“Sort of. We go to the same school.”
“What, if anything, do you know about what happened?”
“Nothing.” I hesitated for a second before adding, “Except that I think there was someone else on the roof.”
“Someone else? You mean someone other than Ethan?”
I nodded. “I looked up, and I’m pretty sure I saw someone up on the roof.”
“Pretty sure?”
“The sun came out. It was hard to get a good look. At first I thought it was a mirage or something.” I kicked myself as soon as the words were out of my mouth. Detective Martin lowered his pen.
“A mirage. I see.”
“But it wasn’t a mirage,” I said quickly. “There was someone up there.”
“Can you describe this person? Was it someone you know?”
“No. I mean, I don’t know if I know him because I didn’t actually see who it was. Because of the sun. It was right behind him and—”
“You keep saying him. So it was a male?”
“He or she,” I said. “It could have been a she. I couldn’t tell.”
“Did this person you think you saw say anything? Did you hear something? Is that why you looked up?”
“No. Nothing like that. I just didn’t want to look at Eth—at the victim. So I looked up and I thought I saw—I mean, I did see someone.”
“But you’re not sure,” Detective Martin said. “Because the sun was in your eyes.” He scribbled a few quick notes and flipped his notebook shut. “If you think of anything else, you know how to reach me.”
The coroner came and went, the body was bagged and taken away, and a uniformed officer told me what I assumed he had already told the cheerleaders—that I should report to the police station to make a formal statement. Aunt Ginny and Detective Martin left the scene. The cheerleaders huddled on the other side of the barricade for a few minutes before finally deciding to abort their practice. I headed to where I’d been going in the first place—the bike lockup. When I got there, the rec center’s parking lot was filled with kids in brightly colored rain gear, and teachers and parents, most of them clutching furled umbrellas. They were making their way to school buses or family cars to go home after what a banner over the front rec-center door proclaimed as the Annual Regional Swim Meet. There seemed to be some kind of buzz among the adults. They stood or walked in small knots and kept glancing at the police cars at the far end of the building.
I unlocked my bike and set off for home, the image of Ethan’s body flashing like a strobe light in my brain. I couldn’t believe it had happened. I couldn’t shake the picture of him staring up but seeing nothing. I couldn’t believe he was dead.
A truck horn bellowed, and a massive dump truck screeched to a stop in the middle of an intersection. Its baseball-capped driver yelled at me to “Look at the light, for the love of Mike!” I did and saw to my horror that it was red. I had ridden through a red light.
I mumbled an apology and set off again, legs trembling. I was assiduous in watching for lights and stop signs—and trucks. So assiduous that I didn’t see an elderly man open his car door in front of me. I managed to stop short without hurting myself or the car. But I startled the man so badly that he clutched his chest. I thought he was going to keel over. He didn’t. Instead he shouted, “Watch where you’re going, for Pete’s sake!”
Then I heard, “Hey, Riley!”
It was Charlie. Where had he come from?
He grabbed my handlebars.
“Are you okay?” He peered at me, frowning.
“I’m fine.” I was, too, if you overlooked the fact that I was shaking all over. I had just had a close call with first a truck and then a car door. It was pure luck that I wasn’t sprawled on the pavement—just like Ethan.
“You don’t look fine,” Charlie said. “Plus, you almost ran someone over. That’s not like you.”
That’s when I did what I hardly ever do. I burst into tears.
TWO
“What is it?” Charlie asked. “Are you hurt?”
“It’s Ethan.” I wiped my tears with the back of my hand.
“Oh.” Bye-bye, sympathy and concern. Hello, disdain.
Charlie didn’t like Ethan. There could have been any number of reasons for this. After all, both were born and raised in Moorebridge, which meant they’d had plenty of time to inflict pain on and nurse grudges against each other. That was my theory. Ashleigh had a different one: Charlie didn’t like Ethan because, for some reason I hadn’t figured out, Ethan had started hanging around me.
