Hanging by a Thread (11 page)

“No, her mom’s not into it, I guess. It’s Dillon’s parents
who planned this whole service. They put a lot of effort into it.”

“It’s at two down at Raley Park,” Giselle said. I wondered if they knew the park was named after the same family my crazy grandmother had married into, the family whose mansion she now lived in. “It’s not going to last long. I can pick you up if you want. Then you can come over after. My folks are making me stay in, because of the ax murderer.”

That got them giggling, which made me feel queasy. It was weird how none of the kids seemed to take the anniversary very seriously, but maybe it was some sort of post-traumatic stress thing, a way to compartmentalize the fear and horror of losing someone they’d all known.

“Mrs. Granger stopped by today to talk to my mom about the house walk,” I said. “She was really nice.”

“She’s amazing,” Giselle said. “I mean, after what happened? She says it helps her heal to give back to the town. But Mr. Granger’s another story.”

“He’s, like, insane,” Victoria said. “Did you ever see him at a game?”

“He got in a lot of trouble a few years ago,” Giselle explained for my benefit. “He got in a fight with another father at one of Dillon’s baseball games.”

“The refs threw him out. He was always yelling at them from the stands. He yelled at Dillon too. He ended up getting barred from the games and practices. He was going to sue for a while, but I guess Mrs. Granger talked him out of it.”

“He’s not like that since they lost Dillon,” Giselle said. “I mean, you see him around town but he hardly even talks anymore.”

“Yeah, but he
stares
at you. At all the kids. Haven’t you noticed? They go to my church.” Victoria shivered. “My mom won’t sit anywhere near him.”

“I can’t imagine losing a child,” I said, feeling a ridiculous urge to defend someone I’d never met.

“Yeah, I guess it could mess you up. Mrs. Stavros is a drunk now. And Amanda’s dad took off a few months after she disappeared. Couldn’t handle it.”

“She used to be so beautiful,” Giselle sighed. “Did you know she was a model?”

“It’s true,” Victoria confirmed. “She did ads, maybe? Catalogs? Amanda’s dad was a
lot
older. I think he went back to Greece or something.”

Rachel popped up along the path at that moment, out of breath. “I got to pee so bad,” she announced.

“Well, do it before you get in the car,” I said. “Since I borrowed my mom’s.”

Mom was still reluctant to let me take the car, since I’d barely passed my license test. I didn’t get a lot of practice until she bought a car when we found out we were moving back to Winston. I talked her into loaning it to me by reminding her that I needed practice, and swearing that I wouldn’t have anything to drink.

And by reminding her that most of the girls I was driving were Gold Key members, which usually served to make people imagine halos over their heads.

We dropped Victoria off first, drove up into the hills where the rich people lived and dropped off Giselle, and then it was only me and Rachel. I drove to her house and parked in the driveway. She was drunker than I’d realized, and she swayed back and forth in the front seat.

“Hey, don’t throw up in here, okay?” I asked anxiously.

Rachel giggled. I knew I should wait until she was sober to talk to her, but I couldn’t help it. “Why didn’t you tell me about Jack?” I demanded, with more irritation than I intended.

“What about him?”

“About him and Amanda Stavros? That they were dating? That he was a suspect in her disappearance?”

“Oh, Cee-Cee …” She hiccupped. “That’s … that’s.”

“How about the fact that he was arrested? Think you could have mentioned that? I had to hear about it from Giselle and Victoria!”

“I woulda told you,” she said, slurring her words, “if you’d started dating him or something. I wouldn’t have let that happen.”

“
Let
it happen? What about letting me make my own decisions? What about telling me what you know about him so I could decide?”

“What’re you so mad about? I was trying to protect you.”

That made me even angrier, but I wasn’t sure why. After all, I believed her—Rachel probably thought she was doing the right thing. “You don’t think I can handle myself with a guy like him, is that it?”

Her head lolled toward me and she looked at me with
wide eyes. “He was never cleared, you know. Some people still think he did it. That he killed Amanda.”

“Well, great. So you didn’t warn me that he was a
murderer
?” I knew that part of my frustration was directed at myself, at how attracted I was to Jack, even knowing what I knew about him. It would have been way easier if I could like an honors student, or at least Kane De Ponceau, who wasn’t guilty of anything except getting drunk and stupid, as far as I could tell.

“Cee-Cee … Okay, forget it. Jack didn’t kill her.”

“How do you know?”

To my surprise, her eyes welled with tears and she snuffled against the sleeve of the sweatshirt she’d borrowed. “He just … didn’t. There were other people involved.”

“Other people involved in what?”

“Everything,” she said vaguely, waving her hands, hitting one of them against the passenger window. “Ow. Dillon and Amanda and everything.”

“Are you saying you know something about who killed them?”

“It’s just … Oh, never mind, I shouldn’t have said anything, okay? Jack thinks he’s better than everyone else because he doesn’t party. But if you want to go out with him then I guess you can.”

I could tell I was losing her attention; her eyelids were sliding down and she looked like she was about to fall asleep. “Do you know something?” I asked again, with more urgency. Rachel had never talked to me like this when she was sober. I put my hand on her arm and shook it gently.

Then, as an afterthought, I touched the hem of the shirt she was wearing under the sweatshirt, the one she’d changed into after she took off the beach dress, but the clothes had nothing to tell me. Which wasn’t surprising: Rachel and her mom were huge shoppers, and her shirt was new.

