by Sara Shepard
I dig into Cobalt next. There are only three Hammonds in the Cobalt online directory. Only one couple about the age of people who have a nineteen-year-old daughter. Bingo.
I find the old Volkswagen Jetta, which Kit and I used to drive in high school, under a tarp in the garage. There is still a Jetta key on a pineapple-shaped ring by the back door, and I grab it, praying the car’s battery isn’t dead. It isn’t, but a mile out of my neighborhood, I notice the gas light blinking. I pull into a station and hunch by the gas pump. Rain is blowing sideways, and fog is so thick that the minimart, only a few yards from where I’m standing, is eerily invisible.
“Hopefully, you’re going somewhere worth it in this weather.”
I jump and turn. A shadow of a man stands on the other side of the gas pump, hat pulled low and the top of his coat resting just below his nose. All I see are his dark eyes. I glance over my shoulder at the spookily empty parking lot. There’s barely a car on the highway.
I grab the gas pump and wrench it from my tank, figuring I’m full enough to at least speed away. But then the figure steps closer. “Willa. It’s Paul.”
He takes off the hat, and I see the mop of brown hair, those haunting eyes. I breathe out shakily. “Oh. S-Sorry.” My heart is still pounding.
“Where are you driving in this?” He gestures to the fog. “It’s not exactly LA weather.”
“I’ll be fine.” My fingers shake as I screw on the gas cap.
“Going anywhere good?”
An eighteen-wheeler barrels past, sending a splash of water dangerously close to our bodies. With his hat off, Paul looks vulnerable and almost small, but I’m still uneasy. Did he just randomly find me here, or has he been following me?
But that’s crazy. Paul’s an old acquaintance. Years ago, I would have died for a chance to hang out with him. I clear my throat. “I’ve decided to stay on for a while until Kit gets back on her feet. But to keep myself from going stir-crazy, I’m doing some sleuthing.”
He grins. “So you’re taking my advice, then.”
“I guess so.”
Paul glances at the highway again. “I don’t know where you’re off to, but you really should have someone driving who knows how to drive in this kind of rain.”
I place my hands on my hips. “Dude, I grew up here. I’ve probably hydroplaned more times than you have.”
“Okay, and there’s also the fact that there’s a killer on the loose, and no one should be alone.”
“I can handle myself,” I tell him.
Paul sticks out his lip in a pout. “I’m trying to come up with excuses for you to invite me along, but it’s not going so well.”
The wind shifts, and all I smell is gasoline, a scent I’ve never liked. Why is Paul so eager to hang out with me? “Do you want to protect me . . . or do you want to help poke around my sister’s husband’s murder case?”
“All of the above.” Paul shrugs. “Look, I just got a big check for some freelance work, so I have a few days off. And I’ve always wanted to investigate a murder. And, well, I’d love for you and me to catch up.”
His eyes meet mine, and I feel a flutter. But then I look away. It takes me a while to answer. I kind of want to make him sweat. “Fine,” I say, “as long as you know it might not be very interesting.”
“I know.”
“And the cops might actually be really pissed at me, if they find out.”
“I’m fully prepared for angry cops.”
“Okay . . .” I glance at what I presume is his car, a blue Chevy, at one of the other pumps. “You want to ride with me, or do you want to follow?”
No surprise: Paul says he’ll ride with me. He moves his car into a regular parking space, then climbs into my passenger seat—there’s no way I’m playing damsel in distress and letting him drive. We pull out of the lot, the windshield wipers groaning to deflect the driving rain, the fog so thick we can only see the taillights of cars once we’ve almost crashed into them. Still, I white-knuckle it through the tunnel, and once we’re in the city, the fog isn’t quite as bad.
“So where are we off to?” Paul asks.
“Cobalt—up north. I think the woman Greg was sleeping with has family there, and I want to ask them some questions.”
His eyebrows shoot up. “You mean e-mail girl? Lolita?”
