by Evan Ronan
It’s really easy to find somebody these days.
Back in the hall, I announce to my two eternal customers. “Honor system today. Can you guys keep an eye out?”
“Greg, are you sure you’re alright?” Wally asks.
Today he sounds genuinely concerned.
“I’ve got to close this case out.”
“Then do it. And then come back here. We worry about you.”
I wait for the infinite jest that always follows a sentiment like that, but neither Wally nor Roy say anything. They just give me the nod and for a moment I feel like a kid again, almost like Pop is watching over me.
It feels good.
I head into Upper Devlin and park on the west side of the mall. Deanna works retail in one of the middle-end clothing stores on the second floor aimed at plus size women.
She herself is plus size, and she wears it well.
According to her Facebook page, she earned her degree at a pretty swanky college in Virginia. I wonder why she ended up at the mall.
“Can I help you?” she asks, eyeing my wrist splint warily.
“Hi, Deanna.” I give her the I don’t think you’re a suspect smile. “My name is Greg Owen. I was hoping to speak with you for a few minutes.”
She nods. “I was wondering if you’d come.”
“You knew I was looking into Julie’s death?”
“Everybody does, Greg.” She points over her shoulder. “Let me ask my boss to take my break early.”
I wander out of the store and sit on a bench nearby with a fake tree beside it. Overhead, a pigeon skitters through the rafters.
How do birds always find a way to get inside a mall?
Deanna comes out of the store a few minutes later. “She made me take my lunch.”
“Made you?” I frown.
“When I told her why you wanted to talk, she said we’d need more than fifteen minutes.” She shrugs. “So I’ve got a half hour. Can we go to the food court?”
“I’m buying.”
We walk in silence to the middle of the mall, take the escalator down. She buys a salad, I go for Chinese.
Deanna picks a table on the edge of the food court, far away from the few other people eating at this early hour.
She waits for me to start eating before she begins picking at her salad. Deanna takes tiny bites, very self-consciously.
“Go ahead,” I say. “Most guys are too busy chowing down to notice how much a woman is eating.”
She smiles gratefully.
Go, me.
I fork some fried rice, drink a little soda. Make sure there’s nothing hanging off my lips or stuck in my teeth, before I say:
“So Julie was thinking about going to the cops before she died.”
Deanna’s fork hovers in mid-air, about three inches from her mouth. When she regains her composure, she puts the fork down.
“Yes.”
“I don’t blame her,” I say. “That must have been embarrassing.”
“I would have died of shame,” Deanna says.
“Did Henry know that she knew?”
“I don’t think so.”
“How do you know?”
“Julie made us all—the few people she told—she made us swear to keep it secret.”
I nod. “And nobody, not one of you, told Henry?”
“No.”
I stick my fork in the box of rice. “Julie and Molly had a fight that night. Right before Julie went to Nick’s house.”
“Yes.”
“Then Molly left the party?”
“A little later, yeah.”
“How much later?”
Deanna folds her hands. She’s stopped eating too.
“Molly was really wasted. She couldn’t drive. So she tried to bum rides off people. Finally I think she just ended up calling her brother or something.”
I sit up a little taller.
“How much time do you think passed from when Molly wanted to leave the party to when she actually did?”
Deanna shrugs. “I don’t really know. I was …”
“I’ll bet everybody was.” I shift in my seat. “Let’s think about it another way. Molly spent some time trying to get a ride, then called her brother, who had to drive out to get her. Where did her brother live at the time?”
“He was home for the summer from college.”
“And how far was Molly’s house from the lake?”
She looks up. “Twenty minutes.”
It’s close. Real close.
Julie was back to the lake between twenty and thirty minutes after leaving to go to Nick’s.
But then what? Think, idiot.
Molly would have been covered in Julie’s blood. Her brother would have seen her like that if he picked her up. Even if she came up with a convincing story that night, her brother would have later heard about Julie Stein’s gruesome murder and questioned her.
Or he kept quiet to protect his sister.
Or Molly cleaned herself up somehow.
But how?
“Did Molly have a spare set of clothes in her car?” I ask.
“We all did,” Deanna says.
“What?” I can’t believe it. “Why?”
“Most of us came straight from the ceremony at school to the lake. We planned ahead in case we wanted to change out of our dresses.”
“So Molly had her dress and another set of clothes there?”
“Yeah.”
“When she left, was she in her dress? Or was she in her change of clothes?”
“Uh …” She thinks for a moment. “Dress? I think. I don’t really remember.”
Someone will remember. But for now I have what I need. Molly had motive, opportunity, and—
“Did Molly carry any sort of—”
She cuts me off. “She had pepper spray and a Swiss army knife. We all did.”
Hive mind. “You all did?”
