Forever, Again

by Victoria Laurie

  It’d been an awful ten days since. Spence had been edgy, distracted, and quick to temper. It was as if he knew something terrible was coming, and, sure enough, that very morning he’d been called to the principal’s office.

  Their meeting had been over an hour long, and Spence had finally confessed to me what it’d been about without admitting any guilt. Someone had sent an anonymous tip to the principal that Spence’s high SAT score was bogus. They’d sent the same anonymous tip to UCLA, and the administration there had contacted the principal to tell him that Spence would need to retake the exam that weekend, and earn a similar score, or his admittance and scholarship could be rescinded.

  As we were trying to figure out what to do, Jamie had knocked on Spence’s door, and now their argument was unfolding out on the front lawn.

  “This is all your fault,” Spence spat at his best friend. “I never should’ve let you talk me into it!”

  “I never told you to get most of the answers right,” Jamie snapped in return. “Christ, Hoss! What were you thinking?”

  “Maybe I’m thinking that Yale should get the same anonymous tip that UCLA did!” Spence spat, his hands curling into fists.

  Jamie’s entire posture changed. He stood up tall, squaring his shoulders, and leaned in angrily toward Spence. “You tell anyone, Spence, and I’ll kill you. You hear me? You got yourself caught. And if you’re looking for who’s really to blame, how come it never occurred to you that it might be your girlfriend, huh? Little Miss Perfect probably made that call herself! You want to know who grabbed your test answers from your little hidey-hole? Ask Amber.”

  I gasped as much at the accusation as for what happened next. Spence punched Jamie so hard he went flying, and landed on his back in the grass. Stacey came up next to me, her eyes wide with worry.

  “What’s going on?” she whispered, trying to peer through the curtains herself.

  I grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her away from the window. “Nothing,” I said. “Nothing, honey. But I need you to sit right here for a minute while I go outside, okay?”

  “But—”

  “Stay!” I ordered, then ran to the door and hurried out on the porch. Jamie was in his car, his cheek swollen and red, glaring hard at the both of us as he squealed away from the curb and flipped us the bird.

  I rushed over to Spence, who was holding a hand over his left eye. “Oh, God, are you okay?”

  Spence shrugged me off as I tried to reach for his arm. “I’m fine,” he said.

  My own temper flared. “Why?” I demanded. “Why?”

  He considered me angrily from his one good eye. “He did it,” he said simply. “He’s the only one that knew about that hiding place. You saw my room, Amber. Nothing else was stolen but my cash.”

  “Why would Jamie, of all people, be after your money?” I yelled.

  Spence glared down the street in the direction that Jamie’s car had gone. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “But he was the only one who knew about the hiding place, and he was the only one who didn’t show up to celebrate with us after I got the call from the coach at UCLA.”

  I shook my head in disbelief. “Didn’t I hear him tell you that he couldn’t make it because his dad was getting that award and he had to go to the ceremony?”

  Spence snorted. “He weaseled out of that before they even served dessert,” he said. “Told his parents he had a stomach thing and left the award ceremony early. He was bragging about how gullible they are after class today.”

  “So, because he doesn’t have a convenient alibi he’s the burglar?”

  “What’s going on?” I heard Stacey call from behind me. Whirling around, I saw her standing in the doorway looking frightened and upset.

  Spence turned slightly away from her so that she couldn’t see the mark on his face from where I assumed Jamie had punched him. “Nothing, Spunky,” he said. “Go back inside and start in on your homework. I’ll be upstairs in a minute to help you.”

  Stacey hesitated in the doorway, but I nodded encouragingly to her and eventually she did as her brother had asked.

  I looked at Spence, who was now carefully touching the swollen area around his eye. A small trickle of blood also leaked from his nostril and he wiped at it, frowning when he saw the red on his fingers.

  “What can I do?” I asked him.

  Spence’s shoulders drooped, and he stared at the ground. “There’s nothing you can do, Ambi,” he said gently. “What’s done is done.”

