No imprints at all.
Violet eased herself away from her parents and edged closer to where Mike was already being handcuffed. She wanted to get near him. She needed to know what had happened out there. She searched him, studying him. She scoured him to the depths of her ability and came back with nothing.
“What do you think?” she heard the familiar voice asking from beside her.
Violet shook her head, confused. “I don’t think he did it.” There was a pause, and then she glanced at Sara, remembering something that needed to be said. “There’s a body out there, other than their dad’s. I think Serena Russo has been buried there for a long time,” Violet stated flatly, feeling hollow now too.
Sara blinked, and Violet could see the questions there, the ones that Violet knew she could answer now. When all this was over with, she would tell Sara everything. “Can you show me where?” Sara asked.
Violet led Sara back into the woods, back toward the echo that had drawn her in the first place.
They couldn’t get close; the area was already being cordoned off, and despite her pull with law enforcement, even Sara was asked to stay back. It didn’t matter though; they were close enough.
Mike’s dad was there, in the same spot he’d been in when Jay had led Violet and Megan away. He still bore the imprints of the lives he’d taken before his death.
And Violet sensed the new imprint too, vibrant and fresh. Surrounding his lifeless body, covering him in ghostly clusters and hovering above him with vaporous, spectral wings, were butterflies. Hundreds and hundreds of beautiful, unearthly butterflies.
Violet’s body hummed with each beat of their delicate, sheer wings.
The gun lay awkwardly beneath his arm.
Violet knew that Mike hadn’t shot his father. She would have seen this imprint on him . . . and it hadn’t been there. Instead, his father bore both the imprint and the echo of his own suicide.
Sara reached out to touch Violet’s arm, misunderstanding the pained expression on Violet’s face. “You don’t have to look at him,” she explained gently.
But Violet wasn’t looking at him. It was the other echo that was causing her to shudder with ache.
“She’s there.” Violet pointed to the spot nearby. “He killed her and buried her there.”
Sara nodded, and Violet realized that soon it would all be over. The pain, the discomfort, the unsettled feeling of a body craving peace.
Once Serena Russo was properly buried—at long last—Violet would be released.
“It was him, you know?” Sara explained as they turned to leave. “Ed Russo was responsible for killing Roger Hartman’s dog.”
Violet tried to respond, but already the pain was unbearable. Sara had no way of knowing.
“We finally reached Hartman, and he told us that Ed Russo had been harassing him ever since he moved back to the area, stopping by his work and his house, making threatening phone calls. Hartman let us listen to some of the messages.” Sara didn’t seem surprised when Violet reached for her, holding on to her arm for support, and Violet was in too much pain to worry about appearances. Sara continued, without missing a beat. “Drunken ramblings, mostly. But he accused Hartman of poisoning his wife’s mind and destroying his family. In the last message, he brags about killing the dog. Pretty ugly stuff.”
But Violet already knew. She had witnessed the echo—the ghostly rain—firsthand.
She frowned, still curious about one thing. “How did you know I needed help?” she questioned Sara. “What made you come all the way up here in the middle of the night?”
Sara glanced up then, but not at Violet.
She looked ahead of her, to where the trees became open field again. There was something strange in her eyes when she saw the person standing there, something Violet couldn’t interpret. A secret of her own, perhaps.
Violet followed Sara’s gaze and saw Rafe there, waiting for them in the snow with his hands stuffed deep into his pockets. It was the first time Violet had realized he was there. His serious blue eyes watched them cautiously, warily.
Even in the dead of night he looked mysteriously out of place.
When Sara answered Violet, her voice was hushed, her words cryptic and heavy with meaning. “Someone told me you were in danger.”
Epilogue
Violet stood on the other side of the glass and studied the men before her.
Again, they couldn’t see her. And again, she was battered by several sensations at once. She stepped closer, until she could see her breath against the barrier that separated her from them, and she pressed her palms against the cool surface, closing her eyes. Concentrating.
There was only one sensation she was searching for in the midst of all the others.
She listened carefully, the sound of her own breathing steadying her as she disentangled one imprint from the rest.
Beautiful. Poignant. Melodic.
The evocative strings of the harp.
It was him, the man who had stolen the little boy from his family in Utah and left him to die inside the shipping crate on the waterfront. Violet would recognize him anywhere.
She opened her eyes. “There,” she said, pointing to the man at the end of the row.
Sara nodded. “You’re right. That’s impressive, Violet.”
Violet smiled. “So I passed?”
“I told you, it’s not a test.”
She took a step away from the glass, distancing herself even as the men were being led from the other room. “Yeah, but it kinda was.”