Chapter 9

While Aunt Laura chatted with Cora’s mother in the living room, I excused myself and found Cora standing in the kitchen, rinsing off a few dishes in the sink. She glanced over her shoulder at me, turned the faucet off, and dried her hands on a tea towel.

“I was hoping we could talk,” I said.

She shrugged but said nothing.

“I’m sorry, Cora,” I said. “I should have taken the time to look at things from your perspective, and I didn’t. When I left the police station, I suppose I felt a bit humiliated because they knew something I didn’t, and it bothered me. Still, I shouldn’t have let it get to me the way I did. It was wrong.”

“There’s no need to apologize,” Cora said. “I should have been honest with you. It’s all right.”

“No, it isn’t. Working with you on this case isn’t just about me being able to trust you, it’s about you being able to trust me, and you can trust me. You can trust me with anything.”

Cora leaned against the counter and said, “I know. Your aunt’s told me a lot about you since I’ve been back in town. I knew coming to you was the right decision.”

“Good. I’d like to begin again if that’s okay.”

“In that spirit, I have something for you. It took a fair amount of searching, but I found a key to the cabin. Follow me.”

We walked down the hallway and into a bedroom. Looking around, it was like I’d just stepped into a time warp. The walls were painted two different shades of purple, a sharp contrast to the bright orange and hot-pink striped comforter on the bed. The darker of the two walls was plastered with photos torn out of magazines of popular actors and singers from the early 2000s—David Boreanaz, Luke Perry, and Francis Capra. On the opposite wall was a large Gilmore Girls poster.

Cora shot me a shy smile. “I know. It’s like a time warp. Aside from boxing up a few of my things, my parents didn’t change much in this room after I left town.”

“Where did you go, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“I have an uncle who lives in Spain. He has a casita he rents out sometimes, and he invited me to stay with his family for as long as I needed. I took him up on his offer and studied abroad for a while. One year turned into two, which turned into several years—the best years of my life. I suppose they were the best because over there, I felt far enough from this place to feel safe.”

“What made you decide to return?”

“I missed my parents. They couldn’t afford to visit more than once a year, and as time passed, it became harder and harder to be so far away.”

She sat on the bed, and I took a seat beside her. “How long have you been back?”

“Guess it was 2009 or so. I moved to Lone Pine. In my first week there, I met a woman named Lelah. A couple of months later, we moved in together, and we’ve been roommates for the last ten years.”

I’d heard of it before, but I’d never been.

“Lone Pine’s in California, right?” I asked.

Cora nodded. “It’s a five-hour drive from here, which makes it easy for my parents to visit. Well, it was easy before my dad became ill.”

She went silent, and I waited, remembering how she’d hesitated when mentioning her father’s illness at my office.

I didn’t want to push.

“My dad’s in the hospital,” she said. “He … ahh, he has late-stage pancreatic cancer. I guess he’s known for several months, but my parents didn’t know how to tell me. Doctor thinks he has three, maybe four months to live, at most. Anyway, let’s talk about something else, okay?”

“Okay, sure.”

I thought about the best way to segue away from the topic of her father, and I uttered the first thing that came to mind.

“How did you meet your roommate, Lelah?” I asked.

“At a self-defense class. She was the instructor. She’s one of the toughest women I’ve ever met. I’ve learned so much from her.” Cora pushed up from the bed and walked over to her nightstand, where she removed a key, which was dangling from a rainbow-colored wrist coil. “This was my key to the cabin. It was the … uhh … key I had the night I … you know, the key I had with me that night. It’s been buried in this drawer of junk ever since.”

She handed it to me, and I slid the key into my handbag.

“Do your parents know I’m planning to go to the cabin to have a look around?” I asked.

“Yes, and they’re fine with it. They have too much on their minds to be bothered with anything other than what my father’s going through right now. I was passing by their bedroom the other day, and I overheard my father telling my mother his one wish before he passes away is for this case to be solved. It’s one of the main reasons I decided to hire you.”

“I will do everything I can to make that happen.”

“I have to say, when I left your office this morning, I felt different, like a weight had been lifted. For the first time, I found myself thinking about what it would be like to move past the guilt I’ve carried from that horrible night. I can imagine myself living a normal life.”

The guilt I’ve carried—a phrase I found interesting.

Cora had expressed guilt earlier over being the lone survivor of the attacks that night. But was there something more, an additional feeling of guilt she had not revealed to me yet?

