Daughter of Mine

By noon, a steady rain has begun to fall as Hazel meets her Uncle Roy for lunch at a café. He continues to argue for an amicable settlement with her brothers, but Hazel refuses to consider it. She also mentions that her mother might have been murdered. During their conversation, Hazel receives a text from Nico. He wants her to come to the high school immediately. The photos from the instant camera have been developed.

When Hazel arrives at the school, Nico is with an art teacher named Carly, who developed the film. They are joined by a police officer named Melvin. The pictures reveal the nighttime raids of the gang of teen burglars: “Whoever the camera belonged to, he’d been sneaking into homes, taking photos as people slept. Capturing himself in the image, as proof” (316). The final photo shows Jamie’s face turned upward toward the camera. She appears terrified.

Melvin calls for backup to search the Barrel where Hazel originally found the camera. When they arrive, Caden is already there. The body of one of the teen burglars is discovered on the rocks below. Apparently, Jamie must have startled him, and he fell. The body is Max Falkner’s, the boy who had gone missing a week earlier. Jamie then disappeared because she feared being blamed for the death. Hazel thinks, “She’d already been in a state of panic—paranoid, after someone had snuck into her house. Someone, she must’ve thought, who was after her. Someone who’d come for her, and she’d reacted” (320).

As she drives back home, Hazel stops to check at the Mirror Lake Motel because Jamie might be hiding out there. She convinces the desk clerk that she can be trusted and finds Jamie in a building at the back of the property. Jamie explains that she fears somebody knows about the letter she found while sorting through Perry’s things. That same somebody came to her house to search for it, and she ran. Startling the teen at the Barrel was an accident, and Hazel convinces Jamie to turn herself in to the police.

That evening, Hazel gets back to the house and finds Gage already there. They argue about the money concealed in the walls. Gage admits that he hid the jewelry in the crawl space and the gun in the garage. When he realized that Jamie had found Libby’s original letter, he was the one who searched her house for it, unintentionally frightening her into fleeing.

Gage also says that he was the one who found Libby’s original note all those years ago, but he hid it because he thought his father had killed her. He left the traced note to give Hazel a sense of closure. He also mailed the postcard from Mexico while staying at Pete’s place. For his part, Perry thought that Gage was responsible for Libby’s death. Hazel is furious at both men for covering up the truth. She realizes that Gage has already confiscated Libby’s original note, which she had left in the house, and destroyed it. Angry, she forces him to leave the house.

It is now 9:00 pm and still raining. Hazel heads downstairs to her father’s office when all the lights go out. She thinks someone is in the yard, so Hazel steps outside to investigate. She knows it must be Caden, who is furious that Jamie turned herself in. Hazel sends Caden a few insulting texts before returning to the house. To her surprise, someone inside has now locked her out. She then enters through the crawlspace. Intending to confront the intruder, she puts her phone in record mode and heads for the kitchen to grab her mother’s gun. Hazel is intercepted by Roy, who has already taken the weapon and is aiming it at her.

Roy tells his niece the whole story. Audrey was leaving Perry for Roy on the night she died. After Perry covered up the accident, Roy began to blackmail him. Roy also killed Nico’s father when he was getting too close to the real facts of Audrey’s death. Hazel thinks, “I could see him clearly then, the puppet master behind the scenes. Manipulating us, playing my brothers and me against one another. An evil lurking in this family. In this town” (341). Libby had never embezzled any money from Roy’s firm, but she noticed a discrepancy in the books that Roy wanted to cover up. He had been dipping into business funds to cover his own financial losses and feared that Libby would tell the police. Before she could leave town with Hazel, he killed her.

Once Hazel came home and started asking questions, the body count increased. Roy was Sonny’s drug dealer, and he wanted to make sure she didn’t steer Hazel in his direction. Now, he was going to shoot Hazel and drop her body into the lake, making it look like suicide. As they move toward the water, Caden shows up with a gun and demands an explanation. Hazel starts to tell him the whole story, but Roy tries to cast suspicion on his niece. Caden tells Hazel to run while he confronts Roy. She hears a single shot followed by silence.

Hazel flees into the shadows as Roy searches for her. Realizing that Caden has been shot, she circles back to him and manages to call 9-1-1. She thinks, “Roy had nothing to lose. Caden was shot. Sonny was dead. Why not me? I knew the truth. I was the most dangerous thing to him right now. Of course he’d kill me” (348). Hazel runs down the bank and dives into the lake, with Roy following. She is the stronger swimmer and heads for the main channel, knowing how to navigate the tricky cross currents. She hears sirens approaching in the distance as Roy pursues her. He is unaware of how to manage the strong current, and it drags him under.

Hazel pulls herself out of the water and goes to join her brothers and Nico. Caden has been shot in the leg. He confesses to Hazel that he was the one who told Libby about Audrey’s death. In the years that followed, he blamed himself for scaring her away. Hazel tells him that Libby had planned to come back for all three children, but Roy killed her: “‘Caden,’ I said, trying to pull him back. ‘He was going to kill me. You saved my life.’ He looked me over then, like he was surprised to find me here still. ‘You saved mine,’ he said” (351).

At the end of June, the Holt family holds a memorial to spread Libby’s ashes over the lake. Her remains had been found beneath the gazebo on Roy’s property. Hazel and her brothers will share the house and Perry’s money equally. Caden moves his family into the house, but Hazel always feels welcome there now: “It felt like the thing my father would’ve wanted. The house full of noise, and life, and our family. A reason, always, to come home” (354).