We both fell silent for a while.
Finally, Andrew spoke again. “I’ll get together some cash for you this week. But are you okay? Moneywise?”
“Moneywise, yeah,” I said.
“What about otherwise?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Why?”
“Because my case is a mess. I don’t know how to help. Or even if anyone can. And I found a weird link back to Frank and I can’t stop thinking about it. Hence the notebooks.”
My brother’s eyebrows went up. “What kind of link?”
“Just a case he worked forever ago. It might have nothing to do with Matt’s friend at all, and I’m just making it into something because, well, because I’m me and this is what I do.”
“No,” Andrew said, “you don’t make something out of nothing. That’s like the opposite of you.” He smiled. “You’ll figure it out.”
Would I?
I shoved half of the blueberry hand pie into my mouth and chewed as dramatically as possible so he couldn’t ask me any more questions.
*
The bureaucracy machine of the Chillicothe Correctional Institution moved a little faster since I’d already been there once. My name was called after forty minutes, and this time when Brad Stockton shuffled down to the Plexiglas booth where I was sitting, he looked flat-out shocked. “You’re back,” he said into the phone.
“I am. I have a few more questions for you.” I wanted to say Please please please tell me you didn’t know Mallory Evans at all but I figured this wasn’t a good way to get to the truth, whatever it happened to be.
Brad shrugged. “Okay, go for it.”
I smiled at him. I felt like a liar—but then again, he might very well be a liar too. “I wanted to ask you about someone else you went to school with,” I said while I studied him, trying to decide if he seemed evil. “Mallory Evans.”
For a beat it looked like he couldn’t place the name. Then his eyebrows knit together. “Really,” he said. “Why do you want to know about that?”
“I’m looking into other crimes near Belmont. Her name came up.”
He thought about that for a second. His face was unreadable. “Okay. Mallory. Yeah.”
“You knew her?”
“Sure, I knew her from school, but we weren’t friends or anything.”
“Did you hear anything about what happened after she went missing?”
Brad scratched his jaw. “Well, she dropped out junior year,” he said. “I didn’t even know she was ‘missing.’” He put air quotes around the word. “But then when they, like, found her, people started saying all kinds of crazy things, trying to guess who she went there with.”
“Went where?”
“To Clover Point.”
I waited, not sure what he was talking about.
“People used to go up there to fool around, you know, like a make-out spot.”
“And where’s Clover Point?”
He raised his eyebrows again, like he hadn’t intended to tell me something I didn’t already know. “She was found in the woods, right, in this ravine? Well, above the ravine, there’s a place to pull in. It used to be where you’d go, to fool around with your girl in the car because it was real quiet. No one ever went up there unless it was, you know, for that.”
“Really.”
“But then, after Mallory, the city put up signs that it was only open during daylight, so that kind of put a stop to it.”
“Did you ever go there?”
“No,” he said, going a little shifty-eyed.
“Not even with Sarah?” I said. “Are you sure?”
“Okay, maybe a few times, but mostly we just went to my house. Why are you asking about this, what’s it got to do with anything?”
I took a deep breath, ignoring the question. “So after Mallory died, your classmates were trying to guess who she might have gone to the overlook with,” I said. It was a simplistic view of the crime, assuming that she had been killed there—the tarp and the bungee cords said otherwise, but I wanted to hear what he had to say about it. “What was the general consensus?”
He shook his head. “It was just talk,” he said. “No one knew anything. Like I said, she dropped out and that was last I ever saw of her.”
“But the police talked to you, right?” I guessed.
His jaw bunched a little. “Yeah, the guy was a real asshole. Even by cop standards, you know? I’d been in some trouble earlier that year, so I guess I was on the watch list or whatever. But I mean, there used to be like four black families in Belmont. I was always getting the third degree for something.”
I decided not to mention that the real asshole was my father. “What were you in trouble for,” I said, “that got people on your case?”
His expression hardened. “It was just a stupid prank.”
“A prank.”
“I got suspended for a few days,” he said. “It wasn’t a big deal.”
“Why’d you get suspended?” I said, like I didn’t already know.
“It was stupid. I wrote something about a teacher, a poem. It got around, and she didn’t like it. The end.” He looked at me, defiant. He wasn’t going to tell me any more about that.
“I heard something about slicing up a teacher’s car seats,” I said. I assumed it was true since I heard it from two different people. “Was that her?”
Brad shot forward in his seat, stabbing a finger in my direction. Without meaning to, I slid my chair back a few inches. “Why are you asking about this stuff?”
His unreadable expression had turned distinctly readable. Now he looked like he wouldn’t mind stabbing me. “The car seats. Did you do that?”
“Yeah, but it was nothing. Like I said, a prank.”
It didn’t sound like a prank to me. “The police questioned you after Mallory Evans died,” I said, “they didn’t do that because of a prank.”
“They questioned everybody.”
I thought about what Derrow had said. Parents would lose their minds if the police questioned everyone in the school. “No, they didn’t, Brad.”
“Why the fuck are you really asking about this stuff?”
“I’m trying to get the whole story. To figure out if what happened to Mallory is somehow tied to what happened to Sarah. I need the truth, Brad. The other day you told me you never had a knife.”
“You got the whole story already,” he said. He shook his head and then, without warning, he stood up and slammed the phone down.
“Brad,” I said, but he was already walking away.
SIXTEEN
It started to rain again on the way back toward the city, which suited my mood. It hadn’t been my intention to make Brad Stockton angry to the point that he refused to talk to me, but I had. Another job well done. I still didn’t understand him: he had seemed ready to give up the other day, to stop fighting. I wondered what it meant that he didn’t want to fight about Sarah anymore, but he did want to throw down on the matter of a teacher’s car seats. I didn’t need to understand him, but I’d at least been hoping for something to definitively rule out his involvement in Mallory’s death. Instead, he acted just like Kenny had, shutting down when he should have been opening up.