by Kara Thomas
Shit shit shit he knows. I consider letting it go to voice mail, but I know it’ll be worse if I do. He’ll just call Tom if I don’t answer. Maybe I can talk him into not telling him at all. I inhale. Answer.
“Hi,” I warble.
“Hey, kid. I’m sorry for running out on you last night.”
I exhale so loudly I’m sure he can hear me. “Don’t be. Is everything okay?”
“Yeah, yeah. False alarm. Some hysterical-sounding woman thought she saw a burglar. Anyway, everything’s fine.”
My nerves cool a bit, and I even let myself feel amused at his description of Ginny. “That’s good to hear.”
“So I ran a background check on your friend’s dad,” Mike says. “I don’t know how much she told you, but I found some heavy stuff.”
I sit up straight in my bed. I didn’t think Mike would actually look up Ginny’s dad. “Oh. Well, she said something about Tom pulling him over for drinking.”
A light thump, and static, as if Mike is tapping his fingers against his cell phone. “Maybe she should tell you about the other thing.”
Ginny must have known what Mike would dig up on her father when she agreed to use him as a ruse. She had to figure Mike might tell me, and some part of her was okay with it.
“I don’t think she wants to see him again or anything,” I say. “She just wants to know where he is.”
“Well, it looks like the registration on his truck expired. The only address he has on record is his house here in Sunnybrook.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means he could be anywhere, pretty much. Must be staying out of trouble, though. He hasn’t even gotten a parking ticket in five years.”
“Five years?” Ginny hadn’t said her dad left the year my sister and the other girls died.
“Yep. Looks like he skipped town before a scheduled court appearance. He never showed.”
“When was his court date?” I ask.
“Gimme a sec.” The sound of keys clacking on Mike’s end mimics my heartbeat. “October thirtieth.”
Three days after Juliana and Susan were murdered. I have to sit. “What was the court appearance for?”
“Something he probably would have done some time for. I don’t feel right telling you more than that, Monica.” Mike sighs. “Bottom line is, this guy disappeared. And it was probably a blessing in disguise for your friend.”
But she says she knows where he is. Either Ginny lied, or she knows where her dad is holed up and she’s protecting him.
“Well, I’ve got to get back to work. I’m pulling a double while everyone sleeps off their PBA dinner hangovers,” Mike says. “I’m sorry I couldn’t help more.”
“No. Thank you.” My thoughts are blurring together—I don’t want him to hang up. Not when something he said is needling me.
“Wait,” I say. “You said Phil Cordero drove a truck. Do you know what type?”
“A 2005 GMC Sierra,” Mike says. “Leased.”
“Is that a pickup truck?”
“That it is,” he confirms. “A crap one too.”
“Thanks,” I force out, a sick feeling gathering in my stomach.
“I can try to help her if your friend’s serious about tracking him down,” Mike says. “But it might be best if she doesn’t pursue this. When a family member takes off…Well, if you look hard enough, you’ll probably find something that makes you wish you hadn’t.”
I don’t know what to say. Ginny told me she knew where her father was.
“Monica? You there?”
“Yeah. I’ve gotta go. Thank you, though.”
“No problem. By the way, thanks for spilling a large Diet Coke in my office.”
I force out a laugh to match his, and he ends the call.
I open my email and pull up the email chain with Daphne Furman. I open a new page.
Hey, Daphne,
Do you think your private investigator friend might be able to look someone up for me? His name is Phil Cordero and he lived in Sunnybrook until five years ago.
My fingertips are humming; this is so wrong, doing this without Ginny knowing.
But she lied to me about knowing where her dad is. Either that, or she really does know where he is, and she’s covering for him, even though he skipped out on his court appearance.
I close my eyes and comb through every interaction I’ve had with Ginny. Her words from the other day haunt me. It’s not really you I’m helping.
What if she already suspected that Jack Canning didn’t kill Susan and Juliana? What if she was helping me to clear up the doubt in her mind that her own father was involved, and in the process, found something she wished she hadn’t?
