“Okay then,” Michael said. “Grab a piece of toast, and I can drop you on my way to the university.”
The ride to the school with Michael was long and silent but not uncomfortably so. He called the administration office on the way and told them that Bex would be there. “You’re all set,” he said to her, grinning as he pulled the car to a stop in front of the school.
“Jeez.” He leaned forward, craning his neck to see over Bex’s head. “More media. They’re vultures.”
Bex shuddered. “I don’t know what else they think they’re going to uncover here.” She hiked her backpack up and stepped out of the car, leaning down toward Michael. “Thanks for the ride.”
The reporters were still huddled in strange groups all over the front grounds of the school, but the frenetic bustle was gone—until Bex stepped onto campus. They immediately started toward her as if some sort of starter gun had gone off, calling her, “miss” and “young lady” as they closed in on her. Her panic started to rise and Bex shrank back, exposed, a deer caught in the laser-sharp sight of a hunter.
She saw the school’s security guard rushing through the gate toward her, barking at the reporters to get back and leave her alone, but nothing would stop them as they surrounded her, shoving microphones in her face and flicking on enormous lights that seemed to blank out the sun.
“Miss, miss, are you a student here?”
Bex felt her face flush, felt heat all the way to the hair follicles on the top of her head. Her stomach lurched and her palms were sweating. She couldn’t have answered the woman even if she wanted to. Her mouth was dry, her tongue a deadweight. She was seven years old again and everyone wanted to know what she knew, whether her father shared anything other than the macabre trinkets of his deeds with her. They wanted to know what she said to indict him, when she realized what he’d done was wrong.
“Please go away.” Bex was surprised by her own voice. “Please, we don’t have anything to say.”
It was exactly what her grandmother had said when they stepped into the big marble hallway in the courthouse after her father’s pretrial hearing.
The reporters bustled there too, but all Beth Anne could hear was the reverberating sound of her grandmother’s voice, half pleading, half demanding. There was the blinding flash of a camera snapping, and while Beth Anne tried to blink away the black blobs in front of her eyes, she saw her father in his nice, gray suit watching, the courtroom door just open enough for him to peer out without being seen.
Her heart swelled, and she knew that her daddy could stop it, would save her like he always did.
“Daddy!”
The horde of reporters followed Beth Anne’s gaze and turned on her and her grandmother then, shoving past them to get to Beth Anne’s father before his lawyer whisked him away. The last thing Beth Anne remembered seeing was the flash of silver around her father’s wrists, his hands clasped together, and the awkward way he walked, his ankles shackled. She had betrayed him again.
“What is your name, please?”
“Did you know the deceased?”
“Are you a student? Are you involved in the case?”
Bex took a step back, the lights and camera flashes blinding her, cell phones shoved in her face. She held up an arm to protect herself and clamped her mouth shut against the bile that tore through her stomach and itched at the back of her throat.
“Step back! You all need to step back!”
The security guard had pushed his way into the suffocating circle and tried to barricade himself against the reporters so Bex could slip between them and through the gates of the school. She took a step and then another, seeing her path to blessed silence, but stopped.
A car was idling in the school parking lot, right at the middle of the horseshoe-shaped drive. It was a dark sedan with a man in the front seat. He was wearing a baseball cap pulled low over his forehead. His eyes were shadowed, but Bex didn’t need a clear view to know that his gaze was laser-focused on her.
The driver put his foot on the gas, the squeal of his tires cutting through the cacophony of reporters and security guards as he sped down the Kill Devil Hills High School driveway and disappeared into traffic.
Fourteen
Even sitting in the school administration office, Bex couldn’t shake the odd feeling she had gotten from the man in the car or the prickly memory of reporters surrounding her. The smell of office supplies and the hypnotic tapping of one of the secretaries typing should have calmed her, but she jumped each time a door opened, each time a phone buzzed.
“I’m sorry, hon.” A pudgy secretary with cheeks like Red Delicious apples grinned up at Bex. “You needed a late pass, correct?”
Bex nodded.
“Do you have a note?”
Bex shook her head and cleared her throat. “No, my…dad…called about twenty minutes ago. My name is—”
“Bex, Bex Andrews.”