Hush by Karen Robards

Jeff hadn’t committed suicide: he knew how fragile Emma was right now, had worried about her state of mind right along with Margaret and Riley, and wouldn’t purposefully have shattered his little sister’s life yet again for anything. Not when it had already been turned upside down by her good-for-nothing bastard of a father.
    Damn you, George .
    If she had a penny for every time those words had popped into her mind over the last few months, Riley thought, she would never have to work again for the rest of her life.
    Seething with impotent anger was useless, though, so she did her best to put it and her worry about Emma and everything else aside except for her immediate objective of obtaining some clean clothes so that she could go to work tomorrow and pay the rent and utilities and buy food and gas, as she stepped out onto the small back stoop.
    The sky was purple now, and the cicadas were singing. Someone nearby was grilling: she could smell the cooking meat, hear the laughing voices of children, the murmur of cheerful adult conversation. Somewhere happiness was in the air, and Riley looked in the direction of the cookout almost wistfully. Then reality bit: in her world, she had things to do, and darkness continued to close in. The sun was gone, and the long shadows that lay across the ground were merging until soon they would swallow everything.
    Riley stood where she was for a moment longer, savoring the solitude, taking a deep breath of the still-sweltering air as her gaze carefully swept her surroundings.
    The one truly positive thing about the scruffy subdivision where Margaret’s house was located was that, except for the street out front, there was no place for TV trucks to park, or camera crews to camp out, or reporters to hide. The small patch of scorched grass that was the backyard was surrounded by a tired chain-link fence that was all but hidden by a dusty vine, and it abutted a number of other tiny yards just like it. The one-story houses were so close together that if they didn’t keep the drapes drawn at night they could see into each other’s windows. Living in such unassuming surroundings wasn’t a stretch for Riley, who had grown up in even less prosperous circumstances, but for Margaret and Emma—and Jeff—it was like being plunked down on the moon.
    Pushing Jeff’s image away for the time being—thinking about him hurt too much—she stepped off the stoop and walked quickly in the opposite direction from the driveway, which was packed with cars, then let herself out through the creaky metal gate on the far side of the house. When they had arrived home after the funeral there’d been quite a crowd out front, but by this time it had largely dispersed. Two TV trucks remained, she saw as she cast a cautious glance toward the street, but only one camera crew was visible.
    They were set up on the sidewalk opposite the house, apparently conducting a running commentary on God-knew-what while keeping their camera trained on the front door, probably in hopes that someone gossip-worthy would enter or leave. A marked police car idled near the camera crew, and another drove slowly down the street, moving away from her. Parked cars lined the curb in both directions and a few people—­neighborsor gawkers, Riley couldn’t be sure which—stood around on the sidewalks talking as they cast occasional glances at the house.
    Being the focus of the scandal-mongers sucked.
    Congratulating herself on her foresight in parking her car around the corner and exiting through the back door, Riley slunk through the neighbors’ front yards, careful to keep well away from the street. She didn’t have far to go, but by the time she was halfway there she’d made the unwelcome discovery that she really didn’t like being alone outside in the dark anymore. The shadows seemed to be closing in on her, and she kept thinking she could hear something sneaking