I look down at the notebook in my lap.
“What’s that?” Dean asks.
“After I left the jail, everything Xavier said to me was tumbling around in my brain. It was just a jumbled mass of words and phrases. It was so confusing, but I wanted to remember as many of them as I possibly could. So, I stopped at the nearest drugstore and got a notebook and pen so I could write as many of them down as I could remember.”
“Imagine your brain being like that all the time,” he says. “That's what it's like for Xavier.”
“Yeah, but it makes sense to him. Look. This is where he was talking about the garage. He said it over and over. ‘Andrew knew. He knew, he knew, he knew.’ He said it over and over.”
“What did he know? That there was gas coming into the garage? Is he saying that Andrew killed himself?”
“No, I don't think so. The garage itself. He was looking up at the ceiling and talking about how people think of a floor and ceiling as being the same thing when you're on different levels. But they're not. They're not the same thing, because there's space in between them. And Andrew knew that." I pause, staring at the paper. "Oh, my god."
"What?" Dean asks.
"’He knew there was something in between’. ‘There was separation’. ‘Space… and air’."
"There were safety features in the garage. An emergency air supply," Dean connects with my line of thinking.
"And Andrew knew about them. Of course, he knew about them because they made Xavier feel safe. And Andrew made Xavier feel safe. He talked about Andrew being stable and predictable. Dependable was the word he used. He depended on Andrew. Xavier knows he doesn't see the world the same way everybody else does. He can understand that. People seem to think that he isn't aware that he's doing things differently, but I think he is. I think he's very aware of it, and Andrew was his connection to the world. Andrew was his best friend and the one person he fully trusted. So, he told him everything.”
“Including all the secrets he put in his house,” Dean says. “Which means Andrew couldn't have died accidentally in that garage. He knew about the emergency air supply.”
“Exactly. And Xavier never would have tried to kill him in that garage because he would know that Andrew knew about that supply.”
“Unless he did it on purpose,” Dean says. “He could have killed Andrew somewhere else and put him in that garage, or incapacitated him in some way and put him in the garage, knowing that people would question whether he would do something so patently obvious as killing his best friend in his own garage. Maybe it was intended to be his alibi.”
“No,” I frown, shaking my head. “With a friendship like that, anyone who knew them would know Xavier used Andrew as his filter to understand the world. They would know he would have told Andrew everything about the garage. Which means they would know he wouldn't think to falsely implicate himself like that because everyone who knew him would know it didn't make sense.”
"That didn't make sense," Dean says.
"Yes, it did. Just unravel it a little at a time. The thing is, friends and family, don't convict. Courts do. And the evidence was enough to influence the court into convicting him. But whoever actually did kill Andrew didn't know him or Xavier very well. Not well enough to know that the garage was modified, or that Andrew would know about the modifications.”
“So you think the murder was random? That seems like a lot of trouble to go through for a random killing," Dean says.
"It wasn't random. This was planned."
"By someone who didn't know them?" Dean asks.
I explain to him what Xavier said about the game pieces. "It seems kind of right on the nose since he’s in jail for something someone else did, but I don't think he meant it as literally as it sounds. He's talking about death, not jail. He said somebody pulled Andrew's card."
We spend the rest of the evening going over all the notes I made, trying to decipher them. Just when I feel as if I'm figuring one thing out, another one takes its place and makes even less sense than before. Beside the notes is the piece of paper Xavier gave me. It's a drawing of a large circle, covered in dots evenly spaced across the shape. Beside the main circle are eight smaller circles. Seven are white, and the eighth is gray. Beneath the whole drawing is a large question mark.
“Do you think he's actually wondering what it means, or is it another riddle?” Dean asks. “Is he trying to get us to figure out what that is?”
“Again, I don't think he means to be communicating in riddles. This is telling me something, not trying to get me to figure it out for myself. Whatever this is, he doesn't know what it is, either.”
“So, how are you going to figure it out?” he asks.
“I don't know,” I sigh. “But I feel as if there are a lot of people I need to talk to.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
I feel as if I've driven more in the week I've been in Harlan than I usually do in a month in Sherwood. Back home, I'm used to walking most of the time. I'll drive if I have to go to the grocery store and buy more than I can comfortably carry, or when the weather is bad, or if I'm leaving the main town. But most days, I get along fine walking or jogging.
I lately also haven't had as much need to go anywhere. On the one hand, it's brought me to the teetering edge of losing my mind. But on the other, it's comforting and sometimes luxurious to just be able to enjoy one place and not be forced to go anywhere else. But here, I'm driving around nonstop.
Harlan isn't a big