I hit send, Mike’s voice echoing in my head. If you look hard enough, you’ll probably find something that makes you wish you hadn’t.
We have another Saturday practice today. My mom drops me off at the school on her way to the playhouse for the two o’clock matinee of The Importance of Being Earnest. As she drives away from the curb, Ginny’s mom pulls up. She gives Ginny a quick kiss on the cheek, and I’m struck by how young she looks.
Just from watching them for a few moments, you can see that there’s no wall of tension between Ginny and her mom, like there is between me and mine. Everything about their interaction looks easy.
As Ginny gets out of the car, her mom catches me staring, and before she drives away, she waves at both of us, smiling like I’m an old friend, even though she has no idea who I am.
I smile back at Ginny’s mom.
“Your mom’s really pretty,” I say, once Ginny has reached me.
“Most people assume she’s my sister.” Ginny hikes her messenger bag up her shoulder. “She was twenty-one when she had me.”
I restrain myself from needling her for more information about her family, about her dad. I look over at her as we head through the side gym door; Coach left it propped open for us. Ginny is looking down at her hands, rubbing at the scar on her knuckle.
Where did she get it? Who is she, really?
Who the hell am I, for doubting her just because her father drove a pickup truck?
The mood in the gym is somber. One of the sophomore girls stands in front of Coach on crutches. She can’t even look at Coach as she chokes out the words: “I f-f-fell.”
A sprained ankle, obtained when the boy giving her a piggyback at a party last night dropped her. A week sitting out of practice. A lifetime, in competition prep. Coach barely looks her.
My eyes connect with Rachel’s; she’s standing in the corner, looking white in the face. I make my way toward her; she grabs me by the arms and whispers, “Alexa texted me. She just fucking woke up.”
Coach makes the rest of us pay for it. Fifty sit-ups and several laps around the gym. When Alexa rushes into the gym fifteen minutes later, everyone is shooting daggers at her. This is Coach’s MO. Punish the group for the sins of the few. Make us turn on each other.
Coach tells us to take a five-minute break. Even Rachel refuses to look at Alexa as she heads off to fill her water bottle at the fountain in the hall. While Lex practically throws herself at Coach’s feet, sputtering excuses, I look for Ginny.
She’s sitting on the bleachers, downing Gatorade. I plop down next to her, aggravating a brutal stomach cramp. “Hey.”
She swallows her gulp of Gatorade and wipes away the red it leaves on her upper lip. “Hey.”
We’re both watching Coach, standing by the speakers, arms crossed, surveying us like we’re a bunch of particularly disappointing zoo animals. Alexa is on the bench below, lacing up her shoes, despondent. I didn’t expect her conversation with Coach to be a very long one. Several feet away from Lex, the sophomore who hurt herself sits on the bleachers, her bandaged ankle propped up on the bench. Next to her, another sophomore is ben
t over, forearms resting on her knees, looking like she’s dry heaving.
I turn to Ginny. “Coach is going to put us all in the grave before we even get to regionals.”
She takes another sip of Gatorade. “She obviously does not understand the Geneva Conventions. We’re not responsible for their crimes.”
Ginny nods toward Alexa and the sophomore. Her deadpan elicits a nervous laugh from me. For some reason, my hands are trembling. I stick them under my thighs.
Ginny pauses, her Gatorade bottle inches from her mouth. “What is it? You’re nervous.”
Ginny told me I could ask Mike to look up her dad. But emailing Daphne about him crossed a line. I’m not sure she’ll forgive me if I tell her.
I take a breath. Opt for the half-truth. “My stepdad’s partner, Mike, called me this morning.”
Ginny glances around. Lowers her voice: “Does he know what we—”
“No, nothing like that.”
Ginny picks at the label of her Gatorade bottle. Waiting.
“He called me about your dad,” I say. “He looked him up.”
