The Cheerleaders(31)

I turn to Ginny. “How did you get these?”

“People submit tons of photos for the yearbook every year. We keep them all on flash drives, whether they make it into the book or not.”

Ginny scoots her chair over and pushes the mouse toward me. I scroll through the pictures. Realize with a pinch in my chest that I’m looking for my sister. But Jen was at home that night, bundled in a blanket in a Chloraseptic and antibiotic haze, pissed off that she was missing everything.

“Scroll down a bit,” Ginny says. “Look at the one…”

Her voice trails off, because I see it: a picture of all the cheerleaders, huddled together, arms tucked around each other’s backs.

Tiny Juliana Ruiz is crouched in front of the group, hands in the pocket of her cheerleading hoodie, mouth stretched in a dizzying grin. Juliana’s giddiness was infectious. Jen said Juliana regularly got kicked out of class for her uncontrollable giggle fits. She always cheered the loudest at games, in a way that would be obnoxious if anyone else were doing it.

“Look what happened next,” Ginny says, voice low.

The rest of the pictures were snapped in succession, like a flipbook. In the next one, Juliana is retreating from the group of girls. Then she can be seen at the edge of the frame, standing by the fence separating the parking lot from the football field, cell phone in one hand, one finger hooked over the metal link. She’s not smiling. She may even be crying; it’s impossible to tell from the angle.

In the final shot, Juliana is standing at the fence, still, face in her hands.

I don’t know what to say.

“It’s probably nothing,” Ginny says quietly. “I just thought it was weird that she was crying…”

“And a few hours later, she was dead.” I bend my head closer to Ginny. “Is there a way I could look at all of these?”

“I can put them on a flash drive for you. Hold on.”

Ginny disappears into the back room. The ball of anxiety that’s taken up residence in my chest grows, and by the time Ginny returns with the flash drive, I’m so dizzy I have to put my head in my hands.

“What’s wrong?” she asks.

I look up at her. “My stepdad lied to me. When I brought up Ethan McCready, he acted like he didn’t remember his name. But his partner told me that Ethan lived in my old neighborhood and that Tom used to complain about him all the time.”

“You didn’t know Ethan lived near you?”

I shake my head. “A lot of kids lived in our neighborhood. I remember there was this group of boys who were kind of sketchy. Ethan could have been one of them but they definitely weren’t the type of kids my sister hung out with.”

Ginny takes a hamster-small bite of the sandwich she’s snuck out of her tote bag. On Mrs. Goldberg’s whiteboard, a sign reads NO FOOD IN THE ART LAB!!! in large letters. She chews and swallows. She almost looks as nervous as I do. Her voice is barely above a whisper when she finally speaks again.

“Your stepdad was the one who shot Susan Berry’s next door neighbor.”

“Yeah. He was.”

Neither of us says what I know we’re both thinking; something had upset Juliana earlier that night, before she and Susan got home and Jack Canning noticed they were by themselves. It might not be connected to the murders, but if it is…it means there’s a chance that Daphne was right and Juliana’s attacker was someone close to her.

It means there’s a chance that Tom killed an innocent man—and whoever did kill Juliana and Susan is still out there.



* * *



—

When I get home from practice, I deposit myself at my laptop. I plug in the flash drive Ginny gave me and sit back as the pictures load onto my hard drive.

Juliana Ruiz and her mom were closer than any mother-daughter pair I’d ever seen. When Juliana and Susan would spend a Saturday night at our house, Juliana would be up first thing in the morning so she could get breakfast with her mother before church.

One of my clearest memories is of Juliana, draped across our living room couch, musing out loud about which of the boys in their grade she’d like to kiss during spin the bottle at Susan’s thirteenth birthday party and which boys she’d kissed the year before. Jen clammed up the whole time, cheeks burning, because Mom was in the kitchen, within earshot.

“What?” Juliana said, rolling onto her stomach. “You don’t tell her everything? I tell my mom everything.”

Mrs. Ruiz might know what made Juliana cry earlier the night she was murdered. It could have been nothing serious—her homecoming date blowing her off, maybe. Either way, I need to know.

Googling Juliana’s parents’ name doesn’t yield anything: no address, no phone numbers, no emails. Just a couple of articles briefly mentioning Juliana’s murder. A few months after the murders, Mr. and Mrs. Ruiz sold their grocery store and moved closer to family in Westchester. The Berrys divorced shortly after they finally sold their house.

I step into my closet and dig out Jen’s phone; I’d buried it in my jewelry box, just in case Tom noticed it was gone and decided to come snooping up here. I scroll through the contacts, but Jen doesn’t have Mrs. Ruiz’s number.

My mother’s voice carries up the stairs: “Monica, we’re eating.”

“I’ll be down in a sec,” I yell. I click out of the windows on my laptop and sit back in my chair.