“Yes. I was actually thinking we could do it tonight.”
She said it with what seemed like odd casualness and disregard, as if she didn’t expect me to have either plans for the evening or a desire to go home. But I sensed urgency underneath. Despite the fact that I’d promised my live-in boyfriend, Beau, that I’d decompress with him tonight on the roof deck of our apartment building, there was no way I could turn Jillian down. I wanted to know what she’d been doing and how she’d fared in life. Besides, my guilt wasn’t going to take anything but yes for answer.
“Of course. Were you thinking of coffee, wine . . . ?”
“Either’s fine.”
“Um, okay. There’s a café I noticed a block up on Lexington. They seem to do both, so why don’t we try that.”
It took only five minutes to reach the café and we didn’t say much on the way, just an inconsequential comment or two about how nice the summer weather had been so far. We settled at a table at the back and each of us ordered a glass of wine, her white, me red. She excused herself, saying she needed to use the restroom.
While she was gone, I texted Beau, telling him that we’d have to bag the roof deck tonight because I’d run into a long-lost friend—and would explain more about it later.
Long-lost friend. Did I have the right to call her that?
She certainly hadn’t strayed far from my memory, nor had the brutal crime. Even after all these years, the details of the grisly murders were still vivid in my mind, as I’m sure they were for people who lived in or near Dory, Massachusetts—one of a series of towns and villages in the Berkshire Mountains Jillian’s parents, brother Danny, twelve, and sister Julia, nineteen, a college freshman at home recuperating from mono that semester, had been stabbed to death by a teenaged boy from their neighborhood who apparently had become obsessed with Julia.
At the time of the killings, I’d agonized over what Jillian must have been going through. Though we’d only known each other for five or six months, we’d grown pretty close. In addition to living a few doors down from each other in the dorm, we were both in the same late-day sociology class and had settled into a routine of splitting a pizza afterwards and trying to decode the ramblings of our professor. I could still recall Jillian wagging a pizza slice one night and exclaiming, “That man is going to drive me into the arms of animal research.” She had a magnetic confidence, as well as wry sense of humor and a contagious, carefree laugh. It was my first realization that science majors could possess a wicked sense of humor.
I didn’t see her before she took off for Dory that morning, and though I had every intention of calling her, I nervously kept putting off the task. I mean, what in the world would I say?
I suppose I could blame it on being nineteen and having social skills that were not yet fully developed, and yet in my case I think it may have had more to do with losing my father so young. His death had been like falling overboard in the middle of the Atlantic and trying desperately to claw my way back through the waves to the ship. For a long time the mere topic of death left me tongue-tied, and I was totally lame at comforting the bereaved. Though that’s hardly justification.
Several days passed and it grew harder and harder to phone Jillian. I promised myself I would make it up to her when she returned to campus.
But she never came back. She dropped out of college, and the next I heard, she was living on the West Coast. By then I was too ashamed to reach out.
Five minutes later, Jillian settled back at the table. I was still adjusting, I realized, to the fact that she was no longer a blonde. She took a quick sip of wine and smiled, with a warmth that I could also see in her deep blue eyes. There was still no sign that she was holding my past failing against me.
“Just so you know,” she said, “I didn’t buy your book tonight because I already own it. I thought it was terrific, Bailey.”
“That’s really nice of you to say.” The book was a true crime drama about the homicide of supermodel Devon Barr at a country house where we’d both been weekend guests. I was really touched by the fact that Jillian had read it, that she wanted to connect with me again.
“Of course, at school, people were sure you’d write one day, but I guess we just didn’t know it would be about crime. How did you end up going in that direction?”
I weighed my words before I spoke. Though her question didn’t seem loaded, we were on weird terrain considering the tragedy in her life.
“When people ask me that, I always say it’s because someone started leaving nasty notes for me when I was in ninth grade and there was such a feeling of triumph when I played detective and figured out who the culprit was. But that’s only part of it. When I got a job out of college at a newspaper in Albany, they put me on the police beat, and one thing kind of led to another.”