“Cool,” he said, his hand still hovering over the cover. “Are you really ready to take a look?”
I stared at the folder. I couldn’t imagine what awful images it might hold, but then I thought of my nightmare—of Ben lying dead and bloody in the field. How much worse than that could it be?
“I’m ready,” I said.
Cole opened the file and began with the first few pages, talking me through them. “The prom was on May twenty-third, nineteen eighty-seven. Ben and Amber went with a group of their friends. Right around ten o’clock, Amber and Spence left the dance. What’s weird is that one of the teachers who was chaperoning said he remembered seeing Ben leave around nine thirty, and then he remembered seeing Amber leave about twenty minutes later.”
My brow furrowed. “They didn’t leave together?”
“No,” Cole said. “And that was the last anybody saw of Ben until around ten thirty when a guy walking his dog came across his body.”
Cole turned a page and revealed a crime scene photo of Ben, lying in the field almost exactly as he’d appeared in my dreams.
It stole my breath.
Cole closed the cover and offered me an apologetic expression. “You okay?”
I sat there, a bit dumbstruck. “Yeah,” I said after a moment. “It’s just so crazy-eerie. That photo could’ve been pulled right out of my nightmare.”
“Do you want to stop?”
“No,” I told him. “I’m okay. You can go on.”
Cole opened the file again and I was able to look at the photo a little more distantly. He flipped to another image, this one taken from farther back, and it showed Amber, in a Tiffany-blue dress with bloodstains, being supported by several people. She looked utterly destroyed. The photo had captured her in a moment of anguish, her mouth open, cheeks wet, hair a mess. She sagged between two boys in tuxes, while others were looking on in shock.
I reached out to touch her image. “Poor thing,” I whispered. I felt such compassion for her.
Cole nodded. “This is the photo that gets to me,” he said. “You take one look at that face, and I don’t know how you can think she had anything to do with Ben’s death.”
We studied the image for another moment in silence and then Cole continued. “The police did about forty interviews between that night and when Amber died,” he said, moving on to a stack of papers held together with a paper clip. “Mostly other students. They’re all the same. Nobody saw anything, nobody heard anything, nobody remembered anything. Most of the kids from the prom were alerted to what happened by the strobe lights from the fire truck that arrived at the scene. It flashed inside the school gym where the prom was being held and kids went out to see what was going on. Amber was already there. She’d pushed her way through to Ben and had to be pulled off by paramedics.”
As Cole spoke, I felt like I was seeing it all just as it unfolded. That awful moment when Amber first realized that Ben was gone, hitting her like a shock wave. The grief was overpowering, and I felt my eyes burn with tears. I blinked them away and cleared my throat quietly, trying to come back to the reality of Cole’s house.
Luckily, he didn’t notice my reaction.
“Paparella stopped interviewing people when Amber died. She left a note at the scene….” Cole paused to pull out a piece of paper, which was a copy of a handwritten note in big, curly cursive. There were splotches on it—fingerprints standing out in dark relief. It was obvious that the police had dusted the letter for prints.
He handed it to me, and I studied it. Immediately, I felt goose pimples rise on my arms. Amber’s handwriting was very similar to my own; we both wrote in large, loopy letters, but hers—at least on the note—seemed a little messy and uneven. Some of the text looked shaky, as though Amber had struggled with her nerves while she was writing the note, which, given the context, was completely understandable.
I read the letter out loud. “‘Dear Momma and Daddy, I’m so sorry for all this. Don’t blame Spence. It wasn’t his fault. It was me. All me. I just want to be with him. Please take care of Bailey. I’ll love you forever. Amber.’”
“Whoa,” I said when I’d finished. “Now I see how Paparella believed she’d killed Ben.”
“Yeah, and also why he concluded she’d committed suicide even though the ME’s report was inconclusive. Paparella confirmed, though, that the suicide note was Amber’s handwriting, and the paper only had her prints on it, so he overrode the autopsy report, called the note a suicide confession, and closed the file, pinning Ben’s murder on Amber.”
I noticed that Cole had surreptitiously shut the folder again. I knew he was hiding Amber’s crime scene photo from me.
“How bad is the photo of her body?” I asked, touching the top of the folder.
“Bad,” he said.
My mouth went dry. “Don’t show me,” I whispered.