Cole shrugged. “Don’t know. I asked Mom that same question, and she said that her dad bullied Gram for their entire marriage. She believed she wouldn’t make it on her own if she left him. Not with two kids in tow.”
“Wow,” I said. “That had to have been rough.”
“It’s why I cut her a lot of slack when she’s not really nice to us.”
I thought about my own grandmother, who had every indulgence and luxury. She’d come from money, married money, and had never wanted for anything. And she was equally bitter and mean, only she had no excuses.
“So, what do we do about the yearbooks?” I asked, putting them back on the floor by my feet.
“She works Sundays, too. We can come back here tomorrow and sneak them in.”
“We’re hanging out again tomorrow?” I asked.
Cole’s cheeks were tinted with red. “Uh…I kinda hoped so. Unless you’ve got other stuff to do.”
“No, I’m good for tomorrow, too,” I said, feeling heat in my own face.
“Cool,” Cole said.
“Cool,” I agreed.
“Okay, then,” Cole said.
“Right. Okay, then.”
There was an awkward silence before Cole pulled away from the curb and turned the car around. “Let’s figure out who we should talk to next.”
“What about that other friend of Ben’s?” I said.
I was kind of enjoying spending the day playing amateur sleuth with Cole. It was both nerve-racking and exhilarating, plus it didn’t hurt that he was freaking gorgeous.
“What? Why are you looking at me like that?” Cole asked, glancing over at me while he drove.
I realized I’d been grinning. “Nothing,” I said quickly. “I guess I’m just having a good time hanging out with you.”
He grinned, too. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Good,” he said. “Maybe it’ll become a habit.”
Cole slid the car over into the lot at a grocery store and parked.
“We going shopping?” I asked curiously.
Before answering, he pulled out his tablet from his backpack. “Naw. I wanted to look up that other friend of Ben’s, like you said. Bill something…”
I waited patiently while Cole tapped at his tablet. “Dammit,” he muttered after a minute.
“What?”
“Bill Metcalf—the guy in the photo with Ben—moved to LA. He’s a TV producer at Warner Brothers.”
“Wow,” I said. That was pretty impressive.
“Yeah,” Cole replied, still tapping at the tablet.
“What if we tried calling him?”
Cole stopped tapping to eye me skeptically. “He’s got no contact info here. If he’s up in the food chain at Warner Brothers, I doubt we’d be able to get through.”
I frowned. “So where does that leave us?”
Cole motioned to the yearbooks at my feet. “We could try looking up some of the other football players on the team. Maybe one of them was close to Ben and knew what was going on.”
But I had a better idea. “Why don’t we try working this through Amber’s friends?” I said. “I know that I used to tell Sophie everything that was going on with Tanner and…” My voice trailed off as I considered that that might not have been a good idea in hindsight.
Cole’s expression turned sympathetic. “You should really think about calling her.”
“I know. I will,” I said sadly. “But let’s focus back on Amber. Maybe she told her two best friends about what was going on with Ben.” After reaching for the yearbooks, I turned to the page I’d marked and opened it up. “Sara Radcliff and Britta Cummings.”
Cole began tapping again at his tablet. A minute later he said, “Bingo. Sara Radcliff lives eighteen miles north of here.”
“Wow,” I said flatly. “You’re really good at looking people up on the internet.”
“Mad skills, remember?” Cole said with a wink.
I laughed. “Yeah, yeah. Okay. Let’s go see her.”
Cole began to back out of the space. “Who’s going to take the lead this time?”
“You again,” I said.
He cocked an eyebrow at me. “She might open up better if you asked her questions.”
“Yeah, but why would I be asking her about Amber?”
Cole thought on that for a bit. “Maybe Amber was your mom’s cousin?” he said. “And you’re doing a report on her for school?”
I felt very nervous about that approach. “If she knew Amber well enough to know her family, and starts asking me questions about relatives, the lie is going to unravel. What about if we say something like we’re working for the school paper, and we decided to cover Chamberlain High’s most controversial event—the murder of Ben Spencer by Amber Greeley? We can dig around in Sara’s memories all we want if that’s our cover story. She won’t think it’s suspicious that we’re asking personal questions about them.”
Cole pointed a finger gun at me. “I like that,” he said. “I like that a lot.”
“Okay, then that’s the story we’ll stick with, and we’ll hope that she can tell us something new.”
“SO WHAT’S THE STORY WITH YOU and Spence?” Sara asked me as we changed into pajamas.
I felt myself stiffen. “Story? There’s no story.”