“Yeah.” Harry bobbed his head adamantly. “Dredging it up would scare Simon and make my mom sad again.”
Nah, hon, she’s nothing like you, just a runaway asking for it. I sat on my hands. On the morning after the blood moon ritual, when Harry and I had shared that we wanted to help Goldilocks, I told Viv and Graham about what Denton said. I described searching for evidence of Goldilocks in the Ghost Tunnel. I admitted the truth about the scar on my shoulder—that it wasn’t a souvenir from my grandmother’s near-feral cat. Viv had run her shaking finger over its ridge.
Graham removed his glasses and cleaned them on his shirt as he slowly shook his head. “Everything the cops and city hall said was an excuse not to investigate.”
Viv piped up. “First the cops said she wasn’t offed in Seven Hills, just dumped here.”
“The police didn’t even tell anyone about how the girl was staged until the newspaper received a photo taken of the crime scene and they had no choice but to comment on it,” Harry interjected.
I hunched forward, intent.
“Indeed,” Graham said, his fingers fussing with his shirtsleeves. “The newspaper said they suspected that the picture had been taken by a first responder on the scene, and that whoever had taken the photo released it once it was clear that the police weren’t being forthcoming with the town.” I could remember the EMTs and firemen and -women who arrived to check on Goldilocks. Yes, if anyone would have been outraged and shocked by the police’s apathy, it would have been a rescue worker. “The cops told everyone it was just a body dump, and then once word of the photograph and the bizarre paw prints spread, they changed their tune and floated an additional theory. She was a part of some wannabe Satanic cult of teenagers that came to Seven Hills to hump and drink on our rock. Their fun turned deadly and one of their own ended up dead before they fled town. A theory that completely disregards the fact that the girl had a massive bruise on her torso, likely from a car hitting her before she was strangled. But the police were probably aware of that fissure in their story. If you ask me, that impact bruise is the damning evidence. There was no one person or someones obsessed with the occult or our meteorite. The whole crime was spur of the moment. Not ritual at all.”
“Whatever theory the cops tried to sell,” Viv said, “they were adamant that Goldilocks either didn’t die here or the killers weren’t from here. No reason to look further. They said there were no leads so they couldn’t pursue him or them. The mayor made a speech. Remember? She was all ‘Life in Seven Hills is precious and outsiders can’t wait to ruin it.’?”
“I remember her saying, ‘We have to stick together.’ She kept repeating it. ‘If we stick together, there’s nothing to fear,’?” Graham mocked her robust voice.
“She came to talk to the three of us the day after we found the body,” Viv said. “The sneaky witch wanted us to keep quiet about the girl’s shirt being cut open. How she had wings. She didn’t want us to ruin their little cover-up. Maybe she thought if people knew about the wings, they’d be more frightened and doubt that it was an accidental and isolated killing. If it had something to do with the rock and the killer was in Seven Hills, couldn’t it happen again? They couldn’t let people panic thinking that.”
I winced remembering her visit. Why hadn’t Mom and Dad sent the mayor away? They should have told me, Talk about it. You’re not alone. Instead I heard, Keep it to yourself. Don’t spread rumors. In the weeks after, their fights grew more intense. Dad spent more nights at hotels. And when they weren’t fighting they sat on opposing sides of their drafting table in the office, working on architectural plans in silence.
Harry said, “It was right before Carver’s reelection. My mom volunteered to work on her campaign to meet people.”
“A murder investigation would have been bad luck for her,” I said. I avoided Mayor Carver when I saw her around town with her constant companion, a bougie golden Labradoodle that wore argyle sweaters during the winter months, but I hadn’t aligned her with Denton in my head until now.
“Yeah, especially if the police were investigating Mayor Carver’s neighbors,” Harry said. Mayor Carver lived only a couple blocks away. “With no clues, the cops probably would have had to go door-to-door asking for alibis and info,” Harry further reasoned. “It would have been our neighborhood they canvassed.”
“Parents would have freaked if they thought there was a murderer still on the loose,” Viv said, feigning a shudder.
“That’s why the police and city hall were so adamant that the perp didn’t live here. That whoever killed Goldilocks had moved on once the crime was committed, all to keep people calm,” Graham said, fist hitting his palm.
Harry was nodding. “Tourists wouldn’t care that our beach is nice or our restaurants are bomb if there was a widely publicized murder investigation.”
“Maybe people would have stopped moving here,” Viv said. “Like those families who moved into the new development Conner’s dad built a few years ago.”
“Mayor Carver, Denton, Sebastian Welsh, people who have shops and restaurants,” I said, “all had reasons to want a murder investigation shut down.”
“To never start at all,” Harry said.
We hadn’t uncovered a deeply buried secret, and yet, because we’d never talked about why the girl’s murder had gone uninvestigated, our realization became the fifth member of our group. We were quiet thinking about what it screamed.
I was a big reason we didn’t usually talk about Goldilocks. I had shut down twelve-year-old Graham when he tried to convince me to solve the case ourselves. When he had complained that I had stopped reading mysteries with him. His curiosity was a reminder of my own.
“Our next rebellion should be aimed at PC Denton and Mayor Carver,” Graham said. Aimed like you aim a weapon. “We exposed Bedford. Now we’ll expose Denton and Carver.”
“Revenge,” Viv sang, and clapped her hands.
“More like takedowns,” Graham told her.
“Can’t we give them a new lead to follow?” Harry said. “Like you tell them about going up to the tunnel, Izzie.”
Graham blustered, “Izzie’s story is too easy to dismantle. No offense, Izzie, but you were twelve and you’d just found a dead body. Who’d listen? Everything you know was told to you by a bum who attacked you.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “She wasn’t a bum.”
He implored with his hands. “Bum. Runaway. Weird girl who travels around squatting in tunnels—it’s hearsay and unreliable. A girl with a blade? The cops might even blame her.” He held a finger in the air. “There are over two hundred thousand unsolved homicides in the United States, and I read that only one in twenty cold cases result in an arrest, and only one in one hundred in a conviction. Shit odds. The Order can’t make it solvable. But we can make Carver and Denton pay for not solving it when they had a shot.”
“Uh, hello, revenge,” Viv said, waving both hands.