Deanna nods. “One of our friends was assaulted in sophomore year at the mall. I mean, here, actually. It was a pretty big deal, and we all started carrying protection.”
“Deanna, do you think Molly could have killed Julie?”
She looks at me sideways. “No.”
“Why?”
“Because Nick killed her.”
“You’re sure?”
She nods slowly. “Yes.” Thinks about it. “Yes, I really think he did.”
“Why?”
“Because Nick was crazy.”
“How about Henry?” I say.
“No.” She thinks about that. “He had a crush on her but he wouldn’t have done that.”
“Even after she broke his heart?”
Thirty-Five
I spend the rest of the day trying to track down Julie’s other friends from Molly’s emailed list, but most of the remainder have moved away.
Jason Shaw calls, but I haven’t heard from the mortgage company. They’re only a forty-five minute drive, and if I had nothing else going on, I’d head on over there and demand an in-person with Steve.
But the case …
The case.
The case.
I’m really starting to think Nick is innocent. I’ve moved into reasonable doubt realm. It’s more likely that someone at the graduation party killed Julie. It’s less likely Nick would follow her from his house to a place that was more crowded and murder her.
“Right, Greg?”
Right, Greg.
It’s easy to talk yourself into just about anything.
I doze off in my office at the pool hall. I’m in that weird place where at times I know I’m dreaming and other times I forget I am. Denise comes into my bedroom, only it’s my bedroom from back in high school. I’m not allowed to have girls up here and can clearly hear my parents downstairs, but for some reason it does not seem weird to have Denise up here.
“I want you to ask me something,” she says.
“What?”
“I want you to ask me to Prom,” she says.
D�
�jà vu.
“Denise, you’re dating somebody else.”
“I want you to ask me.”
And then I remember—
I’ve had this dream before.
This realization shatters the fictive dream. Denise is no longer Denise but is now Julie Stein and the bedroom is the hallway at Apache High School. My locker is next to Julie’s.
“I thought you were my best friend,” Julie says.
“I am,” I insist, even though I know I am not.
And even though I’ve never had this conversation with Julie Stein, it still feels very real to me.
“You wouldn’t do this to me if you were my best friend,” she says.
She’s talking about the sex video. A deep blush reddens her face.
“Julie, I’m sorry,” I say, even though I didn’t have sex with her and I didn’t film it and I didn’t post it anonymously on a hidden forum where sex perverts could lurk and look at underage girls.
“I thought you were my best friend,” she repeats, unsatisfied with my answer. “Why would you do this to me?”
Past Julie, just around the bend in the hallway, I see Denise come around the corner carrying her books like she always did with one arm. This isn’t forty-year-old Denise, this is high school Denise. The skin is smoother and the cheekbones are a little sharper and there’s a bounce in her step that I realize is, depressingly, absent these days.
Julie grabs my wrist. Her palm is slick.
With blood.
And I wake up.
Nearly fall out of my chair.
“You should get checked out,” Wally says from the hall. “You were sawing some wood in there.”
“I snore?” I ask, dumbfounded.
“We thought you had a baby elephant back there.”
I shrug. “I’ll get it checked, right after I solve a murder.”
I accidentally banged my left wrist on the edge of the desk when I nearly toppled out of my chair. Now it’s screaming at me.
Time for some meds.
I pop a pill and get up.
It’s early afternoon. Lorelei calls but I don’t want to think about her moving away right now, and I don’t want to talk about it even more, so I don’t answer. Then I remember Denise asked me to come over for dinner tonight.
Thirty-Six
I show up with a bottle of Vouvray.
“How’d you know I like this kind?”
I didn’t. “I’m a detective.”
She kisses me on the cheek. I step inside. The house is lit up, the windows open to create a breeze, and whatever she’s cooking smells good.
“Sit down and relax,” she says. “You’ve been running around like crazy this week.”
I don’t argue. She has high stools under one counter in her kitchen. I slide one out and plant myself, leaning back against the edge of the counter while she finishes putting dinner together.
“So tell me what you’ve been up to,” she says.
I’m too tired and aching to go through the dance of not telling her what I know, insisting that she doesn’t need to know yet, promising to tell her later … fuck it, it’s just easier to put all my cards on the table now.
Denise takes a break to sip her wine. She’s wearing an apron that says, “Many people have eaten in this kitchen and gone on to lead normal, healthy lives.”
What the hell. “I think Molly Coates or Henry Lucetti could have killed Julie.”
“Why?”
I bring her up to speed. She grows more and more incredulous as my account goes on, her eyes widening at each new revelation.
“My God. I always believed Nick but now it’s like it’s true. Do you know what I mean?”
“We’re not there yet,” I quickly say. “Not yet.”
She smiles and sips more wine. “I knew you’d say that. What do you think?”
“Could go either way. And that includes Nick.”
