Andrew was still talking, saying something about Henry. Then he was carrying things past her. Books. He was moving the books. She should help. But her body wouldn’t work. She blinked at the ceiling, listening to the chuff-whir of that motor, going over everything she’d just heard, trying to make sense of it.
You’ve gone through this before, with James.
What if it was the son and not the father? Because James was a senior, applying to colleges, and if he was even accused of something like that—
His chances are good, I think. With everything taken care of now.
Her mind raced. James instead of John. What had James done? Attacked a girl? What girl? Not Amy. Ken had said a teenager, and besides, the police were still investigating Amy’s death.
Thanks again, Grant.
But they’d stopped investigating the attack on this other girl. Because Pechman had asked them to.
Then she remembered another voice, Henry’s in the car, trying to soothe her, trying to tell her that Amy might not have been a victim…maybe she just saw something, overheard something.
Was that how Amy had come into it? Because she’d known something not about Pechman but about his son?
Not a victim, Henry had said. But a witness. A witness to an attack on a teenage girl, and the investigation was done, over before it had even started, but Amy would have changed that. Made it something other than a he-said-she-said, something that couldn’t be shoved away or dismissed.
Can you think of a better way to silence someone?
Had Pechman done it? Or had James? Or had they done it together? The father and the son—and the Holy Ghost, she thought. It made her want to laugh and scream at the same time.
“Catherine, come on.”
Andrew was trying to get her up.
“We have to go,” he said.
“Henry,” she said as Andrew helped her to her feet.
“He said he could give us fifteen. No idea how, but it’s been about that. We have to go, now.”
“Now,” she echoed.
“Can you hold on to me?”
She nodded and put her left arm around Andrew’s shoulder and leaned into him, her legs shaking under her. Her hand fell onto his arm below his T-shirt. His skin was cool against her burning fingers. Gingerly, as though she were a skittish horse, he slid his right arm around her waist.
“I’m sorry,” she told him as he helped her out of the room and into the hallway. He kept looking around. They were walking carefully, quietly, but she could tell he wanted to move faster, that he was going slowly because of her.
“For what?”
“For hitting you the other day.”
He gave a choking sort of laugh. “Don’t worry about it.”
She looked at his profile and could barely see the cut. Or was it on his other side? She couldn’t remember.
“It was nice of you, to get my coat.”
“It was nothing.”
“No, it—”
“Catherine.” His arm tightened around her waist for a brief moment. “Don’t give me too much credit.”
She frowned at him. They were past Pechman’s office, turning down another hallway. No one seemed to be around. She guessed New Year’s Day was a weird time to be wandering around a church—unless you had ulterior motives.
“Fine,” she said, a little mutinous. “Partial credit, then.”
“Is it at least pass/fail?”
She snorted and then covered her mouth with her free hand. She felt woozy, almost drunk with tiredness. “What’s your major, anyway?”
“Undecided—”
“Hey, me too.”
“—but I’m leaning toward journalism now.”
“Why?”
A shrug. “You can catch the bad guys like cops do, but you don’t have to…”
“Do dangerous stuff like this.”
“Actually, yeah.”
She laughed again and her legs shook. She hoped Andrew knew where he was going because she had no clue. “He didn’t do it, by the way. Pechman. Or, at least, not just him. James did something, to someone else. And Pechman covered it up. Somehow.”
Unsurprisingly, Andrew looked confused at that. “What exactly did you hear in there?”
“That his son attacked someone. And he—Pechman—went to the police and, I don’t know, smoothed it over somehow. So James wouldn’t get in trouble and he’d be able to go to a good college.”
“Smoothed it over how?”
She hesitated—Andrew was close with Bob, after all—then said, “He was talking to the cops on the phone before Ken showed up. It was that guy from the station. Grant. Pechman was talking to him about James, how things were taken care of now. Thanking him.”
Andrew’s arm tensed around her again as he led her down yet another corridor. “You think Amy—”
“No. But I think she might have known about it. And I think they might have known she knew something.” A pause. “James was looking for Henry at the gathering for Amy at the church. The day she died.”
He stopped at that and turned to look at her head-on. “What are you saying?”
“I don’t know. But maybe the cops aren’t the only people here doing something shady. No offense.”
Andrew blew out a breath. “Henry has an alibi.”
“What?”
“An alibi. For the time of Amy’s death.”
“How in the world do you even know that?”
“Because we have the TOD now—sorry, time of death. Nine to eleven. Bob told me. And Henry and I were talking and…” His voice trailed off.
“You asked him for his alibi?”
“Well, he asked me for mine first.”
Catherine barely succeeded in holding back a laugh. Andrew, in his irritation, suddenly looked about ten years old.
