The Girl from Widow Hills - Megan Miranda Page 0,22
of my loose pajama pants. A gash running down the kneecap.
I pressed a stack of toilet paper against the cut, trying to stop the blood, then opened the cabinet under the sink, looking for a bandage. An amber prescription bottle, a pair of nail clippers, a pile of towels. A small trash can and something wedged beside it, in the corner. Something black and metal—
I leaned closer, nudging the garbage can aside.
The metal fell with a clunk, and I jumped back, pulse racing.
A gun.
A gun, hidden. Not one of his shotguns, locked up in a safe down the hall. But kept here. Four steps from his bedroom. Three steps from his living room. So he could get to it fast, should he need it.
I heard Rick’s footsteps coming up the porch again, slow and steady. Behind the trash can, there was a roll of black electrical tape. I tore off a piece with my teeth, wrapped it over my knee, pulled the fabric back down my leg.
I looked fine. Everything was fine.
The sound of the front door opening and closing, footsteps pausing for a moment at the entrance. Like the danger had passed.
Had he nudged the man with his toe, gotten him to wake, gotten him back on his feet, walking him to his car—
Had there been a car?
I hadn’t noticed. Had I even looked?
I remembered the light from Rick’s, the darkness of my own house. The open doorway. I didn’t remember a car . . .
Footsteps again, and then a tap at the bathroom door.
“Liv? You okay?”
“Just a minute,” I said. I eased the cabinet door closed, holding my breath.
“Liv. I’m going to have to call the police now.”
A pause. And then: “Okay,” I said, speaking to my own reflection. Not a call for help. The police, he said.
He was dead.
Everything slowed. My breathing, my thoughts, my movements.
His steps retreating. Images flashing and lingering—the phone, the body, the blood. The feeling of pins and needles in my fingertips. A sour taste in my mouth—the walls were too close, and the drip of the faucet behind me grew louder, more insistent. I couldn’t get a deep breath.
I pulled the door open, desperate for air.
I HEARD RICK ON the phone from where I waited in the living room. He was pacing in the kitchen as he talked. “Yes, there’s the body of a man at the edge of my property. Deceased, yes. No, I don’t know. I’m not sure. I don’t know.”
He spent a while in the kitchen, even after the conversation stopped. And he didn’t look my way at first when he came back to the living room. Stared, instead, out the front windows. Eyes slightly narrowed, a twitch at the corner.
“It takes so long,” he said, “for help to get here. For the police to make it out this far.”
“Rick, did you see? Who it was, I mean?”
He turned in my direction, blinking slowly. “Never saw him before, that I could tell. There was a lot of blood, though.” Eyes drifting away again. Drifting straight to the cabinet beside the television, to the bottle of liquor sitting on top. Then he turned back to me, glancing at my hands, my pants, my bare feet. “Sit down, Liv. Sit down and take a breath.”
I walked to the couch, though the stiffness in my left leg, and the electrical-tape bandage, turned my walk to a slight limp.
“What’s the matter?”
“My knee,” I said, sitting on the edge of his sofa. “I cut it. On a root, I think.”
He frowned at the tear in the fabric. “You tripped out there,” he said, but he said it like a statement, not a question.
“Yes,” I said, and he nodded once. And I realized he was saying it like it was a story, my story, something I had to cover up. “Rick, I tripped over the . . . over the body.” I couldn’t say the name. Who I imagined might be out there. Couldn’t even think it.
“Okay,” he said. And then, “They’re here.” Even before a flash of light cut through the front curtains. “Stay in here. I’ll show them.”
A man was dead, and how many men could it be, lurking outside my house? That phone I’d heard must’ve belonged to whoever was out there. My mind kept drifting back to Jonah, to the text I had sent him—Thinking of you, too—and the one he had sent back, seconds later:
What are you thinking?
Because that was Jonah, always digging deeper, to find the heart of the