  “It’s really that bad then, huh?” I couldn’t believe that it’d all come to this. Just ten days earlier our lives had been perfect, and now everything was a mess.

  I wanted Spence to tell me that everything would be okay, that we’d figure it all out, but he didn’t. Instead he said, “I gotta get cleaned up.” Then he moved past me into the house and shut the door.

  COLE GOT UP AND SAID, “Hang on; let me get cleaned up a little.”

  He went down the hall and I heard a door shut. A moment later I heard the shower turn on. I tried not to imagine him in there, because I really was becoming crazy-attracted to him and shower thoughts would definitely be bad for my concentration. He came back out with slick wet hair, fresh clothes, and the thick file. I tried not to notice how amazing he smelled, or how good he looked with slick, wet hair. Setting the folder down, he said, “You’re the only other person besides Detective Hasslett that knows I have this.”

  “I won’t tell anybody,” I promised.

  “Cool,” he said, his hand still hovering over the cover. “Are you really ready to take a look?”

  I stared at the folder. I couldn’t imagine what awful images it might hold, but then I thought of my nightmare—of Ben lying dead and bloody in the field. How much worse than that could it be?

  “I’m ready,” I said.

  Cole opened the file and began with the first few pages, talking me through them. “The prom was on May twenty-third, nineteen eighty-seven. Ben and Amber went with a group of their friends. Right around ten o’clock, Amber and Spence left the dance. What’s weird is that one of the teachers who was chaperoning said he remembered seeing Ben leave around nine thirty, and then he remembered seeing Amber leave about twenty minutes later.”

  My brow furrowed. “They didn’t leave together?”

  “No,” Cole said. “And that was the last anybody saw of Ben until around ten thirty when a guy walking his dog came across his body.”

  Cole turned a page and revealed a crime scene photo of Ben, lying in the field almost exactly as he’d appeared in my dreams.

  It stole my breath.

  Cole closed the cover and offered me an apologetic expression. “You okay?”

  I sat there, a bit dumbstruck. “Yeah,” I said after a moment. “It’s just so crazy-eerie. That photo could’ve been pulled right out of my nightmare.”

  “Do you want to stop?”

  “No,” I told him. “I’m okay. You can go on.”

  Cole opened the file again and I was able to look at the photo a little more distantly. He flipped to another image, this one taken from farther back, and it showed Amber, in a Tiffany-blue dress with bloodstains, being supported by several people. She looked utterly destroyed. The photo had captured her in a moment of anguish, her mouth open, cheeks wet, hair a mess. She sagged between two boys in tuxes, while others were looking on in shock.

  I reached out to touch her image. “Poor thing,” I whispered. I felt such compassion for her.

  Cole nodded. “This is the photo that gets to me,” he said. “You take one look at that face, and I don’t know how you can think she had anything to do with Ben’s death.”

  We studied the image for another moment in silence and then Cole continued. “The police did about forty interviews between that night and when Amber died,” he said, moving on to a stack of papers held together with a paper clip. “Mostly other students. They’re all the same. Nobody saw anything, nobody heard anything, nobody remembered anything. Most of
the kids from the prom were alerted to what happened by the strobe lights from the fire truck that arrived at the scene. It flashed inside the school gym where the prom was being held and kids went out to see what was going on. Amber was already there. She’d pushed her way through to Ben and had to be pulled off by paramedics.”

  As Cole spoke, I felt like I was seeing it all just as it unfolded. That awful moment when Amber first realized that Ben was gone, hitting her like a shock wave. The grief was overpowering, and I felt my eyes burn with tears. I blinked them away and cleared my throat quietly, trying to come back to the reality of Cole’s house.

  Luckily, he didn’t notice my reaction.

  “Paparella stopped interviewing people when Amber died. She left a note at the scene….” Cole paused to pull out a piece of paper, which was a copy of a handwritten note in big, curly cursive. There were splotches on it—fingerprints standing out in dark relief. It was obvious that the police had dusted the letter for prints.