“I’m not saying anything like that,” she told him, bemused by the idea of the two boys interrogating each other out of sheer dislike in a maintenance closet. “What I’m saying is that with Henry knowing James—it might be useful. Henry could talk to him, at the very least.”
Andrew was looking at her strangely. They were very close together, and in the dim light he looked unnaturally pale, like a creature who couldn’t come out in the sun. A vampire in some Gothic novel. It made her think of high school, that one class she’d had with Henry.
Senior year. AP English literature. Gothic novels. All tall, looming houses and strange, ancient creatures. PowerPoint slides with titles like Decaying Architecture and An Atmosphere of Fear. It was a miracle she’d passed the test that May. She barely remembered any details from the books—SparkNotes had been a godsend—but she could remember with perfect clarity walking in that first day to see Henry sitting at a desk in the front. His eyes meeting hers, both of them giving a strange start of recognition. She’d chosen a seat several rows away from him, a sudden heat encircling her throat and shoulders like a shawl. That whole year she’d tried to get to class right before the bell and leave right after. She’d made determined conversation with the girl next to her, who she’d thankfully run winter track with the year before.
The memory of it made her feel sick with shame now. In the cabinet, she’d sent Henry a text saying help me. That was all. Two words. And barely a minute later, he’d come to her rescue. He hadn’t even wasted any time messaging her back. Forget the four years they’d been apart. It was like they had never happened.
But—
A lot could happen in four years.
Henry knew James. Had bought pills from him. Had spent time at his house. James had been looking for Henry at the church the day Amy’s body had been found. And she’d seen James talking to Henry again on Sunday, when she’d been talking with Pechman.
Did Henry know something?
“You really w
ant to do that?” Andrew asked her now, still giving her that strange, almost incredulous stare. “Ask this James kid if he has an alibi? Or get Henry to ask him?”
She leaned heavily against the wall. “Why not?”
Andrew shook his head at her. “Because this…this is bothering me. Sorry, okay? But I think we’ve taken enough risks for today. The entire year, in fact.”
Be careful out there.
“So you think we should stop?”
“I think,” he said slowly, “that you can barely stand up. And there are a bunch of police officers looking into this case. And whatever you heard in there…I get how it sounds. But I trust them. So, yeah. I think we should stop.”
She looked at Andrew. With his face so intent and focused, she could picture him as he must have looked driving to her house with her coat. She wondered what he’d thought about on the way. If he’d second-guessed himself, told himself he was being stupid and overdramatic and that what he was doing wasn’t necessary so he could turn around. She was sure he must have—but he also must have felt an obligation toward her, to finish the task that had, for whatever reason, been assigned to him. She knew the feeling. She felt it, to her core, about Amy.
Because there was something about being in charge of a child that changed how you saw the world and the choices you made in it. She’d never thought about seat belts that much until Amy was in her car, or muted swear words until they watched movies together. Hadn’t cared about raw eggs until baking with Amy in the sunlit kitchen, the yellow smear of egg yolk across a pink spatula. But Amy had brought out a primal vigilance in her, like a mother bird building a careful nest, or a lion crouching over its young.
Wasn’t it amazing, how a child jumped to the top of your list just by being there?
“Andrew,” she said. “I’m not going to stop. I’m going to ask Henry to talk to James. And if Henry won’t do it, believe me—I will.”
Andrew gave her an exasperated look, then glanced up and down the hallway.
“You look pissed,” she said. “Do you think I’m being stupid?”
“Yes,” he said. “But that’s not why I’m pissed.”
“Why, then?”
“Because I have no fucking clue how to get out of this place.”
She couldn’t help it; she laughed as she slid her arm around his shoulder again and they began to make their way down the hallway.
At the end of her first summer without Henry, she’d gone to the community pool with her girlfriends: breathless and dripping, white smears of cursory sunscreen on the backs of her arms, still talking about camp a little, about messages to the boy after she’d found him online, the one she’d kissed quickly during the scavenger hunt. Those messages were getting few and far between now, but that was fine. School was starting up soon. Life seemed endless and entirely hers. She’d padded over to her chair from the water and picked up her sun-warmed towel, only to see something small and white drift down to her feet. She picked it up, reading the words on it three times over before realizing what it was: the inside of a Reese’s cup candy, the white paper under the orange wrapper that held the two candies in their perfect black cups.
Whatever I did, I’m sorry.
Her head shot up, scanning the pool, every dunking head, each pair of splashing feet, but Henry—and it was Henry, she knew his handwriting as well as her own—had gone. He must have seen her across the pool, perhaps turning underwater handstands with Hania and Abbey, and he’d written the note on impulse on the white paper from the candy he’d gotten from the vending machine. Slipped it into the towel he’d seen her use a million times before. And then he’d left.
