The Cheerleaders(55)

Ginny’s head snaps up.

I hold up the paper, a tremor of excitement moving through my arm. “This man—Mr. Brenner—I knew him. He lived down the street from us, across from Susan. He used to give out pennies on Halloween.” I scan the statement again. “Have you seen anything about when Juliana and Susan got home from float building?”

Ginny’s brow creases. She flips through the pages she’s already gone over. Pauses. “This one is from Juliana’s dad. He said he picked them up a little after nine and left them at the Berrys’ around nine-twenty.”

I look at Mr. Brenner’s words again. Petite, dark-haired girl. It had to have been Juliana. But if Mr. Ruiz dropped the girls off at 9:20, what was Juliana doing getting out of a pickup truck at a quarter to ten? “This can’t be right. Mr. Brenner said he saw someone dropping Juliana off around nine-forty-five.”

Ginny pushes the paper toward me. “Look. Juliana’s dad even said he walked them to the door and asked if they were sure they didn’t want to stay with the Ruizes, but Susan said she couldn’t leave her dog alone all night.”

She’s right. Mr. Ruiz said float building ended at nine, and he’d left the girls inside the house no later than nine-twenty.

If Mr. Brenner was mistaken, and it wasn’t Juliana he saw getting out of the truck and going into Susan’s house…it means there was a third girl there that night.

A girl who left alive.

But if it was Juliana…“She left Susan’s to meet someone,” I say. “Whoever was parked by Mr. Brenner’s—she probably met him inside his pickup truck.”

“He says he saw this happen at nine-forty-five?” Ginny pauses. “Ethan said he saw the argument on the deck around ten.”

I take a sip of my long-cooled hot chocolate. “So whoever Juliana was meeting followed her to the house after Mr. Brenner went back inside.”

A chill crawls up my back. He waited. He waited until no one would see him.

But someone did see him: Ethan.

Ginny says what I’ve been thinking: “Why wouldn’t the police follow up on Mr. Brenner’s statement?”

The clock on the stove says it’s after ten. We’ve been at the kitchen table for almost two hours. “He was really old—like ninetysomething, I think. Maybe they thought he was confused about what he saw.” I rub my eyes. “Or maybe they did follow up and it turned out to be nothing.”

I sit back in my chair, nausea ripping through me. “What if there’s nothing here? I could have gotten us both in serious trouble for nothing.” I can’t even entertain the possibility that we didn’t actually get away with it and that Mike will figure out what I did. “I’m sorry,” I say to Ginny. “I almost ruined everything.”

Ginny taps the handle of her mug. There’s a dried streak of blood on her thumbnail where her cuticle meets the skin. “Monica? Can we please focus?”

I nod, my throat tight. We go back to reading, my eyes getting progressively heavier. Around midnight, I look up and find Ginny out cold, using her stack of witness statements as a pillow.

I reach over and poke her arm with my pen. She stirs and blinks at me.

“I think it’s time to pack it in,” I say. “I haven’t found anything useful anyway.”

Ginny yawns. “Me neither.”

We clean up the piles of paper and stuff them into a spare folder Ginny finds in a kitchen drawer, and I put the whole thing in my overnight bag. I eye the pajamas at the top of the bag.

Ginny spies them and says around another yawn, “My bedroom is upstairs.”

I follow her up the stairs, making a pit stop in the bathroom across the hall to brush my teeth and change.

In Ginny’s room, a twin bed is pushed against the wall. Christmas lights are strung from corner to corner on the ceiling; between each bulb, a photo hangs from a clothespin. I spot a picture of a group of girls in gymnastics leotards. Next to it, an action shot of Ginny standing on the bottom of the uneven bars, arms over her head, reaching for the top bar.

I stop staring, aware that Ginny is watching me from her closet.

“Do you miss it?” I ask.

She shrugs. “Sometimes I do. Mostly it reminds me of when things were bad.”

I swallow, thinking of her reaction to my bringing up her father. Ginny turns back to the closet. Emerges holding a fleece blanket and lays it over her rug. She sits on it, cross-legged, and fluffs the pillow waiting on the floor next to her.

“I’ll sleep on the floor,” I say.

“It’s okay.”

“No, seriously. I’m not kicking you out of your bed.” I plop down on the blanket next to her.

She sighs. “Well, we’re not both sleeping down here. We can fit on the bed, if we lie head to toe.”

“Okay. That’s a decent compromise.”

I climb onto the bed first, getting as close to Ginny’s wall as possible to make room for her. She lies down and adjusts, her socked feet inches from me, and reaches to flip off the light on the wall over the foot of her bed. It should feel weird, sharing a bed with someone I barely know, but it doesn’t.

“Can I ask you something?” I say, breaking the silence.

Ginny shifts on her pillow. “Mmm-hmm.”

“Have you ever done anything you feel like you’ll never be able to forgive yourself for?”