“Sort of.” I’m not sure I trust him enough to go into Sienna’s role in the e-mails, so I say, “Kit’s daughter is certain he was having an affair, and I have a strange feeling it might be one of her friends. Her name’s Raina Hammond.” I search his face, seeing if Raina’s name rings a bell. He’s Greg’s ghostwriter, after all. But Paul just blinks. “Thanks to the hack, I was able to look into her. There are a lot of things about her that don’t add up. So that’s why I’m going to check out her family.”
As we cross another bridge and get on the highway that runs parallel to the city and leads us to the northbound roads toward Cobalt, we discuss Raina: her good looks, her lies about being a student at Aldrich, and her strange behavior, including the naked, unapologetic grief when she came over the morning after Greg was found murdered. “It just seemed odd,” I murmur. “She’s his stepdaughter’s friend. It wasn’t appropriate emotion.”
“Yeah, but if she killed him, would she have carried on like that?” Paul asks.
The heat is blowing into my face, so I lower it a bit. “Unless she thought acting distraught was a good cover.”
“Yeah, but you really think a nineteen-year-old girl is capable of murder?”
A fresh bout of rain pounds us, and I hit the stalk for the windshield wipers. “I don’t know. But I feel like she’s involved somehow. Sienna was so adamant to keep her out of the conversation. Maybe she was protecting her.”
“Have you looked up Sienna’s e-mails in the hack? Maybe she and Raina talk about it there.”
I nod, careful not to say anything about how Sienna was Lolita. “There’s nothing about Raina. No secrets whatsoever, actually.”
Paul runs his hand over his hair. “I’m glad I wasn’t hacked. I’m beyond careless with my e-mail. It really puts things in perspective.”
“You?” I glance at him. “Got anything juicy about local rock bands you cover?”
“Nah.” Paul shrugs noncommittally. “Just angry divorce stuff, mostly.”
His face clouds over. I want to ask him about his divorce, but it’s a level of intimacy I’m not ready for. In fact, even this—letting a near stranger into my car for a long drive up north—is usually too intimate for me. LA Willa would never have done such a thing. The past shapes much of why that is, but it’s also that I’ve been such a loner for so long, I’m more comfortable doing things by myself. When I’m alone, I don’t need to be anyone I’m not. I don’t need to search for things to say. I don’t need to have to anticipate reactions—or, in the worst-case scenario, be caught off guard by total changes in character.
“I can’t believe you remember that dinner at the Indian place,” Paul suddenly says.
I turn to him. “You can’t believe I remember it?”
He smiles. “It was so long ago. And I never heard from you afterward, so I figured it didn’t mean much to you.”
I’m so surprised that I burst out laughing. “I think you have some of the details wrong.”
He cocks his head. “How so?”
I let my gaze rest on a Massachusetts license plate ahead of us. The dinner Paul is talking about was an end-of-the-year lit mag celebration at Tandoori, an Indian restaurant in Blue Hill. Paul and I happened to get there at the same time, and we walked in together. As though sensing my greatest longings, he chose a seat next to me at the table, and we spent the evening talking. It was a funny, dazzling, seventy-two minutes of bullshitting about music and writing and his upcoming sojourn to Princeton, and how uncool most people were, and how there really weren’t ve
ry many people worth talking to. It was one of those times when I was completely aware of the magic I was experiencing as I was experiencing it; I descended further and further into nostalgia as each course arrived, knowing that once everything was eaten, we would be one step closer to the meal’s end. When our advisor, Mr. Hand, finally paid the check, I prayed that Paul would ask me to take a walk so we could continue talking. But then his mom showed up, and he ducked into the car with a crinkly smile, saying he’d see me around this summer.
I daydreamed about that dinner afterward. I picked apart everything Paul said to me. I tried to figure out everything I could about him—where he lived, what he was up to that summer—but because the Internet didn’t exist yet, it wasn’t easy. I prayed Paul would get my phone number from someone and call me, but it didn’t happen. At the end of that summer, he went to Princeton. That fall, a drunk driver killed my mom. I started going to the punk clubs Paul used to frequent—basically, I became the cool, spidery girls he used to date. Not that he was there to see it. Though by then I stopped caring what he thought. What anyone thought.
