Page 20 of Not Quite Dead Yet

Jack stepped over the threshold and Jet followed. It didn’t smell any different, still smelled like home. She thought it wouldn’t. That it would smell like decay and dead things somehow. But there wasn’t a body rotting inside. Nope, she was rotting right here, on theWelcomemat.

A white-and-blue man passed them in the hall, out of place against the Moroccan runner rug. Jack veered left, through the door into the living room. Jet followed, her covered feet shushing against the pale polished oak. She looked down to take a breath, before entering the room, before seeing … everything. But she saw something worse instead.

A trail of blood. Shaped into little paw prints.

Jet gasped, leaned back against the door to catch herself. ‘Reggie?’ she said, her heart crawling into her throat. ‘No. Is he OK? Is he –’

‘He’s fine.’ Jack steadied her, arm under her elbow. ‘The dog is fine.’

Jet still couldn’t swallow, not past her roving heart.

‘Billy brought him in the ambulance, refused to leave him behind,’ Jack said. ‘The dog is with your sister-in-law now, at their house. He’s fine.’ Jack’s eyes narrowed. ‘Are you sure you want to see this?’

She had to. How could she work out who had killed her if she couldn’t even stomach seeing the place where they’d done it?

Jet nodded.

Blinked and held on to it, then stepped out and opened her eyes.

Not her living room. Not the place where she cuddled Reggie and watched Netflix too late. Not where she once dropped spaghetti and stained the rug and begged Dadnot to tell Mom. Not the extra-long couch, one corner that belonged to teenage Luke, the other to Jet. It used to be Emily’s, until Emily didn’t need it anymore. Jet had left it a few years, just to be safe. The TV was now just an empty black mirror, trapping Jet inside it. This was a different room, no longer living. It wasn’t even the red she saw first; it was the yellow.

Little crime scene markers, black numbers printed on them, placed around the room, counting up and up.

The red was next.

More paw prints in panicked circles.

Jet’s eyes followed Reggie’s ghost feet to a pool of blood, drying but not yet dry, winking the afternoon light back at them. Thick and spread out, half on the wood, half soaked into the corner of the rug. Well, forget spaghetti sauce –thatstain was never coming out.

It was more blood than Jet thought a person could lose.

Hers.

Instinct moved her hand to the bandage at the back of her head. She stopped it before her fingers touched the dressing. So much blood it needed four markers of its own:6, 8, 9,and11.

‘You OK?’ Jack asked. ‘We can stop anytime.’

Jet took a breath, looked up at the ceiling for air that wasn’t tainted by blood. That was a mistake too. Two more yellow markers, stuck there on the white ceiling. Numbers31and32.Droplets of red dashed in a strange pattern up there, across one of the LED lights, caking the glass.

‘What’s that?’ she sniffed.

Jack joined her, looked up. ‘It’s a cast-off pattern,’ he said quietly. ‘From the weapon … between hits.’

‘And they don’t know what the weapon was?’

‘It has not been recovered.’

Cop speak forno.

Two voices moved through the hallway then, a snatched view of her mom and Chief Lou as they passed, bumping shoulders, Lou’s hand hovering behind Dianne’s back as they headed for the stairs. Shoes covered in blue.

‘We already did a walk-through with Scott yesterday,’ Lou was saying to her, voice butter-soft again, ‘but it would be really helpful if you can check for us too. Might have a better eye. See if you think anything is missing or out of place. Anything at all.’

Their footsteps disappeared upstairs.

Jet moved closer to the bloodstain, seeking permission in Jack’s eyes. She passed behind the couch, cushions fluffed, their top corners pointy, so neat and out of place in this room of horror.

Jet stopped. Right where her feet must have lain while her head was making all that blood.

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