“No, I didn’t know that,” I said, although I wasn’t surprised by the news. Tristen spoke more like a teacher than . . . well, most of the actual teachers at Supplee Mill. I peered harder at the photo, thinking that Tristen definitely was intriguing, in a way.
Suddenly Becca swung around to face me, laughing. Maybe at me. “You know you think he’s hot, Jill,” she teased, like that would be the funniest thing in the world—if it had been true. “I saw you checking him out in chem!”
“No, I wasn’t!” I wasn’t . . .
“But a guy like Tristen,” Becca said, twisting one of her curls around her finger. “He wouldn’t be good for somebody like you, Jill—no offense!”
My cheeks caught on fire then, both at the unfair accusation that I liked Tristen . . . and at the insult I was perceiving. “What does that mean?”
“You’re sweet,” Becca said in a way that didn’t exactly sound like a compliment. “And Tristen . . . Well, he talks really smooth, but he’s got a rough side, too.”
I sort of rolled my eyes. “Come on, Becca . . .” I honestly couldn’t believe Tristen Hyde would be anything but well-mannered, maybe even kind of . . . proper.
“Well, he beat Todd Flick to within an inch of his life!” Becca defended her assertion. “That’s pretty rough!”
I jolted, nearly slipping off my mattress. “Tristen beat up Todd?”
“Yeah.” Becca seemed genuinely surprised by my ignorance. “Didn’t you hear?”
“No.” Jill Jekel was last on the gossip phone tree. “What happened?”
Becca dismissed motive with a wave of her pink-tipped fingers. “Something about Tristen hitting on Darcy, which is ridiculous, because she is not his type.”
I studied Becca’s delicate, pretty face, wondering how she knew Tristen even had a “type.” I also fought against a terrible urge to take twisted delight in Todd Flick, who’d teased me for years, getting a beating. Nobody deserved violence. I hated violence. “Tristen didn’t really hurt Todd, did he?”
Becca had clearly been relishing the gossip, but the smile she hadn’t quite been able to hide slowly disappeared, and her eyes clouded. “Tris broke Todd’s arm.”
“No . . .” My eyes darted to Tristen’s photo. He couldn’t, could he?
When I looked back to Becca, I saw that she’d gotten not just solemn but almost . . . spooked. And although we were alone, she lowered her voice, so I could barely hear her above the rain pounding the house. “I . . . I kind of know a secret about Tristen, too,” she added. “Something from last summer. A story that I never told anybody.”
“Really?” I swallowed thickly, suddenly not sure I wanted to hear any more. Not from Becca. Not about Tristen, who’d once held me. “Um, maybe you shouldn’t . . .”
But Becca continued confiding in me, with a strange expression that I’d never seen before, not in all our years as friends. “I kind of . . . saw Tris, over the summer,” she said. “And this thing happened . . .”
My fingers curled around the edge of my mattress, and I searched my friend’s expression for some clue as to what she meant by that word “saw.” Like, she saw Tristen with her eyes? Or had Becca Wright gone out with the only guy I’d ever come even close to kissing? I really didn’t want to hear more. Yet I found myself asking, “So . . . what happened?”
I never got to hear the end of Becca’s story that night, though, because, before she could tell the rest, my bedroom door swung open, causing us both to jump nearly out of our skins. “Mom!” I cried. “I didn’t hear you come in!”
My mother stood in the doorway, wet from the rain, looking so grim and tired that, without even being told to go, Becca slipped on her sequined flip-flops, gathered her stuff, and slunk out, muttering, “See you,” to both of us before darting down the stairs.
Mom didn’t say a word until we heard the front door shut. Then she brushed her damp, graying hair from her forehead and announced, “We need to talk, Jill. I have some bad news.”
“Of course,” I agreed.
That was the first reply that sprang to mind, and although the words seemed very matter-of-fact, very resigned, in my thoughts, they sounded surprisingly bitter, almost angry when I heard them blurted out loud.
Of course Mom had bad news.
Would there ever be news of any other kind, in the cursed old Jekel house?
Chapter 7
Jill
MY MOTHER SAT HUNCHED at the kitchen table, shivering a little in her damp scrubs, which clung to her frame. I found myself staring at her shoulders, two bony knobs jutting through the thin cotton fabric. “I’ll make you some tea,” I offered. “And something to eat while we talk.”
“Just tea,” Mom said, not even sounding interested in that. “I’m not hungry.”
“But you should eat,” I told her, a cold knot forming in the pit of my stomach. She’d stopped eating, dropping to nearly one hundred pounds, before her breakdown. “Just a little something.”
“No, Jill.”
I couldn’t force her, so I went to make the tea, putting the kettle on the stove and taking a china cup from the shelf. “So, what’s up?” I asked, although I had my suspicions. Bad news . . . that was usually about Dad. “Did the police find something?”
“No, Jill. Nothing.”
“Oh.” Although Mom certainly hadn’t led me to expect anything good, I was still a little foolishly disappointed that there was no news at all about my father.
Ever since we’d learned about the grainy videos captured by Carson Pharmaceuticals’ security cameras that showed my dad working at three and four a.m., sometimes with a man whose face was indistinct because they kept the lights so low . . . Ever since then I’d clung to the hope that someday the mysterious man would be identified, and not only would the police solve the case and bring Dad’s killer to justice, but Dad would somehow be vindicated.
Silly me.
The kettle whistled, and I reached for it, filling the cup. “So, it’s nothing about Dad? Or the other
