Ginny is watching me expectantly. I feel like a dam inside me is about to break.
So I tell her everything. I start with the letters in Tom’s drawer and how they led me to Jen’s cell phone and Ethan’s phone number. I recap my meeting with Daphne and all the inconsistencies about the murders. Ethan’s warning that Tom is hiding something.
Ginny eyes me while I speak, a look on her face that I can’t quite pin down. I think of Rachel’s reaction the other day when I asked her if she thought everything that happened that year wasn’t a coincidence.
“I know it sounds ridiculous,” I say. “But my sister—I never believed it, that she would kill herself over her friends dying. And maybe that makes me sound like I’m in denial or something, but this stuff with Ethan McCready—him calling her the morning she died…I don’t know.” I take a breath. “It can’t be a coincidence.”
Ginny mulls this over. She rearranges her feet so she’s sitting cross-legged. “You know that theory about a butterfly flapping its wings could cause a tsunami or a tornado across the world?”
I nod. “It sounds familiar. Like, something small can happen and set off a bigger reaction.”
“Yeah,” Ginny says. “The opposite of a coincidence.”
I tug at a blade of grass tickling my ankle and wrap it around the tip of my finger. Ginny’s simple explanation has parted the jumble of thoughts clouding my brain. I don’t know why I didn’t think of the possibility sooner—that the deaths aren’t a bunch of dots waiting to be connected, but a single series of events, set into motion by something that fall.
But what happened? How am I supposed to find the exact spot where a butterfly flapped its wings five years ago?
And how am I supposed to believe anything Ethan says—how he was friends with Jen, how I shouldn’t trust Tom—when according to Mr. Ward, he wanted her dead?
* * *
—
Tom’s car is in the driveway when I get home from practice. The spot in the garage where my mother parks her SUV is empty. I remember her saying something about Meet the Teacher night at Petey’s school. She left a Chinese takeout menu on the kitchen island.
Ethan McCready was expelled for making a hit list that would have had Juliana’s and Susan’s names on it. A couple of weeks later, they were murdered.
There’s no way Tom wouldn’t have made the connection between Ethan McCready and the girls. Principal Heinz would have gotten the police involved if one of his students had made a hit list.
The case against Jack Canning was convincing, but it wasn’t airtight. I need to know if Ethan was ever a potential suspect; the problem is that the person who can tell me for sure is probably the last person who wants to talk about the possibility that someone other than Jack was the killer.
Tom’s office door is closed. He usually keeps it open while he works. I ignore the paranoia needling me and knock.
“Come in.”
I open the door and find Tom hunched over his computer. He’s clicking through photos of a Honda Civic with a smashed-in bumper. He minimizes the window and swivels his chair around. “Hey, kid. Wanna call in dinner? I’m getting hungry.”
“Sure.” I nod to his computer. “What were you looking at?”
Tom rubs his eyes. “A hit-and-run from last month. Been bugging me.”
“I thought you weren’t supposed to take your work home with you.”
“When you do what I do, the work is never done.” Tom studies me. “You all right? Mom says you haven’t been yourself.”
“I don’t know,” I say, combing over my words carefully before they leave my mouth. “There’s something I want to talk to you about.”
Tom’s eyebrows lift. Whatever he expected me to say, it wasn’t that. “Sure. What’s on your mind?”
“Do you know a kid named Ethan McCready?”
“Ethan McCready?”
“He was in Jen’s grade. He got expelled that fall for threatening to kill cheerleaders.”
“You mean the hit list kid? I sent people to his house. He didn’t even own a gun.” Tom frowns. “I didn’t know you knew about that. Your mom and I didn’t talk about it around you or your brother because we didn’t want to upset you.”
“Did you know Ethan wrote Jen a creepy stalkerish poem?” I ask.
Tom stops bouncing the leg crossed over his knee at the ankle. “Did Jen tell you that?”
I hesitate. “I found it in her stuff.”
Tom holds up a hand. “You went through Jen’s things? When?”
“What does that matter?” Anger flares in me at the tone of his voice—like he’s suggesting I dug up my sister’s grave to get that poem.
“It would matter to your mother,” Tom says. “Monica, this month is going to be hard enough for her as it is.”
“You think it’s not hard for me? For the rest of us?”
“Don’t raise your voice. And that’s not fair—you know I didn’t mean this isn’t hard for you too.” Tom looks at his lap, pinching the bridge of his nose. When he picks his head up, he looks exhausted. “I don’t see what your end goal is here. I don’t know what you want from me.”
I bite back the urge to scream: I want you to stop acting like you’re hiding something. I want to ask him why he had Jen’s phone and whether he knows Ethan McCready was the last person to talk to her.
“Don’t you get it?” I ask. “Ethan wanted all the cheerleaders dead, and then Juliana and Susan were just randomly murdered?”
“Monica,” Tom says. “Ethan McCready weighed a hundred ten pounds soaking wet.”
“So?”
Tom leans back in his chair, the leather upholstery farting under his weight. He watches me for a moment before saying, “Susan and Juliana were strangled.”
“I know that.”
“They were very fit girls. Between them, they had about twenty pounds of muscle on Ethan. Do you know how much strength it takes to strangle someone?”
My stomach puckers as I fight off the instinct to picture a pair of hands wrapping around Susan Berry’s neck. “No.”
“Ethan had limbs like toothpicks. Susan could have broken his arms with her eyes closed,” Tom says. “The girls were overpowered. Their killer was much bigger than them.”
“You mean the killer was Jack Canning’s size.”
Tom’s eyes flash with a warning. “This isn’t a conversation I want to have anymore.”
“Well, I do. Ethan was in love with Jen.” My throat goes tight. “What if he decided that if he couldn’t have her, he’d go after her friends? What if he knew she was supposed to be at Susan’s that night, and he went there and—”
“Monica!” The force of Tom’s voice almost blows me back. My stepfather has yelled at me maybe once in the past ten years.
I know he realizes it, too, because he winces. “The person who killed Susan and Juliana is dead. He’s not going to hurt anyone ever again. If someone is telling you otherwise, send them to me and I’ll set them straight.”
My stepfather isn’t a stubborn man. It’s why it’s scary how sure he is that he had a reason to shoot Jack Canning.
“Monica. Look at me.”
I do. Tom forces a smile. “Okay?”
The pit in my stomach widens. “Okay.”
On my way out the door, he tells me to order him some General Tso’s chicken. His voice is measured, cheery. Letting me know that he’s willing to forget this conversation, as long as I never say the names Ethan McCready or Jack Canning to him again.
FIVE YEARS AGO
SEPTEMBER
Juliana had big plans for sophomore year. They had shed the label of annoying freshmen; last year’s seniors who wouldn’t even look their way were gone, replaced with upperclassman boys who stole glances at them even while their arms were around their girlfriends’ waists.