In My Dreams I Hold a Knife(58)

Coop nodded, a wild look in his eyes. “Hey, I’m going to take off all my clothes and streak across campus. Right now.”

“What?” Caro hissed.

“Fast,” I whispered.

But a strange thunder had started in the distance. It took a second, but then I realized: it was cheering. Shouting, coming from all around us, all four directions, building and building like a tidal wave: Frankie. Frankie. Frankie. The people closest to us on the sidewalks almost toppled the barriers, shaking their pom-poms. Someone screamed, “We love you, Frankie!”

The parade had turned into mayhem.

We were rushed by the members of the Duquette football team as they poured in from the back of the float, surrounding Frankie, slapping his arms and squeezing him until they lifted him, despite his protests, high in the air. Frankie Kekoa, dressed like the king of Duquette, laughed and bounced on their shoulders.

He’d done it. Frankie, always so careful, so anxious, had reimagined what his life could look like. I tried to picture what Jack would say if he could see Frankie now.

In the midst of the chaos, one hand clapped to his ear against the noise, Eric pointed to the now-empty back of the float. I didn’t want to go, wanted to stay here and soak up Frankie’s triumph, but the look on Eric’s face brooked no argument. The rest of us followed, gathering around him in a tight circle, pressed shoulder to shoulder.

“I don’t think Frankie did it,” Caro yelled. “I believe him.”

“Me too,” I said, casting an eye at the crowd, which was still going crazy, not paying the slightest attention to us. What Frankie told us hadn’t exactly cleared him. He could be lying, after all; maybe Heather had still planned on telling his coach and he’d done it to stop her. But I felt certain of Frankie’s innocence. Another one of my instincts.

“Now what?” Coop asked. “Where do we go from here?”

“I told you the Frankie theory didn’t match all the evidence,” Eric said. “It’s time to look at everything. Connect all the dots.”

He slipped a hand inside his jacket and pulled out three pieces of white construction paper, enclosed in sheet protectors. Mounted on each was a carefully reconstructed photograph. Three different pictures of the East House Seven. One from freshman year, outside East House. The second from sophomore-year spring break, our trip to Myrtle Beach, all of us sunburned and in bathing suits.

The last was from the final day of junior year. Coop and I stood close together in the back; I could still remember how he’d slipped his hand inside of mine at the last minute, right before the shot. How I’d jerked in surprise, but the next moment, I’d slipped on my mask. The camera had caught that instant—that millisecond—when you could see the conflicting emotions plain as day on my face.

Each photo had been torn into jagged scraps, then pieced back together, like a puzzle. In each, Heather’s head was violently scratched out in pen, so hard the strokes had cut into the photograph—manic swirling circles, knifelike X’s. In the last picture, the pen strokes had been so intense that half of Heather’s face was missing, a gaping maw where her smile should have been.

The world narrowed to those hateful marks, stabbed in ink. The noise of the crowd retreated, the float’s jerky movements falling away. My stomach plummeted. It couldn’t be.

Eric held up the photos, turning so we could all get a look. “I started investigating Heather’s case two days after you graduated. I wasn’t very good at it back then, but I was trying.”

I remembered Eric, stiff and alone, walking across the graduation stage to accept Heather’s diploma, the sound of his shoes scuffing the wood the only noise against a suddenly silent crowd.

“I sat in her room at home and forced myself to unpack her boxes, because my parents couldn’t bring themselves to do it. I knew if I didn’t, she would just sit there, alone and untouched. I remember that it felt like all I had of her was in those boxes—like she was in there, somehow, and needed me to take care of her. So I took them apart. There was a strange mix of stuff. The police had dumped things quickly, after they’d finished searching her room.”

I remembered that too, the dark-clad men rifling through my things.

“I found these strange little scraps of photographs tucked into Heather’s papers from her desk. It took me an hour to find all the pieces. But when I put the first together, lo and behold—” He tapped one of the pictures, right where Heather’s face was slashed by black X-marks. “New evidence. Clues the police missed. That’s the exact moment I knew they’d gotten it wrong, and it was going to be up to me to find my sister’s killer.”

The black hole inside me was spinning, memories spilling out, faster than I could push them down. I’d told myself I would look for Heather’s killer, but I hadn’t expected the path would lead to this.

Eric scanned the circle. “I’ve waited ten years, imagined all the possibilities. I know it’s one of you. So confess.”

“No one here is that much of a freak,” Courtney said, shaking her head. “Those pictures are straight-up stalker material. Sociopath material.”

From across the circle, I felt Coop’s eyes burning into my face. He wanted me to look up, reassure him, tell him unequivocally with my eyes that there was no way I was responsible, despite what he’d said all those years ago. I kept my gaze locked on my feet and heard his sharp intake of breath.