“Who?” Josie asked.
He shrugged. “I don’t know. A man. I asked him what man, and he wouldn’t tell me. He just said the man showed up and when he saw that Rory was hurting Miss Lorelei, he went out to the truck, got the gun, and came in and tried to kill them all.”
Josie watched Pax’s face carefully for any signs of deception. Was this something he and Rory had cooked up together? Although it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility that another person had been there the day Lorelei and Holly were killed, if that was true, Josie would have expected some more detail. Any detail. “Did he describe him?” she asked.
“No, but I didn’t ask him to. I asked him if he knew the man and he said yes, but he wouldn’t tell me who it was.”
“Pax, is it possible it was your father?”
“No.”
“Remember how you told us you were with him the morning that Lorelei and Holly were killed? Were you telling the truth? It’s okay if you weren’t, we just need to know the truth.”
“He was with me. That is the truth. It couldn’t have been him.”
Josie said, “Do you ever remember seeing any men at their home when you were there?”
“No.”
“What about Rory and Holly? Did they ever talk about their father? Do you know if he was in the picture?”
“They didn’t talk about him. It was like they never had a father. When I first started going over there, Rory told me a secret. It was when Miss Lorelei wasn’t listening. He said that they had a dad before Holly was born. Sometimes he would be there but not a lot. He was mean, he hated Rory, and when Holly was a baby, he went away and never came back. That’s all I know.”
“Did Rory ever talk about Harper’s Peak?” Josie asked.
For that, she got two shoulder shrugs.
“Pax?”
“He asked me not to tell anyone.”
“Can you tell me what that was?”
“You know how I told you that I have an aunt that lives in Georgia? Well, Rory claimed that his aunt lived at and ran Harper’s Peak.”
“Did he say whether he had ever met her?”
Pax shook his head. “No. He didn’t say. I wasn’t even sure if I should believe him or not, or if he was just saying it because I told him I had an aunt I never got to see.”
Josie asked, “Did he say anything else about her? Anything at all?”
He shook his head. “No.”
Josie moved on. “Okay, so you’re at the mill. Rory denies having killed Lorelei and Holly. Emily is gathering materials for a doll. What did you do after that? Where did you spend the night?”
“In the van out by the mill. We were all tired and didn’t have a plan. The next day we got up and Rory finished his doll. I didn’t think leaving it for you was a good idea, but they wanted you to have it.”
“Were they with you when you left it?”
He shook his head. “I took them to the farm and told them to wait in the barn. I left the doll, went back and then my dad showed up. He was furious. I tried to explain what was going on, but he didn’t care. I told him what Rory told me about the man killing Lorelei and Holly, but he said it was a bunch of horseshit and that he wasn’t harboring a killer. He said he was going to call the police. That’s when Rory—”
He broke off, more tears leaking from his eyes. “It happened so fast. I couldn’t even stop him. He was so quick.”
Josie knew exactly how quick Rory was. She’d just been lucky he’d had only his fists when he attacked her, and no weapons.
“Emily was screaming and screaming and screaming. I tried to stop Rory but it was too late. By that time, my dad was already dead. I told him we had to call the police, but he said no. We were arguing. That’s when Emily ran off. I went after her but I lost her. By the time I came back, Rory was gone and so was one of the vans.”
“Why didn’t you come to the police, Pax?” Josie asked.
He shrugged. “I wanted to. I was going to, but I was so upset. I didn’t know what to do. I just wanted some time to figure out what to do. I’m sorry I hid. I know it was wrong. But now you know: Rory killed my dad.”
“Where is he now?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where is Emily?”
“Did you not hear what I just told you?” Pax said. “I really don’t know.”
His chest was heaving. Josie gave him a moment to slow his breathing. There was nothing else he could offer her. It was a dead end. Still, she remembered the buttons. “Pax, Emily was placed with some people to take care of her temporarily. While she was there, she cut all the buttons from their sofa and she told the owner of the couch it was because she was afraid they were going to choke her. Do you know what that means?”
“Thought-action fusion,” he said. “It’s her OCD. Sometimes, in our brains, our thoughts get really mixed up so that we can’t even figure out if we just thought something or if it really happened. Like she probably saw those buttons and had an intrusive thought about what if she choked on them? Then in her mind, she couldn’t be sure if she had put one in her mouth or not.”
“So she cut them all off?”
“To get rid of them probably, yeah,” he said. “Miss Lorelei told me all about this stuff when I first started going there. I had it when I was little. Once I was counting pennies and I had a thought about eating one, and then I couldn’t figure out if I had really eaten one or only thought about it. My mom
