Page 51 of You Belong Here

My father, leaving a fake key to replace the missing one. My father, with a house full of antiques he was selling boxed up in the attic. Addresses in his office. The Wi-Fi unplugged, like he didn’t want my mother to receive any emails before he saw them. My father, fired.

Men’s size-ten boots, footsteps in the snow—

Maybe he’d managed to keep some secrets of his own after all.

I wasn’t paying attention, so I barely noticed it at first as I walked back to the house from my parking spot. Movement visible through the slats of the back gate, which was currently hanging partly open.

Someone was in there again. I cautiously approached. It could’ve been Trevor, but I was on edge.

I kept my phone out as I pushed the gate open, ready to place an emergency call. It was broad daylight. Trevor would hear if I called for help. The neighbors could see down from their upstairs window.

I rounded the corner and saw a man standing on the walkway to the back door. He must’ve caught sight of me in his peripheral vision at the same moment, because he pivoted quickly, hand shooting toward his hip.

Fred Mayhew’s eyes must’ve been as wide as mine. He lowered his hand slowly, then looked from me to the house.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“No one answered the door,” he said. “The gate was open. I thought you were back here. Thought I heard you.”

But he’d been staring at the back door like he was making sure no one was home before entering. His sunglasses rested on top of his head like he was preparing to try the handle.

“No,” I said. “I just got back.”

I let the unspoken hang between us. He was trespassing. I wondered if he’d been crossing lines from the start. If he had a way inside, too.

He cleared his throat, took a step closer, like he had every right to be here. I supposed that would be his story, if questioned. Heard something in the back. The gate was open. I came to check—

“I was coming to speak with you. Catch you up, actually,” he said. He gestured toward the back door. “Should we take this inside?”

I crossed my arms. Trevor had listened to me—not letting anyone inside.

“No, thanks,” I said.

“Fair enough.” He grinned, amused by my refusal to invite him inside.

But I had a long memory, too. I gestured for him to get on with it.

“I guess here’s as good a place as any. You’ll probably hear this soon enough, you know how this town can be.” He smirked slightly. “The preliminary cause of death looks to be a strange one, not gonna lie. Asphyxiation.”

The word felt so clinical and cold. So finite.

Not an accident. I pictured a man’s thick hands around her pale neck. Mouth open, gasping, before she was dumped inside the student center pit—

“But the bizarre part is that it looks like everything inside her wallet had been soaking wet. All stuck together and damp, not drying right.”

My mind was buzzing. I couldn’t make the pieces fit. Couldn’t see where he was leading me. It hadn’t rained. She was found at the bottom of the construction pit on campus.

“Look, we’re waiting on the official report, but they’re pretty sure she drowned.”

I shook my head in surprise. It didn’t make sense. There were many ways one could drown: head held in a bathtub or a pool.

“She didn’t die there?” I asked quietly.

He smiled slightly again, pointed two fingers at me and then back at himself. “Me and you, we’re on the same page. We searched the area pretty well but couldn’t find any place she could’ve easily drowned. Not many pools around here.”

He paused. Using that same technique from our last meeting, the silence and time—waiting for me to fill it. But I wouldn’t. I had learned my lesson about talking too much long ago.

He looked around the backyard, at the tall fence surrounding us, the neighbors’ windows peering down.

Like he was checking that we were really alone.

He took a step closer, lowered his voice.

“We got a lucky break. The owner of the deli called about a car that had been parked in their lot for days.”

The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. I’d seen that car, too. I’d seen it parked at the path leading to Cryer’s Quarry when I was searching for Delilah.

“Turns out it was rented to a woman whose name matches Adalyn’s current ID. Anna Brown.” He took a deep breath. “We’re checking the footage all around that area, but we’re really focused on the quarry as the scene of the crime right now.”

I pictured the clear blue water, the rocky, uneven terrain. The red mask floating at the edge.

“We know your daughter was out in the night,” he said.

“She was lost,” I said. It was the story she’d given, and I needed it to hold. It had to hold.

