The Last Time I Lied(84)

I had spent an hour there the night before, being grilled by a pair of detectives who took turns asking me questions. An exhausting back-and-forth, my neck sore from swiveling between them. I answered most of their questions. When the girls had left. What they were wearing. What Vivian said before departing the cabin. As for what I’d told her as she slipped outside and how I prevented them from getting back in, well, that remained unspoken.

The shame was too great. The guilt was even worse.

Now I was being asked a new round of questions, although the female trooper displayed far more patience than the detectives. In fact, she looked like she wanted to hug me to her oversize chest and tell me that everything would be okay.

“I believe you,” she said.

“Where did you find that sweatshirt?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

I looked to the other side of the room, where the folded sweatshirt was being passed to yet another trooper. He also wore gloves. The skin of his hands shone white beneath the latex as he placed the sweatshirt into a cardboard evidence box. Dread flooded my heart.

“Did any of the girls have secrets they might have shared with you but not with others?” the trooper said.

“I don’t know.”

“But they did have secrets?”

“It’s kind of hard to call something a secret if I don’t know who else they told.”

My teenage bitchiness was intentional. An attempt to wipe that pitying look off the trooper’s face. I didn’t deserve her pity. Instead, it only made her lean in closer, acting like the cool guidance counselor at school who was always telling us to think of her as a friend and not as an authority figure.

“Most times teenage girls run away, they do so because they’re meeting someone,” she said. “A boyfriend. Or a lover. It’s usually someone others don’t approve of. A forbidden romance. Did any of the girls mention anything like that?”

I wasn’t sure how much I should say, mostly because I didn’t know what was going on.

“The girls ran away? Is that what you think?”

“We don’t know, honey. Maybe. That’s why we need your help. Because sometimes girls run away to meet a boy who ends up hurting them. We don’t want your friends to get hurt. We just want to find them. So if you know anything—anything at all—I’d really appreciate it if you told me.”

I thought of The Lovely Bones. The teenager found dead in a field. The creepy neighbor who killed her.

“Vivian was seeing someone,” I said.

The trooper’s eyes momentarily brightened before she settled back down, forcing herself to keep playing it cool.

“Did she happen to tell you who it was?”

“Do you think he might have done something to her?”

“We won’t know until we talk to him.”

I took that as a yes. Which meant they thought Vivian, Natalie, and Allison were more than lost. They thought they were dead. Murdered. Just three sets of lovely bones on the forest floor.

“Emma,” the trooper said. “If you know his name, you need to tell us.”

I opened my mouth. My heart thundered so hard I felt it in my teeth.

“It’s Theo,” I said. “Theodore Harris-White.”

I didn’t believe it, not even as I said it. Yet I wanted to. I wanted to think Theo had something to do with the girls’ disappearance, that he was capable of hurting them. Because he already had hurt someone.

Me.

He shattered my heart without even realizing it.

This was my chance to hurt him back.

“Are you sure?” the trooper said.

I tried to convince myself it wasn’t bitter jealousy making me do this. That it made sense Theo would be involved. Once Vivian, Natalie, and Allison returned to the locked cabin, the first thing they would have done was find a counselor. They didn’t because they had been out after hours, not to mention drinking. Both offenses would have gotten them kicked out of camp. So they had gone to the one person of authority they could trust—Theo. Now they were missing, likely presumed dead. That couldn’t be a coincidence.

At least that’s the lie I told myself.

“I’m certain,” I said.

A few minutes later, I was allowed to return to Dogwood. The area outside the arts and crafts building hummed with activity as I left. There were cops and reporters and the bray of bloodhounds in the distance. Troopers had already started searching the camp pickup. I spotted them as I passed, peering into the open cab doors and rifling through the glove compartment.

When I turned away, I saw a search party just returning from a trek through the woods. Most of them were townies, come to help any way they could. But I spotted a few familiar faces in the crowd. The kitchen worker who had piled my plate with pancakes on the Fourth of July, which suddenly felt like weeks ago. The handyman who always seemed to be fixing something around camp.

Then there was Theo, looking haggard in jeans and a T-shirt darkened by sweat. His hair was a shambles. A smudge of dirt stained his cheek.

I flung myself toward him, not quite knowing what I intended to do until I was right there in front of him. I was both mad at Vivian and terrified for her, furious at Theo and in love with him. So my hands curled into fists. I pounded his chest.

“Where are they?” I cried. “What did you do to them?”