and what fountain. Grabbing her duffel bag, she sat on the bench and retrieved her phone. A second later, she logged on to the Crime Stoppers website. It guaranteed anonymity and was the only way she could think of to tell Annie Garnett without having to answer a bunch of questions for which she really didn’t have answers.

Please tell Chief Garnett that the kitchen knife used to kill Olivia Grant on Halloween night is in the bushes by that tacky fountain in front of the Connors house.

Before she pushed the Send button, she deleted the word tacky. She wanted to stick to the facts.

Just like a cop.

LUCKILY FOR ANNIE GARNETT, finding the murder weapon only took twenty minutes and two antacids to calm her roiling stomach. After receiving the tip from the Crime Stoppers site about its whereabouts, a Kitsap County Sheriff’s deputy, crime scene tech, and the police chief herself made fast work of the search in front of the Connorses’ house, converging there after meeting at her office in Port Gamble. They recovered a knife from the lush green folds of landscaping, adjacent to the imported Italian fountain of three cherubs.

“Right there,” the deputy said, pointing with the shiny tip of his black boot. He aimed the beam of his Maglite. Glinting under the edge of a spindly branch of a sprawling juniper was the elongated and bloody edge of an expensive butcher knife.

“I’ll bag and tag it,” he said.

“How could we have missed it?” Annie said, knowing that the media would bash the police for the rookie mistake. Searching a crime scene twice or even many more times wasn’t unusual, but missing something as crucial as the probable murder weapon was a big blunder—the kind of mistake that would call into question whether or not it had been collected properly. The crime scene, after all, had been abandoned. She’d added that error to the growing list of screw-ups that would give any defense lawyer ammunition against the prosecution. The evidence had been trampled, contaminated, compromised.

All of those adjectives would surely be hurled at her if the case got to court.

Chapter 19

THEY’D BEEN DRIVING FOR HOURS, first across the Hood Canal Bridge and then onto the back roads along the tree-shrouded edges of the inland waterway that was America’s answer to a Norwegian fjord. Drew Marcello had ditched his tricked-out black Honda Civic for his mother’s old commuter car, a burnt-orange Accent, a vehicle he considered a complete dorkmobile. But he was willing to drive it, as he was all but certain that no one would ever be looking for that car. His mom would never, ever turn him in. Of that he was certain.

“You want me to tell Dad?” he had said, a threat implicit in his tone.

Marsha Marcello didn’t need to ask what her son was getting at. She fished her key ring out of her purse and pulled off the key.

She looked over at Brianna, who was standing next to Drew’s car.

Brianna’s stare was ice. Green ice.

“I suppose you need some money too,” Marsha said. She held out four twenties and a ten. “That’s all the cash I have.”

Drew snatched the money from her fingers. “Wow, you’re really coming through for me now, Mom. ‘Bout time.”

Marsha, a spiny woman with small birdlike eyes, couldn’t resist a jab back at her son. They’d played a kind of mean version of verbal ping-pong for years. It wasn’t so much as a game between them, either. It was the way they related to each other.

“Which one of you killed Olivia, Drew?” she asked, her tone pointed and hurtful.

Drew shook his head and started walking toward the garage. He waved for Brianna to get behind the wheel and follow him there. Under his arm he carried a dark-blue plastic tarp—one of two he’d purchased at the Home Depot in Silverdale.

“Talk to me,” Marsha called out, but her son kept going. She hurried toward Drew, her arm on his shoulder to stop him from going a step further. Drew turned around and gave her a little push, which sent her onto the soaking wet grass. She looked up, disbelieving what was happening.

What had happened.

Drew’s eyes were fixed, dark, swimming in anger.

Marsha stretched out her hand to have Drew help her up, but the teenager ignored her. He hadn’t meant to cause her to fall, but he kind of liked seeing her there on the muddy lawn.

“If the girl did it, you need to turn her in. That’s the right thing to do,” she said.

“Really, Mom? You’re going to give me tips on morality?”

“I want the best for you,” she said.

Drew’s impulse was to laugh out loud, and that’s exactly what he did.

“You were never, ever there for me,” he said. “You don’t know what the best for me is. You don’t even know who I am. All you’ve ever cared about is yourself. I’d tell Dad everything I know, but I don’t want to hurt him like you have.”

The clouds opened, and Marsha looked up at the sky, cowering from the onslaught of rain. She looked small, helpless, and afraid. Seeing that, Drew felt a surge of power and it felt good. It was the way it should be.

He was cutting ties. With his mother. With his school. With his old life.

It felt good to be him just then.

There was no uncertainty anymore.

“Thanks for that,” Brianna said as they pulled the blue tarp first over the hood, then the rest of Drew’s car.

“For what?” he asked.

Brianna got into the passenger seat of the golf cart-sized Accent. “For defending me,” she said. “The whole world hates me right now.”

Drew looked right at her and put his hand on her knee. “I don’t, Bree,” he said.

She smiled, leaned over and kissed him. “I know.”

“I’ll figure out a way to take care of everything,” he said. “That’s what I do. For now, let’s drive and get the hell out of Kingston. We need us some downtime.”

“Your mom just had some downtime,” Brianna said grinning as she watched Marsha Marcello scramble back toward the house, her backside all covered in mud. “You really don’t think she’ll turn us in?”

Drew smiled. “Not if she wants to keep her job and her marriage,” he said.

“You’ll have to fill me in sometime,” Brianna said, trying to snuggle next to the window. “Right now, I’m beat. I’m going to try to sleep. Can you turn the seat warmers on?”

“Sorry, Bree. No seat warmers in this piece-of-crap car.”

He reached into the backseat and pulled out a blanket with the Buccaneers logo. “Use this. Mom bought it from the Kingston Athletic Boosters two years ago. Never came to any of my games. She was always about acting like an interested parent to other parents who actually cared about their kids.”

“Nice,” Brianna said, drifting off to sleep. “Sounds familiar.”