  He handed it to me, and I studied it. Immediately, I felt goose pimples rise on my arms. Amber’s handwriting was very similar to my own; we both wrote in large, loopy letters, but hers—at least on the note—seemed a little messy and uneven. Some of the text looked shaky, as though Amber had struggled with her nerves while she was writing the note, which, given the context, was completely understandable.

  I read the letter out loud. “‘Dear Momma and Daddy, I’m so sorry for all this. Don’t blame Spence. It wasn’t his fault. It was me. All me. I just want to be with him. Please take care of Bailey. I’ll love you forever. Amber.’”

  “Whoa,” I said when I’d finished. “Now I see how Paparella believed she’d killed Ben.”

  “Yeah, and also why he concluded she’d committed suicide even though the ME’s report was inconclusive. Paparella confirmed, though, that the suicide note was Amber’s handwriting, and the paper only had her prints on it, so he overrode the autopsy report, called the note a suicide confession, and closed the file, pinning Ben’s murder on Amber.”

  I noticed that Cole had surreptitiously shut the folder again. I knew he was hiding Amber’s crime scene photo from me.

  “How bad is the photo of her body?” I asked, touching the top of the folder.

  “Bad,” he said.

  My mouth went dry. “Don’t show me,” I whispered.

  “Okay,” he said, and pushed the closed folder away from us.

  I handed him back the paper with Amber’s apparent suicide note. Playing devil’s advocate, I said, “If Amber didn’t kill herself or Ben, then why would she write this note and leave it for her parents to find?”

  “I don’t know…Maybe she somehow knew it was coming?” Cole said.

  My eyes widened. “She knew she was going to be murdered?”

  “I know, it sounds crazy, but if someone had told us a month ago that we might be reincarnated…”

  “Okay, good point.” I frowned. “But she’s clearly taking the blame here. See? She says, ‘Don’t blame Spence. It wasn’t his fault. It was me. All me.’”

  “I don’t get it, either,” Cole said. “But that’s part of the reason we need to dig into this. We have to find out what really happened.”

  “Okay,” I said. “So now what?”

  “Now we investigate.” He stood up with an excited glint in his eye.

  “That internship with the FBI really put the bug in you, huh?” I said, getting up, too.

  “Hey, don’t knock the FAIT, Lily,” he said. “It taught me mad skills.”

  “Okay, Mr. Mad Skills, so where do we start?”

  “With Ben and Amber’s friends,” he said. “Somebody in their inner circle had to know something.”

  “You know who their friends were?”

  “I know where to look,” he replied, pointing across the room to a low bookshelf. “Their yearbooks.”

  I squinted at the shelf and the three large leather-bound books there: one blue, one white, one black. “Those are their yearbooks?” I asked.

  “Uh, no. Those are mine. But my gram still has Ben’s yearbooks at her house. I looked through them once.”

  “Was it weird?” I asked, wondering if he’d felt any overwhelming bond to Ben.

  “Kinda. He wasn’t that different from me. I don’t know. I didn’t have any déjà vu or anything, but there was this…connection I guess. You know?”

  I smiled. “I do.”

  He smiled, too, and motioned with his chin. “Come on. Grams works on Saturdays, so we can sneak in and out without her knowing, then we can grab something to eat, look over the yearbooks, and decide who to talk to first.”

  I hesitated to follow him to the door. “We’re sneaking in?”

  “Yeah. I don’t want her to know that I’m taking them.”

  “Uh…why?”

  “My grandma is a little weird about her stuff,” he explained. “Especially Ben’s stuff. And, honestly, she’s a little weird in general. Don’t get me wrong—I love her, but she’s not like most grandmas who want their grandkids around a lot. She keeps to herself mostly. I think it’s because of my uncle. Mom says she’s never been the same since Ben died.”

  “That’s so sad,” I said, thinking of my mom’s mom, who’d died three years ago from cancer. She’d lived in Connecticut and would’ve given me the world if I’d asked for it. And then I realized I hadn’t even thought of my dad’s mom. Which reminded me that she’d be expecting me to show up whenever she got around to summoning me. I’d have to give Mom a heads-up. I wasn’t going to give up my Saturday afternoon for her any more than I was going to give up my dreams of becoming a veterinarian and behavioral scientist for her.

