The Sorority Murder (Regan Merritt, #1)(83)

“But you didn’t leave her alone, did you?”

“At first, I did. I tried to talk to Taylor James, but I guess Candace had said something to her because Taylor wouldn’t talk to me, either. That’s when I started thinking something truly weird was going on. But between classes and working part-time, I couldn’t follow up. Then, right after spring break, I had a memory pop up in my social media. It had been from four years before, when Adele had been a senior in high school. Me, Amanda, and Adele at a concert. And I cried because of everything I’d lost. I lost Amanda, I lost Adele, who was like a big sister to me, I lost friends because all I did in high school was try to help the Overton family. And then I got mad. I confronted Candace.”

“At the party?”

“No. The Monday before the Spring Fling. I told her that if she knew anything about what had happened to Adele, she needed to come clean. That if she didn’t, she was tormenting a good family for her own selfish reasons. I was cruel—I mean, I have never said anything like that to anyone. On Friday before the party, I went to apologize, because I hadn’t meant to be so vicious. But my way of apologizing was to ask her to be my tutor again, and I just said I was sorry, I was out of line, and she told me no. Just, simply, no.

“And then she disappeared.”

While Regan didn’t think that Lucas was capable of cold-blooded murder, he had certainly landed himself on the suspect list with that confession—especially since he’d never told the police.

She asked, “What did you think would happen if you solved Candace’s murder? That you would find out what happened to Adele?”

“They’re connected. I have nothing to base that on, except that when I finally confronted Candace, after she walked away, she turned back and looked right at me. She said, ‘I’m really sorry.’ I know, you probably think she said that because she couldn’t help me or that she felt sorry for me, but it was how she said it. You had to be there. I decided to give her a little space, a couple weeks, then I planned to reach out to her again.

“I didn’t know Candace had been missing until I found out she was dead. There wasn’t a lot of public information about her murder, and the newspaper said the police were looking for a homeless guy who had harassed sorority girls. And I thought that was it, I would never know what happened to Adele. No one would know what happened to her. And I put it all aside, got on with my studies.

“When I took the internship at the morgue, I didn’t do it with the purpose of investigating Candace’s murder. I was filing reports for the ME, and I came across her file. Read it. That’s when I learned she had been missing for over a week before she was killed, that she hadn’t drowned in Hope Springs Lake, and that there was no physical evidence. I looked into the case as it stood. None of it made sense.

“Candace was popular and always went above and beyond. She volunteered everywhere. She built homes for homeless veterans through a program during the summers in Colorado. She worked at Sunrise Center downtown. I thought, Is that maybe how her killer knew her? But the manner of her death didn’t make much sense, especially since she didn’t drown in the lake where she was found. I read everything I could, and Joseph Abernathy seemed like a good suspect on the surface, but once I talked to Willa March and found out the seriousness of his alcoholism? It didn’t make sense that he could kill her, then move her body and cover up the crime, then disappear on a train. So I came up with the podcast idea because I thought someone must have seen her during that week. Maybe they didn’t know what they knew, but someone knew something. And that’s everything. I swear, Regan.”

“You thought when you started this podcast that Candace knew something more about Adele’s disappearance,” Regan said.

“Yes.”

“Exactly what?”

He didn’t answer. “I didn’t have evidence. Just that Taylor and Candace had lunch with Adele the day she left campus. And then their reaction to me when I started asking questions. Taylor was angry and Candace was sad. That’s it. She shut me out, but I just sensed she knew more. I didn’t know how or why. Adele didn’t belong to Sigma Rho or any sorority. But based on her schedule and digging around social media, I learned that the three of them had shared a class, then Adele and Taylor had had another class together. They’d all had lunch the last day of finals. It reasoned that they had done other things together. In the back of my mind, I thought that if I could figure out where Candace had been when she was missing, I might find out where Adele was—that maybe she’d gone missing for the same reason.”

“Do you think she’s alive?”

He shook his head. “She would never do that to her family. And if she was in an accident with a head injury or something, eventually authorities would have traced her to her family. And I realized my initial hypothesis just didn’t work. It was based on some conspiracy theory that there was a serial killer who kept his victims alive before he killed them, or something stupid like that. None of the physical evidence held with anything bizarre like that. I think Adele’s dead. And the troopers’ theory—that someone created an accident and grabbed her—makes sense. It’s plausible. But then why was Candace acting so odd, so sad, when I talked to her about Adele? Which led me to believe she knew more about Adele’s disappearance.”