Her fingers go still. “What did he tell you?”
“Nothing.” My heartbeat quickens. “He just said he ran his information and he couldn’t find him.”
Ginny’s jaw goes rigid; I realize it sounds like I’m accusing her of lying.
Coach’s voice fills the gym. “Two more minutes!”
I’m scrambling to rephrase what I said, when down the bleachers from us, Kelsey B lets her foot drop to the bench with a thunk. “It totally hasn’t been five minutes yet.”
I wince. Watch as Coach looks at Kelsey with an eerily calm face. “Ten more laps.”
A groan ripples across the gym. Next to me, Ginny shows no indication she heard Coach. Her voice is barely above a whisper. “What else did Mike say about my dad?”
“Nothing,” I say, a little too quickly.
The pickup truck. The date he left town. I swallow. I shouldn’t have said anything at all, and I don’t get the chance to explain myself. Ginny silently gets up from the bleachers and joins the girls who have started their second round of laps. She doesn’t look at me again for the rest of practice.
* * *
—
It’s raining again, and it doesn’t stop until around ten p.m. I’m at my desk, watching the house across the street, even though I know Ethan won’t be back.
My email thread with Daphne Furman is open on my laptop, my latest message to her unanswered.
The light from the streetlamp outside blurs behind the raindrops trailing down my window. I don’t trust him. That’s what Ginny said about Ethan, more than once. She sounded convinced he was lying about what he saw outside the Berrys’ house.
Or she wanted to convince me that he was lying.
I return to the stack of files Ginny and I didn’t make it through. Mr. Brenner couldn’t describe the pickup truck, but there may have been someone else on the street who saw it and remembered the make and color.
I flip through the statements, skipping over the ones with familiar-looking handwriting. I pause at a page covered in nearly illegible script. Flip it over, in search of the accompanying typed version.
The statement is from Mrs. Diane Cullen. Address 54 Norwood Drive. I balk at the date on the page: April 19. Six months before the murders. The box labeled Incident contains two words: neighbor complaint.
The typed version of Diane Cullen’s statement is only one paragraph:
On the evening of April 18, I came home around 8:30 p.m. to find my back gate open. Several of my flowers had been trampled, as if someone had climbed over the fence to enter the backyard. Nothing was stolen from my house but I believe the intruder was Mr. Jack Canning, who lives at 61 Norwood Drive. Several others on my street have reported strange incidents, and we believe Mr. Canning to be behind them. In fact, his neighbors had to install a privacy fence due to Mr. Canning watching their daughter sunbathing by their pool.
I read the statement three times. The Berrys had a privacy fence around their backyard. The new owners tore it down when they redesigned the yard; I’d forgotten that detail while Ethan was telling Ginny and me what he saw from the woods that night.
But Ethan McCready couldn’t have seen anything from the woods; he wouldn’t have been able to see over the fence and into the backyard unless he was ten feet tall.
An uneasy feeling slithers into my stomach. Ethan’s story about what he saw is bullshit, and the police would have known it. That’s why they never processed his statement—not because of some conspiracy to keep Ethan quiet, but because he’s a liar.
I inhale, trying to control my simmering anger. We stole those files because of what Ethan told us. Ginny didn’t trust Ethan, and I didn’t listen to her, and thanks to my impulsiveness, she’s pissed off at me.
I have to find a way to apologize. For suggesting she’s a liar, for what I implied about her dad, for almost getting us arrested for stealing evidence—all of it. I’ll find a way to make it right.
After I have a few words with Ethan McCready.
* * *
—
Ethan is working a double shift Sunday and can’t meet me until Monday night. I insist on Monday morning before school.
Sunday night I tell Rachel that I have to get to school earlier in the morning for extra help in chem, and I tell my mother that Rachel and I have to go to school early for extra help. When Mom heads into the shower around 6:15 that morning, I sneak into the garage and hop on my bike.
