You Can Never Tell by Sarah Warburton

Author:Sarah Warburton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: CROOKED LANE BOOKS

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The next few days were a nightmare, caught between piercing fear and unrelenting tedium, the grinding certainty that terrible things were on the horizon but all I could do was wait. Wait as the police summoned Michael for another round of questioning, wait as the reporters filled our lawn, wait until the next awful surprise.

The police had gone over our house, every inch of it, and they had found cameras in the security system, hidden in the white boxes that housed the motion sensors. “Why didn’t they interfere with the alarm?” I’d asked the technician who’d carefully dismantled the box.

He shrugged. “Plastic housing was big enough for both. And your system’s hooked into the landline, but these cameras are wireless.”

The tech team searched every corner of our house, and the scanners they used made Brady’s look like a child’s toy. For all I knew, it might have been. We’d invited in the very person who’d installed the cameras, and we’d believed every lie he’d told us. No wonder his special sweeper hadn’t found them. He’d probably rigged it to beep whenever he wanted.

And now our house had holes and gashes, missing pieces removed by the police, and the parts that remained were tainted and untrustworthy.

They’d even dug up the tiered garden Michael and Brady had built. Now the lumber was piled to one side, the plants in a wilted heap beside the mound of loose earth the police had dumped back into the hole. Maybe it did resemble a fresh grave, but at least I knew it was empty.

I did what I could, fixing concrete things that didn’t distract my mind from the vortex of questions. I had the locks changed and the alarms rewired and rearmed, for all the good those security features had ever done us. I bought a rosebush and stuck it into the space where the garden used to be. I hauled the lumber to the curb. And now Grace and I were waiting again. Just like we had been for days.

But no, it was more than waiting. I had summoned all my strength to talk to my mother, to tell her the barest outline of what had happened. And then I spent twice as long talking her out of flying to be with us like she had after Grace was born. “You can’t do anything right now, Mom. Nobody’s sick. We’re okay,” I said, even though I wished to my bones that she was right next to me, wrapping me in a hug, making it all go away. But I wasn’t a child. Letting my parents come down would only put more people I loved in an untenable position.

I called Michael’s parents, too, hoping to spare him some of the trauma of reliving the story. But of course it didn’t work. He was their only child. They had always been kind to me, they probably even loved me, but they needed to hear this from him. Which meant he had to explain to

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