Rapid Falls(20)

“Just you and Jesse in the truck?”

“No, his best friend, Wade, was with us. Wade Turner.” I saw the corner of the sergeant’s mouth turn down at the name. He made a note in a small blue pad. I had to talk to Wade before the sergeant could.

“Anna wasn’t with you?”

“No, she caught a ride with Sandy.” I had made sure of it after what she had done at Wade’s house, but I didn’t volunteer that information.

“So you and Jesse were together at the start of the party?”

I nodded, and all of a sudden my throat swelled closed with the force of my sorrow. I looked out the window at the school, our school, as I tried to force breath back into my lungs. This time, I wasn’t pretending. Jesse was gone forever.

“Do you need a minute?” His hand hovered over the recorder.

I shook my head, and words came out before I thought them through. “I loved him so much.” The silence in the room felt sympathetic, not condemning, as Sergeant Murphy nodded. I hadn’t planned to say that. I was glad Sergeant Murphy understood.

“I know.” He paused until I nodded for him to continue. “So you and Jesse were together?”

“Yes, we were together at the beginning of the party.”

Sergeant Murphy continued, “Okay. The accident occurred at roughly four thirty a.m. What time did you and Jesse get to the Field?” His voice was gentle, but I knew I already told him the time of our arrival. I swallowed nervously. He was trying to catch me in a lie.

I shrugged. “I wasn’t looking at the time. I’m pretty sure it was ten, like I said. We stopped at Wade’s for a bit.”

“Wade Turner.”

“Yes.”

“What did you do at his house?”

“We . . .” I trailed off. Wade’s parents had always turned a blind eye to underage drinking. They said it was better we did it there than anywhere else. They thought it would keep us safe. So much for that idea, but I still didn’t want to get them in trouble. “We watched a movie.”

“A movie? On prom night?”

“It was a school project. Kind of a celebration.” I remembered Jesse’s smile filling the screen, and my stomach flipped.

“So you stayed there for how long?”

“About an hour.”

“And you were drinking?”

I stumbled on my words, thrown by my memory. “Yeah.”

“A lot?”

“A little.”

“Who drove up to the Field?”

“Jesse.”

“Was he drunk?”

“No.”

He looked at me closely, like he didn’t believe me, but then he kept talking. He knew as well as I did that nobody in Rapid Falls wanted to hear that Jesse had been driving drunk. “What happened when you got to the party?”

I shuddered. Silence filled the room again. I needed to get through the next part as quickly as I could.

“Jesse and I talked to Officer Grey at the roadblock. She might know the time we arrived. When we got to the party, everyone was there,” I lied. I was gambling that the police officer wouldn’t remember if she saw us or not. Jesse had been too drunk to get through the roadblock. We had taken the back way to the Field.

“Okay. I’ll double-check with her. So what happened when you got to the party?”

I was back on safe ground. I remembered the feeling of leaving the tension of the truck cab and entering the darkness flecked with the light of the huge fire and the laughter and shouts of my friends. In that moment, everything had been perfect again. I knew that Jesse felt it too. It seemed like the beginning of the rest of our lives.

“We walked to the fire,” I said.

“Who did you talk to?”

“Mostly Wade and Jesse, I guess. Ross Armstrong. I saw Debra Black.”

“Did anything unusual happen at the party?”

“Todd Carter got in a fight.” Todd was in his late twenties. He had lived in Rapid Falls all his life. He owned a ramshackle trailer in the crappiest part of town. I’d been there for parties a few times. I’d heard rumors that Todd sold drugs. I was sure Sergeant Murphy had heard them too.

“That doesn’t sound so unusual for him.” Sergeant Murphy grimaced.

“I guess not.”

“I’ve got a witness saying they saw you and Jesse down by his truck, sometime around two a.m.”

A shock of cold hit me. Someone saw us? “Well, yeah. I needed to . . . um . . . pee.” I felt like a child using baby words. “I asked him to walk with me. I don’t like going into the woods alone.” Flickers of firelight through tree branches. Soft moans and other murmuring sounds. Things Sergeant Murphy didn’t need to know.

“Uh-huh,” the sergeant said. “Maybe you lost a bit of time back there?” There’s a hint of something dirty in his voice that could have been horrible if it weren’t a lifeline.

“Yeah, maybe.” I looked down at the floor.

“Okay, enough said.” He seemed embarrassed too, but satisfied. He made another note in his book.

“Jesse was pretty tired, so he decided to lie down in the truck. It was getting late by then. Most people had left.”

He looked at me closely. “Tired?”