I tried to stop the spiral, but I couldn’t. The watermarks on Delilah’s broken phone. The bruises on her body. The scratch across her face. Wet hair and muddy shoes. I pictured a fight, a struggle, the gasp before the dropped call—only the gasp was not hers.

An accident. It had to be an accident.

My eyes burned. This was my fault. The police knew she was out there only because of me. They knew she was unaccounted for during the night of Adalyn’s death because I’d begged them to look for her.

“But the body wasn’t there,” I said, a life raft to cling to. What did he think she had done? Dragged it all the way through the woods, cutting through downtown back to campus?

“The body’s a real head-scratcher,” he said, like it was all a game. Like there wasn’t a dead woman in a morgue somewhere who had lived a very real life for forty-one years. Like he wasn’t currently threatening my daughter’s future.

“If it were me,” he continued, “I’d need help. I’d need a car. I’d call someone I really trusted.”

I regretted being outside like this now—in a position where he was currently blocking the exit from my yard.

“I don’t know what you’re getting at.”

He raised an eyebrow like he could see right through me. “The power was off on campus, like whoever was moving the body wanted to make sure none of the cameras caught them. I can think of a few people who would know how to access the power hub for the school,” he said.

“I can think of an entire town’s worth,” I countered. All of us, as kids, messing with the students during the howling—But it didn’t make sense. “Why would anyone want to move the body onto campus?”

He shrugged. “Maybe they were hoping she’d get buried by the construction and no one would notice.

Maybe they were planning to drag her into the woods and underestimated how hard it is to carry something like that.

I don’t know. Criminals don’t always think straight.

” He shifted on his feet. “Usually they panic, honestly. They do something wrong. Make mistakes. You can count on it. It’s how they get caught, every time.

It’s not like you see in the movies, is it? ”

I felt my pulse racing, a cold sweat on the back of my neck.

“This is some story, Detective,” I said, folding my arms to keep the tremble in my hands from showing.

“Meanwhile, any matter of evidence could’ve been cleaned up at Cryer’s Quarry.

While we’ve been chasing our tail around a location that was definitely not the scene of the crime.

Luckily, there are now double the number of potential witnesses who could’ve seen someone up on campus.

Or down at the quarry.” And then he grinned.

“We have one who puts you there, Beckett.”

I heard an echo of his claim, twenty years later. Someone saw you, Beckett—

“Who puts me where ?” I asked. It wasn’t possible. I was sleeping in the living room, with Trevor and Delilah beside me. I was out cold. There was no way someone saw me on campus.

“On the trail to Cryer’s Quarry,” he said.

My ears were ringing. “I was looking for Delilah.”

“So you keep saying.”

“I went to the dorms first,” I said. “Ask Lenny. Or her roommate. Or the RA.” I’d been panicked and desperate. I had not been helping my daughter cover up a crime.

Fred Mayhew shouldn’t have been here. I knew this.

He should have had me down at the station, on camera, so I would know what was happening.

His methods may have changed, but his motivation remained the same.

He wanted to catch me off guard, trip me up, trick me into a confession before I realized what he was doing.

Like he was picking up where he’d left off twenty years earlier.

I started walking, wanting out of this enclosed space. I needed him to stop talking so I could think straight.

He followed me to the gate, then stopped at the driveway, peering at my parents’ car in a way that unnerved me.

“Just so I understand the timeline, you called your ex-husband here around—”

“He’s not my ex-husband,” I said. “He’s Delilah’s father.”

“Okay, you called Delilah’s father here when?”

“When I couldn’t find her after looking on my own.” I tried to remember the specifics. They would be able to find this out easily with phone records. “Around ten a.m. on Saturday, I think.”

He nodded sagely. “Looks like you’ve both been busy running around. I have a kid, two years old. But I get it, the things I would do for her, if she ever needed it.”

Just then the front door beside us opened, and the woman I’d met on Saturday night stepped outside.

She waved and started to walk in my direction before she noticed Fred Mayhew with me.

