Take the Fall(44)

I spend a few minutes jotting down the events I’ve collected and gone over in my head a million times:

~10:00 p.m. Sonia, Gretchen, and Kirsten arrived at Brianne’s party. Kirsten got drunk. Marcus and Gretchen hooked up.

~10:50 p.m. Gretchen and Kirsten fought. Gretchen left the party with Sonia, telling Kirsten to get her own ride. (Kirsten likely stayed behind at the party.)

~11:00 p.m. Sonia and Gretchen arrived at Gretchen’s house. Gretchen went inside and Sonia briefly spoke with Haley Jacobs, out walking her dog. From there, Sonia walked home through Hidden Falls Park.

~11:04 p.m. Gretchen called her own house from her cell phone.

~11:05 p.m. Sonia was attacked in the woods.

~11:30 p.m. The sheriff was called to the diner after Sonia’s attack.

-Mr. and Mrs. Meyer arrived home, but Gretchen wasn’t there.

-Kip Peterson saw Gretchen sitting by herself near the top of the falls (the last person to see her alive).

-Marcus went for a walk in the park.

~11:45 p.m. Gretchen’s father discovered a male intruder in Gretchen’s bedroom. The intruder escaped over the balcony. Gretchen’s parents called the sheriff.

~11:50 p.m. Aisha Wallace heard a commotion outside her house, looked outside, and saw Marcus leaving Hidden Falls Park.

~11:55 p.m. Police arrived at the Meyer home in response to the break-in.

~12:30 a.m. Kirsten came home, very drunk.

~6:15 a.m. Gretchen’s body was spotted floating in the pool at the base of Hidden Falls. Her Mercedes is still unaccounted for.

Marcus studies the page a long time after I finish. I expect him to amend it somehow, maybe fill in a few blanks, but he just nods and hands it back to me.

“That’s it?” I say. “You have nothing to add?”

He shrugs. “I didn’t know about the phone call. Everything else looks about right.”

“Really.” I fold my hands in my lap. “Well, there’s something I’ve been wondering. You hooked up with Gretchen at the party, then she and Kirsten got into that huge fight. What exactly was that about?”

“She didn’t tell you?”

I just look at him. He dated her long enough that he should know better than to ask. If Gretchen was mad about something, there was no talking to her. If you tried, she deflected your words back at you like shrapnel.

He runs his hand through his hair. “Kirsten tried to come on to me. Gretchen found us.”

“Wait. Did you say Kirsten?” I was sure the two of them hooking up was just a rumor.

“She was pretty drunk. She just started kissing me. I would never have let it go anywhere, but Gretchen found us in a room together right when Kirsten decided to take her shirt off. Gretchen made her put it back on and threw her out.”

I try to imagine this. Shy, awkward Kirsten, who Gretchen teased on her sixteenth birthday for never being kissed, trying to seduce Gretchen’s loner ex-boyfriend. Neither she nor Gretchen had been acting like themselves the night of the party. I can’t remember ever seeing Kirsten drunk before. But it still strikes me as nuts.

I raise my eyebrows. “I thought you had sex with Gretchen.”

“Yeah . . .” He looks at his shoes.

I force my mouth closed, but it’s actually starting to make sense. Gretchen’s exes always seemed to have trouble moving on after she was done with them—and she was always the one to end it. I can’t think of a single time she was dumped. If Kirsten was drunk and trying to prove something to her sister, poor rejected Marcus would’ve been an easy target, and Gretchen wouldn’t have reacted well to finding them together.

“So, help me out with something here,” I say.

He raises his head.

“You and Gretchen had breakup sex—sort of. After her sister came on to you. Kirsten got pissed, they fought, Gretchen and I went home. You supposedly went home too, to check on your grandmother.” He nods slowly. I wet my lips, knowing this is a long shot. “At some point, Gretchen went back out into the woods . . . and so did you. Is that just a coincidence?”

Marcus stares at me, his face reddening. I stare back. I’ve had a feeling he wasn’t telling me everything, but I wait for him to speak. He exhales, closing his eyes.

“I missed her . . . I wanted to get back together.”

I press my mouth into a line. I’m not exactly shocked to hear this—I swear Gretchen left a permanent mark on guys’ hearts. I just had this idea Marcus wasn’t like the rest of them.

I look away, annoyed with myself for being disappointed.

He grabs his mug and rises to his feet. “I need more coffee.”

I open my mouth, but he’s gone before I can speak. Behind him on the chair, he left his sketchbook open to a blank page. I look in the direction he disappeared and lean over, lifting just the top couple of pages, hoping for another glimpse of Summer Wentworth. An intricate flowering vine grows wild and twisting all over the first page I turn to, like it was planted there instead of sketched. It’s strange and beautiful, like nothing I’ve ever seen. But then I look more closely and notice the flowers have faces and each of them is frozen in a scream.

I think of what Kip said about the sketch of Gretchen and I let the page drop, the tremor in my fingers telling me it’s past time to leave. I reach for my bag, pull myself out of the awkward seat, but then Marcus appears and shoves me back, landing in the chair with me.