And When I Die, page 21
Ava frowned, her eyes scanning the rows of frames and glass in search of a photo of Erica.
Not a single one.
In the countless times she’d been over here through the years, how had she never noticed that?
A lifetime of pictures splashed across the wall. The two girls. Jay.
Erica nowhere to be found.
“Ava?”
She spun around, gasping when she saw Erica standing in front of her, puzzled.
“Oh, gosh, sorry, I just … I got caught up in looking at your family photos.” She tapped the glass of Jordan dressed as a genie from a dance recital. “I remember this. So cute.”
“You were gone so long, I told Kyle I’d come check on you, make sure you were okay.” Erica fiddled with the lone heart charm on her gold Tiffany bracelet as she stepped forward for a closer look. “She hates that I keep this up.”
“You know, Erica, I just realized, you aren’t in any of the pictures.” She crossed her arms. “In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in a picture. Never in your Christmas cards, not on Facebook, not on anything.”
She scrunched up her nose and shook her head. “I hate, absolutely hate having my picture taken. I cannot stand the way I look in photos.”
“Really?” Ava scratched her neck. “Those pictures from your yearbook that Jay did for that collage at your birthday were great. I mean you were in so many. Homecoming queen and cheerleading.”
“Oh. Those. God, Jay badgered me so much about that. I literally threw the book at him and told him to use whatever. I couldn’t even look at the thing and made him throw it out the next day.”
“Well, your pictures looked better than most. You should be proud.”
A peal of Jay’s raucous laughter followed by some gibberish from Kyle rang out from the dining room. Erica smiled. “We’d better get back in there.” She beckoned for Ava to follow her. “I guess we’ll have to walk down memory lane another time.”
Ava smiled and followed Erica back to the dining room, but not before taking one last glance over her shoulder at the wall of smiling photos.
49
ERICA
The memorial service for Whitney Victoria Dean almost a month after she was murdered was standing room only. Hundreds of weeping, tear-stained faces crowded into First Presbyterian Church, snug against each other in the pews, lining the hallways, watching the closed caption feed in the Sunday school rooms.
Erica studied Whitney’s picture looming over the altar, the smiling perfection of her sophomore yearbook photo forever freezing her in time.
Sixteen forever.
All these weeks later, the shock of Whitney’s murder still rattled her, memories ricocheting across her brain like flashes of lightening. Dance recitals, pool parties. All the sleepovers the girls had. Once, during a slumber party for Jordan’s tenth birthday, Whitney convinced the girls they needed to raid Erica’s makeup so they could make a music video. She should have been furious, but watching them lip-synch to some silly song, their faces slathered with every shade of purple, pink, red, and blue they could find, as they recorded themselves with Whitney’s phone, ridiculous and adorable all at once, it was hard to stay mad. A tear pricked Erica’s eye. That was Whitney.
Ahead of her by eight rows, Lauren Dean sat in the front pew, flanked by her husband and son, her stepdaughter to Steve’s right. Predictably, she wore a prim black Chanel suit, her eyes obscured by large sunglasses, even inside, though they did nothing to hide the tears, the shaking shoulders, or the muffled wails that occasionally escaped from her tiny frame.
Erica’s gaze wandered around the sanctuary, the faces of her friends and neighbors sliding across her vision in a blur. Some of Jordan’s teachers, the principal, and the superintendent had taken up residence near the back, their faces wavering between distress and shock. Eventually she landed on Ava Ewing staring straight ahead, a glassy vacant look in her eye, her husband Kyle engrossed in the program. Erica was surprised at how wrecked Ava looked today. She hadn’t had that much to drink. This definitely seemed like more than just grief or the residue of one too many glasses from last night. She tried to catch Ava’s eye to no avail. Erica put it on her mental to-do list to check in with Ava later in the week, see if she could unearth what was troubling her friend, which was probably a touch too familiar a way of describing their relationship. Granted, she didn’t spend a lot of time with Ava, as she had always been a little cool to her. Friendly enough, but never chummy, not like she was with Lauren or the passel of girlfriends (from work, high school, college?) she saw her in photos with whenever she creeped her Facebook page. But surely last night was the start of something, wasn’t it?
Erica frowned to herself, wondering where Carly was, knowing she had to be here somewhere since her name was listed in the program, given the task of reading a poem. Erica had been unable to compel Jordan into paying her respects. She couldn’t even get Jay to intervene, as he was of the mindset to let Jordan be, to allow her to grieve in her own way, whatever the hell that meant. She was of the mindset that there was a proper and fitting way of doing things and that even if Jordan didn’t want to be here, she should have been. She pulled her phone from her purse to check that Jordan’s car and phone were still at home. In fact, her daughter had been quite dutiful—and truthful—about where she was spending her time. School, the library, Coffee City. Old Orchard on occasion. There had been nary a blip to her routine since Erica had installed the trackers on the phone and car. She’d consider keeping them on for a little bit longer. Just to be sure.