“Before I take off, I thought I’d ask if there’s anything else you’ve thought of that I might need to know,” I said. “If there is, now is the time.”

Cora walked over to a small bookcase near the closet and removed her high school yearbook from the bottom shelf.

“Have you had a chance to look at it yet?” I asked.

“I’ve started. What I’ve seen so far has brought back a lot of memories I’ve forgotten about. I know you asked me to look at my classmates to see who you should talk to, but I’m not sure I can get through it.”

“Is there anything in particular that you found triggering or want to talk about?”

Cora sat down on the bed, flipping through several pages of the yearbook. She stopped, pointing at a photo of a teen boy. In the photo, he was in a classroom, stirring a pot of soup.

“This is Xander Thornton,” Cora said. “We were in culinary class together.”

I leaned in to get a closer look. What struck me first was the sheer size of the kid. Xander wasn’t just big—he was professional-football player big, which set my mind ablaze. He would have had no problem wielding a bat—or any other object for that matter.

“Xander’s a big guy,” I said.

“No one in our school came anywhere close to his size.”

“He doesn’t even look like a high-schooler. If I saw this photo and had no other context, I’d guess he was in his mid-twenties.”

“He was older than we were, I think. There were rumors back then that he’d been held back more than once. I don’t know if the rumors were true, though. We were in the same grade, but we didn’t grow up together. He moved to Cambria when he was in high school.”

“Is there something you want to tell me about him?”

Cora nodded. “He was picked on a lot in school, which, given his size, is a surprise, I know. If he had defended himself, no one would have stood a chance against him.”

“Who picked on him?”

“A few of the guys on the football team. Some of their girlfriends went along with it too.”

I shook my head and said, “Why did they pick on him?”

“He wasn’t like us … he was different.”

“Different in what way?”

“He just seemed a bit … I don’t know. Slow, I guess. Knowing what I know now, he may have been on the spectrum or maybe even had a mental health issue.”

“What did the footballers do to him?” I asked.

She swallowed hard, turning away from me as she whispered, “They called him names and told him he was stupid. They’d do things like flick him in the back of the head when they passed him in the hall.”

It disgusted me to hear about how he’d been treated.

Bullying was never okay, no matter what rationalization a person used.

“Did any of your friends who were at the cabin that night take part in the bullying?” I asked.

Cora went quiet for a moment, which gave me my answer.

Her eyes welled up with tears as she said, “I want you to know, I never said anything mean to him, not one disparaging thing. Aidan and Jackson were the ringleaders. They teased him the most, and I suppose Brynn and Aubree went right along with it. My friends … they weren’t bad people, you know? I mean, the way Xander was treated was wrong, of course. We were stupid teenagers, doing stupid things.”

Her passive response wasn’t enough.

It didn’t excuse how they’d treated him.

Harm was inflicted, harm that may have impacted Xander’s life in such a way that he’d plotted revenge—revenge on all of them.

“What about Owen, your next-door neighbor?” I asked. “Did he pick on Xander too?”

“Oh, no. Owen was the nicest, gentlest person I’ve ever known. One time, Aidan and Owen were walking together down the hall between classes. They passed by Xander, who was carrying a pile of books and papers. Aidan reached out and smacked it right out of Xander’s hands. Everything went flying. Aidan laughed and kept on walking, but Owen stopped and helped Xander pick it all up.”

While Owen may have been more sympathetic than his fellow classmates when it came to Xander, the fact remained he was still friends with those who’d bullied the poor kid, as was Cora.

Helping Xander pick up books was one thing.

Standing up for him was another.

And by the sounds of it, no one stepped in to stop what was going on.

“I need to ask you a serious question, Cora.”

“You want to know whether I think Xander could be responsible for the murders.”

“You must suspect him, or you wouldn’t be pointing him out to me or telling the story you just did.”

Cora’s expression soured. “I didn’t think he did it back then, but now … I’m not sure.”

“Why? What’s changed?”

“I still haven’t told you everything. The bullying … it was just part of it.”

The bullying was part of it.

I braced for what was to come.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Xander used to call us on the phone.”

“I’m sorry, I’m not following.”

Cora snapped the yearbook closed and said, “He used to call a few of us girls. When we’d answer, he’d breathe this awful, heavy breathing like he was out of breath, and then he’d whisper our names over and over again.”

“Did anyone tell the police about the phone calls?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t.”

“Did the caller say anything else, other than your name?”

