Her voice trails off, because I see it: a picture of all the cheerleaders, huddled together, arms tucked around each other’s backs.
Tiny Juliana Ruiz is crouched in front of the group, hands in the pocket of her cheerleading hoodie, mouth stretched in a dizzying grin. Juliana’s giddiness was infectious. Jen said Juliana regularly got kicked out of class for her uncontrollable giggle fits. She always cheered the loudest at games, in a way that would be obnoxious if anyone else were doing it.
“Look what happened next,” Ginny says, voice low.
The rest of the pictures were snapped in succession, like a flipbook. In the next one, Juliana is retreating from the group of girls. Then she can be seen at the edge of the frame, standing by the fence separating the parking lot from the football field, cell phone in one hand, one finger hooked over the metal link. She’s not smiling. She may even be crying; it’s impossible to tell from the angle.
In the final shot, Juliana is standing at the fence, still, face in her hands.
I don’t know what to say.
“It’s probably nothing,” Ginny says quietly. “I just thought it was weird that she was crying…”
“And a few hours later, she was dead.” I bend my head closer to Ginny. “Is there a way I could look at all of these?”
“I can put them on a flash drive for you. Hold on.”
Ginny disappears into the back room. The ball of anxiety that’s taken up residence in my chest grows, and by the time Ginny returns with the flash drive, I’m so dizzy I have to put my head in my hands.
“What’s wrong?” she asks.
I look up at her. “My stepdad lied to me. When I brought up Ethan McCready, he acted like he didn’t remember his name. But his partner told me that Ethan lived in my old neighborhood and that Tom used to complain about him all the time.”
“You didn’t know Ethan lived near you?”
I shake my head. “A lot of kids lived in our neighborhood. I remember there was this group of boys who were kind of sketchy. Ethan could have been one of them but they definitely weren’t the type of kids my sister hung out with.”
Ginny takes a hamster-small bite of the sandwich she’s snuck out of her tote bag. On Mrs. Goldberg’s whiteboard, a sign reads NO FOOD IN THE ART LAB!!! in large letters. She chews and swallows. She almost looks as nervous as I do. Her voice is barely above a whisper when she finally speaks again.
“Your stepdad was the one who shot Susan Berry’s next door neighbor.”
“Yeah. He was.”
Neither of us says what I know we’re both thinking; something had upset Juliana earlier that night, before she and Susan got home and Jack Canning noticed they were by themselves. It might not be connected to the murders, but if it is…it means there’s a chance that Daphne was right and Juliana’s attacker was someone close to her.
It means there’s a chance that Tom killed an innocent man—and whoever did kill Juliana and Susan is still out there.
* * *
—
When I get home from practice, I deposit myself at my laptop. I plug in the flash drive Ginny gave me and sit back as the pictures load onto my hard drive.
Juliana Ruiz and her mom were closer than any mother-daughter pair I’d ever seen. When Juliana and Susan would spend a Saturday night at our house, Juliana would be up first thing in the morning so she could get breakfast with her mother before church.
One of my clearest memories is of Juliana, draped across our living room couch, musing out loud about which of the boys in their grade she’d like to kiss during spin the bottle at Susan’s thirteenth birthday party and which boys she’d kissed the year before. Jen clammed up the whole time, cheeks burning, because Mom was in the kitchen, within earshot.
“What?” Juliana said, rolling onto her stomach. “You don’t tell her everything? I tell my mom everything.”
Mrs. Ruiz might know what made Juliana cry earlier the night she was murdered. It could have been nothing serious—her homecoming date blowing her off, maybe. Either way, I need to know.
Googling Juliana’s parents’ name doesn’t yield anything: no address, no phone numbers, no emails. Just a couple of articles briefly mentioning Juliana’s murder. A few months after the murders, Mr. and Mrs. Ruiz sold their grocery store and moved closer to family in Westchester. The Berrys divorced shortly after they finally sold their house.
I step into my closet and dig out Jen’s phone; I’d buried it in my jewelry box, just in case Tom noticed it was gone and decided to come snooping up here. I scroll through the contacts, but Jen doesn’t have Mrs. Ruiz’s number.
My mother’s voice carries up the stairs: “Monica, we’re eating.”
“I’ll be down in a sec,” I yell. I click out of the windows on my laptop and sit back in my chair.
My mind swivels to the first anniversary of Jen’s death. That evening, my mom shut herself in her bedroom; I stood outside her door, listening to her murmurs, trying to figure out who she was speaking to on the phone. Tom had put a hand on my shoulder and steered me away; when I pointed out that Mom had been on the phone for almost an hour, Tom said, “She needs to talk to someone who’s been through the same thing.”
I slink out of my room and down to the end of the hall, listening for a break in the sound of the pots clanging and the oven timer beeping downstairs.
The door to the master suite is open a crack; I push my way in, the door purring against the carpet. The room is done up in cream—the paint on the walls, the carpet, the silky bedspread. It’s so bland, it’s disorienting. The only thing out of place is a pair of Tom’s jeans strewn across the chaise beneath the bay window.
Tom is not a chaise guy. The jeans on said chaise are from Costco. If Jen were here, she’d find the whole scene hilarious. She’d find this house hilarious.
My mother’s iPhone is on her nightstand, hooked up to its charger, where she always leaves it. I swipe a finger across the screen and enter her password—Petey’s birthday. Same as the security code to open the garage door. At least I know where I stand with my family.
I scroll through her contacts; I notice there is no one with the last name Berry or Steiger or Coughlin.
My mom may have lost touch with the other girls’ parents out of self-preservation, but Mrs. Ruiz wasn’t just a cheer mother. When Mrs. Ruiz came over to say goodbye before they moved, Mom clung to her and sobbed more than I’d seen her cry since Jen died.
And sure enough, at the bottom, there’s Tina Ruiz.
“What are you doing?”
I look up. Petey is in the bedroom doorway, index finger jammed in his ear, digging at earwax even though we’re always telling him that’s disgusting. I set Mom’s phone down. “What are you doing?”
“Telling you to set the table.” Petey cocks his head. “Were you on Mom’s phone?”
“Mind your own business.”
I know what he’s going to do the second his lips part. I rocket off the bed and cover his mouth with my hand, muffling his cry of Mah-OM. “There’s a twenty-dollar bill in my nightstand. Stay quiet and it’s yours.”
Petey shrugs out of my grasp and flounces into the hall. Moments later, I hear my bedroom door click open.
I shake my head and text Tina Ruiz’s number to myself from my mother’s phone, deleting the outgoing message when I’m done.
* * *
—
When the plates are cleared from the table, stray crumbles of taco meat scraped into the garbage, I head back up to my room. No one questions my antisocial behavior, and that’s fine. The more unpleasant my family thinks I am, the more likely they are to leave me alone to do whatever this is that I’m doing.
After I scratch out some answers to my pre-calc problem set, I sit cross-legged on my bed, palms damp with sweat. I rehearsed what I want to say, combed over every word, but it doesn’t make calling Mrs. Ruiz feel less wrong.
I stare at the number on my screen for a solid minute, my heartbeat mimicking a metronome. I swallow and hit the call button.
A woman picks up. “Hello?”
“Hi. Is this Mrs. Ruiz?”
“No, it’s Maria. Who is this?”