“So what happened?” Charlie’s tone was mocking. “Did Mr. Wonderful decide to go back to his girlfriend?”
This was something else I was having trouble fathoming. Charlie acting obnoxiously jealous. Of Ethan. Okay, so yes, Ethan had been trailing me for the past week. And, yes, he’d dumped his girlfriend, Serena, just before he started mooning around my locker. But he hadn’t asked me out, and even if he had, I’m not sure I would have accepted. For one thing, I didn’t know him well. I had no idea what kind of person he was. For another, Serena gave the evil eye to every girl Ethan so much as glanced at. And if there’s one thing I know—mostly because the guys in Jimmy’s band told me every time they did what they subsequently warned me against—it’s that it’s never a good idea to get involved with someone who’s fresh off a breakup. You need to give it time. A lot of time.
Not that any of this was even remotely relevant to my relationship with Charlie. We were friends. If that had changed, no one had told me.
“Oh, Charlie,” I said. “Ethan’s dead.”
Charlie laughed. He actually laughed. I was furious. I tried to shake him loose from my handlebars. That’s when I noticed his hand. I didn’t have a chance to ask him about it, though, because he said something that made me even angrier.
“Yeah right. As if my dreams ever come true.”
How could he be so cruel?
“I’m not kidding, Charlie. He’s really dead.”
“Nice try, Riley. But he was at school today, as charming as ever. I should know.”
“You don’t understand. It really happened. Just now. The cops were there. He’s dead.”
Doubt overtook Charlie’s face. “You’re not kidding, are you?”
“I was there. I saw him.” It was as if I’d stumbled on the words of a malevolent spell. As soon as I spoke them, I saw Ethan again, eyes open, body motionless, lying in a pool of blood. I felt myself tremble.
“What happened?” Charlie asked. “How did—”
“He fell off the rec-center roof. You know, where the jocks like to hang out.” There was a large patio on the roof that was used in the warm months for fresh-air yoga classes, seniors’ exercise programs and other outdoor activities. The school jocks—mainly the football team—liked to take weights out there and work their biceps, triceps, quads, glutes and every other muscle in their bodies except, as far as I could tell, their brains.
“He fell?”
“I think he might have been pushed.”
“What? What makes you think that?”
“I’m pretty sure I saw someone up there. Right after we found Ethan.”
“We?”
I filled him in on what had happened since I’d parted company with Ashleigh.
“This person you saw,” Charlie said. “Did you get a good look at him?”
I had to admit—again—that I hadn’t.
“What did the cops say?”
“What they always say. Nothing.”
“Maybe he jumped,” Charlie said.
I gave him a sharp look. “Is that supposed to make me feel better? Because it doesn’t.”
Charlie mumbled a barely audible “Sorry.”
“I have to get home.” I waited for Charlie to let go of my handlebars. That’s when I got another look at his hands. The knuckles of the right one were red. Some of them were skinned almost raw. “What happened? Were you in a fight or something?”
He whip
ped his hand out of sight behind his back. “I fell.”
I looked at his other hand. There wasn’t a mark on it. He would have had to fall on the knuckles of one hand to get the injuries I had seen. I was about to press him for details when his eyes shifted to my backpack. What if he noticed that his four-leaf clover was no longer attached to it?
“I’ll see you tomorrow.” I jumped onto my bike and shot down the street.
My cell phone buzzed before I’d gone very far. I stopped and checked it. Ashleigh had texted. Did you hear what happened?
I texted her back. Where are you?
I found her nursing a giant latte at a table in the window of the Sip ’n’ Bite. “So I can keep an eye on what’s happening,” she explained. She nodded at the police station, which was kitty-corner to the café.
“What about the photo contest?”
“Done.” She kept her eye on her target. I glanced across the street.
“Seen anything?”
“Not so far. You want my opinion? I bet it was suicide.”
“Suicide? He didn’t seem depressed to me.”
