The Winter Sister(43)

“Thanks,” I finally said, and I saw the corner of her lips lift just a little before she took a sip from her mug. “But, uh—” I cleared my throat, then drank from my water, leaving my own coffee untouched. “The reason I wanted to meet with you is to ask if you remember a Tommy Dent?”

Falley hesitated for only a moment before she nodded.

“Yes,” she said. “He was a suspect.”

I felt my stomach contract, and I had to lean back against the booth.

“Why?” I managed.

Falley ran her finger over a dark stain like a burn mark on the table. “For lots of reasons,” she said. “But we started to look into him because of Ben Emory. When we first questioned him, he told us that Tommy had been stalking Persephone.”

“And you believed him?” I asked. “Just like that?”

She shook her head, scratching at the stain with her thumbnail. “No,” she said. “But it’s the kind of thing you can’t just ignore. We had to look into it.”

“What else did Ben say?” I asked. I could feel the sandwich I’d eaten an hour earlier rocking in my stomach.

“As I recall,” she began, putting her elbow on the table and rubbing at the back of her neck, “he said that Tommy used to leave notes in Persephone’s locker, saying—weird things. I don’t remember exactly, it’s been so long, but stuff like . . . what she’d been wearing that day, or what she’d eaten for lunch. ‘Good choice going with the egg salad today.’ Things like that. Nothing overtly threatening.”

She paused, her eyes sweeping over my face as if trying to gauge my reaction. But I couldn’t react. Couldn’t even move.

“Go on,” I urged after a moment.

Falley reached for her coffee and took another sip.

“Ben said that, some nights, when he dropped Persephone off, he’d see Tommy out on his front steps, just watching Ben’s car go by. Almost as if he’d seen Persephone go out and had been waiting for her to return. Because of that, Ben always waited until he saw Persephone get safely back inside the house, and then he’d stop in front of Tommy’s house and glare at him until he went back inside, too.”

“How chivalrous of him,” I said, but even as the words came out, I was remembering how, on that very last night, with snow just beginning to frost the streets, Persephone hadn’t given up on our locked bedroom window and rung the doorbell instead, as I’d planned. She’d returned to Ben’s car—which hadn’t left, which still had its brake lights on.

“He said,” Falley continued, “that he thought maybe Tommy saw Persephone leave with him on the night she went missing, and that maybe he decided to follow them. He said it was possible that Tommy saw Persephone get out of his car on Weston Street after their argument, and maybe he . . .”

She trailed off, the end of her sentence as clear as the water I reached for and drank, its iciness spreading along the walls of my stomach.

“That’s a lot of maybes,” I said when I set down the glass, and Falley nodded.

“We thought so, too. But after her body was discovered and we went to question Tommy, we saw that he was—” She shook her head slightly as if unsure of what words to use. “He was just very strange. We went to his house and the first thing he did was take us to his bedroom, as if he wanted to give us a tour. And his room was kind of creepy. There were all these posters of guns and samurai swords and other weapons. And it was dark in there. The windows were covered with, like, cardboard or something, except for a few holes that had been made to let some light in. And then—” She shuddered a little. “There was this doll.”

“A doll?” I asked.

She nodded. “It was creepy. Not really the doll itself so much as the fact that it was so ‘one of these things is not like the other,’ you know? It was a porcelain doll, in perfect condition, and it was lying on his bed against the pillow. I remember it had this shiny golden hair, and it was wearing a pink satin dress with little lace frills at the collar and wrists. And then he—he introduced us to it.”

“To the doll?”

“To the doll. He said her name was Molly—God, I’ve never forgotten that—and then he just . . . stood there, waiting for us to say something, like ‘Nice to meet you’ or something. It gave me the willies, if I’m being honest.”

I shrugged one shoulder. “So he was weird,” I said. “That doesn’t mean he had anything to do with what happened to my sister.” Still, my heart thudded.

“It was more than that,” Falley said. “When we actually got down to questioning him, he was so . . . interested. He was just really, really interested in what had happened. And not in a devastated way, or in a ‘Wow, this happened so close to where I live’ kind of way, but as if he was really fascinated by it. He kept asking us questions—what did her body look like? How was she positioned? Was her lipstick smeared? Had she been wearing lipstick at all? It definitely raised a red flag.”

I’d been tearing my napkin to shreds. There was a pile at my fingertips I hadn’t noticed I’d been making.

“Well,” I said, “wouldn’t those questions suggest he didn’t know how she looked that night, which would suggest he didn’t do it?”