I met his eyes in the reflection. “You can’t just say that. You have to mean it.”
“I do,” he promised.
“This isn’t a story. It’s my life.”
“I don’t care about the story,” he said. I made a skeptical noise. “Naomi, when you are ready to tell your story, I’d like to help. But that’s never really been why I came here. I wanted to know the truth for myself.”
I nodded slowly. I believed him, or I wanted to believe him, and the difference was so small it didn’t matter.
“You said that the only way the attack made sense was if there was a body in the woods,” I said. I watched his reflection, the image of him as half real as his touch. “There was. That’s why we were there, too. We found her that summer, and we never told anyone. But Liv found out who she was. That’s why she asked me to come. Liv knew who she was, and now I do, too.”
I turned toward him. It was easy to tell Ethan secrets. I understood now what he meant about people talking to him. There was no judgment in his eyes. “Tell me what happened,” he said. And for the first time since that summer, I found myself telling the truth.
* * *
When I was eleven years old, I believed in magic.
The meaning of belief has changed over the ages. We tend to think of it as a matter of fact. I believe this thing is true; I hold it to be factual. But once, it meant something different, a meaning that lingers when we say I believe in you. It is not a statement of factual existence, but one of faith and loyalty. To believe is to hold dear, to cherish, to claim as a truth more fundamental than fact.
I believed in magic. We all did.
When we saw the beads that spelled out Persephone’s name, it was a sign. There were seven rituals to perform for the Goddess Game, and now we knew they came from her, that they were for her. None of us even suggested telling our parents or the police. They belonged to that other world; Persephone belonged to ours.
We made her offerings and whispered secrets to her bones. We never told. And then came the end of the summer and the attack, and the chance to say something slipped further and further away with each passing hour, each day, until it had gone from secret to lie, and we were trapped in it.
“You have to understand,” I said, standing with my back to the wall, my arms folded. “Everyone kept telling us how important it was that we be believed. That our testimony was found reliable. They told us that it was up to us to keep Stahl from killing more women. If they’d known about Persephone—”
“The defense would have shredded your credibility,” Ethan said. He sat on the end of the motel bed, his elbows resting on his knees. “So you kept her hidden.”
“We were kids,” I said. “We were stupid.”
“You went through something no child should have to experience. Whatever you had to do to survive was justified,” Ethan said.
“Even lie about what happened that day?” I said quietly. He gave me a sharp look.
“You’re not talking about the body now.”
I shook my head. I sat next to him. “I was eating my lunch. The first blow came from behind me. I fell. I managed to turn over, but I could barely move. All I remember is the trees. And the knife,” I said. I stared at the painting on the opposite wall, a landscape of a lake, the colors muddy and off-putting. “I never saw his face. But Cass and Liv saw, and they were sure, and the police wanted me to be, too. So I said it was him. I said I was sure.”
Ethan didn’t look the least bit surprised. “They needed to put him away. It would be a shock if they managed not to influence you. Given the condition you were in, it wouldn’t have been hard to get you to ID Stahl. Even to convince you that you had seen him.”
“For a long time, I told myself that I must have,” I said. I pushed off the bed, started pacing. “I let myself believe it. I had to. If I said I was wrong, that it wasn’t him, everyone would have hated me. I was an idiot. I was a coward. I—”
“Slow down, Naomi,” Ethan said. I stopped in my circuit. He stood, but kept his distance. “Let’s take this one thing at a time. Start with Persephone. Who is she?”
“Her name is Jessi Walker.” I pulled up the file on my phone and showed him. He read through it with a faint frown.
“She fits the type,” he said, more to himself than me.
“So she could be another victim.”
“Maybe.” He handed me back my phone. “There’s a trap that investigations tend to fall into. They get tunnel vision. They ram the evidence into place around a single theory, instead of staying open to the possibilities. We have a theory: Stahl killed Jessi Walker. But the only thing we know for sure is that Jessi Walker died. It might have been misadventure, not murder.”
“But it makes sense. It explains why Stahl was in the woods. It means—”
“It means that the right person got locked up for attacking you. It absolves you,” Ethan said. If he’d said it gently, tenderly, I think I would have hated him for it. But there was no forgiveness in his voice, just cold truth. “You need to decide if you’re trying to find out what really happened, or if you’re trying to prove you didn’t do anything wrong.”
I looked away. “I never wanted to know too much about Stahl—the things he did. I’ve always just accepted that he killed all those women.” I’d never thought about his son, either—the damage done to him. The life he must have lived. I swallowed against a hard lump in my throat. “I didn’t want to think about what it would mean if everyone was wrong, and I sent an innocent man to prison,” I said.
“You didn’t,” Ethan said sharply, and I glanced at him in surprise. “That is one thing you do not need to feel guilty about.”
“They didn’t have enough evidence to convict him.”
“That doesn’t mean they didn’t have enough to know it was him. Don’t waste any energy fretting over Stahl. He’s dead and the world’s a better place without him.”
His certainty would have been comforting, if I was capable of being comforted. But I was thinking of the letter now. “Even if that’s true, if Stahl didn’t attack me, it means that whoever did got away with it. Maybe even did it again.” To a girl who wasn’t as fortunate as me, I didn’t add.
Ethan rubbed a hand over his chin. “For now, let’s focus on Jessi. It’s been a long time, and Stahl sometimes drove with his victims for hours before he turned on them. She might have been from just about anywhere. We need to find out where she was before she disappeared.”
The we was more comforting than it should have been. “I think I recognize her,” I said. It had been bothering me since I saw the picture, that lingering sense of familiarity. “I can’t tell if it’s her that I recognize, or just the type, but there’s something there. And I never left Chester back then, so if I do recognize her, she was here.”
“Who’d remember her, around here?” he asked.
I sighed, realizing the obvious next step. “My dad might know,” I said. “And he won’t spread our business around town like just about anyone else would.”