  I followed Cole to his car, and as we pulled out of the drive, I texted Mom. She called my phone almost right away.

  “Lily?” she said. “How was it at Amber’s gravesite?”

  I bit my lip. What to tell her? I decided to fib a little. “It was good, Mom. I think it helped.”

  “Oh, that’s great, honey!” Mom said, her relief shining through her words. “I’m so happy. I want you to take a nap today, all right? You’ve got quite a bit of sleep to catch up on.”

  “I really want to,” I said, choosing my words carefully, “but Grandmother wants me to spend the afternoon with her. And, Mom, I’m so tired. All I want to do is hang out in my room and try to get some sleep.”

  There was a pause then, “I’ll take care of it, sweetheart. You rest. If your grandmother sends for you, don’t answer the door. Just stay in bed. I’ll be home tomorrow morning, but check in with me between now and then, you hear?”

  I sighed with relief. “I will.”

  “There’s lasagna in the fridge,” Mom added. “Don’t forget to eat, okay, lovey?”

  “I won’t,” I promised.

  We clicked off, and I sat back in satisfaction. That’d been easier than I thought.

  “Everything cool?” Cole asked.

  “Perfect,” I said. At that moment my phone pinged, and I lifted it to see an incoming text from Sophie:

  Tanner and I broke up. He’s an asshole, and I miss you. I’ve been crying all morning. You’re my best friend, Lily. Please, please forgive me and come home.

  I read the text with a hammering heart, and then I promptly burst into tears.

  “OH, BRITT,” I SAID, HUGGING my best friend and rubbing her back as she cried onto my shoulder. “I’m so sorry he broke your heart.”

  “Why, Amber?” she wailed. “Why?”

  Britt and her boyfriend had split up the day before. The timing couldn’t have been worse. Spence was at school taking his SATs for a fourth time, and I’d wanted to be there to support him, but Britt had called and she was so upset that I’d been a little worried about her hurting herself. I had spent the night at her house and we’d stayed up until two A.M. talking about what an ass Grady—her ex—was. I’d thought she was past the tears, but the second I’d mentioned going to meet Spence, the waterworks had started all over again.

/>   “Who’s going to take me to prom?” she sobbed.

  “You’ll come with us,” I told her.

  She shook her head into my shoulder. “I’ll look like a loser hanging out alone!”

  “No way!” I said. “You won’t look like a loser. Momma can do your hair and we’ll find you an amazing dress, and we’ll show Grady what an idiot he was for letting you go.”

  Britt continued to sob, and all I could do was hug her and tell her that it’d be okay. I’d tried to get her to eat something, but she’d refused all food, and as she leaned against me I could feel the sharpness of her frame against mine. What if this sent her on another one of those starvation sprees? Britt couldn’t afford to lose any more weight.

  At last the tears subsided a little and we made our way downstairs. “Where’re your parents?” I asked as I sat her at the table. I went to the cabinets and rummaged around for something tempting enough to make her eat.

  “Dad’s probably at the golf course, and Mom’s at aerobics.”

  Britt’s parents were almost never around. Her two older brothers were off to college, and her mom and dad acted like she was gone, too. They often went away on vacation leaving her behind for weeks at a time, and not once had they come to any of our school events or to see her perform in school plays.

  Britt had an incredible voice, and had been the lead in the school musical every single year we’d been in high school. We all thought she’d move to Hollywood and try to make it big some day. I was rooting for her. I found a box of Pop-Tarts in the back of the pantry and toasted two—one for her, one for me. When I set the plate in front of her, she simply stared at it moodily.

  “I’m not hungry,” she said, before getting up to retrieve a Tab from the fridge.

  I made a face. That stuff was so gross; I didn’t know how she could stomach it. I nibbled on the other pastry and said, “How about when Spence gets done with his test we go to a movie? The Secret of My Success looks good.”