Instead, she headed for her car at the curb, but I noticed her adjusting the rearview mirror once inside, watching our exchange.

A rumor that would start spreading quickly. There were cops at the Bowery house—

“Well, I’ll let you get back to things,” Mayhew said, sliding his sunglasses down. “You know how to reach me if you want to chat.”

A warning that the circle was closing, with us at the center.

I closed my eyes and thought, with the same force as always: Not her.

I waited until I was sure his car was gone—watching it to the edge of College Lane, where it turned past the construction vehicles and Cliff’s house.

And then I let myself inside.

“Trevor?” I called. “It’s me.”

But the house was eerily empty.

I poked my head into the dark basement, called his name, listened to it resound in a dull echo. Then I headed to the back of the kitchen, where I called for him up the steps. Nothing.

I peered around the kitchen, confused. On the table, Delilah’s note still sat there. And written just below was an addendum: Went for a drive.

I frowned, checked my phone. My message still hadn’t been delivered to him, even though I was back on Wi-Fi. He was likely off grid somewhere. I checked for his location and saw that, at some point between his search in the woods and today, he’d turned off the “share” feature.

Where the hell was he? I tried calling him, but it went straight to voicemail.

I was panicking, and I needed to talk to him. I needed him to have a plan —

Instead, in his desire to go for a drive, he’d left the back door unlocked on his way out, since he didn’t have a key. So close to where the detective had been standing.

Maybe Fred Mayhew hadn’t been lying. The gate could’ve been left open if Trevor had exited that way. You had to pull it shut firmly behind you to latch it.

Trevor didn’t seem to understand what he’d done, leaving the house unsecured like that.

Adalyn was dead, and our daughter was a suspect. This house was full of all manner of evidence—from her phone, to the skeleton key currently tucked inside my purse, to the boxes of artifacts packed up in the attic.

I stormed up the back steps, finally with a purpose.

I wanted to drag the boxes out of storage, ask Trevor’s expert opinion.

Have him tell me exactly what I was looking at.

Discover what my parents were really doing—if Cliff had been right.

That my father was selling off the valuable pieces of his collection in a way that had raised a red flag with the school.

I ducked into the bathroom and once more entered the attic through the narrow door. This time, I bypassed the boxes of memorabilia and went straight for the back, to the pyramid of artifacts.

Carefully I carried them out one by one and left them on the floor of my old bedroom, where I’d be able to see things more clearly.

By the time I was done transporting all the boxes, my body was coated in a fine layer of dust, and I needed to change.

I went back for the very last item, in case there was something valuable wrapped in the old blanket I’d seen earlier, tucked against the wall.

But when I pulled the blanket away, I found a duffel bag underneath.

I crouched down and slowly unzipped it, expecting to see old winter gear that they’d stored offseason. Instead, I saw a layer of neatly folded T-shirts and a bag of toiletries on top. As if this was someone’s luggage.

I took the bag out to my room as well and started emptying the contents onto my bed, my heart pounding.

Other than clothing, I found a toothbrush and a body mist—something slightly sweet, the same scent that had lingered when I’d arrived.

There was also a small makeup bag with foundation, mascara, and pink lip gloss—a shade that brought to mind the lip print on the cup left in the kitchen the day I’d arrived.

Maybe Delilah had been telling the truth when she’d said it hadn’t been her up here.

No, I was sure now: It was Adalyn. It was always Adalyn. Adalyn, who knew where the spare key was hidden from long ago. Who must’ve found this house empty and decided to stay, sleeping in my bed upstairs. It must’ve been her light the neighbors had seen in the night.

At the very bottom of the bag was a large padded envelope, the seal ripped open.

I peered inside only to see a stack of white envelopes bound in rubber bands.

I dumped them onto my bed and froze. Each envelope was stuffed with money.

It took some time to count it all.

By my best estimate, at the time of her death, Adalyn had close to fifteen thousand dollars hidden at the bottom of her duffel bag.