Nice Girls(55)

Still, it only took a moment, a spark of rage.

Anger could push anyone too far—I knew that from experience.

After my shower, I sat on the toilet, my head in my hands. I was light-headed from the steam, but I preferred it that way, the images all hazy and blurry:

Dwayne and Olivia meeting up somewhere discreet. The two of them getting into a fight. Olivia dead in some spur-of-the-moment violence. Dwayne quickly disposing of her.

I could picture it all so easily.

But something else bothered me: DeMaria Jackson. She had to factor in somehow, but based on what I knew about Dwayne, she shouldn’t have.

“You ever notice the kind of girls that Dwayne likes?” Madison once mused.

It was the day after the Patriots defeated Ondaasagaam High School. Liberty Lake was entering the state football championship, and Dwayne had appeared in the city newspaper, a hero standing proud in the rain, his fist held to the sky.

As soon as he entered the lunchroom, a group of his friends began to holler and cheer. Kevin was the loudest out of them. Everyone else quickly broke into applause. Dwayne grinned and took a long bow. Olivia patted his cheek before his friends ushered him away.

When the noise died down, Madison had a smirk on her face.

“Did you know Dwayne’s hooking up with Penny Jones?” she asked.

“Really?” Penny was the co-captain of the color guard.

“Yeah,” Madison said. “I was surprised, too. Penny’s not that talkative outside of the guard. But then again, it kind of makes sense.”

“Does it?”

“You ever notice the kind of girls that Dwayne likes?”

I shrugged, hoping that no one else had heard her. But even then I’d known she was right. Dwayne had dated Olivia Willand, who, at the time, had reached two thousand followers on Instagram. Before her, he’d dated Alyson Johnson, the student council president. Other sources confirmed that Dwayne had also slept with Alexis Vance, a star volleyball player, and Isabella Murphy, the runner-up to Miss Teen North Star.

The girls were all pretty and well-known. Their names appeared in the weekly announcements, their faces on the school’s bulletin boards. Among the sea of students, they stood out. They were special, and Dwayne appreciated that. He was special, too. Number twenty-four of the Patriots had a type.

And it seemed like DeMaria Jackson was not it. In life, she drew neither attention nor praise. She was pretty but unremarkable. It seemed unlikely that Dwayne would have noticed her.

But then again, her arm had washed up outside his apartment . . .

When I opened the bathroom door, I watched as the steam floated out. The cold air crept in, mottling my arms with goose bumps. The cold air rattled me awake.

In my bedroom, I pulled up the office number for the Liberty Lake police on my phone.

They were only one click away.

But I couldn’t do it.

I pictured Dwayne’s grin, the one dimple on his cheek, the way his eyes crinkled up as he flirted with an old woman at work. I remembered the way Jim seemed to gush about him. Even if he had never finished college, Dwayne had still made something of himself. That was more than what a lot of people could say, including me.

Dwayne was too nice, too charming, too handsome, too normal to kill someone.

That’s what I hoped.

But people had said the same things about other killers. And they had been proven wrong.

Before I knew it, an hour had passed as I sat in bed, paralyzed by my choices. I shut my eyes tight.

As a child, whenever I got overwhelmed about schoolwork, I would force myself to sleep on it. I hoped that I would wake up with a fresh mind.

And every single time, I would wake up as anxious and paralyzed as before.



There was a loud crash downstairs. The door from the garage had slammed open. I jerked awake, drool slipping down my lips.

The house was dark when I got downstairs. I could see the gloomy, brisk November day outside. But the light was turned on in the kitchen. Dad was brewing a pot of coffee. He hadn’t taken off his work overalls or jacket. The light seemed to glow off the bald spot at the back of his head.

“Why aren’t you at work?” I asked. It was only around lunchtime.

Dad turned around, startled. He looked so much older now, with his eyes sinking into his face, the crow’s-feet now prominent at the corners of his eyes.

“Why are you home so early?” I asked.

“They found her.”





27




The highway leading down to West End Park was packed. We never had midday traffic unless there was a snowstorm or a car accident along the highway. But the current situation was different.

As we sat in the car, creeping slowly behind a semitruck, Dad and I listened to the updates on public radio. The details so far were scant. The reports were focused on an ongoing crime scene at West End Park and the number of emergency vehicles and police force that were being sent in.

Earlier that day, Dad had worked on a client’s roof. His cell phone kept vibrating, and Dad thought that I was calling him because of an emergency.

But it was Mr. Willand who called. He said that a group of teenagers had found something floating in the lake, just offshore from West End Park. The police had given him a heads-up. Mr. Willand had been crying on the phone—he was stuck in Atlanta for a brief business trip. He was asking folks from church to head over to the park on his behalf. Mr. Obermueller, Kevin, and John Stack were stuck at work, and he didn’t think his wife was in the right mind to go.