“He was an athlete. And a guy. He hid his emotions. What if he was secretly pining for Serena?”
“Why would he pine for her? He dumped her, not the other way around.”
“Technically,” Ashleigh said, “Serena engineered the breakup.” She took a tiny sip of her latte. Ashleigh was a slow drinker. It could take her nearly an hour to get through a mug that size. It never bothered her that the coffee went cold.
“Technically?” I asked. “And what do you mean she engineered it?”
“Serena was fed up with the way Ethan was acting. She told him he’d better change or else. That’s when he said if she didn’t like the way he was, then she was free to break up with him. She called him on it. She said she didn’t like it. He said, Fine, then I guess we’re through.”
“In other words, he broke up with her.”
“In other words, she said change or else. He refused to change, leaving her with no option but to act on the or else—in other words, to initiate breakup proceedings. That’s what makes it a technicality. It also makes her smart—really, she broke up with him, but he gets all the blame and she, therefore, gets all the sympathy.” She said this with frank admiration, as if Serena had invented some devilishly clever new chess move.
“I don’t think Ethan jumped off a roof over that,” I said. “Like I said, he didn’t seem depressed. Besides, if he didn’t want to lose Serena, all he had to do was change whatever was bothering her.”
Ashleigh seemed reluctant to let go of her theory.
“What do you think happened?” she asked. “Do you think it was an accident?”
“If only.”
“What do you mean?”
I told her the same thing I had told Charlie. “I saw someone else on the roof.”
“You think someone pushed him?”
“At the very least, the person I saw knows something.”
“Maybe whoever it was went up there after Ethan jumped.”
“He didn’t jump. And the person on the roof didn’t come down when he saw what had happened. Or when the police showed up. Why not?”
“Maybe he was freaked out by seeing a dead body.”
“Maybe.”
“Hey,” she said after a brief silence. “What if the person you saw was Serena? What if she pushed him?”
“Why would she do that? You just told me she dumped him. Why would she push him off a roof if she’d already cut him out of her life?”
Ashleigh looked at me incredulously. “Are you kidding? The green-eyed monster. Jealousy.”
“Uh-huh. And who exactly is she jealous of?”
“You. The minute Ethan was free of her, he started puppy-dogging you. Maybe she suspected that was the reason he broke up with her.”
“Whoa. Time out. I thought she broke up with him. That technicality thing.”
“Whatever. Even though she started the whole thing, I’m pretty sure what she wanted was for him to change, not walk away. Oh, and then there’s Andes.”
Andes, I had learned by the end of the first week of school, was a fullback on the football team. His real name was Andrew Maracle, but he was built like a mountain and could stop anything up to and including a Mac truck (it was said), so everyone called him Andes.
“Then there’s Andes what?” I asked.
“As a suspect. If Ethan was pushed. Maybe Andes did it.”
“What does he have against Ethan? They’re on the same team. And it’s not even like they’re in competition with each other. They play completely different positions.”
“Andes has a thing for Serena. Maybe he thought he’d finally score when Ethan broke up with her. I saw them together the other day.”
“Serena and Andes?”
She nodded. “Maybe Ethan was having second thoughts about breaking up with Serena, and Andes didn’t like that. Or maybe Serena was having second thoughts about breaking up with Ethan, and Andes decided to get rid of him before Serena tried to patch things up.”
“That’s a lot of maybes. Here’s another one—maybe you should write a book. You have a pretty wild imagination.”
“I’m sorry about what happened to him, Riley. I know you liked him. I’m sure the cops will figure it out.”
“I’m sorry about what happened to him too,” I said. “But I hardly knew him.”
Ashleigh arched an eyebrow. “You two sure spent a lot of time together. I saw him waiting at your locker three times last week.”
“You’re keeping score?”
“Just noticing things, that’s all.”
Noticing them accurately. He had indeed waited for me three times in the past week. Each time he had greeted me with a shy hi.
“He wasn’t a big talker,” I told Ashleigh.
