Deny everything. “That’s not true. I wasn’t snooping on her. I was home the whole night.”
“That’s right, Detective,” my mom says. “I was with her on Thursday night. She didn’t go out.”
“So she wasn’t out of your sight the entire night?”
My mother hesitates. “Well, she’s sixteen. I don’t feel that I need to babysit her all the time. At some point, she was up in her room…”
“So it’s possible she could have gone out?”
My mother glances at me, then back at the detective. “I suppose it’s possible, yes.”
“Also…” Sprague reaches into her trench coat pocket and pulls out a folded piece of notebook paper. She hands it over to me. “Did you write this to Mrs. Bennett?”
Mom leans over my shoulder to read the paper she gave me. My knees wobble as I read the angry scribbles. No. Oh no.
It can’t be.
I’d like to gouge out your eyes, then fill the sockets with hot coals. I’d like to stab you right in the throat with my pen…
My mother claps a hand over her mouth. “Addie!”
“Did you write this?” the detective presses me.
There’s no point in lying. My mother knows my handwriting, so she knows that I wrote this. “Yes,” I admit. “But it wasn’t… I mean, I wrote it, but I didn’t write it to Mrs. Bennett.”
Sprague’s eyebrows shoot up. “Who did you write it to?”
“I didn’t write it to anyone,” I say. “It was…it was an assignment for English class.”
I think back to writing this letter, when I was so mad at Kenzie for stealing my clothes from my gym locker. And then Nathaniel gave me the assignment to write a letter to her, expressing my anger. I didn’t mean any of it. I was just being…dramatic. I was trying to impress him.
“An assignment?” Mom says in disbelief. Detective Sprague does not say the same, but I can see on her face that she’s thinking it.
“Yeah, like…” I scratch at the back of my elbow. “I was supposed to write a letter to somebody I was angry at. But I never gave it to anyone. It wasn’t a real letter.”
“An assignment.” Sprague frowns. “So then…other kids got the same assignment? If I ask them, will they remember it?”
“No, it was just me.”
The detective gives me a funny look, but she doesn’t question me further on that. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
“So I need to ask you, Addie,” Detective Sprague says, “where were you last night?”
“Home,” I say quickly.
She looks at my mother. “And were you here as well?”
My mother’s cheeks turned pink. “I’m a nurse, and I had an overnight shift last night.”
That crease between my mother’s eyebrows that she always gets when she’s worried about me has turned into a crevice. She’s looked at me like that a lot in the last year.
“So…” Sprague is addressing my mother now. “Did you drive your car to work?”
She frowns in confusion. “Yes.”
“And do you have another vehicle?”
“We have…” Mom glances at the door leading to the garage. “My late husband’s car is in the garage. But nobody uses that car.”
She claims she’s been saving my father’s car for me, although really, she just doesn’t want to get rid of any of his stuff. I bet she wishes she had gotten rid of it now.
“So you had access to a car last night?” Sprague asks me.
Before I can answer, my mother breaks in with, “But she doesn’t have a driver’s license. She only has a learner’s permit.”
The detective arches an eyebrow. She knows better than anyone that a lack of a driver’s license isn’t going to keep a teenager from getting behind the wheel. “But the car was in the garage?”
“Yes,” Mom says in a small voice.
I don’t know why the detective was asking that though. Why would she care if I have access to a car or not? I didn’t use my father’s car last night. The only reason I would have needed a car last night is if…
If I were working alone.
A horrible, dizzying sensation is coming over me. Detective Sprague acted like she just found that letter, but I’m pretty sure the only way she could have gotten it is if Nathaniel gave it to her. And since the school is closed today, he must have been the one who told her that I was spotted lurking around by their house.