His mouth scrunched up. “See, that’s the part you were vague about the other night.”
I glared at him.
“You were. Graham, rather than solving the murder”—he spoke in a breathy voice that dipped up and down, his smile wicked—“we’ll just force the killer to identify himself by setting a trap that can’t be traced back to us.”
“Come over here so I can flick you in the nose.”
The cleft in his chin darkened. “Tell me, Pendleton, what incentive would prompt someone who’d gotten away with a killing to reveal themselves as a killer?”
“We convince them they haven’t gotten away with it.”
He tilted his head, stumped. “But they have. The physical evidence is gone. The police never investigated to begin with. They are the Webster’s definition of gotten away with murder.”
“You’re forgetting something.”
“I am?”
“Someone. Someones even.”
“I give up.”
I grinned. “The blonde who cut me. The other girls in the Ghost Tunnel. The killer may know Goldilocks was sleeping in the tunnel. He might even know she wasn’t alone. He might not. Doesn’t matter because we know both for sure. We mention this to our most gossipy neighbor. Swinton, I say. We tell her that a bunch of high school kids were at a party in the Ghost Tunnel the other night and a woman showed up, ragged clothes, late twenties. She was talking about the girl who was killed five years ago. Claimed to be her friend, even that she was with her here, camping in the tunnel. She’s tried to get over it. Forget what she saw. But she can’t. She knows it’s someone who lives here, on our street, and she can prove it.”
“Under what pretext do we spill all that to Swinton, an elderly woman you and I haven’t spoken to since we sold her wrapping paper in grade school?”
My posture went straight and my pitch high. “Hi, Mrs. Swinton. You know me, Izzie, from up the street. I write for my school news blog; yeah, it’s on the Internet, and I’m covering the recent acts of vandalism on Driftwood and Landmark and their connection to the murder of Jane Doe five years ago. You remember her, yeah? I got a lead from some kids at a party last week and”—I fell out of character—“simple as that.”
Graham’s nostrils flared. “And Viv thinks she’s the actress.”
“Swinton gets wind of that and she’ll tell people. They stood on Viv’s lawn and admitted to hearing the girl’s murder and not doing crap about it.” My fist pounded the sketch pad. “They gossiped about criminal negligence. They’ll gossip about this. If the killer lives on this street, even just in town, they’ll hear.”
“And then?”
“They’ll go up to the tunnel to see for themselves who it is. To kill her. To buy her silence. To scare her. Who knows. They won’t be able to resist.”
“But they’d risk revealing themselves to a possible witness.”
“If he or she doesn’t go, they risk someone else or the cops going up there to find a witness who may know who they are.”
“You want to leave the spy cam by the tunnel. To catch whoever it is on film.”
“Abso-freaking-lutely.”
“Best-case scenario is we capture someone on camera we think is responsible for the killing. It won’t be evidence enough to convince the police.”
“Who needs the police?”
Graham mimed tipping a hat.
“That’s why I don’t want us to tell Harry or Viv. Setting the trap isn’t dangerous, but the information we’ll have afterward, what we do with it, will be.”
“We’re never going to tell them?”
“It’ll be dangerous,” I said emphatically.
An understanding passed between us. Graham and I had always toyed with danger. We would protect Harry and Viv from this.
“I have a working theory of who,” he admitted, staring at the floor.
“Tell me.”
“It isn’t ready.”
I kicked off the desk and the swivel chair rolled in front of him. “When?”
“I’m going to Trent’s tonight. Video games.” His hand passed nonchalantly through his bronze hair.
“Are you being coerced?”
“No, it’s . . . complicated. I’ll have a better handle on my theory afterward. Your plan may very well confirm it.”
? ? ?
Forty-five minutes later I balanced unsteadily on the step of Graham’s laced fingers. We picked a pine nearest to the mouth of the Ghost Tunnel. He boosted me to the lowest branch. I shimmied up, cursing under my breath when the bark bit into the wound. The bough was thin and I flexed my thighs around it to stay put. Stared at the blood seeping through the bandage on my palm.
On the second toss of the camera, I caught it. I’d dug up my old iPod armband, the one I used to run with when Viv and I decided it’d be cool to be girls who jogged. Really, that lasted a week. The tiny camera fit into the clear plastic pocket. The armband stretched taut around the tree bough and fastened in place.
“Can you spot it from there?” I called to Graham, who went to stand at the maw of the tunnel.
“Not at all.” He checked the camera feed on his phone. “Tilt the lens to the left. Your left.”
I hung sharply to the side of the bough and fiddled with the lens through the plastic. My clenched thighs began to shake. “Good?”
“More to the left. No. Wait. Up a little. Good, good, good. Freeze.”
I held my hand in the air. “You sure?”
“Perfect.”
He jogged through the pine needles as I squirmed to sit.
“How do we know it won’t die?”
“The camera accesses my cell plan. I have service here so it won’t black out. I’ll be able to watch from my phone. The battery life is supposed to be at least a week as long as I’m deleting old footage, so it doesn’t need to store a lot.”
He extended his arm. “Catch you.”
I jumped down beside him, wincing at the jolt to my ankles. Picking the dead ants and bark from my injured hand. “Let’s go see about hijacking that train car,” I said.
? ? ?
Graham dropped me of at my house before driving to Trent’s. I went inside to change into my most believable student-journalist ensemble. A cardigan and pearl studs would make me appear above suspicion to Ms. Swinton. The kind of outfit I wore for lunch with my grandmother.
It went according to plan. Ms. Swinton invited me inside. She apologized for having to entertain me in the dining room, since the window hadn’t been fixed yet and the living room was cordoned off with thick sheets of plastic.