“No.”

“When did the calls begin?” I asked.

“Around the middle of our senior year.”

“If he didn’t say anything, how did you know Xander was responsible for making the calls?”

“For months, we didn’t know who was doing it. We assumed it was Xander, but we didn’t know for sure. We figured it out after a call he made to Aubree.”

“What happened?”

“She confronted him.”

“In what way?” I asked.

“During the call, Aubree challenged him to reveal himself, to tell her who he was and why he was calling. She said if he didn’t, she’d never take another one of his calls again, and she’d make sure none of the other girls would either.”

“How did Xander respond?”

“He didn’t say a word at first, and then he asked her if she wanted to play a word game. She said yes. He told her he would give her a clue.”

“What was the clue?”

“He said he was near the exit. Or at least, that’s what she thought he’d said. After they hung up, she called me. She told me about it, and I stewed on it for a while. Then I realized if you take the letters in Xander’s name and scramble them you get the word ‘near.’”

“What about the exit?”

“I don’t think he was saying ‘the exit.’ I think he was saying DX. Scramble NEAR and D and X, and you get Xander. Once we put it all together, we were sure he was the one making the calls. Aubree told Jackson. He told Aidan and …”

Cora hung her head, going quiet.

“And what?” I asked. “What did they do?”

She slapped a hand against her mouth, speaking through her fingers. “It wasn’t good. I didn’t know. I didn’t know it was going to go that far.”

The guilt I’ve carried.

I was about to learn the true meaning behind those words.

“Whatever happened back then, no matter how awful it was, I need to know,” I said. “It’s important.”

One minute went by.

I placed a hand on her shoulder, giving it a light squeeze.

Cora looked up at me and said, “All right. Aidan and Jackson invited Xander to hang out with them one night at the park. They told him they were sorry about how they’d treated him in the past, and they wanted to make up for it.”

“I’m assuming Xander went?”

“He did, and we knew he would. If anything, I always got the impression Xander wanted to be accepted by the rest of us.”

“What happened at the park?”

“They were nice to him at first. They’d taken a bottle of vodka from Aidan’s dad’s liquor cabinet, and the guys were laughing and doing shots together. Except, Aidan and Jackson were pouring themselves a single and not taking the whole shot. They were giving Xander doubles. After giving Xander a few shots, he was drunk, and I mean, blackout drunk. I don’t think he’d ever had liquor before. He passed out.”

“What happened next?”

“Aidan and Jackson thought it would be funny to strip Xander’s clothes off, down to his underwear, and they did. They leaned him against a tree and tied a rope around his waist. Then they dangled a piece of paper from his neck, a note that said he was a stalker and a pervert. The next morning, a jogger found Xander. He called the police. And that’s not even the saddest part. Even after all they did to him, Xander refused to tell anyone who’d done it.”

Thinking of what Xander had been put through, it wasn’t hard to imagine the elation he must have felt to get an invitation to hang out with a couple of the most popular boys in school. Only to arrive and have his hopes dashed when he was stripped down to his tighty-whities and left for all to see. It was the ultimate humiliation.

“Aside from Aidan and Jackson, who else was at the park that night?” I asked.

“Brynn and Aubree … and me.”

And there it was—Cora’s role in all of it.

Cora may have not assisted in what had happened that night, but she was there. She was there, and she did nothing.

“I would do anything to take it back now, to stand up for him,” she said. “I’m so ashamed.”

“We’ve all done things we’re ashamed about. What matters is that we learn from our wrongdoings and strive to do better.”

I handed her a few tissues, and she blotted her eyes.

Cora scooted back on the bed so she could lean against the headboard, saying, “I wanted to go back to the park after we left to untie him.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I worried about how angry he’d be and what might happen if we were alone together.”

“I know it wasn’t easy for you to tell me what you just did. Thank you for telling me the truth. I have another question. Did you tell the police your friends were responsible for what happened to Xander at the park, after the murders happened, I mean?”

She shook her head. “I know it was a mistake. I was ashamed about my role in it all. Ashamed or not, I was scared, but it shouldn’t have stopped me from telling the truth. It’s the reason I’m telling you now. I meant it when I said I thought Xander was innocent back then.”

“Seems to me he had a clear motive. Why didn’t you consider him a suspect?”

“I was in the hospital during the funerals. I heard he showed up at every single one, and he cried at all of them. He cried like he’d lost his closest friends.”