My heart stopped.
“For what?” I asked. “What did you do?”
She pressed the side of her face against the pillow.
“I’m so sorry,” she said over and over, the words muffled and indistinct.
I grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her. “For what? What happened, Jessica?”
She just cried harder.
“Mom,” I said. The word tasted like burnt orange dust on my tongue. “What happened?”
“I told you not to ride your bike in the driveway after dark,” she said. “I told you so many times . . .”
My skin flushed hot.
“I didn’t mean to,” she said. “I’m so sorry . . .”
I sat there, silent and stunned, until Jessica passed out.
? ? ?
Jessica had killed Danny.
My head was hot and buzzing and I couldn’t think. I went out to the backyard—vaguely noticing that my hands were shaking when I opened the French doors that led to the patio—and kicked off my shoes and jeans before jumping into the pool. The cool, silent water surrounded me, and I stayed under until my burning lungs forced me to the surface. I clumsily swam a couple of laps. I didn’t know how to swim properly, but the movement felt good.
Jessica had killed Danny. He was riding his bike in the driveway. It was dark, and she didn’t see him.
It was an accident. None of the Tates had hurt him on purpose. None of them was a murderer. I started to laugh. I floated on my back, looked up at the sky, and laughed at the stars.
I’d thought Danny’s killer must have done it on purpose, because otherwise there was no reason not to just call the police and report the accident. But it was obvious what Jessica had wanted to hide. She must have been wasted when she hit Danny with her car. Her marriage to Robert was starting to go bad, she’d had an affair with her ex-husband that had gotten her pregnant, Mia had been born with health problems, Ben McConnell had killed himself, and she was watching Lex fall apart before her eyes. Drinking herself unconscious was the only coping mechanism Jessica had, and I knew very well that it didn’t stop her from getting behind the wheel. She knew she would go to prison if anyone found out what had really happened that night and—
I sucked in a breath and got a lungful of water along with it. I stood up, sputtering and coughing.
That night?
That’s what Jessica had said; she always warned him not to ride his bike after dark. But the family realized Danny was missing in the early evening, when it was still plenty light outside.
Either Jessica’s drunken, sobbing confession was just another lie, or the official story was wrong.
I heaved myself out of the pool and returned, dripping, to the house. I grabbed a towel out of the laundry room and wrapped it around myself as I climbed the stairs back to Danny’s room.
I knew the supposed timeline of that Saturday by heart now, but once I got to Danny’s room, I opened my file anyway just to check. Jessica made breakfast for Patrick, Lex, Danny, and Mia at about nine in the morning. She left with Mia for the doctor’s office at ten. As she pulled out of the driveway, she saw Danny retrieving his bike from the garage to ride to Andrew’s house. Lex and Patrick left the house not long after and met their friends at the mall about an hour later.
But if Jessica had hit Danny with her car because it was nighttime and she hadn’t been able to see him, it must have happened the night before. Nicholas and Robert had been away from the house Friday night and all of Saturday, and Mia was just a toddler, but Lex and Patrick both said that they’d seen Danny Saturday morning before he went missing. They had to have been lying. Almost an entire day passed between when Jessica killed him and when she called the police to report him missing, plenty of time for the three of them to come up with their cover stories, destroy any evidence of the accident, dump the bike and Danny’s body in the desert, and establish alibis for themselves.
It was an extreme plan, but it was hard to blame Lex and Patrick. They were practically kids themselves and probably terrified of the prospect of their mother, the only parent they had left, going to prison so soon after the death of their father. Nothing would bring Danny back, so why not do what they could to help their mother? And then they were a part of it, just as culpable as Jessica was. All three of them needed me to deflect suspicion from their crimes. When Jessica was on the brink of cracking, Lex and Patrick kept her in line. Even if they no longer felt so protective of a mother who had all but abandoned them for the bottle, they knew they would also be in trouble for the part they’d played in covering up the truth.
It made sense. Right?
I reached for my phone to call Nicholas and get him to come home so I could tell him the whole story. The mystery was solved, and it wasn’t as bad as either of us had feared. None of the Tates were murderers.
Downstairs the doorbell rang.
What now? I hurriedly pulled on some dry pants and grabbed a shirt on my way out of the bedroom. I pulled it over my head as I jogged down the stairs and opened the front door.
“Hey!” Ren said. “You’re all wet!”
With everything that had happened, I’d completely forgotten I’d invited her over this morning. It seemed like days ago that I’d attempted to go to school.
“Hey,” I said, adjusting the shirt as it stuck to my damp skin. “You’re here.”
“As promised,” she said, stepping past me into the house. “It was a good call skipping school, by the way. The place was a madhouse.”
“Yeah?” I said. My brain was still struggling to deal with her presence here on top of everything else.
She cocked her head at me. “You okay?”
“I . . . yeah,” I said. “Just a lot on my mind. You know.”
“Oh,” she said. “Do you want me to leave?”
She was trying to cover it up, but there was disappointment in her voice. Even after the day I’d had, it surprised me, and I couldn’t turn that away.
“No,” I said. “Stay.”
She smiled. “All right.”
We ended up on the sofa in the basement, watching a movie on the big screen. I don’t even remember what it was, because I wasn’t watching. I was thinking about Jessica and Danny and Nicholas.
I should call Nicholas, I knew that. But if the mystery was solved, there was no reason for him to keep me around. Although some of his rage at me seemed to have dissipated in the past day or so, there was a good chance he was only biding his time before seeing me put in jail for impersonating his brother.
But if I kept him in the dark, he would let me stay to keep helping him find out what had happened to Danny, at least for a little while longer. That would give me time to plan my next move and make sure I got away before he could turn me in. Or, maybe, if I could play things out long enough . . .