The organ’s groan rumbling through the sanctuary stopped Erica’s musings, snapping all of them to attention. Carly emerged from a cluster of the pom squad teammates stuffed next to each other across one pew to give her reading. In spite of herself, the pang of not seeing Jordan among the pom girls snapped against Erica. Whitney’s half-sister, Janine, delivered the eulogy, a missive on fighting over hairbrushes, jeans, and shampoo, followed by teary remembrances of the sweet, funny sister who she was happy to have had for sixteen years and devastated because she would never know what the future held.
Erica managed to keep her composure throughout the teary, emotional service, electing to hold in her feelings, as she was wont to do. Just the way she trained herself for so many years.
“That was good,” Jay whispered as the service drew to a close and he grabbed her hand with his bear paw, giving it a hearty squeeze. “Really nice.”
“Yes. Quite nice.”
“I guess we should start making our way to the reception,” Jay said.
Erica nodded as they edged into the clogged aisle, keeping her focus on the light of the vestibule, her mild claustrophobia nudging against her. She unfurled the crumpled program in her hand to fan her face, relieved when they finally reached the threshold, fresh, cool air mere steps away.
A scream erupted from outside. Through the crowd, she could see Madison hyperventilating as she looked down at her phone.
“What the hell is going on?” Jay muttered.
Erica’s confused look matched the rest of the crowd as she spotted Carly running to Madison’s side just as Lexi snatched her phone away and gasped at the screen.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” Peyton screamed.
“They just arrested Mr. Byrne for Whitney’s murder!” Lexi yelled.
50
RON
Technically, yes, he’d been arrested.
Not for Whitney’s murder, though. A stupid fucking traffic ticket. It was just an excuse to get him in here. Their last resort, he supposed.
The plan had been to flee to his brother’s in Detroit for a few days and lay low in the vain, preposterous hope the police would get tired of bugging him to come down to the station for questioning because they’d moved on to someone else. As soon as he opened his door, duffel bag in hand, there they were.
Of course they were.
As he sat here now in the interrogation room, parked at a battered metal table, glued to a metal chair, the sickly yellow walls burning his eyes, he wondered what on earth he’d been thinking.
He hadn’t been thinking. That was the problem. That’s how this whole mess started.
Ron smoothed down his shirt, his fingers trembling, his tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth, both crying out for water. All sorts of awful possibilities ran through his head on a loop about how this little sit-down would go.
He didn’t see it ending well.
The door swung open and the detective who had shown up just as he was fleeing to Detroit came into the room. Ron straightened up involuntarily and smoothed his hair back.
“Can I go now?” he asked.
“No.” The detective went quiet, thumbing through a manila folder in front of her, the rustle of the papers filling the room.
“Did you have to haul me out of my apartment like that, for all my neighbors to see?”
“Mr. Byrne, we’ve left you several messages, which you haven’t returned.” She ran her tongue across her teeth. “Guess you should have paid that speeding ticket.”
He squirmed in his seat under the pointed accusation.
The detective—he couldn’t remember what she said her name was—leaned back in her chair, which squealed with delight, and smiled at him, which made him even more of a wreck, because he knew what was coming.
“Mr. Byrne, how long have you been a teacher?”
“Seven years.”
“And how many of those years at East Lake Forest High School?”
“This is my first full year.”
“I see. And where were you prior?”
Sweat flooded his underarms and he was grateful for his windbreaker hiding the moons of sweat he knew were soaking his shirt.
“I was with CPS right out of college.”
“That’s a pretty big leap from CPS to Lake Forest. Why’d you leave?”
His bowels pinged and pressed against him. If he moved even an inch, he was likely to shit all over this interrogation room. Why was the detective bothering with the pretense? They knew the story. Why didn’t they just come out and say it?
Ron sighed. “Listen, we both know why I left.”
The detective hunched over the manila folder and pulled out a piece of paper from beneath the stack. “An inappropriate relationship with a student.”
“She was a former student—”
“What was your relationship with Whitney Dean?”
“What?”
The detective pulled another piece of paper from her magic hat. “We had several witnesses tell us that you often kept Miss Dean after class.”
“Listen, I had nothing to do with her murder—”
“I’ll ask you again, what was the nature of your relationship with Whitney Dean?”
Tears pricked the backs of his eyes. “I didn’t have a relationship with Whitney—Miss Dean. She was my student, that was it.”
“Why’d you keep her after school so often?”
“Because she…” He let out a frustrated sigh. “She had a bad attitude in class and I was trying to nip it in the bud. That was it. There was nothing going on between us other than student and teacher.”
“Isn’t that how things started with you and Miss—” The detective checked her notes. “Anthony? Keeping her after class?”
“No.”
The detective raised an eyebrow. “No?”
Mr. Byrne leaned back in his chair, his fingers trembling as he held them to his mouth. “Liane Anthony was in my American lit class as a junior and the only time I saw her after that was in the hallways at school. She graduated and as far as I knew, went to college out of state.”
“So how did your affair start?”
