The Thrashers(6)
The detective pulled her phone out of her pocket and tapped the screen. “You made it easy, Paige.”
When she turned her phone toward them, Paige and Lucy’s faces filled the screen. They were in Lucy’s Jeep in today’s outfits, just hours before. The text across the Instagram story said, Party on Fortune Ct—come thru!
Julian dropped his head back and sighed. Paige’s lip trembled.
“Come on, girls.”
The detective spun on her stiletto, her ponytail swinging over her shoulder as she clicked back toward the door. Paige followed, her pink toenails bright against the linoleum. Jodi looked one last time to Zack and left.
Behind the door was a short hallway lined with offices on the left and closed doors on the right. Detective Harding stopped at a room labeled 202 and twisted the knob. The overhead lights sprang on. Jodi could make out a table with four mismatched chairs.
“Miss Dillon. If you could wait here while I get Miss Montgomery settled.”
Jodi stepped past her and took in the empty room. She met Paige’s wide eyes just as the detective closed the door.
They were separating them.
She didn’t know much about detective work that she couldn’t learn from reruns of Law & Order or Castle, but she knew that if they were being interviewed separately, something was up.
Jodi spun to look at the walls, trying to figure out if they had one of those two-way mirrors, but there was just a small window overlooking the parking lot and a couple of inspirational posters about teamwork. She sat in an orange plastic chair facing the door and waited.
How long would they be here? Lucy told her to walk out, but could she do that? If she walked up to the guard at the front and told them she was going home, would they let her?
Like a splash of cold water over her face, Jodi thought, Did they call my dad?
She rubbed the space between her eyes that had started to ache. When she’d left a few hours ago, there had been a graveyard of Corona bottles at her father’s feet, the game on and the easy chair occupied—a usual Friday night. He shouldn’t be driving anywhere, especially not to a police station that was a little trigger-happy with their Breathalyzer.
Jodi’s cheeks flamed at the thought of her friends seeing her dad, bleary-eyed and beer-stained. Zack knew. Zack knew that there were some nights that Jodi just needed to get out of the house. Zack knew not to ask questions, just show up, open her bedroom window, and help her climb out. But the others only saw her dad at school functions and briefly when they swung by to pick her up. She had to pray that he was passed out already, unable to hear the phone.
She sighed and sat back, thinking about what kinds of questions she’d be asked. Zack seemed confident that this whole thing was about Emily.
Her chest tightened, and she squeezed her eyes closed.
Emily Mills.
They didn’t talk about her. Not since it happened. That helped Jodi not think about her too much as well.
Emily had been a year younger than them, a sophomore last year. If not for Emily’s advanced placements in math and science, Jodi wouldn’t have gotten to know her at all. Emily was … nice, if a bit …
Jodi cracked her knuckles and rolled her shoulders back, trying to shake off those thoughts. Don’t speak ill of the dead and all that. But it wasn’t unkind; it was true. Emily had been strange. She’d ask personal questions that acquaintances had no business asking. Every day she’d wear the same pair of orange Converse, orange backpack, and orange earrings. She’d stand too close to you when she talked.
Emily Mills might have been odd—a little moon-eyed—but the one thing she had in common with every other girl at New Helvetia? She was in love with Zack Thrasher.
When Emily had killed herself on prom night, Jodi had been in the limo with her friends, laughing and breathing in the smell of summer right around the corner. Zack’s older sister had provided enough alcohol for five limos, and Julian had drunk almost half of it by the time they got to the dance. At the start of the spring semester, Lucy had decreed that all five of them would go stag that year. Lucy claimed she wanted an excuse to break up with her girlfriend, but Jodi knew there were several motivations behind this, not least of all that Zack would be forced to be single that night.
They’d danced, they’d laughed, they’d taken official prom pictures standing front-to-back, and when they left early to drive lazily around the luxurious streets between 40th and 49th, nicknamed the Fab Forties, two cop cars had careened past. An ambulance followed.
It was Emily’s street. Jodi had been there often to study, sometimes even forced into dinner with the whole family. Not to mention the handful of times they’d picked Emily up or dropped her off after a night out.
Jodi had knocked on the window, asking the driver to squeeze down 35th. The limo had turned and stopped, unable to pass the emergency vehicles with their flashing lights. Jodi had stumbled barefoot onto the sidewalk, ignoring the calls from the others.
She had been frozen in her aquamarine prom dress, staring in horror as Emily’s mother tried to tug a gurney carrying a black body bag back inside of the house, screaming at the paramedics. Emily’s father stood off to the side with a trembling jaw, talking to a cop who was taking notes. In the corner of the patio, on the porch swing Jodi had sat in a few times over the past year, a small blond figure was swaying in the breeze, staring right at her.
Hannah Mills looked so much like her older sister that it had taken Jodi several moments to realize that it wasn’t Emily herself. Hannah hadn’t taken her eyes off Jodi the whole time, something unrecognizable in the shy girl’s eyes. Something haunted.