Everything You Want Me to Be(19)

“I don’t know.”

“Did you like the play on Friday? Did Hattie do all right?”

“I guess.”

Kid wasn’t much for talking. I finally turned around and put myself dead in front of him and waited until he looked up. He was big; he could probably bench my whole weight, but he didn’t look it right now. He looked small and scared, hunched between his mom and dad.

“Where’d you and Hattie go after the play, Tommy?”

“Out for a drive,” he admitted.

“For a drive where?”

“I dunno.”

Jake jumped in, hell-bent on playing bad cop. “We can take you down to the station, if you’d prefer, or to the murder scene. Maybe that would jog your memory a bit.”

“What are you accusing my son of, Jake Adkins?” Mrs. Kinakis asked, standing up.

“No one’s doing any accusing, Mrs. Kinakis. All we know is Hattie left the school with Tommy on Friday night and the next time anyone saw her she was dead. Now we need to know what Tommy knows. I understand it’s hard to talk about, but it’s going to be a lot harder if he chooses not to talk to us. For us and for him.”

Mr. Kinakis cleared his throat and motioned to his wife to sit down. She walked to the other side of the room instead, and we all waited for Tommy. After a minute, he took a breath and started in.

“I thought we were going to Dairy Queen, but she wanted to go out to Crosby instead.”

Mrs. Kinakis gasped and covered her mouth. “You didn’t tell us you took her to the lake.”

Tommy looked away.

“Where on Crosby?” I asked.

“The parking lot by the beach. We went there sometimes to . . .” He glanced at his dad. “Just to make out. Nothing else. She hadn’t wanted to go out there for a while.”

“What then?”

“Well, I thought she wanted to—you know, but she didn’t. She said she couldn’t see me anymore.”

“She broke up with you?” Jake asked.

Tommy nodded. “She acted so strange. I told her there was still another couple months before graduation, and prom, too. Didn’t she want to go to prom?”

He was looking at his hands now, almost seeming to forget we were all there.

“She got real quiet then. Looked sad for a minute. And she said some girls weren’t meant to go to prom. It was like she already knew. Like she knew she was gonna die.”

He broke off and put his head in his hands.

“What happened then, Tommy?”

“She left.” His voice was muffled and I wished I could see his eyes.

“She got out of the truck and told me to go find some other farm girl who’d let me fuck her. Sorry, Mom. She said, ‘’Bye, Tommy,’ and then she walked off into the night. She never swore. I didn’t know why she was acting like that. I didn’t know what I did wrong.”

“Did you follow her?”

“No.”

“Must have made you mad, what she said.”

He lifted his head again and his eyes were dripping. “It was cold out. I thought, let her walk home then. Fuck her, you know? Sorry, Mom.”

“Anybody else in the parking lot?”

“No.”

“You pass anybody on the way in?”

“I don’t think so.”

“And you just let her walk off and went home?”

“I—yeah, I left, but I drove around for a while before going home. I was pretty mad.”

“You pick anybody up? Call any of your buddies to talk about it?”

He shook his head. “I didn’t want to tell anybody. I even . . . doubled back and drove around the back roads for a while, thinking I might see her and maybe she’d apologize. She just wasn’t like that, you know? We were going to do things. We were getting a limo for prom and all of us were going up to Derek’s cabin in July. It’s been all planned for months. Everyone’s bringing their girlfriends.”

“Did you go back to the parking lot? Try to find her there?”

“I just drove by without stopping.” He swallowed and took a shaky breath. “It was cold.”

“Then what?”

He looked at the door. “I came home.”

“When did he get home that night?” Jake asked his parents.

“Didn’t hear him,” Mr. Kinakis said. “We were already in bed.”

“I’m sure I heard him come in.” Mrs. Kinakis jumped in. “It couldn’t have been later than ten thirty.”

“Tommy?” I turned back to him.

“Yeah, it was probably around then,” he mumbled.

We kept after him for more details and his story didn’t waver. He kept his head down and wiped tears from his eyes with meaty forearms. As we wrapped up the interview, Mrs. Kinakis wasted no time shooing us out the door. Before she got us all the way out, I shot Tommy one last question.

“Hattie ever talk about a curse?”

“Curse? Like a voodoo curse?” He looked up blankly and shook his head as Mrs. Kinakis hustled us out of her house.

After that Jake and I headed over to the east side of Crosby to check on Shel, the deputy who’d won the coin toss to search the lake. The rest of the boys had made a full search of the shoreline first thing this morning and turned up nothing. Most of them were combing Winifred’s fields with the dogs now while Shel had the boat out on the lake, scanning the bottom. It was a shallow lake. Twenty feet at the deepest point. If there was anything to be found, Shel would see it soon enough.