He gulped again, still afraid to move. “I was out with some friends one night and ran into her and that’s how it started. She was twenty, okay? By the time I ran into her again, she was twenty years old. She wasn’t my student anymore, she wasn’t a minor. Look, it didn’t last very long, but then her father, who’s very protective and not all that reasonable, found out and because I’d been her teacher, he assumed … anyway, he threatened to ruin me if I didn’t cut ties with his daughter. He’s chummy with Jay Mitchell and here I am. That’s what happened. That’s the story.”
“When’s the last time you saw Miss Anthony?”
He hesitated, then sighed. His life was on the line. There was no sense in holding the dam back anymore. “The Saturday that Whitney Dean was murdered.”
The detective raised an eyebrow. “That so?”
“She—she found out where I lived and showed up at my apartment.”
The detective tapped her pen against the table. “Go on.”
“I was at home, grading papers and she just showed up.”
“What’d you do?”
Ron closed his eyes and shook his head. “I—we went to dinner. I mean, we were about to go to dinner. I mean, we got in my car to go to dinner and we—”
“Had dessert first?” Diehl asked, smirking.
“That’s really crass.”
She rolled her eyes. “My apologies for offending your delicate sensibilities.”
“Yes, we had an … encounter, in my car and then we grabbed a burger at Chief’s. I sent her home in an Uber and haven’t seen her since.”
“Why were you leaving town?”
“I … I was trying to avoid this.”
“’This?’”
Ron ran his hands across his head and sighed. “Because of my past. I didn’t want it to get out to the school and lose my job. I just wanted to lay low. Let it blow over.”
“Hmm.” The detective nodded her head as though she were contemplating this. She dropped her pen and gathered up the manila folder. “I have to step out. Make yourself comfortable.”
Ron bent over the table, his head dropping into the cradle of his hands. This was bad. Really bad.
A seeming eternity passed before the detective swung the door open, causing him to jump. “We’re exercising our right to hold you for forty-eight hours, while we check out your alibi.”
He slumped in his chair. They were going to talk to Liane, and her father would find out, because he had a knack for uncovering things that didn’t want to be found. As usual, he was out of his depth. He needed help.
“You know what? I want my phone call. I want a lawyer.”
“You’ll get your phone call soon,” she said as she led him out of the squad room to a holding cell.
51
JORDAN
Jordan took a shaky sip of her latte as she played with the ends of her hoodie string and watched her phone for updates on Mr. Byrne.
Nothing.
It had been two days since Whitney’s memorial service, two days since he’d been hauled out of his apartment building. Two days since they’d found out he had sex with students, that he may have been having sex with Whitney.
That he may have killed her.
All weekend, the only thought that had burned through Jordan’s mind was that if the police thought Mr. Byrne did it, they would leave her alone, wouldn’t be asking her anymore questions about what she was doing that day. She didn’t know anything about Whitney and Mr. Byrne, but it wouldn’t have surprised her. Whitney was into older guys and was all about playing games and doing shit she wasn’t supposed to. Everyone thought she was so special and so perfect.
Jordan knew all too well what a viper her best friend was.
Her eyes flicked over to the community bulletin board next to the front door, one of those pervasive pink fliers with Whitney’s face asking people to come forward with any information about her murder still tacked prominently to the crowded cork. Now that Mr. Byrne had been arrested, she wondered how long it would be before those pink pieces of paper disappeared.
The bell dinged over the door of the busy café and Jordan groaned when she saw Dionne and Carly. They were so gross. Two wannabees in a pod.
Carly and Dionne stopped chatting as soon as they spotted Jordan across the room and scowled at each other. Jordan looked back down at her phone, determined to ignore them, until a shadow fell over her table, forcing her to lock eyes with the girls. Dionne looked defiant, her hand on her hip, gum snapping and popping, while Carly fidgeted with the buttons of her shirt, her eyes darting around the café.
“I’ll bet you’re glad the police arrested Mr. Byrne instead of you,” Dionne said.
“Go away, Dionne.”
“Maybe you helped him,” she continued. “Maybe he was sleeping with you too and you both killed Whitney.”
“You’re pathetic,” Jordan said.
“You’re pathetic,” Dionne shot back. She ribbed Carly. “Have you ever seen anything more pathetic?”
Carly cleared her throat and shook her head. “She’s disgusting. No wonder Whitney hated her.”
Jordan plunked her coffee cup down on the table and gathered up her book bag. “Don’t you have a broom waiting somewhere to fly you around?” She looked them up and down. “A two-seater?”
Dionne scoffed. “Oh, my God. So original.”
“Yeah, Jordan, like come up with something else,” Carly chimed in.
Over Dionne’s shoulder, Mr. Byrne’s face flashed across the café’s TV and someone at the counter yelled for the barista to turn up the sound on the afternoon news. All three girls turned their attention to the screen. An older woman in a red suit, a large spider pin affixed to the lapel, wiry strands of white woven through her wavy dark hair, rushed Mr. Byrne past the frenzied media throng and toward a black SUV idling nearby. She hustled him into the back seat and got in behind him, before the car inched away from the curb and the shouted questions from the pack of reporters.
