Fullepub 
Chapter Six
CHAPTER SIX
For a lot of reasons, one of my most vivid memories was of the summer I was twelve. I remembered bright sunlight glinting off windshields on the highway and the feel of old grit under my bare feet. I remembered the sugary frozen ices I had to eat fast before they melted and rubbery sticks of flavorless chewing gum that sometimes were the only meal I would get. I remembered tying my greasy hair back with my last, precious hair elastic, feeling it tear the strands and pull at my sweaty scalp. And I remembered my mother, wearing faded, tight jeans, her permed blond waves falling past her shoulders, her eyes hidden behind white-rimmed sunglasses. I remembered that no matter how hot it was, her grip on my arm was always cold.
Every year, without fail, when the cicadas started screaming and the pavement got hot beneath the soles of my sandals, I remembered that summer. It had changed my life. It had made me who I was, April Delray, the pretty girl who was an expert in moving through life unnoticed when she wanted to. Until Eddie had noticed me.
I told him about that summer on our fourth date, as we sat on the run-down sofa in his apartment. He’d cooked for me on that date—spaghetti and meatballs, a meal I later learned he considered the best in his repertoire. It was the first time he’d cooked for me, the first time I’d been to his apartment. Normally, the big question of a date like this—to end up in bed or not?—would have hung over us, but with Eddie I didn’t obsess about it. Instead, I told him the worst thing that had ever happened to me.
We’d already eaten the spaghetti and washed the dishes. I watched a muscle in Eddie’s jaw tick as I spoke, and I watched his handsome eyes darken with shadows.
When I’d finished, he’d taken my hand and kissed the back of it without saying a word. I had felt his breath on my skin. His big hand had encompassed mine.
My heart had cracked when he did that, and my heart never cracked. Not for anyone, ever.
Now the memory of that summer was crossed with the memory of Eddie kissing my hand in his kitchen. I wondered if that was how marriage worked, if the memories you made with the person you married started taking over the ones that had come before, like a radio station that fades out on the dial as another one comes in.
As it happened, we didn’t go to bed together that night—that came later. Sitting on his sofa, my stomach full of spaghetti and meatballs, I’d still had the idea that Eddie Carter was too nice for me to sleep with. I was still in the well-worn habit of assuming I’d live my life all alone. I’d had no idea I was already falling.
Now we stepped out of the back of the police cruiser. The sun was blazing hot already, the sky burning blue, the wind nothing but a tired breath. Sweat trickled beneath my shirt between my shoulder blades.
We were in the parking lot of a grocery store that hadn’t opened yet, and to my surprise, I realized I knew where I was for the first time since last night. We were next to the turnoff Eddie and I had taken from Atticus Line into town, when we’d been speeding away from the truck behind us.
There were two other cars in the parking lot besides the cruiser we had pulled up in, one of them another police cruiser, one of them an unmarked car. The cars were all parked with their noses together, like the circle of an old wagon train. Kyle and the other cop who had driven us stood by Eddie and me. Two other uniforms had exited the other cruiser, and I realized that one of them was Officer Syed from last night. He looked at Eddie and me, then looked away.
The third car was a Cutlass, and standing alongside it were Detectives Quentin and Beam. Quentin had traded his warm-up suit for a pair of suit pants and a dress shirt unbuttoned at the throat, with no jacket and no tie. Like the warm-up suit, the look was casual, yet it was strangely formal on him. Beam was in a full suit, and he already looked sweaty and a little bit mad.
“Thank you, Officers,” Quentin said to Kyle and his partner. “You may go.”
Kyle’s fake-jovial face went hard, but he didn’t argue. His partner was already turning back toward their car. Kyle looked at Eddie and me; his type could never resist a parting shot. “Have fun, kids,” he said. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
“You may go,” Detective Quentin repeated, and in that moment I could see that Kyle hated him. I could also see that Quentin didn’t care.
The two cops got back in their cruiser and left.
Detective Beam, meanwhile, had pulled out a map and unfolded it over the hood of the Cutlass. He smoothed the squares of folds out, pinning the edges as the hot, faint breeze worked under the paper. Detective Quentin gestured for us to come closer.
“Mr. Carter,” he said to Eddie. “You were driving last night, correct?”
“Yes,” Eddie said.
“Please show me the route you took.”
Eddie stood over the map, looking down at it through his sunglasses. “Here,” he said, pointing to the paper. “We were on the interstate. I remember passing a sign for Greendale. I must have turned off somewhere around here.” He pointed.