Osprey Lake is a mile from my house, and another half mile from the high school. Every morning there are joggers and dog walkers taking the path around the lake. A public place in broad daylight.
I got Ethan to agree to meet me by texting him that I found something weird in my sister’s things, and I wanted to show it to him. I knew he would bite; Ethan McCready was obsessed with my sister. As much as it turns my stomach, dangling Jen in front of him is my best chance at getting the truth out of him.
I walk my bike to an empty bench below a sugar maple tree. The sky is shell pink over the lake. I barely slept, but my body is awake and thrumming. I grab the thermos of coffee out of my bike basket and wedge it between my knees as I dig my phone out of my backpack.
It’s 6:35. I’m five minutes late, and Ethan still isn’t here. The knot in my gut tightens.
Someone sits at the opposite end of the bench and I look up to see Ethan lower the hood of his sweatshirt. He tugs his headphones out of his ears and rubs his eyes, which are dark-rimmed and pink.
For a moment, neither of us says anything. Then he yawns. Says, “Where’s your friend?”
“She’s not too happy with me at the moment.”
“Bummer.” Ethan stretches. I hear the joints in his neck crack. “She didn’t seem enamored of me either. What did she call me? A crackpot conspiracy theorist?”
“Do you blame her?” I feel my pulse ticking. “You lied to our faces.”
Ethan blinks at me. “About what my friends saw the night of the crash?”
“Not that,” I say. “When you told us what you saw in the Berrys’ backyard, I forgot about their fence. They put up a really tall one, because of Jack Canning.”
Ethan doesn’t say anything. Adrenaline racks my body, shortening my breath, making my fingers tremble. I hate how he’s played me and how he’s mysteriously lost the ability to speak now that I’ve confronted him. I’m not leaving here until I find out why he lied to me.
A maple leaf, scarlet and veiny, falls onto Ethan’s knee. He brushes it away. His jaw is set, his face expressionless. A woman wrangling two large black Labs on leashes trots past us. The dogs stop to pee at the tree a couple of yards away from us. I resist the urge to scream at Ethan. “You didn’t see anyone on Susan’s back deck. You couldn’t have seen them from the woods because
no one could see anything over that fence.”
When Ethan finally speaks, his voice is monotone. “I wasn’t in the woods at all. I was leaving your house.”
I swallow a bark of a laugh. “You were at my house.”
“Jen snuck me in,” Ethan says. “I left through her bedroom window. The one over your garage. I was on the roof when I saw what was going on in Susan’s backyard.”
“You were in Jen’s room,” I say slowly.
There isn’t a trace of embarrassment on Ethan’s face, but he starts bouncing his knee like he’s nervous. “It wasn’t like that. She was really sick. I just hung out with her until she fell asleep. I didn’t want to wake her up to sneak me back out, so I went through the window. Messed up my leg on the drop from the garage roof.”
I close my eyes. I’m back in Jen’s room, peering out the window over the garage, trying to get a glimpse of her and Juliana, three houses down, sunning by Susan’s pool. Anyone on the garage roof would have had a perfect view of the back deck.
“What color was her room?” I ask.
Ethan blinks at me. “What?”
“Jen’s room. So I know you were really in there.”
Ethan’s knee stops jiggling. He looks out over the lake. “I don’t remember the color on the walls. Her bedspread was light pink and puckered or pleated or whatever you call it. And she had pictures of her friends everywhere.”
When I shut my eyes again, I can see it all. I remember the feel of that bedspread beneath my knees as I climbed behind my sister and braided her hair for Juliana’s wake. Ethan’s voice draws me back.
“So now you know why I fudged my statement a bit,” he says. “If your stepdad found out I was on the roof outside Jen’s room that night, I wouldn’t have lived long enough to tell the cops anything, because Tom would have ordered my execution.”
“Yeah, but your statement was useless,” I say. “The police knew it was impossible for you to have seen anything from the woods behind the Berrys’ house. You may as well have not told them anything.”