met Justin Vaughn once or twice. A sweet, shrewd guy with three daughters and a knack for keeping them happy. Kate was the youngest by fifteen years, and she could wrap her father around her little finger simply by adding an extra syllable to his name: Dad-dy, can you lend me the car? Dad-dy, will you buy me a hotel of my own, the Blackbird Hotel, we can’t let them tear it down...
“Oh, you two know each other?” Emma said, affecting an air of cool disinterest.
“We used to,” Kate said. “In the biblical sense. Kate Vaughn.”
Emma’s face was blank as she took Kate’s outstretched hand. “You went to church together?”
Kate’s mouth twitched at the corner, a dimple winking in her cheek. The moment swelled as Julian realized he should introduce them and couldn’t, because he didn’t know Emma’s last name and wasn’t entirely sure of her first one. Emma could be Ella, or Anna, or Abby, or Eve. He had resorted to an assortment of pseudo-endearments over the past few days, waiting for her to repeat her name—which, maddeningly, she never did.
Kate turned to Julian.
“You heard about the reopening, I take it? Did you get our email? I blasted it to everyone in my contacts.”
He nodded. It had given him a shock to see the Blackbird’s photograph appear on the screen. He’d shut the window down immediately, unable to open it again for more than a week. When he finally gathered the courage, he pored over every page and all the fine print on the hotel website.
THE HISTORIC BLACKBIRD HOTEL
GRAND OPENING
JAWBONE RIDGE, COLORADO
Nowhere had the flyer mentioned the Blackbird was now one of the Vaughn family properties.
“I didn’t realize—” he said again.
“Yeah, that’s my dad’s thing. I think he doesn’t want people to realize it belongs to us. Not our finest business investment, by a long shot. He probably wants to save face if the whole thing folds or falls off the cliff or something.”
She walked over to a small desk, where a computer sat next to a stack of unopened mail. Insects buzzed from outside the half-open windows.
“So, what’s up? Do you need a room?”
“No,” said Julian.
“Yes,” said Emma at the same time.
“We just wanted to see the place,” he said. “We don’t need a room. Probably stay at the Adelaide.”
It was a foolish thing to say, with two suitcases at his feet and this fluffy blonde hotel accessory clinging to his elbow. But seeing Kate here unnerved him, gave his anger a point around which to coalesce.
“It looks good,” he said, glancing around. “Very...tasteful.”
A deep flush rose up her neck. “Yes, well, I’m not sure the whole bohemian thing would have worked out that well in the long run.”
“I think it would have worked fine.”
“Do you? Would you have me leave it as a shrine?”
“I would have had you leave it alone.”
“Ah. And is that what you’re doing? Leaving it alone?”
Julian pressed his lips together.
“They were going to tear it down,” Kate said. “I’m trying to save it. I would have thought you’d approve. They were your friends, too.”
“What friends?” Emma said.
“You didn’t tell her about the murders?” Kate said.
“She doesn’t need to hear about that,” Julian said.
“Murders!” Emma said. “Of course I need to hear about it. When was this?”
“What’s it been now, Julian?” Kate said. “Five years?”
A slow prickle crept up Julian’s back, under the collar of his cotton shirt. His ears seemed to fill with sound, a low, almost electrical hum that muffled the sound of her voice.
Five years. An anniversary, a number that meant something, that indicated something might happen again. Five. Dangerous, sharp-sounding, like a blade or the edge of a stony cliff.
“Five,” he said, carefully.
“Wait, you were here?” Emma said.
“We were both here,” Kate said. “Staying in the hotel, that is. We didn’t witness the crime or anything.”
A sour taste convulsed Julian’s mouth. No, he wanted to say, I didn’t see a thing; it’s nothing to do with me. But the words were swimming in water and he couldn’t get them out.
“Oh,” Emma said. “So who was murdered?”
Kate slid behind the desk and switched on the computer. “My friends. My three best friends.”
Emma was taken aback. “Oh. I’m sorry, I thought...if you don’t want to talk about it...”
“Celia Dark. Celia’s stepbrother, Rory McFarland, and her boyfriend, Eric Dillon.”
The computer chattered to life, an alien presence in the gothic gloom.
“We don’t need to go into it.” Julian’s temple ached from gritting his teeth.
“I don’t mind.” Kate smiled and gave Emma a little half shrug. “It was a long time ago. And anyway, there’s no escaping the topic here on the Ridge. It was all anybody talked about for months. You couldn’t get away from it, not if you lived here.”
Julian walked to the other end of the room, where the boxy new furniture was arranged around the fireplace. It looked nothing like it had five years before, nothing like the way he remembered it.
After the murders, Kate had sent snapshots of the common room and kitchen, along with a bundle of newspaper clippings she’d carefully packed and mailed to his mother’s address in New York. Block headlines at first with thick chunks of text, then smaller, sketchier pieces, featuring standard-issue high school pictures of the three victims and a bigger photo of the Blackbird Hotel. The news petered out at last to a single column of newsprint from the obituaries page: Eric Dillon, Rory McFarland. Their faces grinned out at him, blurred as if by smoke, the ink like soot on his hands.
There was no obituary for Celia. Julian never knew whether the paper hadn’t run one or whether Kate had simply forgotten to include it with the others.
“So did they catch the murderer?”
“There was no one to catch.”
“You mean, one of them killed the others?”
“Maybe. It’s hard to tell for sure. We know that Celia’s stepbrother,
