pressing against mine. Then I separate us.
“Where’s Annie?”
“In bed.”
“Good. Do you feel like telling me what you know now?”
She wipes her eyes and nose. “My eyes are swollen. That always happens when I cry. I know I look like shit.”
“It’s okay. Just tell me what happened.”
She disengages from me, sits on the top step, and hugs her knees. “About seven tonight, Chris bet Jimmy Wingate he could beat him across the lake. Swimming, right? As cold as it is at night, and that’s the wide part of the lake, too. Jimmy didn’t want to do it, but Chris was wasted and kept calling Jimmy a pussy. I can just see it. Chris is such a redneck sometimes. So they tried it. No life jackets, pitch black. They were about halfway across when Chris got into trouble. He just stopped swimming and tried to float. He told Jimmy he was watching the moon, that the moon was changing colors every second.”
“Jimmy tried to get him to keep swimming,” Mia continues, “but it was like Chris couldn’t hear him. Jimmy was treading water, and he knew he couldn’t last long. When he finally got Chris to start swimming again, Chris started puking. After that, Chris couldn’t keep himself afloat. Jimmy wasn’t sure which bank they were closer to, so he tried to pull Chris back to the pier where they’d started. He barely made it forty yards before he was exhausted.” Mia is rocking steadily now. “He had to let Chris go, and he barely made it back himself. He was crying like a baby when he told me this.”
“Things
“Did I help any?” Mia asks.
“What?”
“About Shad Johnson. Did I help Dr. Elliott by seeing Shad with the judge and the sheriff?”
I reach down and squeeze her shoulder. “You helped a lot. I really appreciate it.”
“Can you tell me about it?”
“I wish I could, but-”
“You don’t trust me.”
“It’s not that. It’s just…”
She looks up, her eyes hurt. “If you really trusted me, you’d tell me.”
I sit beside her on the steps. “Drew’s situation is about more than a crime, okay? It’s political. The D.A. wants to convict Drew to prove that a rich white man won’t be treated any better than a poor black one in this town.”
“That sounds like a good thing.”
“If that were the real reason he was doing it, it would be. But it’s not. Shad wants to be elected mayor. And if what he really wanted was to bring this city back to life, I’d support him. But that’s not what he wants. He wants a stepping-stone to bigger things. He wants personal power. And he’s willing to railroad Drew to get it.”
Mia turns to me and smiles through her tears. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
“No.”
She raises a forefinger and pretends to zip her lips. “It’s in the vault.”
“
She laughs. Then she begins to cry again.
“Did you know Chris well?” I ask.
“Since nursery school.”
This doesn’t surprise me. I started at St. Stephen’s when I was four years old. Fourteen years later, most of the people I graduated with were children I’d played with in nursery school. I knew them as well as I knew my own family, and many of them I still do. That’s one of the things that makes this shrinking town worth saving. Some of the best parts of American life that have vanished elsewhere still thrive here.
“I still want to help,” Mia says. “I mean it. Even if you think it’s dangerous. School’s boring me to death. I’m just counting the days until graduation. I want to do something that matters. Especially now.”
I stand and pull her to her feet, then look hard into her eyes. “Who brought the LSD to the party?”
She goes still, her eyes locked on mine.
“Was it Marko?”
“I don’t know. Not for sure.”
“Would you tell me if you knew?”
“I don’t know.”
“What would keep you from it? Loyalty to your friends? To Marko? Or is it fear of Marko?”
She closes her eyes, then opens them again. “I’ll think about that, okay? I’m not sure myself.”
“Fair enough.”
“I’d better go now.”
I try to give her a smile of encouragement, but it fails.
“Will you hug me once more?” she asks in a small voice.
I start to, but something stops me.
“Never mind,” she says, her mercurial eyes quick to recognize my hesitation. She walks down the steps and to her car, not once looking back.
“Be careful, Mia.”
“Don’t worry. I can take care of myself.” She slams her door and pulls away, leaving me feeling like a complete asshole.
Chapter 15
Closeted in my downstairs bedroom with Kate’s shoe box, I remove her journal again and prop myself up in bed. I already tried without success to view the contents of the three Lexar flash drives from the box. Each flash drive is protected by a security program that requires a password even to view file names and types. I’ll have to ask Drew tomorrow if he knows any of Kate’s passwords. If Kate stored intimate photos on the drives, maybe he was privy to that information, so that he could borrow the drives sometimes and view them. If not, I’ll have to hire a professional hacker to open the files.
After adjusting my reading light, I reread the opening passage of Kate’s journal, then wade into the body of the work. Her voice seems mature for her age, which I would expect from a senior bound for Harvard. But there’s something else here, an unguarded honesty I didn’t expect. I’ve been sent many manuscripts by published and unpublished writers over the years, and one thing I’ve learned is that people who write unflinchingly from the heart have the capacity to move us, where more polished craftsmen often fall short.
Kate’s journal begins in the early summer of last year. As I read the early entries, my hunger to know more about her more recent months causes me to skip ahead. What quickly emerges from the pages is a picture of a girl maturing very fast, changing from a bored overachiever concerned with the social politics of high school to a fully engaged young woman ready to ditch the standard plan in order to be with the man she loved. By the time I’ve skimmed to the halfway point, I find myself mourning Kate Townsend more deeply than I would have thought possible.
Realizing that I might have missed important information in my haste, I go back and start again, this time folding down the corners of pages that seem representative of the arc of her final year, and also of those that hold information that might be helpful in defending Drew.
There’s the early stuff, where Kate was still a part of the high school as most adults imagine it. Drew was recuperating from a knee injury, and thus home all day with Kate and Timmy.
6/3
