I should pat his back.
I was gratified to see my hand appear near his shoulder. When he felt the heat of it, he leaned over, into my arms. He was a good-size man, five ten at least. I held him while he sobbed. Mom had said this was a wife’s duty, but she wasn’t here. Why did Dad break so easily?
“Brenda’s dead,” he said when his weeping subsided. His voice sounded left over. Discarded.
“I know.”
“Jerome took Ant and Ricky in for questioning right away,” Dad continued, ignoring me. Or maybe I hadn’t spoken. “They swear they don’t know anything. Ricky says he hasn’t seen Brenda since she stopped by work to see you Saturday. Ant says he saw her that same morning, but not since. Does that sound right?”
I lifted one shoulder. Dad either didn’t feel it or didn’t care.
“They agreed to a polygraph, and their parents signed off on it. Both boys passed.” He pulled away from me, ran the back of his hand across his mouth. “I’m so sorry, Heather.”
“What about Ed?” I asked. “What does he say?”
“We can’t find him.” Dad shook his head like he couldn’t believe his bad luck. “We really messed this one up.”
We both sat in that for a while. My fingertips started tingling, so I stretched out my arms. Then I cracked my jaw. It felt luxurious.
“She was strangled,” Dad said.
That pierced my protection. I tried to press the visual back, but it kept at me, a hand searching beneath my covers. “Brenda?”
He nodded. “There were no defensive wounds. Jerome thinks it was two perpetrators, one restraining her, the other killing her.”
I blinked. Blinked again. I could see Brenda’s legs covered in nylons, the scratchy skirt that looked like it came from the bottom of a yard-sale free box. “Why’d they change her clothes?”
“What?”
“Brenda was wearing clothes that weren’t hers. Why’d they put her in them?”
Dad looked out the front window, then back at me. He looked confused. Or betrayed. “How do you know they weren’t hers?”
He hadn’t asked me how I knew what she’d been wearing when her body was discovered. He’d asked me how I knew the clothes weren’t hers. “I know. They weren’t.”
His mouth tightened, his lips barely moving as he spoke. “Maybe you don’t know your friends as well as you thought.”
A pilot light in my belly sparked on, one I hadn’t known was there.
Flick. Hiss.
His words should have made me small, frozen me, my own dad telling me that I was wrong about the people I loved. But they’d done the opposite. They’d heated me up. I did know my friends. I might not have known everything they’d been doing, or who they’d been doing it with, but I knew the kind of people they were.
I knew their hearts.
I let that new fire burn, quietly. I wasn’t ready to show it yet. Not to my dad.
“Was Maureen strangled?” I asked.
Dad made a scoffing noise, stood. “Let her lie in the ground, Heather.”
I stared up at him, my strong dad, handsome as a Kennedy, though not the famous one, and I saw him, really saw him, for the first time. It unhinged something in me, allowing the flame he’d ignited to suddenly tear through all the paper truths he’d built. I could smell the burning, hear the crackle of the flames. It felt good, and terrifying, and like too much. I had to get away before it burned down everything, the good along with the bad.
I stood, wobbling a little. “I’m going for a walk.”
“It’s too hot out.”
“In the tunnels,” I said, shuffling toward the basement.
I still had just enough of my old blinders clinging on that I expected him to stop me, to say it was dangerous, that we should gather Junie and deal with this like a family.
He instead poured himself a drink.
It was a relief, almost, that we were done pretending.
I padded downstairs, grabbed the flashlight, opened the door. The cool of the tunnels was like a kiss. I considered which direction to go, but in the end, there was only one person who could give me relief, one person I could hurt like I was hurting.
Ant.
I walked to his house, stuck my good ear to his basement door. Nothing. I thought I heard a scraping shuffling coming from the dummy door across the way, the one tucked in the alcove, but that was my imagination.
I’d hoped to do something to Ant, something raw, like shredding his skin with my fingernails, ripping out his hair, making him suffer the fire that was now burning out of control inside me. But I couldn’t hear him inside his basement.