Page 88 of Twisted Truths

She moves quietly around the room, folding my sister’s clothes and putting the things she’d like to keep into a suitcase while stuffing the rest into plastic bags for goodwill. I know Zara would want Hadley to have whatever she wanted.

As I’m pulling piles of old fashion and hairdressing magazines out from under the bed, something catches my eye half hidden in the shadows, tucked behind an old shoebox. I crouch down, crawling as far under her bed as I can to retrieve it, my fingers finally curling around the cool metal object.

It’s a silver compass.

The glass on the front has a large crack, but it still seems to work, the needle moving as I hold it up in the light.

My gut tells me it didn’t belong to Zara. She wasn’t into camping or nature walks of any kind. My sister was allergic to any and all forms of exercise or physical exertion. Yet something tugs at a thread in my memory, telling me I’ve seen it somewhere before.

“What is it?” Hadley asks, startling me from my thoughts.

“I don’t know,” I admit, turning the compass over in my hands, almost dropping it when I notice the dark brown spots on it. My stomach churns. “I found it under the bed, but I don’t think it belongs to Zara.”

“Is that?—”

“Blood? Yeah, I think it is.”

Her face pales. “You think it belongs to Tanner?”

Rubbing a hand over my face, I shake my head. “I don’t think so. I’ve seen it somewhere before, but I can’t figure out where, and I never met Tanner until the other week.”

Her brow furrows. “So, Tanner had an accomplice? Someone you might know?”

The thought churns my stomach. Could someone I know have been involved in murdering my family?

“I don’t know.” Those three words fill me with a heaviness.

We’re still no closer to figuring out who killed my family. Sure, we have our suspicions, but if this compass belongs to the murderer, then it isn’t Tanner Crawley or Seraphina Solomon.

With a sigh, I place the compass on Zara’s desk. “Let’s just finish packing. I want to get it over and done with.”

Hadley nods, but her eyes linger on the compass for a moment longer before she turns back to the bookshelf and the half-filled box of photo albums and books.

My mind swirls with questions I can’t answer and fears I’m not ready to name, but I force myself to return to the task athand. Crouching back down, I retrieve the shoebox from under her bed and open it up, finding a pile of letters from her high school friends, gushing about boys and clothes and their favourite tv shows. Despite my dark mood, I can’t help but chuckle and shake my head when I read my own name in letters from Zara’s best friend, Sasha, only to feel a surge of anger when I realise she wasn’t at the funeral.

I’m distracted by a soft giggle behind me. I glance over at Hadley sitting cross-legged on the floor, a Barrenridge High School yearbook cracked open on her lap. “Nice hair, Troy Bolton,” she quips.

I walk over and peer down. There I am, age sixteen, grinning like an idiot, my arm slung around Tom’s shoulder after a basketball game. She’s not wrong about the hair. It flops over my forehead like Zac Efron circa High School Musical Three.

“Is that?—”

“Tom? Yeah, it is.”

“The two of you look like major troublemakers,” she remarks.

A reluctant half-smile tugs at my lips. “We were.”

She flips through a couple of pages, landing on a candid shot of me and Zara at some school event. She’s laughing, mid eye roll, and I’m clearly teasing her about something.

Hadley traces her fingers over Zara’s face. “She looks so happy here.”

“She was.”

It hits me hard then, how much life Zara had in her. How unfair it is that it was cut short before her son gets to know her.

“She deserved better,” I choke out.

Hadley closes the yearbook and gently places it in the box of things to keep. “We’ll make sure she gets justice.”