“Where’s Viv?”
I dropped my feet and lifted to see the stage. Deserted.
“What the?”
“Did you fall asleep?”
“No, it’s been like two minutes,” I said, reaching for my cell. “Twenty.”
“Sometimes she goes out the back,” he said.
“She must not have seen me.” I frowned faintly at how pathetic I sounded.
“Harry got called off from work. He’s waiting in the car.”
Graham scooped up my bag before I got to it.
I texted Viv while walking to Graham’s car. Harry sat on the trunk, headphones on, mouthing the words until he saw us approach.
“You guys just missed her,” he called. “Viv said to tell you she’s going to the mall with Jess. Dance dress shopping.”
I stopped walking. I held up my cell. Why hadn’t Viv texted me? Invited me? I could play a role in her revenge scheme.
Graham clapped a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t take it personally.”
I brushed his hand off. “Easy for you to say. You’re going to homecoming with her, riding in the limo. You probably won’t want to be my friend once Jess recruits you for her axis of jadedness.” My frown wavered. Graham grinned goofily. Harry bent laughing. What I’d said was that absurd. Graham would never ditch me; neither would Vivy—not for real.
The three of us stopped at Cup of Jo for supplies before heading to the barn. Without Viv present, the barn remained our territory.
The boys sprawled on the rug with laptops and notebooks between them. I was hungry after my chai latte and the barn’s fridge was empty except for mustard, a can of whipped cream, and cider.
I tapped on the French doors of the main house’s kitchen. Before Ina’s diagnosis, she had worked as a pediatrician at the big hospital over the hill. Recently she’d started to see patients at the tiny clinic in Seven Hills, her schedule unpredictable. I hadn’t seen her car in the driveway. Scott would be at his office downtown. I let myself in.
I had a wheat cracker in my mouth when I spotted the brown jacket on the dining chair. Soft brown canvas, brass buttons, a collar you could pop up or fold down. Water resistant. A hidden pocket in the lining. A gift to my dad on his last birthday. From me. I stopped chewing.
The floorboards on the level above whined.
I flew out of the house, forgot to lock the door behind me, probably didn’t close the fridge. I slipped on the pool deck wet from a sprinkler’s runoff, the box of crackers dropping and skidding short of the deep end. A jolt in my elbows as I caught myself.
I collected the crackers. My eyes watered. I paused under the trellis covered in dainty white blooms and ignored a fat black bumblebee streaking close to my ear.
The math was plain. If Dad was at Viv’s, and Viv and Scott weren’t home, Dad was with Ina. Alone. Upstairs. An affair. That word teemed with melodrama. I kicked the trellis, dislodging a shower of white snowflakes.
I was picking the flowers from my hair as I rejoined the boys.
Desperate to stop thinking about Dad and Ina, I started talking about the teachers I planned to request recommendations from and how I wished I’d done more extracurriculars other than my lone season of track and field freshman year and that one meeting of the Steampunk Fashion Club Viv dragged me to. “But I hate staying at school after class. I want to go home. Read. Be here. Do homework.”
“Izzie?” Graham said.
I looked up from the blameless pillow I’d been squeezing to death.
“I have a confession.”
He and Harry had been passing the can of whipped cream back and forth, and Graham had a tiny dollop on his top lip.
“I’m the one who left the picture of Jane Doe—your Goldilocks—for the newspaper.”
I sagged into the foot of the sofa. “What?” I said, as Harry murmured, “How?”
Graham took a deep breath, gave a little nod, and plunged in with a practiced shine to his performance. “I was on the rock alone for a while as we waited for the grown-ups to arrive. I kept the vulture away. I got caught up. This sounds deranged, I realize. But kids get excited by macabre stuff. Finding Jane Doe was huge. I wanted a souvenir. You wait for something that big and insane. Like one of our mystery or adventure books. It happened to us twice. The rock and the girl. But then a couple days passed and still no word about the T-shirt and rock wings from anyone. Mom said the authorities didn’t want to make the crime seem sensational. They didn’t want people thinking a killer was on the loose looking to sacrifice girls. Mom knew better than to believe that.” The sincerity in his eyes shifted to smugness. “She knew that if it had been a ritual killing, it would have been more authentic, actual feathers or birds, not a hasty copycat using what was there and easy. She thought Goldilocks wouldn’t have been the first victim or the last.”
Graham stared at his hands as he continued, “I was ashamed over the picture on my phone. Horrified I’d taken it. I thought maybe I could use it for good? I slipped it under the newspaper’s door. Once I was acting, it was hard to stop. I had the idea to leave the prints in the dirt around the rock.” I coughed deliberately to cover up my gasp. “Like the animals in the cave drawings had come to life and circled it. Make it look even more sensational. Draw more attention. I thought it would frighten the cops into investigating. I never imagined they’d weave a story about a few kids and a séance or something getting out of control.”
His eyes were as round as his spectacle lenses. How could I judge Graham for keeping a secret about Goldilocks when I’d also kept one? Graham had been trying to manipulate the police into paying her death more attention. Trying to make the town pay attention. I also understood what it was like to be caught up in a mystery. If I’d really wanted nothing to do with Goldilocks, I wouldn’t have looked for her face online. Wouldn’t have hiked up to the tunnel.
The police hadn’t searched the orchard the day we found Goldilocks and so they assumed the prints had been there, along with her body. Her death and the animal prints were linked by proximity. In the cops’ two scenarios, Goldilocks’s wings were either her killer’s effort to make his ordinary crime seem ritualistic or just part of the pageantry created by teen runaways acting out a sacrificial ceremony inspired by the rock. The police pointed to the paw prints as another related effort, fitting into either scenario.
Graham unfolded a piece of paper he pulled from his pocket.
“This is a scale drawing of the model I made,” he said.
I studied the pencil rendering. I knew what it was to keep a secret like this alone. How the guilt blinkered you from seeing anything else but your mistake. I met Graham’s eager, hopeful eyes. “You were a little kid,” I said. “The cops had made up their minds not to investigate way before the tracks.”
I handed it to Harry, who silently chewed his thumbnail.