The Lies I Told(34)

“Driving clears my head.”

He dropped the cigarette, ground it with the point of a wingtip shoe. “You said you bought gas in Ashland, twenty-six miles north of the party around eight p.m.”

The receipt was legit, and I’d used it to prop up my story. “I told you that. I gave you a receipt.”

“Why so far from the party? What else were you doing?”

“I wasn’t doing anything.” Color flooded my face, and holding his gaze was a struggle now. It felt like he had X-ray eyes.

“Where’d you get the alcohol?”

“I stole it from my father.”

“I’m not looking to put you in jail, Marisa. Your family has been through enough. But it’s important I know why you were so far from a party that you convinced your pal Jo-Jo to throw.”

Allowing one crack in my story would lead to more fractures and then fissures. And then it could all fall apart.

“Clare was passing as you,” he went on. “And then she stepped outside and vanished. Just like that she’s gone. No one saw a thing.”

I’d called Jo-Jo once the news of Clare’s death was public. I convinced her to sneak out of her house and talk to me. “Did you see her at all?” I demanded.

Jo-Jo’s eyes had been bloodshot. “That party you talked me into having has fucked me seven different ways. The cops are pressing charges against my parents.”

“Why?”

“Duh. Underage drinking. They should’ve been home.”

“They chose to leave.”

Jo-Jo rolled her eyes. “My father might lose his job.”

Richards blew out smoke, snapping me back to the moment.

“I asked all my friends,” I said. “No one knows anything.”

“Have you ever thought that someone out there thought you deserved a little payback and decided to teach you a lesson?”

The thought had occurred to me. All our friends thought they could tell the Stockton twins apart, but that wasn’t true. We’d fooled them before.

“What lesson?” I was careful to keep my voice even, steady.

“I don’t know. But I bet there’re a few people in that room that don’t like you.”

“Who?”

“If you sit down and think about it, you could come up with a list,” he said.

Jo-Jo and Kurt weren’t taking my calls anymore. And there were certainly others. Tamara, my dad’s girlfriend’s daughter, wasn’t a fan, but she had sense enough to keep it to herself.

“Like I said, Marisa, I’m not judging you. Girls like you with brains and too much money get themselves into trouble. What I care about is who you pissed off so badly that they killed you.”

Color drained from my face. “Not me. Clare.”

“No, kiddo—that killer was after you. I’d bet my reputation on it.”

I had shut down after that conversation. That night I swiped a bottle of vodka from the reception, went to my room, and drank until I passed out. I didn’t really climb out of that bottle for thirteen years.

In that time, my father sent me to rehab several times. By the time my third stint failed, his third marriage was falling apart, and Brit was in law school. I was on my own.

When I really sobered up, I couldn’t look in a mirror without seeing Clare. Even the reflection wasn’t buying my own bullshit excuses. To block out that face, I returned to anything that would numb me.

With Richards’s words always echoing, I’d never figured out what I had done to kill my sister. I never meant for you to be hurt. I never, ever . . .

Now, as I ran my fingers over the copied pages of Richards’s notes, I realized I had to make my own list of people who wanted to hurt me. It wasn’t a long list, but all it took was one to do the deed.





19


MARISA

Tuesday, March 15, 2022

Midnight

I spent the next few hours rereading Detective Richards’s copied notes. My friends’ candor, their willingness to throw me under the bus, shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. And it hurt.

“She likes to push the edge,” Jo-Jo had said to Richards. “Once we were sunning on top of her father’s garage. We did that a lot because it was fun to be above everyone and the rays felt more intense on the roof. Plus, we could take our tops off. Mom keeps saying we’re ruining our skin, but we all look better and thinner with a tan, right? Anyway, Marisa rose up out of her chair and walked to the edge of the roof. She dangled a leg over. Clare told her to stop. I didn’t because the more you tell Marisa not to do something, the more she’s prone to do it. The fall likely wouldn’t have killed her, but it would have broken bones or caused a head injury. Clare begged her to stop, and she finally did.” There’s a paragraph break, and I imagine Jo-Jo reaching for a can of diet soda and taking a long sip—she drank diet sodas obsessively in high school. “Yes, she uses drugs. Pot before school, coke at parties. Who knows, maybe someone in her drug world mistook Clare for her. Wouldn’t be the first time.”

“Where does she get her drugs?”

“I don’t know. That’s not my world.”

“Brit’s boyfriend, Jack Dutton, sells drugs,” Richards said.

“Like I said, not my world.”