“But he asked you out, right?”
I shook my head. “He just wanted to talk. At least, that’s all he ever did. He said he’d heard some things about me, like what happened this summer. Stuff from before I moved here too. I think he was just curious.”
“You’re saying he didn’t ask you out?” Ashleigh looked disappointed for me.
“He didn’t ask me out, and I’m fine with that.”
“You didn’t like him? You didn’t like Ethan Crawford?”
“I liked him. He was okay, I guess.”
“Okay? You guess?”
“But he never asked me out.”
“But I heard—”
“You heard what?”
“I heard that he did.”
“Where did you hear that?”
“In the girls’ bathroom. I overheard some girls. One of them was Serena. The way she was trash-talking you—”
“She was trash-talking me? She doesn’t even know me.”
“From the way she was talking, I thought she’d caught you and Ethan together or something.”
“Well, she didn’t.”
“Huh,” Ashleigh said.
We stared across the street. Ashleigh sipped her latte. She was getting close to the bottom when I spotted Aunt Ginny in the police parking lot.
“I’ll be right back,” I said.
I caught Aunt Ginny as she was getting into her car.
“Did you find out who was on the roof?” I asked.
“Riley, I have work to do. I’m on my way to Ethan’s house.”
I didn’t envy her that.
“There was someone else on the roof, Aunt Ginny. I told Detective Martin, but I don’t think—”
“He told me what you said. We know what we’re doing, Riley.”
“So you’re looking for that person?”
Aunt Ginny looked evenly at me. She unlocked her car and got in.
“Do you think he was pushed, Aunt Ginny?”
“Goodbye, Riley.” She turned the key in the ignition, and I watched her pull away.
I rode home thinking about Ethan and Ethan’s dad, whom I had never met, and
hoping that both Ashleigh and I were wrong, that Ethan hadn’t been pushed and hadn’t jumped. That it was an accident because accidents, as unpredictable as they are, are easier to understand than intentional violence or self-destruction. I tried to focus on my homework, but Ashleigh barraged me with texts, asking if I had heard anything new. I told her what I always told her—Aunt Ginny never talked about a case under active investigation. Ashleigh fed me every scrap of intelligence, ridiculous or otherwise, that came her way. This consisted of the following:
Somebody (it wasn’t clear who) had heard somebody (identity also not clear) say that she or he had heard that Ethan was going to make up with Serena.
Somebody (again, not clear who) had heard that Ethan had asked me out and I had turned him down.
Somebody had heard that Ethan had asked me out and I had accepted and I had boasted to everyone I knew.
Somebody had heard that Andes had asked Serena out and she had turned him down.
Somebody had heard exactly the opposite: that Serena had asked Andes out and he had turned her down.
Did I say intelligence? I meant idle gossip.
I was sprawled on my bed, staring at the ceiling, when I heard car tires crunch over the gravel driveway. Aunt Ginny was home. When I met her on the back porch, she was getting out of a police car.
“Your car still isn’t fixed?” I asked.
She rolled her eyes. “Every time I ask that lunatic about it, he tells me it’ll be one more day. It’s been five days already.” She had taken her car in for minor repairs, and the wait was putting her in a bad mood. At least, that’s how she would have described it. I knew better. She was hangry—in a grouchy mood induced by low blood sugar. I knew how to deal with that.
“I made that meatloaf you like, and there’s mashed potatoes. I could have it ready in five minutes, if you’d like a snack,” I said.
“I’ll take a quick shower.” She unholstered her firearm, removed the bullets from it, carried them directly to the lock box where she kept them when she was at home, and padded upstairs to change. By the time she returned, scrubbed, shampooed and pajamaed, I had a plate of hot food waiting. She tucked in. I sat down with her.
“How did Ethan’s father take it?” I asked.
“Not well, poor man.” This through a mouthful of mashed potato and meatloaf. “Did you know Ethan’s brother is a paraplegic?”
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