Not long after that, the thing happened that ruined me for good. In some ways, if I look back on it, that dinner with Paul was the last good day I had in this town. The last ray of sunshine.
“You didn’t call me,” I say now. I try to temper my emotions, keeping my gaze steady on the road. “Not the other way around.” And I waited, I wanted to add. God, how I waited.
Paul frowns. “Why was I supposed to call you? You could have picked up the phone, too.”
“But you were . . .”—I scramble for a word that doesn’t sound too adolescent—“you were the head of the magazine. You were older. You were going to Princeton. I figured you were busy.”
He crosses his arms over his chest. “I thought you were a feminist, Willa Manning.” And then he looks at me with hesitation, almost like he wants to say something more but he’s not sure. Whatever it is, he decides against it, shrugging and shutting his mouth and turning back toward the window again.
I study the way his hair curls over his left ear. Why hadn’t I just called him? My mind reels for bigger reasons, too. I think about what Paul just said. I thought you were a feminist. Which means he thought of me, period. I feel a bittersweet smile creep across my lips. I wish I’d known back then how I could have just called him. I wish I’d known he would have answered.
* * *
Cobalt hunches like a feral animal alongside the Allegheny River. The town’s main attraction seems to be a Dollar General, which stands next to a bunch of scrubby trees leading down to the river. Across the street is a hardware store that looks like it’s been open for a hundred years in a building that seems on the verge of collapse. The rest of the buildings in the row seem like set pieces on a studio back lot—their facades are convincing from afar, but up close they’re way too flimsy to be structurally sound. A very old sign marking boat rentals sags in the grass; a piece of paper pointing to a beer distributor is affixed to a stop sign with duct tape.
I pull onto a residential street. The houses are worn but occupied; a pink one a few doors down has cheerful Easter decorations peppered through the yard. “I wouldn’t have thought Raina would have come from here,” I murmur.
Paul nods, glancing at Raina’s Instagram page, which he managed to find after some digging. The page is private, so he can see only a tiny thumbnail of her profile picture, a close-up of Raina’s pretty face, red hair, and red lips. There’s something glam about the profile picture, something expensive. This is the kind of girl who’s told no one at snobby, class-obsessed Aldrich about her roots.
We step toward the house that’s listed in the name of Judy and Bill Hammond. When I ring the bell, a dog inside barks. I shift from foot to foot, shaking out my hands. I’m always nervous before doing an interview. I’m always afraid someone’s going to slam a door in my face.
The wooden door hefts open with a squeak. A redheaded woman with perky breasts and a thin gray T-shirt peers at us from behind a ripped screen. She has Raina’s oval face and bright eyes, though her skin is traversed with fine lines. With a little pampering, though, she’d probably be mistaken for Raina’s sister. “Help you?” She has the raspy voice of a smoker.
“Hi.” I step forward. “I apologize for bothering you, but you’re Mrs. Hammond, right? And you have a daughter, Raina?” The woman nods, looking nervous at the sound of Raina’s name. “We’re your daughter’s advisors at Aldrich University. We have some concerns about her, and we thought we’d come to see you in person to talk them over.”
“Wait.” Mrs. Hammond looks startled. “My daughter’s where?”
“Aldrich University.” Paul smiles. “In the city.”
Mrs. Hammond’s eyes wander between the two of us. She lets out a bark of a laugh. “Raina’s not at a university! That’s bullshit!”
I glance at Paul. “Yes, actually, she is,” Paul says.
“Do you mind if we come in?” I ask.
Mrs. Hammond stares at us hard but finally opens the door. Inside, the house smells like something meaty has just been microwaved. A small, fluffy dog barks from behind a baby gate in the kitchen. A man with thinning brown bedhead, wearing a shrunken Steelers jersey, ambles forward to scoop the animal up. His eyes narrow when he notices us standing on the patchy carpet. “Who’re you?” he growls.