“You don’t recall exactly where?” Quentin asked.
“It was dark and late. We were lost.”
Quentin nodded. “Why did you exit the interstate?”
“I thought I was going the right way.”
“There’s no sign that says anything about Five Pines Resort, which you say is where you were going.” Quentin’s expression was blank, impossible to read, even though he wasn’t wearing sunglasses. “So why did you exit?”
“I thought I was going the right way,” Eddie said again.
“Based on what? Have you been to this area before?”
“No.” Eddie stood back from the map. “Have other people died? Is that what this is about?”
Detective Beam said, “What makes you say that?”
Eddie looked pointedly at the police surrounding us. “Just a hunch.”
“Mr. Carter.” Detective Quentin’s voice was calm. “You and your wife are suspects in that young woman’s death until I am satisfied and say that you are not. Is that clear?”
I looked over at Officer Syed and the other uniformed officer. The other officer looked to be about twenty, blond-haired and blue-eyed, and he was checking me out without bothering to hide it. I was wearing cutoff jean shorts, sneakers, and a blue-and-white nautical striped T-shirt with a wide boatneck that almost touched my shoulders. I’d packed for a honeymoon on the beach, not a police interrogation. The blond cop was checking out my legs.
I ignored him and looked at Officer Syed. To my surprise, he was also watching me, though his look wasn’t lascivious. He gave me the briefest shake of his head, invisible to everyone but me.
What did that mean? Was he telling me to stay quiet? That he didn’t believe I’d killed Rhonda Jean? That he did believe it?
“Who was she?” Eddie asked. “Rhonda Jean. Was she a local girl? Did you find her family?”
“I’d appreciate it if you’d get in the car,” Detective Quentin said, ignoring the question. “We’re going to the place where you exited the interstate, and you and your wife are going to walk me and Detective Beam through what happened last night. The faster I get my answers, Mr. Carter, the faster we can all go home.”
—Quentin was lying. We weren’t going home—at least, not today. The police still had our car, and they were going through our luggage. We’d shown up with a murdered girl in our back seat. We weren’t going anywhere.
It wasn’t legal and it wasn’t fair, but the system wasn’t fair. People like Eddie and me didn’t get to call up a team of high-priced lawyers and make a dream team. We got to rely on our wits instead. I hoped Eddie would follow my lead, because I had the feeling I had more experience with the police than he did.
At least the back seat of the Cutlass had door handles. The air-conditioning did its best in the hot air. We drove as a two-car convoy, with Detective Beam driving the Cutlass, Detective Quentin in the passenger seat, and the two uniforms in their cruiser behind us.
“Nice weather for a honeymoon,” Detective Quentin said. “How long have you two known each other?”
I wasn’t answering that, and neither was Eddie. This wasn’t a social trip. Eddie took my hand in his silently, grasped it. I opened my hand, feeling the powerful warmth of his grip, running my thumb over one of his big knuckles. We would get through this. We would.
“You should probably answer our questions,” Detective Beam said from the driver’s seat.
“We don’t need to,” I said. “I’m sure you already know all about us.”
“I couldn’t find much information,” Detective Quentin admitted mildly. “I didn’t have a lot of time. The car is in Mr. Carter’s name and registered to your address. Mr. Carter did military service from which he was discharged at the beginning of this year.”
Quentin had an oddly formal way of speaking, calm and without inflection. It should have been soothing, but instead, the more he spoke, the more wary of him I became.
“You, Mrs. Carter,” Quentin continued. “Or should I call you Miss Delray?”
“Mrs. Carter,” I said, and Eddie squeezed my hand.
“All right, Mrs. Carter. You don’t have much of an official record of anything. You have a driver’s license and that’s about it. You’re something of a ghost.”
A ghost. He thought I was a ghost. He had no idea. “I live a quiet life,” I said. “Not everyone commits crime all the time.”
“That makes you very admirable.” Quentin’s tone was hard to decipher, but I thought perhaps he didn’t believe me. “A young lady who lives a simple life and finds a decent man to marry. You don’t see that often these days.”
If there had been something heavy in the back seat, I would have been tempted to smash the back of his smug head with it. But I curled the fingers of my free hand and took a breath. I knew he was trying to goad me. It was what I would do if I were him.
