Locust Lane(62)

He was already there when she arrived. She joined him in his car. His eyes were bloodshot with exhaustion. She wanted to embrace him but something about his body language made it clear that they’d need to speak first. She asked if he’d seen the Twitter thread about Jack this morning.

“Cantor told me about it,” he said.

“That was me,” she said.

“Okay,” he said, not particularly surprised.

“Are you mad?”

“No. I’m just wondering what good it will do. The police have made up their minds.”

She didn’t like the defeated tone in his voice. She could handle scared and frustrated and sad. She could definitely get behind pissed off. But she didn’t know what to do with defeat.

“I talked to Hannah this morning,” she pressed on. “She’s definitely hiding something.”

“But what?”

“Geoff interrupted us before I could get her to say. But something definitely happened between Jack and Eden.”

Suddenly, his eyes filled with tears. It was a sight so unexpected that for a few seconds she was unable to respond. But then she leaned over and embraced him.

“Oh baby.”

“I just feel so powerless.”

“Michel, listen to me. I’m going to get Hannah to tell me what she knows. She’s going to tell me the truth and then we’re going to get Christopher free and clear and put that fucking rapist in a cage.”

They kissed. Softly, not for long. There was no sex in it. After a few seconds she wrapped her arms around his shoulders and put her head against his chest. She could hear his heart beating against his ribs, slow and sad. She wished they could stay here forever, invisible to the world.

“I got you,” she said.

His phone rang loudly enough to cause her to bang her elbow against the steering wheel as she recoiled.

“Cantor,” he said after reading the flip phone’s crummy little screen.

She retreated to her side of the car. She could tell by the tone of the lawyer’s voice that it was bad news. Michel hung up without responding and stared out the window for the longest five seconds of Alice’s life.

“If you’re going to talk to Hannah, you should do it soon.” He looked at her. “They’ve just arrested Christopher.”



* * *



Hannah was in her room when Alice arrived back home. Geoff was at the lab. Seeing her chance, she knocked and entered. Hannah immediately placed her phone facedown on the bed.

“I thought you were at school,” Alice said as she sat next to her.

“I had to get out of there. This thing on Twitter.”

“Yeah, I saw that.”

“Jack says Lexi must have posted it.”

“Makes sense,” Alice said, bookmarking the self-loathing for later.

“I mean, the only reason Jack’s parents gave the stupid girl money was to stop her from lying. And now she’s doing it anyway! It’s so unfair. He didn’t do anything. And all this other stuff. That thing at the mall was a prank! It’s such crap.”

“I know, I know.” Alice let a few seconds pass. “Hannah, earlier, you said something about Eden having a temper. What was that all about?”

Hannah stared at her capsized phone. Alice touched her forearm.

“Hey, come on, Hanns. It’s me.”

“Can I ask you something?” she asked.

“Of course,” Alice said.

“If something happened that didn’t really matter and I didn’t tell the cops, that’s okay, right?”

“Well, that sorta depends.”

“I mean, if there’s something that might make us look bad but telling people won’t change anything about Christopher, it’s okay not to tell them, right?”

“Hannah, why don’t you just tell me what happened at the Bondurant house. Let’s start there.”

“Okay, but you can’t tell anybody I told you this.”

“You can trust me. You know that.”

Hannah took a deep, memory-fueling breath.

“After we took the pills, I mean, they hit really hard. I got totally zoned and wound up in an upstairs bedroom. Their son’s. The one who died? They have all these photos of him. I got kind of lost in them and then I lay down on his bed and wondered if this was where he’d died and started thinking about what it must be like to be dead. I mean, like, what if there are new colors you’ve never seen before? And then I passed out for a while, until I heard somebody screaming. For a second I thought it was the dead boy but then I figured out it was Eden. So I ran downstairs. She was standing in the middle of the room, totally hysterical. She’d wrapped herself in a comforter, like it was a cape or something. I mean all of a sudden she’s this fierce goddess. Jack and Christopher were just standing there like they didn’t know what to do.”

She shook her head in appalled wonder.

“You should have seen her face. She was crazy. She kept on saying, You’re going to pay for this. Over and over.”

“Who was going to pay?”

“Jack. Which made no sense. She was saying he’d attacked her. We tried to reason with her but she was crazy. Finally he was like fuck this, I’m out, this chick has lost it. He tells Christopher he needs to fix this and then we go.”