“No. We’ve just been busy. With school. I mean, college.”
He laughed again. “Right, college.”
I swirled the ice in my drink, trying to buy myself time to find a good way to phrase what I wanted to ask. “There might, uh, be someone joining us. A guy—I think maybe we brought him here before?”
He shrugged. “If you did, it wasn’t during one of my shifts. Your friend’s pretty friendly, but I don’t remember seeing you let anyone too close.” Then he smiled. “That reminds me—how was your big date?”
“Sorry?”
He shook his head in mock disappointment. “Girls. Last time you guys didn’t talk about anything else, now you can’t even remember it. You were all secretive about it too, kept asking her not to tell anyone about it.”
“Oh. Right,” I said carefully. “It was that night?”
“Nah, I don’t think so. Next day or something.”
The sound of a car horn sounded outside. It went on for three seconds. Sarah’s warning that my time had elapsed.
I put a five-dollar bill on the bar. “I think that’s my friend. I should go check on her.”
“All right. Don’t stay away so long next time,” he said.
I threw him a half smile, trying to channel Anna.
I was almost to the door when it opened and a man walked in—a man in his late forties with pale blue eyes and skin that had been out too long in the sun. I tried to walk past him, but he saw me, and faster than I’d have thought possible, he caught me by the wrist.
“Hey, look who it is,” he said.
I yanked my hand away hard. “Let go.”
“Careful, now,” he said, moving to block my access to the door. “It’s rude to rush out just as I’m trying to say hello.”
I stared at him. No. I thought. Not him. No matter how little I knew about Anna, not this guy. Not because he was ugly, which he wasn’t—not exactly—but because the way he looked at me made my bones want to crawl out of my body. “Get out of my way,” I said.
He narrowed his eyes. “You should be nicer,” he said. “Given what I have, you should be much nicer to me than that. Nice when you see me, quiet when you don’t. Don’t you forget that.”
“Is there a problem?” the bartender called from behind the bar. “Because otherwise, I think you should let her by.”
“There’s no problem,” the man said, without taking his eyes off me. “No problem unless she makes one.”
He stepped aside when the car horn sounded again.
“Take care, little girl,” he said.
Little girl. I looked at him, with his baked skin, his cold, mean eyes. Thought of him looking at Anna’s picture.
I only just made it out the door before I vomited, everything I’d eaten that day pouring out onto the gravel.
And one of the men from the bar did help us.
But after he fixed the car he kept Lily’s keys tight in his hand. He said that if we wanted them back he’d need something in exchange.
A photo. A photo of me.
LAUREN WAS, AS SHE OFTEN was, in a bad mood. I’d snagged the changing room first, and when I emerged she’d glared at me like I’d stolen her most valued possession.
“Christ, what were you doing?” she said. “I could’ve changed four times in the time you were in there.”
If this was meant to make me feel bad, or to make me hurry out, she had miscalculated. Because after last night, I wasn’t exactly in the best mood myself. I’d spent an hour in the shower after I got home, and another hour this morning, and I still felt unclean. Taking too long in a changing room was not something I was interested in being made to feel bad about.
So I leaned against the curtain, still half inside the changing room. Tried to think if there was anything I wanted to ask her about while I had the home court advantage. And I realized there was.
“I meant to ask you about something, actually,” I said.
Lauren sighed, a long, exaggerated sigh. It was not endearing. “What?”
“You said once that the police were incompetent assholes,” I said. “Why?”
“I don’t remember talking to you about that.” She crossed her bony arms and narrowed her eyes. “Are you, like, spying on me?”
“You have a very distinctive voice,” I said. “It’s pretty hard not to hear you.”
The corners of her mouth twitched upward. She seemed to take “distinctive” as a compliment. “Okay, fine,” she said. “Yeah, I do think that. They don’t see anything other than what they want to see—they don’t ask the right questions.”
“Do you mean the interviews they did about Anna?”
“Among other things. And yeah, I’m sorry, but those were a mess. It was weird—they even asked if I’d seen her at the party at the quarry, when clearly I wouldn’t have, since she didn’t even leave the house.” Then she paused and looked a little embarrassed. “Aside from, you know. Falling. Anyway, I guess I was one of the first people they interviewed. Sounds like later they figured it out.”
I remembered the police officer telling us about the chief being on his way back from Boise, as though he’d been the key to getting the investigation under way. “They probably hadn’t talked to Lily yet,” I said, then paused. “You didn’t see Lily at the quarry, did you?” I asked, wondering if I could catch Lily in a lie, prove she wasn’t telling the truth about her and Anna’s plans for that night.
“No, I didn’t see her—thank God.”
“You didn’t like Lily?”
Lauren shrugged. “Usually she was all right, but she’d been a total nightmare at practice that day.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. She did that sometimes. Got all pissy or whatever.”
That was less than helpful, so I tried to get back on track. “So, the police asked you if you’d seen Anna that night and that’s what makes them incompetent assholes?”
“Yeah, well, that and other stuff.”
“Like what?”
Lauren paused for a moment. “They just have their own