In this moment, he suspected me of murder. More than one, if my guess was correct. A woman who would stab a hitchhiker—or watch her husband stab her—and then take her to the hospital would have to be what my mother used to call a Prime Bitch. Detective Quentin wanted to know if I was a Prime Bitch or not. The fastest way to find out was to make me mad. It was a game of one-upmanship, pure and simple.
I stared out the window and didn’t take the bait, though I wanted to.
“How many other people have been killed?” Eddie asked.
“You’re persistent, Mr. Carter,” Quentin replied.
“You must have called the Five Pines Resort, at least,” Eddie said, ignoring him. “You wouldn’t be very good cops if you didn’t.”
Detective Beam looked at Detective Quentin, but Quentin was staring straight ahead. “Of course we called them,” Beam said, annoyed. “They verified you have a reservation.”
“Then why don’t you believe we were going there?”
“Because I’ve never heard of the Five Pines Resort, and when we looked it up, we discovered it’s miles west of here, on Lake Michigan. You were going in the wrong direction, Mr. Carter.”
Eddie scratched his chin. “So let me get this straight. April and I got married in Ann Arbor—which you can also verify—and made reservations for our honeymoon. We did all of this with the purpose of coming to a deserted road in the middle of the night, where we somehow knew a young lady would be, and killed her. Then, instead of driving off and getting away with it—because no one would ever know it was us—we drove her to the hospital. That was our plan?”
“We’re close to the interstate now,” was Quentin’s only reply.
I was looking out the window, trying to recognize the landscape. I thought it looked familiar in daylight, but I couldn’t be sure. It had all been so strange last night—the light we’d seen in the trees, the dark road. The scratchy country music. The leaves stirring behind Rhonda Jean when I’d rolled down the window to talk to her. The fact that Eddie hadn’t wanted me to get out of the car. Had we really been going the wrong way?
Detective Beam made a turn, and then we were on the interstate, which was nearly deserted at this time of morning on a weekday. The sun was all the way up now, heating the blacktop. Beam picked up speed.
The detectives were silent, the tension thick in the car. Eddie and I had stopped for a hamburger, I remembered. But that must have been much earlier. Wasn’t it?
“Up here,” Eddie said, his voice calm, his expression flat behind his sunglasses. “We made the turnoff up here.”
“There’s no sign,” Detective Beam pointed out.
“We didn’t have the map out. I thought this was the right direction.”
“And yet,” Quentin said, “we found an unfolded map on the floor of your car.”
“That was after we realized we were lost,” Eddie said. “April took out the map.”
Beam made the turnoff, and the noise of the interstate vanished quickly behind us. We were on a two-lane road lined with trees, and everything clicked into place. I remembered this.
Detective Beam slowed the car as Detective Quentin said, “Please point out where you found the young woman last night.”
Eddie was silent. We cruised slowly down the road, the harsh sunlight dappling between the leaves overhead. I remembered how dark it had been, except for that one strange light that we couldn’t explain. It should have been a less frightening place in daylight, but it wasn’t. There were no other cars, no wind, no houses, no sign of life. I had the sudden urge to tell Beam to go faster.
Eddie squeezed my hand briefly—a signal. I looked out the window and saw the stand of trees where we’d seen the light last night.
“It was somewhere up here,” Eddie said. “Right, April?”
My voice was rough from being silent so long. “Yes, I think so. Right along here.”
Beam slowed the car. “Was she on the right shoulder or the left?”
“Right,” Eddie said.
“Did she have her thumb out?”
“No. She was just walking, real slow and not very steady. We thought she might be drunk. We also thought she was a boy at first.”
Beam pulled over, and we all got out of the car. The cruiser pulled up behind us, and Officer Syed and his partner got out. “Were there any landmarks that you recall?” Quentin asked.
My sneakers crunched on the gravel of the shoulder as I turned in place, looking around. “It was so dark,” I said, answering Quentin.
They asked more questions—did we get out of the car? What exactly did Rhonda Jean say?—as we walked along the shoulder of the road. Quentin made a brief gesture to the uniformed cops, and they spread out ahead of us, scanning the ground for blood or any other clues.
The emptiness on Atticus Line was so complete it was like a deafening noise. I’d never seen a road like this—so empty of people, so empty of anything, that it felt like a void. What was this place? Where had Rhonda Jean come from, standing here in the middle of the night in the silence? How far had she walked? Where had she been going?
Who was she? Where was home?
And who had been out on this road last night, trying to run us down?