“Mrs. Stavros does.”

“Does what?”

“She knows. She has …”

Rachel made a face and hiccupped gently, and then she got the car door open just in time to throw up on her parents’ driveway.

After getting Rachel up to her room, I drove home, preoccupied with Dillon Granger and Amanda Stavros. I was thinking back to a year ago. Mom had taken off all four days of the holiday weekend, which was practically unheard of, and we got to go out on a boat belonging to her ex-boss. We went to a concert in Golden Gate park, and shopping downtown. It had been a good weekend.

And three hours away, in the town I grew up in, a girl my age had been taken, most likely murdered.

In my room, my laptop’s screen saver flashed pictures from the last Blake School exhibit I’d taken part in. There were Lincoln’s copper tubing sculptures, weird landscapes in oil pastel by my friend Maura. Caleb’s photos, which I never had the heart to tell him looked like the ones I had taken on my mom’s phone when I was in grade school. And
my masterpiece from last year: a sixties cherry red wool swing coat I’d taken apart and painstakingly reconstructed, tailoring it perfectly for myself, lining it with camel-colored silk. Lincoln had gone with me to a notion shop in Oakland to buy the buttons, which were made of genuine bone. Even impossible-to-please Mrs. Bertrand had grudgingly admired the finished product, and gave me an A for the semester; too bad it would hardly ever get cold enough to wear it in Winston.

I really needed to call the rest of my old friends. Lincoln and I had talked about all of them visiting in August, and he said he’d ask to borrow his dad’s Lexus and bring Maura and Caleb with him.

I was happier about moving than I’d expected to be. I had NewToYou and Rachel and now Jack, but I missed things about my old life, too. I missed our taco truck lunches on the steps of the school, the vegan kids glaring at us as we licked our greasy fingers. I missed trips to Buffalo Exchange, the best vintage clothing store ever. I missed nights up on Lincoln’s roof deck talking about the boys we liked.

But I wasn’t ready for my old world and my new friends to collide. Not quite yet, not until I figured out the situation with Jack, not until things were more settled. I promised myself I’d call everyone later in the week.

I watched the screen saver for a few minutes, letting it cycle through the images twice. Then I took a deep breath and Googled Jack. I knew that any official police reports wouldn’t be public, since he had been a minor when
he got into trouble, but you never knew what would turn up online.

I scrolled through the hits. There were a few articles about Amanda, in which Jack was listed as a friend, nothing more. There were no reports of his arrest or suspension. I found a few mentions of him in articles from sources as far away as Monterey about the soccer team, and it appeared that he really had been a good player.

I wasn’t finding anything to help put my mind at ease, and it felt a bit wrong to be looking. Okay, a lot wrong, even if Jack was practically a stranger. He didn’t know about my weird gift, about the visions. Wasn’t it wrong to go around behind his back? To spy on him?

Except he hadn’t told me much about himself. He could be trouble—big trouble, if he hadn’t really reformed the way he implied. Rachel said he was innocent, and even if she wouldn’t tell me why, my intuition agreed—at least, I thought Jack was innocent of hurting Amanda. But wouldn’t it be stupid to make that assumption without any proof?

Unable to decide one way or another, I typed in Amanda’s name instead. Maybe something would turn up there, a quote or interview or something. I wanted to know more, especially since Jack had dated her. I was curious, and there was something else, some uneasy, scared feeling that was nagging in the back of my mind.

I hit “Enter.”

There were over a thousand results. I clicked on “Images,” and my screen was tiled with pictures of her, a beautiful
young girl in a cheerleading outfit, in a photo with her parents, in her official school picture—

I froze, unable to breathe.

There, over and over, sprinkled among the other images, was a photo of a laughing dark-haired girl in front of a bush blooming with pink flowers, wearing the denim jacket that was stuffed in a box in my closet. The one that had knocked me out, that practically buzzed with terrifying energy, had belonged to a girl who disappeared.

I knew it had to be the same jacket because of the unmistakable details: the distinctive topstitching, the twisted placket that was a hallmark of Ripley Couture sportswear, the crested silver buttons, the striped silk lining. And I’d lay odds that Amanda was a size small, judging from her fine bone structure and lean figure. What were the chances of two of the same expensive designer jacket showing up in a tiny town like Winston? It was practically impossible.

I scanned several of the articles, but learned nothing new. I’d seen it all on the news over the past year. Still, there was something nagging at the back of my mind.…

A memory popped into my head, the borrowed memory from Lara’s vision. The long-haired girl who’d been at Dell Market … It hadn’t clicked before, but I suddenly realized what had been nagging at my mind: she had been wearing the jacket. It had been
Amanda
, getting ready to party with the crowd I now was trying so hard to belong to. All I could see in the vision was her profile, but it was the same girl on my screen, wearing the same jacket. The distance between me and this stranger, this girl who’d disappeared a year ago,
was starting to close. I couldn’t pretend much longer that I didn’t care about what happened to her.

Rachel knew things she wasn’t telling me. All of it seemed connected, and not in a good way. The people I knew best, the people I cared about in Winston, had a dark side that I had only begun to recognize, much less understand.

But somehow I was being pulled right into the middle of it all. The jacket in the box was Amanda’s, I was sure of it. But how had it gotten filthy and torn? How did it end up in a plastic bag on a junk dealer’s table?

And what was I supposed to do with it now?