“And Taylor James’s.”
He nodded. “Yeah, but Candace was more accessible, and Taylor was kind of a bitch. I know that’s not nice to say, but I did try to reach out to her, and she ignored me as if I were a gnat. Candace was genuinely a nice person. She worked in the writing lab, and so I made an appointment. I could use the help, anyway. I didn’t know how to approach her, so I went to her for several weeks before I worked up the courage to ask her about Adele. She went from friendly to blank.”
“Blank?”
“Like, we’d chat about a lot of things, and she was nice. Not flirting or anything but just friendly. And at the time, I wasn’t thinking she had anything to do with Adele going missing—I just wanted to know more about her friendship with Adele, to find out if maybe she’d said anything, if she’d been depressed or struggling, had a stalker, I don’t know. Something that would explain why her car was found in New Mexico.
“But as soon as I mentioned Adele, Candace shut down. Went blank. She canceled our next session. Then said she didn’t have time to tutor and recommended someone else. I tracked her down because I knew that it was me mentioning Adele that changed everything. She just said she was upset about what had happened and knew nothing about it, and she was sorry. It was just…weird.”
He stared at his hands, and Regan let him take his time. The truth was coming out, but maybe he was still processing it because he hadn’t told anyone.
Finally, he said, “I tracked her down right before winter break. I was angry because I didn’t know why she had reacted that way, and I laid into her. I told her that Adele’s parents had no idea what happened to her, they’d never found her body, that Mrs. Overton thought her daughter was still alive and she spent her days and nights on missing-person websites looking at pictures. She called hospitals monthly. Probably still does, even now, six years later. Amanda, my ex-girlfriend, couldn’t stand it and never wanted to go home. She told me she might as well be dead because her parents remained so focused on Adele that they forgot all about her. Their lives were in limbo, and her parents didn’t have money for a private investigator, so I asked Candace if Adele had said anything to her about her plans, why she was going to New Mexico, if there was a boyfriend, anything that would help find her or discover the truth. All she told me was that she barely knew Adele, they’d had a class together and sometimes had lunch together, and that was it, and to leave her alone.”
“But you didn’t leave her alone, did you?”
“At first, I did. I tried to talk to Taylor James, but I guess Candace had said something to her because Taylor wouldn’t talk to me, either. That’s when I started thinking something truly weird was going on. But between classes and working part-time, I couldn’t follow up. Then, right after spring break, I had a memory pop up in my social media. It had been from four years before, when Adele had been a senior in high school. Me, Amanda, and Adele at a concert. And I cried because of everything I’d lost. I lost Amanda, I lost Adele, who was like a big sister to me, I lost friends because all I did in high school was try to help the Overton family. And then I got mad. I confronted Candace.”
“At the party?”
“No. The Monday before the Spring Fling. I told her that if she knew anything about what had happened to Adele, she needed to come clean. That if she didn’t, she was tormenting a good family for her own selfish reasons. I was cruel—I mean, I have never said anything like that to anyone. On Friday before the party, I went to apologize, because I hadn’t meant to be so vicious. But my way of apologizing was to ask her to be my tutor again, and I just said I was sorry, I was out of line, and she told me no. Just, simply, no.
“And then she disappeared.”
While Regan didn’t think that Lucas was capable of cold-blooded murder, he had certainly landed himself on the suspect list with that confession—especially since he’d never told the police.
She asked, “What did you think would happen if you solved Candace’s murder? That you would find out what happened to Adele?”
“They’re connected. I have nothing to base that on, except that when I finally confronted Candace, after she walked away, she turned back and looked right at me. She said, ‘I’m really sorry.’ I know, you probably think she said that because she couldn’t help me or that she felt sorry for me, but it was how she said it. You had to be there. I decided to give her a little space, a couple weeks, then I planned to reach out to her again.