Esme had killed Belinda.
And, somehow, she had set Stefan up to take the blame.
BOOK THREE:
Redemption
10
I couldn’t wait until morning so that I could call Pete Sunday.
I glanced at the clock.
It was 6:20 a.m.
What kind of person would awaken her peacefully sleeping best friend on a cold morning to say something that could easily be said two hours from then? I would wait until eight o’clock. That resolve lasted three minutes.
“Wake up, Jules!” I said. She grunted, snuggled deeper into the plushy mattress. Sleep was another of the gifts I envied her. “Julie! Wake up.”
“Huh? What the hell, Thea.”
“I have to go home right now. I’ll take a bus if you don’t want to go back.”
“Wait, what?” Julie said. “Go home why? What time is it? Is it morning?”
“It’s morning.”
“I haven’t even had coffee.”
“I have to make a phone call. It’s urgent.”
“Thea, there are phones right here.”
“I have to call from my house.”
Julie sat up with a reluctant sigh and a stretch.
She said, “No, Thea. No, you really don’t. This phone connects to anyone on earth you need to call. Why don’t you tell me what’s going on? What happened in the past six hours that I’ve been asleep?” She swung her feet to the floor. “No, don’t tell me yet. Wait, I’m going to make an espresso for me and one for you. That will take less than ten minutes, and then you can tell me.”
I said, “I figured out last night that Stefan didn’t kill Belinda.”
Julie would sooner have held her hand to a flame than disrespect me, so she kept her face neutral as she made the espresso and put butter on my raisin toast, peanut butter on hers.
“So so so…” she said. “I clearly missed out on some key life moments.”
I said, “Julie, I’m serious.”
“I know you are,” she said and hugged me briefly but firmly. “Thea… I don’t know what to say.”
I laid it out for her then, all the clues in the phone calls, the unremitting inquiries about Stefan, the warnings about “remembering” too much.
Finally, Julie said, “It’s all very compelling. But…why didn’t you think of this before now? Why didn’t Stefan? For that matter, why didn’t I?”
I didn’t know why. The best reason I could think of was that all of us believed the same story to be true; Stefan had confessed. Not one of us had a complete picture of that night. I hadn’t wanted to remember. Stefan couldn’t.
A few months earlier, I’d suggested that he consider being hypnotized to remember more of the events that night. His reaction was pure fury. “Do you not get that I want to put this behind me, Mom? Not keep going back and back and back and back until I’m a complete emotional cripple who just sits in the closet chewing on my raincoat? I’m done, Mom! I want a life. I suggest you get one too.”
“I have to tell him.”
“Well, you don’t have to tell him before breakfast. I imagine even detectives don’t get started until after they have coffee. Particularly on a Sunday.”
I said, “What? I mean Stefan. I have to call Stefan right now.”
Julie literally took hold of my shoulders then. “No, Thea, no. Not until something real comes of this…”
“But what if it’s all true…？”
“If it’s true, it will be wonderful beyond anything and awful beyond anything and it will all happen very soon. But imagine if you told Stefan and then this theory came to nothing? This isn’t like not getting a job, Thea. It’s like having your life held out to you after you’d thought you lost it and then losing it all over again.” She sat down and closed her eyes, inhaling the smell of the espresso. “I won’t let you do that to my godson. I don’t even want you to tell Jep.”
“I have to tell Jep.”
“Okay, maybe, maybe you’re right. Think that one through. Let’s take this one world at a time, Thea. One world at a time.” She began to run a bath.
I tried to force myself to settle and when I couldn’t, I threw on my wraps and went out for a hard solo hike to the edge of the bluff. My brain was like dolphins racing, silvery beams of light in a deep blue abyss. The list of questions I’d written down after examining the contents of the box didn’t matter now. Well, they did matter, but if Esme’s fingerprints turned out to be one of the unidentified fingerprints on the golf club, it would just be more proof that she was guilty. She’d been there, or so she kept insisting, and she must have wrapped Stefan’s hand around the handle of the golf club to cover her own guilt.