Vengeance. Mystery Writers of America Presents B00A25NLU4

the bathtub, turning the rug and tiles crimson. The faucet was still running, a slow trickle like syrup out of the jar. Grace was naked, soaking in cold, red water. Her arms were splayed out in mock crucifixion, her wrists sliced open, exposing sinew and flesh.
    Richard had found her. June was downstairs in her sewing room when she heard him knocking on Grace’s bedroom door to say good night. Grace was upset because her debate team had lost their bid for the regional finals. Debate club was the last bastion of Grace’s old life, the only indication that the black-clad child hunched at the dinner table still belonged to them.
    Richard was one of the debate-team coaches, had been with the team since Grace had joined, back in middle school. It was the perfect pursuit for two people who loved to argue. He’d been depressed about the loss, too, and covered badly with a fake bravado as he knocked, first softly, then firmly, on her door.
    “All right, Gracie-gray. No more feeling sorry for ourselves. We’ll get through this.” More loud knocking, then the floor creaking as he walked toward the bathroom. Again, the knocking, the calling out. Richard mumbled to himself, tried the bathroom door. June heard the hinges groan open, then heard Richard screaming.
    The sound was at once inhuman and brutally human, a noise that comes only from a mortal wounding. June had been so shocked by the sound that her hand had slipped, the needle digging deep into the meat of her thumb. She hadn’t registered the pain until days later when she was picking out the dress Grace would be buried in. The bruise was dark, almost black, as if the tip of June’s thumb had been marked with an ink pen.
    The razor Grace used was a straight-edge blade, a relic from the shaving kit that had belonged to June’s father. June had forgotten all about it until she saw it lying on the floor just below her daughter’s lifeless hand. Grace didn’t leave a suicide note. There were no hidden diaries or journals blaming anyone or explaining why she had chosen this way out.
    The police wanted to know if Grace had been depressed lately. Had she ever done drugs? Was she withdrawn? Secretive? There seemed to be a checklist for calling a case a suicide, and the detectives asked only the questions that helped them tick off the boxes. June recognized the complacency in their stance, the tiredness in their eyes. She often saw it in the mirror when she got home from school. Another troubled teenager. Another problem to be dealt with. They wanted to stamp the case solved and file it away so that they could move on to the next one.
    Washing dirt off their hands.
    June didn’t want to move on. She couldn’t move on. She hounded her daughter’s best friend, Danielle, until Martha, the girl’s mother, firmly told June to leave her alone. June would not be so easily deterred. She called Grace’s other friends into her office, demanded they tell her every detail about her daughter’s life. She turned into a tyrant, firing off warning shots at anyone who dared resist.
    She studied her daughter’s death the way she had studied for her degrees, so that by the end of it all, June could’ve written a dissertation on Grace’s suicide. She knew the left wrist was cut first, that there were two hesitation marks before the blade had gone in. She knew that the cut to the right wrist was more shallow, that the blade had nicked the ulnar nerve, causing some fingers of the hand to curl. She knew from the autopsy report that her daughter’s right femur still showed the dark line of a healed fracture where she’d fallen off the monkey bars ten years before. Her liver was of normal size and texture. The formation of her sagittal sutures was consistent with the stated age of fifteen. There were 250 ccs of urine in her bladder, and her stomach contents were consistent with the ingestion of popcorn, which June could still smell wafting from the kitchen when she ran upstairs to find her daughter.
    The lungs, kidneys, spleen, and pancreas were all as expected. Bones were measured, cataloged. The brain was weighed. All appeared normal. All were in the predictable margins. The heart, according to the doctor who performed the autopsy, was unremarkable.
    How could that be? June had wondered. How could a precious fifteen-year-old girl, a baby June had carried in her womb and delivered to the world with such promise, have an unremarkable heart?
    “What’s that?” Richard asked,