I mean, it could have been any of them. I don’t know.
So you’re saying: Lucinda could have written these suggestive notes, which you then took and kept in your car along with her diary, which just happens to be missing a page?
I didn’t know the diary was missing a page. I was bringing it here. And about the notes, I don’t know, okay? I don’t know.
You expect us to believe that?
I don’t know anything.
When Lee’s trial began to take shape, during the intricate volley of he-saids and she-saids—before they’d known that Hilary would refuse to testify, before Russ could fathom that his friend would simply pick up and leave—Russ confronted Lee.
Lee had gotten out on bail. Mostly, he stayed in the house with the curtains drawn shut. Outside, Lee was a pariah. A criminal. Dangerous. He was all these things inside too, but Cynthia’s form of cruelty was different from the points and stares the population of Broomsville showered on him as they ushered their children out of sight. Cynthia was cruel in the only way she knew how. Disregard.
Amidst the confusion of the trial, Cynthia took a part-time job at the craft store downtown. She could be seen through the window from the coffee shop across the street, picking through bins of beads, searching for crippling deformities—tumors bulging from smooth glass surfaces, bubbles in the center of gold-flecked orbs. She could be seen in the park for hours in the afternoon, pushing Cameron on the swings, his little hands frozen red, nose runny, in desperate need of a hot bath. She could be seen everywhere but her own home, where a monster took residence in her bed, beneath the quilt her grandmother had sewn by hand in a pattern Russ could dictate from memory. The force was under strict orders not to visit Lee.
Russ rang their doorbell like any other visitor. He had sat in the car outside for twenty-five minutes, hands in his lap, trying so hard to remember. All those lazy afternoons on the cliff, meals on that checkered tablecloth, never-ending games of gin rummy. How can you let all that go, even in the face of such incriminating evidence? You can’t. You can’t.
Lee opened the door, wide. Not surprised to see Russ, sheepish on the porch. Russ followed him inside, and they sat in the cluttered living room. Russ perched—dainty, like a woman—on the arm of the leather chair.
His heart, a patter. A gallop. A roar.
Please, Lee said, from the other side of the room. You’re my best friend, Russ. You have to help me. The evidence has to go. They’re trying to use the type of soil on her shoes to convict me. Please, for Cynthia. For Cameron. You have to help.
Lee walked right up to Russ. Came closer, closer. That gallop—that roar—Russ could kill this man. His oldest and dearest. But Russ kept still as Lee put one warm palm to Russ’s stubbly cheek. Cupped it there.
Protecting, always protecting.
Russ went in after hours. Late in the evening. It wasn’t hard to get into the evidence room, one of the Broomsville Police Department’s many failings. Russ knew the password from watching the receptionist type it in, and she kept the swipe key in a safe beneath her desk, which remained consistently unlocked.
It didn’t take Russ long to find the box. He pulled only the essentials: The bloodied blouse. (Plaid, silver buttons.) The pair of cheap cotton panties. (Unstained, but catalogued anyway.) Two high-heeled boots. (Both covered in the soft soil that caked the plains surrounding the stretch of highway Lee had patrolled, alone, on the night in question.)
Russ drove around aimlessly, evidence of Hilary Jameson’s assault shoved in his trunk like a body. Broomsville was so small that night, as Russ wound through suburban streets. All the houses were the same; new developments from the same contractor. Year after year. In the dusk, the peaks of the houses were miniature mountains. Russ drove in circles for hours until, finally, he stopped behind the public library.
He left the car running. Pulled the clothes from their evidence bags and shoved them to the bottom of a dirty trash can by the light of a moth-clouded streetlamp. As he left the incriminating evidence to the bottom of the public garbage can, Russ thought mostly of Cynthia and Cameron. It didn’t seem fair, how loving someone made their precious things your precious things, too.
On the drive back to his hollow house on his snoozing white street, Russ remembered the security cameras at the police station. When the evidence was discovered missing, two weeks later, Russ took a sick day. He huddled beneath the throw blanket on his living-room sofa, sure they’d come for him the way they came for Lee. Rattling handcuffs. But no. If Lieutenant Gonzalez had watched the security tapes, he never said a thing.
Now Russ stands by the coffee machine. In the conference room, the art teacher’s head is in his hands.
Intimidation before interrogation, Detective Williams tells Russ, though Russ can see through this forced conviction: Detective Williams has no faith in the art teacher’s guilt. The man has been cooperative, if shaky, and he has an alibi—a weekly night class for painting students. He hadn’t swiped out of the Broomsville Community College art studio until after eleven o’clock the night Lucinda died, and stoplight cameras showed him headed straight home.
I found the diary in my classroom, the teacher tells them, and it sounds like the truth. Lucinda must have left it there. I took it to my car, to bring in after the funeral.
Detective Williams pounds the table when he asks questions. Scare tactics. Russ is used to cold weather—he has lived through thirty-six Colorado winters now—but looking at the teacher on the other side of the mirrored glass, Russ is chilled to the bone.
Fletcher, someone says. Fletcher. You okay?
Russ stumbles backward.
Fletcher? Where are you going?
Everything ended the night before Hilary Jameson was assaulted. Russ will think of this night every day for the rest of his life, and when he does, he will feel a shocking combination of regret and yearning.
Patrol was slow. Russ and Lee sipped black coffee. They’d been doing this lately—joining one another voluntarily for the overnight shifts, the ultimate insomniac pairing. This night, they idled in the car beneath the shadow of the cliff, both too tired and dazed to make the climb up for sunrise, though this had been the original plan, the only reason Russ had come along for Lee’s graveyard shift. The houses around them slept, peaceful and stagnant. Russ and Lee kept awake with a game of Would You Rather.
Would You Rather: hear one song for the rest of your life—“Eye of the Tiger” or “Bohemian Rhapsody”?
Would You Rather: have sex with your cousin in secret, or never have sex with your cousin but everyone thinks you did?
Would You Rather: have sex with Detective Williams or the lieutenant?
What the hell? Russ asked.
If you had to choose one, Lee said. Life or death.
Death, Russ said, and they both laughed.
This is a dumb game, Lee said.