The shadow that was Eric didn’t move.
“I sold pot and molly in college. Party drugs. I needed fast money, and I’ve never thought those kinds of drugs should be illegal in the first place. I’m not proud of it now, because of everything that happened, but I swear, until senior year, I wasn’t hurting anybody.”
I thought of my father, bent over the steering wheel of his smoking car, the office lobby in shambles around him.
“Yeah, we all know,” Mint said. “Everyone bought from you.”
“I didn’t know,” Caro said.
“Neither did Eric,” Coop said. “He was too young. I didn’t fully realize until I tried to stop selling, but the guys I worked for were territorial and violent. I brought in a lot of money selling on campus, and they didn’t want to lose it. After I quit, they broke into my apartment and broke my arm as a warning.”
The terrible scream. The machete, the gun, the evil pulsing underneath their skin. Those dark eyes.
“Wait, that’s how you broke your arm?” Mint looked stunned. “Not playing basketball?”
“I lied,” Coop said. “In reality, a hulking man snapped it while I watched.”
“I can’t…” Caro shivered.
“They told me if I refused to sell—and if I refused to sell tweak, specifically, which was hot back then, profitable but dangerous—they’d kill me. And…” Coop looked at me, then looked away quickly. “My friends. To teach me a lesson.”
“It was you,” Courtney breathed, a strange look on her face. “Are the rest of you hearing this? It was his fault.”
“Shut up, Courtney,” Caro snapped, to everyone’s surprise.
Coop turned to face Eric. “No, Courtney’s right. It is my fault. The guys tracked me on campus, and I led them right to Heather’s suite. I was trying to hide and I wasn’t thinking straight. I told them I’d sell tweak just to get them off my back, and the day Heather died, I was supposed to start. But I didn’t want to. They went searching for me. They knew what my friends looked like. I think there’s a strong chance they went back to the suite looking to hurt someone close to me and found Heather. And then they…” His voice faltered, but he straightened his shoulders and drew a breath. “Killed her. Making me responsible.”
“You’re not,” I said quickly.
“I can’t believe you kept this secret for ten years.” Coop’s news seemed to act like a splash of cold water to Courtney. She was no longer wobbling, her face now lucid. “You’re a bigger liar than Frankie.”
Caro whirled on Courtney. “I have been nothing but nice to you since college, defended you despite everything you’ve done, and you have the nerve—”
“No one broke into the suite,” Eric said. “And it wasn’t tweak.”
Everyone turned to stare.
“What?” Coop asked.
Eric finally stepped out of the shadow, into the light. “The cops found no evidence of a break-in. They suspect whoever killed Heather knew the code to the suite.”
Someone close to her.
“And you’re forgetting what I said. I told you the cops found a drug like tweak in Heather’s system. It looked like the street drug, but it wasn’t tweak itself. The cops checked.”
Coop blinked. “What was it, then?”
“It was a weight-loss drug,” Eric said, his eyes leaving Coop to travel over the rest of us. “Illegal in the States because it was basically speed. Ridiculous, toxic side effects. It baffled the cops, because we told them Heather didn’t take things like that. You could only buy the drug in China, and the cops could never find the purchase transactions in any students’ or professors’ accounts.”
My stomach dropped. Coop had been right—the drug in Heather’s system was a smoking gun, a virtual fingerprint, but it didn’t point to him.
I spun, but Caro beat me to it.
“You!” she yelled, pointing at Courtney. “You did it!”
Courtney looked like a deer caught in headlights. All of a sudden she turned to bolt, but Caro—tiny Caro—sprang and knocked her to the ground.
“Caro, Jesus!” Mint knelt and pulled Caro off his wife.
Caro thrust her finger in Courtney’s face. “She’s guilty.”
“Give her a chance to defend herself.” Mint looked at his wife. “Babe?”
Courtney blinked at him, then turned to look around the circle of faces, searching for an ally, a single measure of sympathy. That day freshman year echoed back—the one where she’d tried to humiliate me but Heather had stepped in to stop it. Heather wasn’t here anymore.