The Girls in the Snow (Nikki Hunt #1) - Stacy Green Page 0,84

night. She remembered how badly her legs had wanted to give out, how she’d taken the porch steps one at a time. How the door had stood open, with glass everywhere.

“Can I help you?” A young woman with a baby on her hip stood in the doorway.

“I used to live here,” Nikki said. “A long time ago. Sorry to bother you.”

Her eyebrows knitted together. “Are you the girl whose parents were killed?”

That’s exactly who she was, no matter how hard she tried to pretend. “My name is Nicole.”

The woman bounced the fussing baby. “Did you want to come in or something?”

The cop in Nikki surfaced. “You should never invite a stranger in the house, even a woman.”

“Aren’t you with the FBI?”

Right. Everyone knew she was in town. “You don’t mind?”

“I have to put him down for his nap, but if it’s something you need to do…” She held the door open. “I’ll leave you alone.”

Nikki’s feet suddenly felt filled with lead. Could she really do this? The young mother headed down the hall into the kitchen. The strawberry wallpaper her mother had so painstakingly hung had been replaced by cheery yellow paint. The vinyl flooring in the hall was gone, too. Engineered hardwood had taken its place. Her father had laid the vinyl himself, cutting his hand during the process. He told everyone he’d bled for the house and then proudly showed his scar. The irony almost made Nikki bolt for her jeep, but she forced her legs to move.

Nikki walked by the living room; the fireplace looked the same. Even the wooden mantle remained.

A few more feet, and then the stairs on her left. The hallway led into the kitchen, where the phone had hung on the right wall, next to the dining room doorway.

Mark’s version of events had him going downstairs, probably still woozy, in search of a phone, in a dark, unfamiliar place. He’d tried to save her mother and ended up with her blood on his shirt. What about his hands? Nikki didn’t remember seeing a photograph of blood streaks on the wall, but if Mark had really had his bell rung, she’d expect him to need help staying steady.

If his head had been bleeding, did anyone look for a blood trail other than the footprints he’d left after stepping in her mother’s blood? If Mark had bled onto the wood floor, it was possible the blood stain had set into the wood. If it had, the stain might still be visible.

The kitchen flooring had been the house’s original hardwood. Her father applied fresh stain every few years, declaring this was the last time and they were covering it with vinyl. It never happened, but someone had finally upgraded the flooring to tile.

There was different carpet on the stairs. Plush, not the tightly woven Berber she remembered. Thirteen steps; the fifth, sixth and seventh still squeaked.

Nikki scrubbed the tears off her cheeks and kept walking. Her parents’ old bedroom had been completely redone, and the bed was on the other side of the room. Nikki waited for the memories to bombard her, but she remained numb.

Her room at the end of the hall was now a nursery. A changing table sat in the spot where her father’s body had lain.

Nikki’s throat tightened. Everything had changed, the time her family spent in the house wiped out, as though the Walsh family never existed.

She went back downstairs and found the homeowner in the kitchen. “Thank you for letting me come inside.”

“No problem.”

The phone no longer hung on the wall, and a portable island countertop sat against the back wall. Like the hallway, the kitchen floors had been replaced by engineered hardwood. “This is nice work.”

“Thanks. My husband has done most of the upgrades. The old oak trim doesn’t match. He was supposed to replace that in the summer. You know how men are.”

Could it actually be the same trim from twenty years ago? Her own house was fifteen years old, and the trim had only been treated, never replaced. Nikki knelt in the corner where the phone had been. The trim was definitely old, but clean.

“I like the yellow paint,” Nikki said. “Very cheery. My mother had strawberry wallpaper. It was expensive at the time.”

“It was still here when we moved in a few years ago,” the woman said. “The house had been pretty neglected. I liked the wallpaper, but it was in bad shape. Some of it had peeled off in places, and that wall in particular