“I’ve got some girls. But you know all it takes is someone to get you alone for a minute.”
“If Suzanne suspends us, she might keep us in for the full thirty. We could be in for even longer if she doesn’t cancel it. You’ll have to watch your back every second.” Ryan was right. Suzanne had the authority to suspend us for thirty days while the police investigated, and if she still thought we were a risk, she could refer us to the Parole Board for a post-suspension hearing. That could take another ninety days.
“What about you?” I said. “Will you be okay?”
“I’ll be fine.” But he fingered the scar again, and I wondered if he also had enemies inside. For a second it was like we were kids again and he was showing me another bruise or cut that his dad had given him. I almost reached out to touch the scar, then curled my hand under the table, digging my fingers into my leg.
Ryan said, “The cops are going to tell you stuff about me, trying to turn us against each other like they did the first time.” We’d never spoken about our interviews, the lies the cops had told, but obviously they’d tried to screw with his head as well. It made me feel good, knowing that neither of us had thrown the other to the wolves. We’d stayed loyal. “It looks bad that I was talking to Cathy, but I didn’t hurt her. I wanted her alive.”
“I know.” And I did—though I couldn’t stop thinking about the anger in his face, the rage, how prison changes a person. How it changed me.
“I want to clear our names,” he said. “It’s not enough that we’re out. I want to be free, no bullshit parole conditions.” He paused, looking at my face. He was gauging my reaction, testing me. “I want it how it used to be.”
The words hung in the air, an invisible cord that pulled me closer. I caught my breath. I knew what he really meant. I felt myself on the edge, wanted to give over to it, wanted to get up and walk around the table and sit in his lap like when we were kids. But something held me back. Fear held me back.
“A lot’s changed over the years, Ryan. We grew up.”
“Haven’t you heard?” A bitter smile. “No one grows up in prison.”
I had heard that. I’d heard it a lot, but it wasn’t true for me. I felt like I’d aged a thousand years. My skin weighed me down. I imagined it sliding onto the table, puddling on the floor, wanted to climb back into it like a sleeping bag.
Ryan’s voice pulled me out of my thoughts. “What if we could go back in time?”
“If we could go back in time I never would’ve gone to the lake that night. If we hadn’t taken Nicole, she’d still be alive.” It was the hard, painful truth that I lived with every damn day and that beat in me like another heart.
Ryan nodded and sighed, his shoulders slumping as he sat back in his chair. After a moment, he said, “I’ve been talking to some people we went to school with and found someone else who was at the lake that night, at that party we saw down below. Her name’s Allison—she was a year younger than us. She said she told the cops back then that she saw a white car like Shauna’s tear out of there that night, just after eleven. I asked which cop and she said it was Hicks. He told her she wasn’t a reliable witness because she was drunk. Then he kept asking her stuff until she said she wasn’t sure what she saw.”
I remembered the girls’ testimony at the trial, how they said they’d been at the lake earlier, saw me fighting with Nicole around ten, not long after we got there, then they left before ten-thirty. The police figured Nicole had been murdered around eleven. So if Allison saw a white car later, that backed up the girls being involved.
Ryan was still talking. “I figure because Shauna’s dad’s a cop, they didn’t even consider that she and her friends could’ve been involved.”
If the girls had been hunting for me, or saw Ryan’s truck and decided to screw with us but mistook Nicole for me in the dark … We did look alike. Or maybe something had happened between all of them during those final weeks of summer. I had a flash of an image, the white car slowing down outside the house a few days before Nicole was killed. She’d said Shauna was away. Was that a lie?
“She’s willing to give another statement, but it’s not enough,” Ryan said. “Hicks was right—if she was drinking, she’s not a reliable witness. They’ll just say she got the time wrong.” He thumped his fist on the table. “I’ve got to find someone else willing to talk before Shauna kills any other witnesses.”
Or we got sent back to prison.