“No.” I shook my head. “I have to know. Keep going.”
Cathy and Kim refused to hit Nicole, but once she was dead they helped take off her clothes and drag her body to the water. Kim, hysterical by this point, wanted to go to the police, but Shauna said she’d be arrested as an accomplice. They all snuck back to Shauna’s, thinking that they could shower there, that her dad would be working late and no one would ever know. After the trial, Kim fled town and hoped to never come back, but then Shauna tracked her down and told her she had to return to help “clean things up.”
Rachel had confessed as well, saying Shauna had delivered the worst of the blows. Rachel had only hit Nicole in the body, never in the head, and she’d been terrified of Shauna. She was also charged with Nicole’s murder.
When the police searched Shauna’s home they found Nicole’s necklace in her jewelry box, with some trace evidence still on it. It made perfect, terrible sense that Shauna hadn’t been able to part with the gift, a symbol of her father’s betrayal and a trophy of her destruction of Nicole.
After Shauna was confronted with the evidence and the testimony of the other girls, she turned on her father. She hadn’t realized that he’d started fooling around with Nicole until later that July, when he begged off from an annual family camping trip, sending Shauna alone with her uncle and aunt. A week later she came home early and discovered her father in bed with Nicole. They’d fought and he swore he’d break it off, but that wasn’t enough for Shauna.
“What happened to Nicole’s clothes?” I said. “The tire iron?”
“They were in the trunk of the car—along with the girls’ bloody clothes. Shauna was supposed to get rid of them, but when McKinney came home in the morning, after the other girls had left, he noticed some sand on the car tires.”
“He realized they’d been at the lake?”
Suzanne nodded. “He confronted her, and she told him everything.” I could well imagine that fight, Shauna trying to hurt her father with all the vicious details of how she’d killed Nicole. “He dumped the tire iron into the ocean, burned the clothes, cleaned up the car, and they never spoke about it again until Shauna called him, saying that Cathy was starting to talk about that night.”
“Did Shauna kill her?”
“Looks like it was Frank McKinney. They found hair and DNA samples on some of his clothes. That might not have been enough, but a witness saw a man matching his description down at the pier the night she was killed.”
I remembered how Frank had defended sending us to jail. You two would have ended up there eventually.… Was that how he justified killing Cathy? She was just a drug addict? I wondered if Cathy had trusted him at the end or just needed the money for drugs so bad she threw caution to the wind. I sat back in my chair, thinking of Nicole, Cathy, Ryan, of all the ruined lives since that night, of all the ways Shauna’s hatred and jealousy had destroyed so many people over the years.
Suzanne said, “A lot to take in, I know.”
“You’re not kidding.” My mouth was parched, my head pounding. I grabbed one of the cans of Coke, opened it, and took a long swallow. When I was finished I put it down and looked at Suzanne across the table, remembering how tough she’d always been on me and wondering what was going on with her now. Was it guilt?
“Why are you really here, Suzanne?”
She looked around at the other inmates and their visitors, then back at me.
“Lots of my parolees over the years have claimed they’re innocent.…” I held my breath, waiting. “You’re the first one I believed.”
I was glad she’d said it but still angry that I’d been caught up in a system where it didn’t matter what Suzanne believed, the law had decided I was guilty and she had to make sure I followed the rules. But there was something else, something she wasn’t saying—I could see it in the way she was looking at me, like she was waiting for me to connect the dots. I thought of all the times she urged me to stay away from Ryan, reminded me over and over.
“Did you know Ryan and I were meeting each other?”
“Of course not. I would’ve suspended your parole immediately.” Her face was serious, but she held my gaze a minute too long.
She pointed to my half-eaten chocolate bar.
“Are you going to finish that? Men don’t like skinny chicks.”
I smiled at her.
*