One of Us is Lying(80)
“Now?” Cooper asks.
Maeve angles her screen so Cooper can see it. “No time like the present.”
Bronwyn’s next to me, and we start from the bottom of the Tumblr posts. I got the idea for killing Simon while watching Dateline. Nate’s never struck me as a newsmagazine show fan, but I doubt that’s the kind of insight Bronwyn’s looking for. We sit in silence for a while, reading. Boredom creeps in and I realize I’ve been skimming, so I go back and try to read more thoroughly. Blah blah, I’m so smart, nobody knows it’s me, the police don’t have a clue. And so on.
“Hang on. This didn’t happen.” Cooper’s reading more carefully than I am. “Have you gotten to this yet? The one dated October twentieth, about Detective Wheeler and the doughnuts?”
I raise my head like a cat pricking up its ears at a distant sound. “Um,” Bronwyn says, her eyes scanning the screen. “Oh yeah. That’s a weird little aside, isn’t it? We were never all at the police station at once. Well, maybe right after the funeral, but we didn’t see or talk to each other. Usually when whoever’s writing these throws in specific details, they’re accurate.”
“What are you guys looking at?” I ask.
Bronwyn increases the page size and points. “There. Second to last line.”
This investigation is turning into such a cliché, the four of us even caught Detective Wheeler eating a pile of doughnuts in the interrogation room.
A cold wave washes over me as the words enter my brain and nest there, pushing everything else out. Cooper and Bronwyn are right: that didn’t happen.
But I told Jake it did.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Bronwyn
Tuesday, November 6, 7:30 p.m.
I’m not supposed to talk to Eli. So last night I texted Mrs. Macauley a link to the Tumblr post that Addy, Cooper, and I read together, and told her what was weird about it. Then I waited. A frustratingly long time, until I got a text back from her after school.
Thank you. I’ve informed Eli, but he asks that you don’t involve yourself further.
That’s all. I wanted to throw my phone across the room. I’ll admit it; I spent most of last night fantasizing that Addy’s bombshell would get Nate out of jail immediately. While I realize that was ridiculously na?ve, I still think it deserves more than a brush-off.
Even though I can’t wrap my brain around what it means. Because—Jake Riordan? If I had to pick the most random possible person to be involved in this, it still wouldn’t have been him. And involved how, exactly? Did he write the whole Tumblr, or just that one post? Did he frame Nate? Did he kill Simon?
Cooper shot that down almost immediately. “He couldn’t have,” he said Monday night. “Jake was at football practice when Addy called him.”
“He might have left,” I insisted. So Cooper called Luis to confirm. “Luis says no,” Cooper reported. “Jake was leading passing drills the whole time.”
I’m not sure we can hinge an entire investigation on Luis’s memory, though. That boy’s killed a lot of brain cells over the years. He didn’t even question why Cooper was asking.
Now I’m in my room with Maeve and Addy, putting dozens of colored Post-its on the wall that summarize everything we know. It’s very Law & Order, except none of it makes sense.
Someone planted phones in our backpacks
Simon was poisoned during detention
Bronwyn, Nate, Cooper, Addy & Mr. Avery were in the room
The car accident distracted us
Jake wrote at least one Tumblr post
Jake and Simon were friends once
Leah hates Simon
Aiden Wu hates Simon
Simon had a thing for Keely
Simon had a violence-loving alter ego online
Simon was depressed
Janae seems depressed
Janae & Simon stopped being friends?
My mother’s voice floats up the stairs. “Bronwyn, Cooper’s here.”
Mom already loves Cooper. So much that she doesn’t protest all of us getting together again, even though Robin’s legal advice is to still keep our distance from one another.
“Hey,” Cooper says, not the least bit breathless from bounding up our stairs. “I can’t stay long, but I got some good news. Luis thinks he might’ve found that car. His brother called a buddy at a repair place in Eastland and they had a red Camaro come through with fender damage a few days after Simon died. I got you the license plate and a phone number.” He searches through his backpack and hands me a torn envelope with numbers scrawled across the back. “I guess you can pass that along to Eli, huh? Maybe there’s something there.”
“Thanks,” I say gratefully.
Cooper runs his eyes over my wall. “This helping?”
Addy sits back on her haunches with a frustrated noise. “Not really. It’s just a collection of random facts. Simon this, Janae that, Leah this, Jake that …”
Cooper frowns and crosses his arms, leaning forward for a better look at the wall. “I don’t get the Jake part, at all. I can’t believe he’d actually sit around and write that damn Tumblr. I think he just … blabbed to the wrong person or something.” He taps a finger on the Post-it with all our names on it. “And I keep wondering: Why us? Why’d we get dragged into this? Are we just collateral damage, like Nate said? Or is there some specific reason we’re part of this?”