“What happened?” I asked.
Dad held us for a bit longer, until Brenda’s crying subsided to a quiet shudder. Then he gave us both a quick squeeze and stepped back, glancing down the trail. I’d only ever seen my dad break down once before, that time when both me and Mom had to go to the hospital.
I was jolted back to that memory, the quarry sky giving way to harsh hospital lights. Dad had ridden in my ambulance. Mom had been bundled up into her own.
He chose me.
“I’m so sorry, baby,” he’d said all those years ago, standing, gray-faced, at the rear of the ambulance. His stillness had been a jarring contrast to the rapid movements of the paramedic, whose hands had fluttered as gentle as moths, searching my body for burns. “I shouldn’t have done it. I never should have done it.”
That had confused me—Mom had set me on fire, not Dad—but he had been out of his mind with worry. He didn’t know what he was saying.
He was speaking clearly now, in the quarry parking lot, even though his eyes were swollen from crying. He stared at the back of the ambulance driving Maureen away.
“Jerome thinks it might be suicide,” he said.
Brenda’s head swiveled. I saw the truth I knew reflected in her eyes, but I located the words first.
“No,” I said. “Not Maureen.”
Sheriff Nillson and his deputy were emerging from the woods, the sheriff holding what looked like one of the platform shoes Maureen had worn at our concert.
Dad patted my arm. “There’s nothing you could have done.”
But he misunderstood. Maureen was more alive than any of us. She protected kids from bullies. When men catcalled her, she’d catcall back. She’d demanded we pierce her ears first because she was Maureen.
“She wouldn’t kill herself, Dad.”
A breeze kicked the lake-water smell of the quarries toward us. If I squinted, I could see the rocks rimming the edges through the trees, but I wasn’t looking in that direction. I stared at my dad, which was why I saw when the sorrow slipped off his face, replaced with a cold, hard mask.
I clutched my arms to my chest.
“We’ll see what the coroner says, Heather, but there weren’t any wounds on her body.”
CHAPTER 29
I went to work the next day. Nobody would have blinked if I’d taken it off. In fact, Mom had suggested it from her bed when I went to check on her. She seemed normal, for her: eyes clear, mouth curved in a pretty line. It was enough that I felt comfortable leaving Junie at home, but what would I do there myself? Every time I blinked, I saw Maureen, her glossy fish-eyes staring at nothing, her mouth open in a forever scream.
Claude was supposed to open the deli, but I didn’t see him when I arrived, so I began prepping by myself. The shopping center was quiet for a hot day. When the pavement grew sticky enough to swallow your kickstand, you could count on people swarming inside for the air-conditioning. But today’s crowd was half its usual size. Where were they all gathering? Were they talking about Maureen?
“Hey,” Claude said, appearing from the back. “I stopped by your house to see if we could bike together. Junie said you’d left early.”
“Yeah.” I was staring across my till at the grocery store. Mrs. Pitt was picking up soaps from a display, sniffing them, setting them back down. The Pitts were rich, for Pantown. They even owned a microwave. Mrs. Pitt kept a glass of water inside so it didn’t accidentally start a fire.
“I heard about Maureen.”
“Yeah.” I wanted to keep watching Mrs. Pitt, but Claude’s voice was so mournful. I turned to him. His appearance—ashen skin, raccoon circles around his eyes—almost shocked me back to myself. “You okay?”
His mouth curled without opening. Then, softly: “What happened?”
His question felt larger than the two of us. “The sheriff says suicide.”
“He thinks she drowned herself?”
Brenda and I had thrown that back and forth like a hot, hungry rock on the bike ride home. “I guess. But you know what a good a swimmer she was.”
“Those quarries are deep,” Claude said. “We’ve both heard of strong swimmers going down in them before. All it takes is a leg cramp. Maybe she was out there with someone.”
“Maybe.” Or maybe Sheriff Nillson killed her somewhere else and tossed her body in. “But why didn’t that person try to save her? Or at least report what happened?”
“Jeez, Heather,” he said, palms facing me, telling me to back off. “I said maybe.”