“Well, you are just so cool,” Maggie told Stride with a smile.
“It wasn’t my finest moment,” he admitted.
“How did Ray feel about Dada getting away?”
“In retrospect, I think he was relieved. He knew that Dada was long gone once he got on that train. We were never going to see him again. Everyone got what they wanted. Ray. Laura’s dad. Peter Stanhope and his father. They could all believe that we knew who killed Laura, and he had left town for good. It could all go away, go underground. And that’s what happened.”
“But did Dada kill Laura?” Maggie asked.
“Ray had the lab check Dada’s canteen for fingerprints, and they compared them with Peter’s bat. There was a match. Dada had his hands on that bat, which tracked with Peter’s story. There weren’t any other witnesses.”
“That was enough for Ray?”
“That was enough for everyone. Even me. Until now.”
WHO KILLED LAURA STARR?
SEVENTEEN
I never believed the story about Dada. I couldn’t say anything, though. My dad needed closure, not an open wound. The police wouldn’t listen. They barely pretended to search for Dada around the country, because no one really wanted to find him. If he came back, questions would be asked, and the answers were better off buried with the body.
It’s easy to believe in evil. Easy to spot it. The black devil came to town, and he picked one girl to sacrifice, and then he rode the dirty train back to the wilderness. That’s the kind of fable they used to tell us in church. People around here like to think that good and evil are as easy as black and white. Good people wear the cross. Bad people don’t. Bad people are strangers. It’s so much harder to accept that evil could be living among you. Your neighbor. Your teacher. Your friend.
The stalker? No one wanted to know about him. Dada wasn’t the one on the school grounds, slipping vile notes into Laura’s locker. He wasn’t mailing threats to her. It didn’t matter. If Dada killed her, why look for a stalker? If Dada killed her, the city was safe again. Parents could stop holding their breath. Kids could make out in the park. That’s what we all wanted.
So I let it go, even though I knew it was a lie. Even though I knew there was a killer among us. I didn’t know his face, but I was sure I knew who he was.
Someday I hoped the truth would come out, but that wasn’t up to me.
Jonny took it hard. He felt as if he had let me down. He took the blame on himself; he had let Dada escape. The doctors worked on his jaw, but his face always looked imperfect after that, slightly flawed. I liked it. It made him human. He looked older, too. Tougher. Like the scar on his face from Dada’s ring was a reminder that you could fight and lose, but you could never win if you didn’t fight at all. I began to see the man I would live with. Love. Marry.
The strange thing is, I knew he was going to be a cop before he did. The experience with Laura, Peter, and Dada changed him. So did Ray. I never told him that I didn’t trust Ray, not ever, not for a minute. But Jonny had found someone’s footsteps to follow, the way he once expected to follow his father’s path. I always thought he would be a better cop than Ray, because Ray was in it for himself. Jonny was different. He was in it because something had been taken from him that year, and this was a way to get it back.
Not that he ever would. When you lose some things, they’re gone for good.
Life goes on, for better or worse, but sometimes in the silence, your mind travels back. I never really got past that summer. We never talked about it again, but I carried it with me every day. I knew he did, too.
I never went back to the park. To the lake. I didn’t want to be reminded. Even so, there would be days when I drove along the highway that skirted the wilderness refuge, and I would stare down into the nest of trees, and I would be seventeen again. In my bare feet. The baseball bat in my hands.
If only I could tell Jonny the truth about what happened that night.
PART THREE. The Witness
18
Clark Biggs looked stiff and uncomfortable in a straight-backed wooden chair pushed against the living room wall. His hands sat limply in his lap. His eyes were fixed on a bookshelf across the room. Maggie followed his stare to a picture frame with a photograph of Clark and Mary in the backyard. They were playing in the fall leaves. Mary tossed colored oak leaves in the air, her smile big and wide, her blond curls flying. In the photograph, Maggie could see the contentment and pride hiding behind Clark’s solemn eyes. Today, that happiness had been vacuumed away, leaving his heart empty.
“Mr. Biggs?” she asked again softly.
He broke out of his trance. “I’m sorry, what?”
“I was asking if you had ever seen a silver RAV4 parked around the neighborhood, or whether anyone you know owns a vehicle like that.”
“Oh.” He put his hands on his knees and studied the faded pattern in the carpet at his