Her smile turns sad. The timer on the oven beeps to let her know the food is ready. Denise opens it up and the smell intensifies. She’s cooked some steaks and asparagus with a side of wild rice.
I’m salivating.
“Let’s go into the dining room. I never eat in there.”
A nice tablecloth and silverware. “Looks nice.”
She lights a candle then dims the lights. With the apron off, I’m treated to a full view of her in that casual spring dress.
Two heads are better than one, right?
Riiiiight.
We dig in. The beef is delicious. She reaches her third glass of wine.
“Do you miss high school?”
“Parts of it.”
“I miss it all,” she says. “Even the not-so-nice parts.”
“Why?”
“Back then we had our whole lives ahead of us.”
“Still do.”
“It’s different now. Don’t you feel that way?”
“No. I don’t.”
She laughs. “That’s because you’re one of a kind, Greg.”
The old patterns.
We
f
a
l
l
into them so easily.
So easily.
“I would have done some things differently,” she says.
I stop eating. Is this where she finally admits to her overwhelming, undying love for me?
“Like what?”
“Us.”
I don’t say anything.
“Look, Denise, this thing with Nick has got you thinking about the old days. I know because I’m doing the same thing too. But that was a long time ago. And what happened, happened. It’s ancient history.”
“You always know what to say.”
I look at her.
“You were always there for me, Greg. But.”
But.
She puts her fork down and stares across the table at me. Her eyes yearning.
But does she really want me, or does she just want to step into the past for a night and taste what might have been?
There are itches we can’t ever scratch.
She finishes what she was saying. “But I wasn’t there for you. Was I?”
“I don’t think any relationship in history has been even-handed.”
“You’re being polite now.”
“Yes,” I say, surprising myself. “I had such a crush on you.”
“I hated lying to you.”
What …
“Lying to me?”
She nods.
“What are you talking about?”
“That night at the lake, Greg.”
I suddenly don’t want to hear this. In twenty plus years, she never brought this up and part of me had hoped she’d forgotten.
But how do you forget a thing like that?
“When you told me how much you loved me.”
I’d been drunk at the time, but drink didn’t turn me into a liar. It had only emboldened me.
“We were both with somebody else,” she says, as if I needed reminding.
I’m actually embarrassed.
“And I lied to you,” she says.
“You did.”
She nods. “I had feelings for you too, Greg.”
Why are we going here? Will it do either of us any good?
And are we speaking in the past tense but thinking in the present?
“Why’d you lie to me then and say you just wanted to be friends?”
“Because … I don’t know.”
I’m still reeling. So I get a little spiteful. “Because there was always somebody else you liked more.”
“When you put it like that, it makes me sound like such a cruel bitch.”
I shake my head. Try to salvage a little dignity.
“That’s life. It happens. I’m over it.”
Oh, are you, Greg?
Or are you ready to push these plates off the table and get down to business with the One You Could Never Have?
While I have this internal monologue,
Denise smiles nostalgically.
“We had a great relationship. Greg, I didn’t deserve you. A best friend like you.”
“Your best friend was Alicia Briggs.”
She shakes her head. “No, Greg. You were. You were my best friend.”
Best friend.
It’s one of the nicest things you can tell anybody.
It’s also one of the most hurtful things you can say to a guy who’s in love with you.
And looking back, I was a little in love with Denise.
“Best friend …” I say.
“Yes,” she says, and I barely hear her, because my mind is drifting to the case. The hundreds of facts and details and innuendos all swirling through my brain. They have begun to orbit this thought:
Best friend.
Thirty-Seven
I park on the street, a few units down from the townhouse I want.
The sun is setting as I come down the sidewalk. Three tween boys go whipping past on their bicycles, one of them carrying a basketball. Across the street, a woman about my age whom I sort of recognize is walking an enormous English mastiff. She makes a face like she knows me too. Normally I’d stop and talk because everybody knows everybody around here.
But I’m a bit preoccupied tonight.
I stop in front of the end unit. A car is parked in the tiny driveway, the lights on both downstairs and upstairs. The unmistakable flicker of a TV coming from one of the windows.
Did you kill your best friend?
Thinking back now to when Denise told me we could only be friends, I remember vividly how I felt. Defeated, sad, lost, embarrassed, ashamed, unworthy, and …
Angry.
Really fucking angry.
At how unfair life was.
I remember being mad at Denise, not mad enough to hurt her, but still just … mad. After that night, I remembered all of our conversations and experiences and awkward moments and saw them in a completely different light.
I even got to thinking she’d taken advantage of my affection and used it. Calling on me only when she needed somebody, but not giving me what I really wanted in return.
Inside my head, I turned into a mean son of a bitch.
But I got some distance from it. Checked out of our relationship for a couple months. That helped me move on.
Henry doesn’t seem to have moved on from it.