“Nothing,” Rachel said quickly. “Work stuff.” She found herself scanning the yard as if someone might be hiding behind the trees. Her gaze landed on the Sandhu house across the street. She thought she could see movement in Akash’s window. How often did he watch them? She thought of all those cars making slow U-turns on Lily Lane. The strangers who showed up to snap pictures of the house. Just the other day, a neighbor had walked her toddlers down from two streets over to admire the decorations.
“B-o-o-o-ring,” Lucy said with an exaggerated sigh. She was on her knees now, carefully nudging a plastic spider into place on a pillowy nest of cotton.
Rachel balled the note in her hand and glared across the empty space.
Too bad,she thought.We’re staying.
Five
We
All of us hate-listened toBlood in the Water, the podcast produced by the three amateur sleuths who’d stormed 88 Lily Lane.
We hated to admit the podcast was well produced. Episode 3 made us feel as if we were ourselves trespassing on the Vales’ property one misty October evening, listening to the whine of the old gates as they were scaled and the repetitious bite of shovels in the dirt. Soon Lucy Vale was shouting dimly into our headphones, threatening to call the police.
One jump cut and a short bit of narration later, she was sitting down for an interview.
Lucy Vale’s segment was less than three minutes long. Still, it was a revelation. That’s how we found out that Lucy Vale knew even more about the Faraday case than we did, that the Rockland County Sheriff’s Department was apparently besieged with requests to reopen the investigation into Lydia Faraday’s death, and that the internet was confused about where Lydia Faraday’s body had been found hanging. According to the producers ofBlood in the Water, Lydia Faraday’s body was discoveredinsidethe house, hanging from the second-floor landing and roped to the banister.
Even weirder, Lucy Vale confirmed it.
The news shuddered our Discord server and quickly ricocheted around our group texts.
At first, none of us believed it. A small hysteria seized us. We fired back Reddit messages that we regretted the moment we hit post. We were sure that Lydia Faraday’s body had been pulled from the apple tree in the front yard. We were positive. It was a known thing. As kids we’d biked to the gates of 88 Lily Lane at sunset and stood with the wind lifting a chill on our arms and legs as the sunset deepened shadows in the yard. We’d whisperedNina, Nina, where did you go? Lydia, Lydia, what do you know? We’d waited in the evening stillness, the wind hissing a message back through the wild clutch of growing things, until a sense of deep terror gripped us: eyes watching us from somewhere in the tangle of shadows. Kyle Hannigan had actually seen her and nearly pissed himself—the silhouette form emerging, taking shape like a breaching whale from an ebb of twilight, with her neck crooked over the rope, wild, sightless eyes, and the slow pendulum of her feet groaning the branches. Some of us were there, watching from a distance as Kyle turned with a yelp and came sprinting back toward Elizabeth Street, breathless and bloodless. Peyton Neely’s camp counselor had told her about a girl who took an apple from a strange dark-haired woman she saw standing beneath the tree one day, and almost died.
But the Vales, and strangers all over the internet, claimed otherwise. We even found a leaked 9-1-1 call that seemed to confirm it. Surely, we thought, they had made a mistake. We theorized instead that the report was fake. Weinsistedit must have been doctored.
@spinn_doctor:here’s a tip: never trust anything you read online
@gustagusta:right. Except conspiracy theories
@spinn_doctor:Exactly. It’s all Russian misinformation
@mememeup:ah, yes. The old Russian operative cold case campaign
@mememeup:Sewing American dissension over the mishandling of suicide cases
@brentmann:#bluelivesmatter
@geminirising:please stop
We might have asked Lucy Vale. We might simply have leaned over in homeroom and mentioned the podcast and the police report. We might have casually corrected her about the facts of the Faraday case and explained that we knew for a fact that Lydia Faraday had hanged herself in the apple tree because we’d all been terrified of the apple tree growing up, which only made sense if it was, in fact, where Lydia Faraday had been found hanging.
In desperation, we did the unthinkable and turned to our parents. Didtheyremember how and where Lydia Faraday had died?
This, unfortunately, only muddied the picture. Astonishingly, Mrs. Courtland seemed to think she’d overdosed. Mr. Hannigan, who’d provided an ice-cream cake for Lydia Faraday’s memorial service, which only a handful of people had attended, could only vaguely indicate that he thought a gun was involved.
It turned out neither of them was entirely wrong.
According toBlood in the Water, a gun registered in Lydia Faraday’s name was discovered in an unlocked gun safe by the police who recovered her body. A toxicology report returned proof of both alcohol and prescription barbiturates. The two facts together inflamed conspiracy theorists still speculating that there was more to her death than the police had let on. Why, the theory went, would a woman with a handgun choose to rope herself to a banister when she could have taken an easier, more painless way out? A pair of YouTubers, both amateur criminologists, had even consulted both a physics professor and a forensic scientist and filmed an entire twenty-six-minute video about how the evidence from the medical examiner’s report proved that LydiaFaraday must have been pushed or thrown off the second-floor balcony, launched over the banister headfirst.
It was suspicious. It was convincing. It was clickbait.
We were sure it was just clickbait.
Luckily, Halloween gave us the excuse to find out.
Six
