From the Desk of Zoe Washington(38)

My eyes filled with tears, but I tried not to sound like I was upset. “So that’s it? You can’t help me?”

“I’m sorry. I have another call right now so I’d better—”

I hung up the phone before he could finish.

I pressed my palms over my eyes as tears squeezed out of them. Mr. Miller probably still thought Marcus was guilty, so of course he wouldn’t help me. Maybe this was all a lost cause.

But there was a tiny voice in the back of my brain. It told me to remember what I read in The Wrongfully Convicted, and in my research about the Innocence Project. It told me that Susan Thomas was out there somewhere, and she still might’ve seen Marcus that day. It told me not to lose hope. Not yet.

Now that I’d gotten my cereal cupcake recipe right, it was time to experiment with the food coloring. On Saturday, I separated the batch into three different bowls and mixed a little gel food coloring into each one—red, blue, and green, to match the Froot Loops. The batter looked super vibrant. I scooped a little of each color batter into each cupcake pan before baking them.

The first batch came out pretty enough, but I realized I could’ve used a toothpick to swirl the colored batter a little so the finished cupcakes looked more tie-dyed.

I started working on another batch of cupcake batter so I could try that, when my phone chirped.

It had to be Susan Thomas! I wiped my hands on my apron and grabbed my phone.

It was a reply from Susan Thomas, and I skimmed through the email, looking for Marcus’s name. But it wasn’t good news. She said she only moved to Brookline eight years earlier, so she wasn’t living there when Marcus would’ve gone to a tag sale. She wasn’t the right person.

My shoulders slumped as I put my phone down. I was back at square one.

When I heard Trevor come home that night, I texted him to come over so I could show him the email.

“This is hopeless,” I told him.

“Are you sure you don’t know anything else about her? Can you ask Marcus again?”

“All Marcus said he remembered is her name, what she looked like, the fact that she lived in Brookline, and she mentioned students at one point. Oh, and she was married, with no kids.”

“I have an idea.” Trevor pulled my laptop toward him and opened a search browser. He typed in “Susan Thomas Brookline MA professor.”

“Oh.” My eyes lit up.

“There are so many colleges in Boston,” Trevor said. “Maybe she teaches at one of them.”

“That makes sense.” I wished I’d thought of it.

Unlike the other times we searched for Susan Thomas, this time the results got smaller—the first page was all websites about the same person. The first link was to a Harvard University page for a Professor Susan Thomas who worked in the math department, and below that was a résumé website for the same person.

Trevor clicked on the first link.

“There’s a picture.” I stared at the small rectangular box that appeared next to the professor’s biography. The picture was in black and white, but it was clear that she had dark hair and dark eyes. I squinted at it. “Does it look like she has freckles?”

Trevor leaned in to the picture himself. “I’m not sure. Let’s read her bio.”

The two of us stared at the computer screen as we read it. Right there in the first line, it said that she was a Massachusetts native.

“So she grew up here,” Trevor said.

“But it doesn’t say whether or not she lived in Brookline,” I pointed out. “What about the other website that came up below this one? The résumé one—it might say where she’s lived.”

Trevor clicked back over to the website and we stared at her résumé. There, at the bottom, under education, it said Brookline High School.

“She lived in Brookline!” I said. “It has to be her!”

“It says she went to high school there,” Trevor said. “She must’ve grown up there. But Marcus said she was in her thirties when he met her.”

“Right, but maybe she lived there for a while after. Or moved back, or something.”

“Yeah,” Trevor said.

I switched back to the Harvard page. I scrolled down and found a list of classes that Professor Thomas would teach when the fall semester started in a few weeks.

“Do you see this?” I asked, still staring at the screen. “Classes start up at Harvard on August thirtieth. School doesn’t start for us until September sixth. Maybe one of those days in between, we can go to Harvard and talk to her, figure out if she’s the same person Marcus met. And if she is, I can see if she remembers him.”

Trevor nodded. “But how will we get to Harvard without your parents finding out what we’re going there for? Maybe you should try emailing her first.”

“You’re right.”

I opened my email and wrote out a similar message to the one I’d sent the first Susan Thomas. “Let’s hope she replies faster than the last one.”





Chapter Twenty-Five


I needed a plan. It’d been a few days since I sent the email to Professor Thomas, and still no response.

“I’m tired of waiting for her email,” I told Trevor. We were sitting at the bottom of our porch steps one afternoon, eating orange Popsicles after riding our bikes around the neighborhood. Well, Trevor was eating his Popsicle. A few seconds earlier, my phone chirped and I dropped my Popsicle while trying to get to my pocket as fast as possible. Butternut was on it in a second, happily licking it while I checked the email—which turned out to be spam. I wanted to throw my phone on the ground, too, but Trevor stopped me. I put it in my pocket instead and debated going inside to get another Popsicle.