Graham, Viv, and I didn’t need to promise not to breathe a word of this to anyone. There was nothing in this world or the next that would make us implicate Harry in provoking Conner. We would keep his last secret no matter what.
Soon, we were taken to the police station. The questioning began friendly enough. All of us together. Our parents, except for my mother, standing around.
An officer said, “Tell us about the events leading up to your friend’s death. Tell us about the events of October and September.” The Seven Hills PD was not so dim after all, given that they suspected us immediately of a larger conspiracy—of being IV.
I said, “October happened because September happened because August happened.”
Graham sounded like he had a bad cold telling them the only official answer we’d give them. Ten kids around a bonfire. Peaceful. Shooting the shit. Conner Welsh, a boy who’d always been a bully, rushed Harry. Fists flew, a deranged Conner knocked Harry off balance, the two boys fell twelve feet from the meteorite. Harry’s head smacked a rock, neck crimped, Conner on top of him.
Our version was obviously a lie. What about the dagger? Why were you four in red? Why the others in white? What was the wooden doll by the fire, on a throne? A break in our questioning. Then the others started talking. Not all of them. Jess, Amanda, and Campbell denied knowing anything about IV. They denied that we were involved. They told a story almost identical to ours. Conner had snapped. Gone after Harry. The boys had fallen. Whether they lied to the police out of self-preservation or loyalty to us and the Order, I never found out.
It was Conner, Trent, and Rachel who bleated the truth to the police—the truth as they knew it. Not a party, but a ritual ceremony. A secret order born from the history of our town. They divulged all of what they knew about the Order of IV. They spilled our rites and rebellions on the linoleum floor of the police station. Conner swore he’d received a secret order to go after Harry on the rock. A note in his locker. No proof, though; he’d thrown it away. He’d figured Harry had sent it himself. He wanted a fight with Conner but was too chickenshit to throw the first punch.
The police weren’t treating us like criminals yet. They hadn’t found Harry’s IV tattoo. They didn’t know if the IV in blood on the rock had been a bit of rebellious pretend, as harmless as the kids’ armbands and emblems at school. We hadn’t been cautioned or arrested. Their official opinion of us was too colored by what good students we were; what nice Seven Hills families we came from.
Mom flew home from Denver on the red-eye. She arrived with the sun the morning after Harry died. Harry. He would never see the sun again.
The authorities had separated Viv, Graham, and me by then. They had one shiny new piece of evidence that we were IV, or that at least Harry was. The doctors at the hospital emergency room reported the IV tattoo on his rib cage. Then, at midnight, the video of Amanda sharing her secret posted on the school news blog from an anonymous user.
In the restroom of the police station, Viv said that logging onto Harry’s news blog account had been easy. Two days before she’d borrowed his laptop at lunch. We were all sitting there, without a clue. Harry’s username and password auto-populated as soon as Viv loaded the blog. She uploaded the video clip of Amanda from her e-mail, saved it as a draft, selected that it would post anonymously, and set it to publish at midnight on the night we had planned to tell the initiates that the Order of IV was dissolving for a time.
She cried that she’d only uploaded the video to make herself feel like she had the upper hand over Amanda. Only set it for publication so she felt closer to revenge. She wasn’t going to go through with it. She would have told Harry to delete it in time. At least that’s what she swore to me as I shook my head silently at her in the bathroom stall.
“You had Conner and Trent kill a goat. You weren’t satisfied until there was death on display for the whole town to see,” Viv said. “Why are you acting like you don’t understand? I needed to hurt Amanda. She deserved it just like the rest of them did.”
I dropped to my knees in the bathroom, and threw up into the toilet.
So there. The police had a video, shot in the Marlos’ barn, showing all four of us surrounding a sea of candles and Amanda holding the same strange wooden doll they’d found us with up on the rock.
They went after us. Tried to play us against one another. Swore to me that Viv and Graham had confessed to being IV. That they were cooperating. Lines straight out of true crime television. I remained silent. Arms folded on a table. Head resting on them. Tears falling intermittently. Not one word slipped from my lips from the time they split us up to the time a lawyer my parents hired came in to say I was going home. Eight hours. Never for a fleeting second did I worry that Graham and Viv were in rooms somewhere betraying Harry’s secret. If we told about IV, even just confirmed what the police suspected, Conner might not be held completely responsible for Harry. Harry might be made to share the blame.
None of us would ever hold Harry accountable.
When we arrived home, in my bedroom, I told Mom everything about the Order of IV, Dad’s affair with Ina, and how Dad fell into our trap at the Ghost Tunnel. I shared every detail but one: Harry’s rite to Conner. After I finished, she stared out at the waves like she was waiting for answers to wash ashore.
She confronted Dad in their office but with the door open. A little over five years ago, he and Ina had gone to dinner up the coast; it was her first time eating out after surgery. Dad met her behind her clinic; they went in her car. They both drank at dinner. Champagne. Ina had medication and painkillers in her bloodstream. Still, she wanted to drive. Wanted to feel in charge, alive, normal. So she was the one driving up Driftwood when Goldilocks came flying out of the orchard. She was the one who mistakenly hit the gas rather than the brakes. They got out of the car. Ina assessed her injuries. She didn’t feel a pulse.
Dad didn’t share the conversation they had. What transpired, though, is clear. They decided that their lives, all they had to lose, was more important than the helpless girl who lay before them. She was dead—whether they believed this or not, I’ll never know. Ina drove home to hide the car with its dented front bumper in the garage. Dad ran up the street to our house to get his car. They needed to move the body. Dump it far away from Seven Hills. But when he got back, the girl was gone. He idled slowly down Driftwood, killed the engine when he heard a cry.