On the far side of the park, the west side, the city had constructed a little band shell. They painted it light blue, and in the summers offered live music. Mostly old guys trying to play bluegrass, their banjos and fiddles twanging across the lawn while even older people in lawn chairs nodded along. In the winter, the place looked desolate. It filled with dead leaves, and only the skateboarders congregated there, using the place for dramatic takeoffs and landings.
As Jared passed by the band shell, he saw a group of four people, their figures dark outlines in the fading light. Kids from school, he figured, and he hoped he didn’t know them. He didn’t want to talk. He wanted to get to Tabitha’s house and put his mind at ease.
“Look who it is,” a voice said.
Jared turned to the right, toward the sound of the voice, but he kept walking quickly.
“Hey, hold it.”
A girl’s voice.
Jared slowed down, squinting as he peered into the quickening darkness. The girl was moving toward him, her long, wavy hair and tall boots growing visible. He thought he knew her, but it took a moment.
She reached the lit path he walked on, stepping into the glow of one of the lamps.
“Oh,” he said.
“Hi, Jared.”
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d spoken to Ursula Walters. He knew it was before her mom disappeared, way before. Their moms made them play together when they were kids, sometimes on the very swings Jared was just remembering. She had fascinated him when they were little. She was bossy and brash, braver than any of the boys he knew. He never forgot the time she shoved him, causing him to crack his head against the corner of a coffee table. With friends like that, who needs enemies, right?
But he also used to go to sleep at night and think about her, imagining that they’d grow up and become more than friends. His mom and Celia liked to try to embarrass both of them by mentioning the way they used to bathe together as babies. Jared always felt his face turn red when one of the moms brought it up, but Ursula never blushed. She acted as though nothing in the world bothered her or knocked her off stride.
“Hey, Ursula,” he said, hoping she didn’t want to talk.
But she studied him up and down, taking in his clothes and his face, inspecting him as if she needed to know everything he was up to. A surprising amount of interest considering how little they spoke to each other. Around the time they became teenagers, Ursula had transformed into a mean girl, someone who ran with a crowd of rich kids. Their parents belonged to the country club, and they all wore the best clothes, as if they had Abercrombie & Fitch on speed dial. Jared felt squeezed out of her life, and he really didn’t mind. Once she’d started acting that way, his nearly lifelong crush dissolved.
“Where are you going in such a hurry?” she asked.
He looked behind her. Three bigger, older-looking guys accompanied her. Ursula was that kind of kid. She couldn’t spend time with people her own age.
“Just walking,” Jared said, and started to move on.
But the voice of one of the guys stopped him again.
“Ursula, isn’t that the kid whose mom got your mom killed?”
Two of the guys came forward, looming behind Ursula in the dark. The third guy, bigger than the other two, hung back, a red glow near his head telling Jared he was smoking. For the first time, Jared felt scared. The adrenaline and emotion that had fueled his rush toward Tabitha’s house shifted to something more desperate and pointed. His own safety might be in jeopardy.
He wasn’t a fighter. He’d skirmished with a couple of kids on the playground years ago, winning one battle by pinning his opponent to the ground and emerging with a bloody nose and a detention from the other. But these guys were bigger and older, and they sounded tougher.
“Don’t blame my mother,” he said. “She didn’t do anything.”
“She stood Mrs. Walters up,” the kid on the left said, the one who had already spoken. He wore a puffy ski vest over a button-down shirt. Not exactly brawling clothes, but Jared had seen rich kids fight and he knew some of them were as tough as the poorest and most desperate students in town. Being rich didn’t mean someone wasn’t deeply pissed at the core of his being. “Handed her over to some killer on a silver platter.”
The kid so casually threw the words “killed” and “killer” around. Everyone—the media, friends, family—took great pains to talk about Celia as though she were missing and might come back someday. Deep down, Jared suspected everyone knew the truth, but they never admitted it. This kid didn’t try to sugarcoat it, and he assumed Ursula felt the same way or else they wouldn’t be saying it around her.
“It wasn’t her,” Jared said. He needed to get to Tabitha, to check on her well-being, and then he needed to get home so his mom wouldn’t worry too much. But he couldn’t just walk away from the confrontation, letting these kids—and by extension everyone else in town—think that his mother was the one solely responsible for leaving Celia alone on the edge of Caldwell Park that night. “It was me,” he said. “I made her late that night. Shit, she found some alcohol in my room, and we had to fucking talk about it. That’s why she was late.”