When Willa’s and Paxton’s arms touched, they jerked apart and put some space between them.

“Don’t worry, Willa. Your grandmother didn’t kill him,” Agatha said. “And I know that for sure.”

Willa smiled. “Well, it’s a relief to hear someone say that.”

“Because I killed him,” Agatha finished.

EIGHT

Party Girls

Paxton took swift and immediate action. “I think you’ve upset her enough,” she said, ushering Willa to the door with the skill of a hostess herding her last guests out. “Now she’s talking nonsense.”

“I haven’t talked nonsense a day in my life!” Agatha barked.

Once in the hallway, Paxton said, “She’s delicate, and she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Don’t come back here and upset her. I mean it.”

Paxton went back into the room and closed the door. Willa was tempted to get angry, but she’d seen something in Paxton that tempered the emotion. Paxton wanted to protect her grandmother. Just like Willa did.

So Willa left the nursing home with even more questions than she’d started with. There had been a surprising vehemence in her voice when Agatha had declared that her friendship to Georgie still existed, as if it was a living, breathing thing, something that came to life the moment it happened and didn’t just go away because they no longer acknowledged it. How far would that friendship go? Far enough to lie? Or far enough to tell the truth?

She wondered if Paxton was thinking the same thing.

One thing she knew for sure: Willa was on her own when it came to finding answers now. She’d seen the wall go up. There was no way Paxton would let her talk to Agatha again.

When she got home, she changed clothes and climbed the stairs to the only other place she knew to look for clues.

The attic.

It had been a long time since she’d had any reason to come up here. It was dim and dusty, and spiderwebs wrapped around the entire area, making it look like a large ball of string. She broke through the webs to see boxes piled to the rafters. Her old toys from childhood. Her dad’s teaching awards. Her grandmother’s things were in large white boxes under some quilted packing blankets. Willa had been away at college when her dad had moved her grandmother into the house from her apartment, so Willa had no idea what was in those boxes. Probably a little bit of everything. Her dad never threw anything out. The couch Willa had finally gotten rid of last week had been the same couch her father and mother had bought when they’d first married. Over the years, it had been patched, re-stuffed and re-stitched, then finally covered with a blanket to hide the grape jelly and coffee stains.

She took a deep breath and began to unearth the boxes that had her grandmother’s name on them. One at a time, she brought them downstairs, until they filled half of the living room.

She picked a box at random, sat down in front of it, then opened it.

She almost gave in to tears at the scent that whooshed out at her. Cedar and lavender, with undertones of borax and bleach. Scents she would always associate with her grandmother. Georgie had been obsessively neat, and Willa remembered her father telling her that walking into Georgie’s apartment and finding dishes piled in her sink had been his first clue that something was wrong. Georgie never forgot to do the dishes. Her memory had only gotten worse after that.

Her father had packed these boxes, and it must have been hard for him. He always, stridently, respected his mother’s privacy. That was probably why it looked like this box had been packed with his eyes closed.

The box contained items Willa remembered from Grandmother Georgie’s sparse living room. She began to take things out. Everything was individually wrapped in newspaper. A crystal candy dish. Two embroidered pillows. A Bible. A photo album.

Ah. That had possibilities.

After she unwrapped it, she set the album on her lap and cracked it open. She remembered looking through it as a child. It contained photos of her father. Only her father. Grandmother Georgie had had some of Willa’s school photos framed and sitting on her television, but her son had had a book of his own. Willa found herself smiling as she flipped through the pages. There was Ham as a baby, swallowed up in a large white christening gown. There he was as a chubby little boy in front of what looked like Hickory Cottage. School pictures. Graduation. Then came a series of photos of him in his twenties, randy and carefree. Willa had always loved these particular photos, watching her father’s charm as it grew around him. If she hadn’t known exactly the path his life had taken, the one where he’d ended up a widowed, sedate chemistry teacher, she would have assumed from these photos that he was destined to become a charismatic public figure. A movie star. A politician.

But he’d wanted a small life. He’d wanted the life his mother had wanted him to have, because her opinion meant that much to him.

She turned the page, and her smile faded. There was her father, at about age thirty. He wouldn’t marry for another eight years. Willa wouldn’t be born for more than ten. He was wearing funny, dated pants, and his hair was longer than she’d ever seen it. His hands were in his pockets, and he was looking at the camera in a way that almost made the photo tremble with the force of his personality. He looked like the world was a ripe peach and he was ready to bite it. For some reason, it startled her. It reminded her of something she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

She suddenly thought of a conversation she’d had with one of her father’s fellow teachers, Mrs. Peirce, at his funeral. She’d told Willa that Ham had been something of a ladies’ man before he’d married Willa’s mother, which at the time Willa had found hard to believe. But Mrs. Peirce had insisted that when Ham had come back from college, there had been something about him. She’d said Ham’s mother had been very strict with him as a boy, and he’d been quite shy. But he’d been transformed by adulthood. Female teachers had clustered around him in the faculty lounge and would bring him sweets they’d stayed up all night making—divinity and angel food cake, wedding balls and honeymoon pie. Occasionally, he would invite one of them on a date, and it would leave the recipient of his attention unable to leave footprints for days, as if her feet weren’t quite touching the ground. Mrs. Peirce had also said that Ham’s female students were all so in love with him that sometimes they would cry over their Bunsen burners in his classroom and leave locks of their hair in his desk drawers. She’d even mentioned a small scandal involving some mothers of students who had lobbied for an advancement in Ham’s career. Although he’d been perfectly happy as a teacher, they’d wanted him to become dean, principal, superintendent, and they hadn’t been above blackmailing others. He’d been so charismatic in those days, Mrs. Peirce had said wistfully.

Now, looking at this photo, Willa could finally understand what Mrs. Peirce had been talking about. Grandmother Georgie had obviously snapped it; it was taken outside her apartment building. She, too, had seemed startled by what she was seeing. The photo was a little blurry, as though the camera had moved just seconds before she’d clicked it.

Willa looked through the rest of the photos, but she found herself coming back to this one. She was supposed to be looking for clues, anything that proved her grandmother didn’t have anything to do with the skeleton on the hill. Her father’s photos weren’t going to help her. She should just put the album away and go on to the next box.

But she continued to come back to this one photo. Why did it seem so familiar, as though she’d seen it recently?