Catherine thought of that note now as she faced Henry across her kitchen table, feeling wary and determined at the same time. There was so much history between them, not all of it pleasant. More her fault than his, she knew. But now she wondered if Henry was really as innocent as she had thought, or if he was hiding something from her to protect a friend. She couldn’t stop thinking about James, racking her memory for anything even remotely related to him, and remembered Stephanie again, that cheerleader who had broken up with James last year. She’d been complaining about him in calculus class. What had she said? Something about how James wouldn’t stop texting her. Desperate, she’d called him. Did that mean something?
Well, she had the chance to talk to Henry about James now. At least that was something. It was an hour since they’d left the church. Andrew had dropped them off, then left for Bob’s house. Henry took her inside her empty house, with her mother at work and her dad out at a New Year’s antiques sale. Henry waited downstairs while she showered. A long shower she had to make herself leave. Her skin was red by the time she stepped out, the mirror completely steamed over. She towel-dried her hair and pulled on some college sweats, leaving her hair to drip into the hood of the sweatshirt. When she got downstairs, Henry had made coffee, and the kitchen felt homey and pleasant and a little unreal, like it was a set for a commercial and they were only actors.
She took a mug and sat down at the kitchen table. The coffee steamed. He pushed a carton of creamer toward her. She poured it. The silence wasn’t uncomfortable. It was like they were each waiting for the other to say something but it didn’t matter when it happened or who spoke first.
“Thanks,” she said finally. “For getting me out of there.”
“No problem.”
She wondered if he knew what she was thinking. As a child, he’d always sort of known. It had been the same for her, with him. But now he was a little harder to know; outwardly, he looked fine, but she could tell there was something underneath that stillness. She just wasn’t sure what it was.
“Are you mad at me?” he asked her.
“No,” she said.
“I thought you might be, since it was my idea.”
“No,” she said again.
“It was a lot, what you did.”
“I kind of had to.”
“Because of me?”
“Because of Amy.”
“Catherine,” he said, “what happened in there?”
She didn’t answer at first. Instead she drank her coffee, hot and perfect, until she’d finished it all, and then she told him everything.
In order. The waiting. The phone call. The meeting. Every word she could remember, the cadence of speech. She didn’t tell him what she made of it, the conclusions she’d drawn. She just waited in the silence that fell after she’d stopped talking, watching his face, trying to see behind his eyes.
“What are you thinking?” she asked him after nearly a full minute.
Henry cleared his throat. Ran a hand through his hair. “That’s—it’s a lot to take in.”
“It is.” She traced a finger along the rim of her mug. “I know you’re his friend.”
“What?”
“James. I know you’re his friend.”
“James?”
She nodded. “Do you know something?”
“About James?”
“No,” she said, a little impatiently. “About our savior Jesus Christ. Have you heard the good news? Yes, Henry, about James. I know he was looking for you the day Amy’s body was found and I know Pechman got the cops to cover up him attacking some girl—whatever that means—so yes, I’d like to know what you know about James. Because I think you were right when you said Amy was a witness, but I think she knew about something James did, not his dad.” A pause. “I meant to say that a lot more calmly than that.”
But Henry was grinning at her. “You usually do.”
“Shut up.” But a smile was tugging at her mouth as well. She squashed it. “So? Why was he looking for you after Amy died?”
Henry sighed and gave her a brief, searching look. “He was worried,” he admitted.
“Worried about what?”
Henry sat back. H
e wasn’t looking at her at all now. “He…he said something about how crazy this all was. How…how fast everyone got to the church. The crowd. He was upset about it.”
“Upset about Amy?”
“No,” Henry said slowly. “Not about Amy. Not exactly.”
“But you said he was upset, worried. About what?”
“I don’t know. All the attention, I guess. It wasn’t exactly the most restful holiday season.”
Catherine waited for more, but Henry was silent. She felt that bite of impatience again.
“What else did he say?”
“It’s not…It’s stupid. I don’t think—”
“Henry.”
“It was a joke. It literally just sounded like a joke.”
“What was the joke?”
He waved a hand. “He was saying something about this other murder he’d read about somewhere. Massachusetts, I think. How they thought the murderer was someone in the town, so they did a volunteer thing where people offered up their DNA. He made a joke about how the first place Nazi Germany comes to in America is New England.”
“Funny,” she said.
“I didn’t say it was a good joke.”
“They do have DNA,” she said. “Andrew—”
“Yeah, he told me, too.”
“Do you think it’s James? Do you think—?”
“Jesus, Catherine.”
“What? You can accuse his dad but not him?”
“Yeah, because Pechman isn’t in high school, and while Pechman’s shady as hell, James—”
“Wait, you’re saying James isn’t shady? Are you kidding?”
“He sells pills,” Henry said. “That’s hardly homicide.”
“Rape is pretty close.”
Henry shot her a look. “That’s what they said he did?”
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