was storming up the sidewalk, Eileen unhurriedly following.
“You can’t keep doing that! If I lost you, Mom would kill me.”
“Nah.” Murphy shrugged. “It’d take her a while to notice. You could skip town before then.”
“Not funny.” Claire reached Murphy, planting her feet and folding her arms. “Maybe neither of you are taking this seriously”—she shot a pointed look at Eileen—“but I am. Don’t you get what it means, everything Cathy said? If Patrick is really our uncle, then—”
“Sure,” Murphy cut in. “It means that house is where Dad grew up.”
Claire blinked. “Well … yeah.” Then she seemed to board her former train of thought: “It also means we’re related to a murderer.”
Eileen said something under her breath, brusque and derisive. Claire ignored her and added, plaintively, “I don’t know why Mom wouldn’t tell us any of this.”
Murphy swallowed. She wasn’t exactly happy with Mom for leaving the family for Christmas. All the same, Murphy didn’t like to think of Mom as a liar. And something about this didn’t seem fair—questioning Mom when she wasn’t around to answer. She probably had a good explanation. For instance—
“Maybe she was trying to protect us.”
Claire parted her lips, but Murphy pressed ahead.
“Everyone gets it, right?” she said. “Dad was the oldest brother, John. Same name. He was away at college when it happened, and the murder probably freaked him out so bad he never came home and decided to lie about it, say his whole family was dead. He wanted a fresh start. That makes sense.”
Claire was glaring at the concrete, toeing a scraggly patch of grass. “Well, if that’s true, it’s another lie. Mom said Dad never went to college.”
Murphy thought about this. “I dunno if she ever said didn’t. She just never said did.”
“Come on. If he had a college degree, you think he’d settle down in freaking Emmet?”
“Maybe,” Murphy said, “Dad got so upset about the murders he didn’t graduate.”
“Whatever.” Claire threw up her hands. “This doesn’t matter. Mom’s not here, and Dad and Uncle Patrick are dead. The only one left is this Mark person, who probably killed our grandparents, and for all we know, he’s back in town.”
Claire scrunched her nose, and Murphy did too. She bet the others were thinking how weird what Claire had said sounded. Uncles. Grandparents. Murders. Those weren’t part of the Sullivan sisters’ lives.
“This is the plan,” said Claire. “Eileen, you’re going to try starting the van again. If it works, great. If it doesn’t, we call a mechanic, get the van fixed as quick as we can, and leave town. We forget this whole thing ever happened.”
Murphy gaped. “Forget about our inheritance?”
Murphy had reached a conclusion: Sure, the house had turned out to be a murder mansion, but it was her murder mansion. A third of it, anyway. There was magic in the place, and it had drawn the sisters together. It was the place to enact Operation Memory Making. She wasn’t ready to leave that yet.
“Of course not,” Claire told her. “But there’s nothing we can do about the inheritance part right now.”
While Claire had been laying out her master plan, the sisters had resumed their walk toward the bluff. This entire time, Eileen had stayed quiet. Murphy kept sneaking glances, trying to read her oldest sister’s face, with no success. Eileen’s eyes remained lightless, her lips drawn in a long, neutral line until, after the silence, she said, “I’m not ready to leave.”
“What do you think you’re going to find there?” Claire challenged. “Cathy already told us the deepest, darkest secret a family could have.”
“Or,” said Eileen, “she just scratched the surface. Maybe only the Enrights knew what really happened in that house. But we could know too. There could be something in there that tells us the whole story. Maybe even … stuff about Dad.”
“You can’t be serious.” Claire motioned at Murphy. “What about her? Maybe you’re fine being reckless with your own life, but Murphy’s a kid, and I’m not going to keep her here when there could be a killer in town.”
Red-hot indignation filled Murphy. A kid? That really was how Eileen and Claire thought of her: the kid, the nuisance, the baggage. The spare tire.
Well, this spare tire could talk.
“I’m fourteen,” she growled at Claire. “We’re both in high school. And I want to stay.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Uh, yeah it does.” Murphy raised her voice. “We’re a democracy, and it’s two against one.”
Claire laughed. “You think this is a democracy? News flash: I’m the one with the money. I