now. A group of other children were playing in Eric Holmes’s yard across the street. He wanted to play with them, but when he started to cross the street, Eric and his friends had abruptly stopped talking. And he knew, without any of them saying anything, that they didn’t want to let him play with them. Doing his best not to cry, he’d turned around and gone back into his grandmother’s house.
Today, though, in the parish house next to the church, they didn’t stay silent. When Matthew was still a few feet away, Eric Holmes spoke. He kept his voice low enough so it wouldn’t fill the room, but loud enough so Matt would hear his words clearly.
“How did it feel?” he asked. “How did it feel to shoot your dad?”
Matt stopped short, the words slashing through him like a razor. For a moment he couldn’t speak — couldn’t even think. Then his mind slowly began to function again, yet still he didn’t speak, for he knew there was nothing he could say.
They had made up their minds: he was guilty.
His eyes moved from face to face. For ten years they had been his friends, the people he’d gone to school with! They’d known him! They’d liked him!
Or had they? Was it possible they’d never been his friends? That they’d only pretended to be because of who his stepfather was? Suddenly Matt felt as if he were four years old again.
Then, as his eyes fell on Kelly Conroe, he felt a flicker of hope. There was something in her expression that told him she wasn’t as certain about what had happened as the rest of them. He took a step toward her, but as if reading his thoughts, she shook her head in a quick movement and she edged toward Eric Holmes.
Another stab of pain shot through Matt, and as he felt his eyes sting with tears, he turned quickly away.
At least he didn’t have to let them see the pain he was feeling.
Out!
He had to get out!
His head down so no one could see his glistening eyes, Matt hurried toward the door, brushing past his mother and pushing his way out onto the loggia that connected the parish hall to the church. Breathing deeply, he tried to swallow the lump that had blocked his throat, and to conquer the tears that streamed from his eyes.
But it didn’t matter — nothing mattered now.
Everything was gone.
His stepfather.
His friends.
Even Kelly.
When he heard the door open behind him, he held very still, refusing even to turn around.
“I’m really sorry about your dad, Matt.”
When he failed to face her, Becky Adams moved around in front of Matt and looked directly into his face. Her mousy brown hair was cut in bangs that made her face look even rounder than it was, and she seemed almost lost in the bulky brown sweater she was wearing. Her brow was furrowed with worry, and her eyes looked enormous behind the thick lenses she’d been wearing since they were little. “I don’t care what anyone else thinks,” she said. “I don’t believe it. I don’t believe any of it.”
Matt’s first impulse was to turn away, knowing what his friends would say if they caught him actually talking to Becky Adams. But then he remembered that it didn’t matter anymore what his friends might say.
He no longer had any friends.
“Thanks,” he said. “And thanks for at least talking to me.”
Thirty minutes later, as the limousine pulled away from the front of the church, Matt looked back to see Becky Adams still standing on the loggia. She raised a hand to wave to him, and he waved back, though he wasn’t sure she could see him through the car’s dark windows.
CHAPTER 10
TRIP WAINWRIGHT — whose full name was Wallace Fisher Wainwright III — had been involved in the affairs of Bill Hapgood since the day he graduated from law school twenty-six years ago. Five months later, when he’d passed the bar and received his license to practice, his father added his name to the shingle that hung outside the old stone building at the corner of Main and Chestnut, which had originally been a post house. It had been Bill Hapgood’s suggestion that at such time as Trip’s own son, currently in his second year at his father’s alma mater, took over Senior Wainwright’s desk in the old post house, the name of the firm should be modernized to WW, an appellation that Trip suspected might very well prove prophetic if and when he broached the idea to his father. “Don’t worry about that,” Bill had assured him. “I can handle your dad. He’s always liked me better than you anyway.”
Though Bill had said it half jokingly, it was more than half true, and as Trip sat through the funeral that morning, he’d realized just how much he was going to miss the man who had been not only his first client, but one of his best friends as well. Now, as he went through his briefcase one last time to make certain he had all the files that might be relevant to whatever questions Joan Hapgood might have, he reflected that he was far from the only person in Granite Falls who had thought of Bill Hapgood as their best friend. Besides himself and Gerry Conroe, Trip suspected that Paul Arneson and Marty Holmes would have placed Bill at the top of their list of friends, and even beyond those three, nearly everyone in town had liked and respected Bill.
Granite Falls wasn’t going to be the same without him.
Sighing, Trip snapped the latches of his briefcase closed, started out of his office, then turned back to pick up the telephone and call Dan Pullman, whose office was just down the block in the town hall. “I’m on my way out to talk to Joan,” he said. “Is there anything I can tell her?” He listened, grunted noncommittally, then hung up. Finally leaving his office, he got into the little Miata that his father never failed to remind him was too flashy for a lawyer — which was the primary reason he’d bought it — and headed out to the Hapgood house. But he found himself driving slowly, turning the two-minute drive into a ten-minute run for no other reason than to put off the inevitable. That was another thing his father never failed to needle him about: “Never put things off, Trip. You never know when a client might drop dead, and you don’t want to have papers still waiting to be signed.” Sometimes, when he wasn’t feeling particularly charitable, Trip wondered if that was all the clients were to his father: nothing more than sheaves of paper, neatly filed away in manila folders, to be shuffled about and eventually disposed of.
But Bill Hapgood had been his friend, and he was not looking forward to the next couple of hours. Yet as he turned through the gates and started up the long driveway to the house, he knew his father was right — the sooner he got it over with, the better.
Joan answered the door as he was about to press the bell a second time. She was still wearing the same black dress she’d worn to the funeral, and the single strand of pearls still hung around her neck. She’d taken off the pearl earrings, though, and removed her makeup.
As had happened every time Trip Wainwright had seen Joan since she’d first come back to Granite Falls fifteen years ago, his heart had skipped a beat and he felt a hollowness in his stomach. It wasn’t that Joan had turned beautiful while she was away, for her features hadn’t so much changed as simply matured. It was that she didn’t seem to have any idea how beautiful she was. Of course, Trip — already married and with a son of his own — had been careful never to reveal the crush he’d developed on Joan Moore, and even when she married Bill Hapgood, he carefully betrayed none of the sense of loss he felt. Then, after Adrienne died three years ago, he’d been even more vigilant in guarding the secret of his feelings toward Joan Hapgood. Now, even without her makeup, and with her eyes still red from the tears she’d shed at the funeral, he still thought she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.
And she still seemed utterly unaware of it.
“Come in, Trip,” she said, pulling the door wide. She managed a weak smile. “I’d intended to change and be