“Guess where Raina is, Bill?” Judy puts her hands on her broad hips. “A university!” She says it like a punch line.
Mr. Hammond’s face sours. He gives a dismissive I-don’t-give-a-fuck gesture and stomps down the hall.
Judy Hammond turns back to us and shrugs. “He’s still sensitive about what happened.”
I feel a prickle of excitement. “What do you mean, what happened?”
“You want to sit down?” Judy walks over to a small, upholstered couch and clears off some magazines and laundry to make room. “Can I get you anything to drink? We got pop. And water. Coffee?”
“I’m fine, thanks.” I settle onto the couch. Paul sits next to me, declining a beverage, too. “So wait, you didn’t even know your daughter was in college?” I ask carefully.
“Nope.” Mrs. Hammond plops on a vinyl-upholstered recliner by the window. There’s something fragile about her, like she’s been broken and glued back together too many times. “She ran away in September. Just up and took off. We were worried sick. Bill, too, though he doesn’t like to admit it.” She clucks her tongue. “But college? Well, it’s much better than sticking around this place. Though how’s she paying for it?” Mrs. Hammond sweeps her arm around the shabby room. “We don’t got the money.”
Bingo. I glance at Paul, trying not to get too excited. I had a hunch Raina’s parents weren’t paying for college. “Maybe you could tell me a little more about the person she was when she lived here? And why she would have run away?”
Mrs. Hammond’s gaze lands on me, suddenly distrustful. “Who did you say you were again?”
“We help out with students who are adjusting to Aldrich life. Sort of like therapists.”
Mrs. Hammond turtles her chin. “Therapists,” she repeats disdainfully.
“Listen, if you have anything to tell us about her, we’d be grateful,” Paul urges. “Raina’s doing great in school. Really on track. You want her to do well, right? Come home an Aldrich grad?”
Mrs. Hammond stares at her fingernails. Her hands are chapped and raw, her nails nibbled to the quick. “Raina was always smart. Way too smart to stay in this place. All the industry left this town decades ago. Now all you can get here are dead-end jobs. A lot end up hooked on opiates, meth. Get caught doing random shit. Hauled into jail for DUIs. That’s who Raina was drawn to, but I could always tell she was smarter. She loved to read. And write. She was always writing stories.” She sighed wistfully, but then her expression turned bitter. “Good at telling stories, too. That’s what got her in troubl
e.”
“What do you mean?” I venture.
“I guess she wouldn’t have told you.” Mrs. Hammond won’t meet my gaze. “I doubt big-city smart people would find what she did particularly admirable.”
Paul rolls his ankle, and a joint cracks. “Is there something we should know about? We want to set her up for success at Aldrich. She has a lot of promise.”
A smile forms on Mrs. Hammond’s lips. “She does have promise, doesn’t she? But . . .”—she takes a breath—“her last few years of high school, Raina got into some . . . trouble. With this doctor fella. He’s one of the only prominent people in these parts, not that he’s from here—he just practices medicine at the hospital out here because someone has to do it.” She sweeps her arm to the left. “He owned a huge lodge a few miles away. It sits on about six hundred acres of hunting land.”
“And?” I ask.
“All of a sudden, Raina was coming home with a pretty new handbag, a new leather coat. I asked her where she got the money. She said she had some new job a few towns away, but I could tell she was lying.”
I’m trying hard not to look at Paul. It’s not hard to put the pieces together. “You think this man was giving her the money? This . . . doctor? Was Raina his . . .” I trail off, not knowing the appropriate word. Girlfriend? Sugar baby?
Judy Hammond sighs. “They were only together once. But as you probably already know, a grown man caught with a girl of sixteen is a criminal offense.”
“Raina was sixteen when this happened?” Paul bleats.
Mrs. Hammond nods soberly. “She knew that law like the back of her hand. Made that doctor pay her in exchange for her not going to the police. And he did.”