Her Perfect Life

by Hank Phillippi Ryan

  Kirkhalter scratched the side of his forehead with one finger. “He didn’t actually, Ms. Atwood. But you just confirmed it.”

  Cassie’s cheeks burned, she felt the heat in her face, and somehow a chill at the same time. “You just lied to me?”

  “That’s called being a detective, Ms. Atwood. If I’d asked whether you’d been with Jeremy Duggan that night, what would you have told me?”

  “I would have told you the truth.” Cassie lifted her chin. This had to be unfair. “I always tell the truth.”

  “Good. That makes things a lot easier. I appreciate it.”

  Cassie mentally edited her story, changed it, shortened it. Reimagined it, the way it needed to have happened. She’d met Jem on Mountville Street, just randomly, everyone was on Mountville on Fridays. She’d seen his bandage, asked about it, like anyone would, he’d been in the school paper, after all, and she’d walked him home like anyone would have, dropped him off, left. Some stupid super couldn’t know how long she’d been there. Unless he kept some kind of timetable, which no one would.

  “And your roommate confirmed you’d been at the hospital.”

  The hospital thing. He had heard Marianne, and that made it more complicated. What if—

  “Just so you don’t have to decide what to say,” Kirkhalter went on. “We’d checked the hospital to see if Professor Shaw had any visitors while he was there. Do you remember a receptionist, name of Sarita?”

  If she remembered the receptionist, then she’d been there. “Why?” she asked.

  “So much for the truth.” Kirkhalter reached out, turned a dial on the dashboard. The radio’s row of pin dot lights cycled on again, flashing a row of white, then red, then green. A squawk of static announced a successful connection.

  “So, Ms. Atwood. Your decision here. You can get out.” He’d pointed toward the dorm. “You can do what you want, pull your story together, call your parents, whatever. You could try to run, which I highly discourage. Trust me, you would not get far on your own, and it’d merely make matters worse when we found you and brought you back. Nothing says guilty like running away. So here are your choices. You can talk to me, here in the back of this cold, uncomfortable police car in plain sight of everyone. Or we can go back to the station.”

  Cassie knew what to say, knew it from Law & Order and from everything. “Do I need a lawyer?”

  “Do you?” He lifted an eyebrow.

  Crap, maybe she had put that wrong. Now she had to say she didn’t. And what if that wasn’t true? What if she did need a lawyer? He was twisting her words, and it wasn’t fair. Cassie winced at a sound, startled, but it was the campus clock tower bells chiming the hour. They’d ring ten times, she knew. She almost laughed. For Whom the Bell Tolls, they were reading that in English class now. “It tolls for thee,” the poem said.

  “Look, Ms.—Cassie.” He smiled, and Cassie couldn’t tell what he was thinking. He wasn’t that old, but, like, early forties. And she guessed he seemed nice enough, in a someone’s older-brother kind of way.

  “I know you’re worried about what happened to your friend Jem Duggan.”

  “He wasn’t my—”

  “And you were in Zachary Shaw’s biology class. I know that.”

  “So were about a million other—”

  “Cassie?”

  The bells kept ringing, low and relentless and unstoppable, and it felt like her life, like the bells were saying, Wrong, wrong, wrong, and there was nothing she could ever do to make it right again.

  “Yeah?” Whatever he was about to say, there was no way she could stop that either.

  She saw the detective’s chest rise and fall, saw an expression cross his face as if he were making some kind of a decision.

  “Maybe we should talk at the station.” He’d waited. Watched her. “It’ll be more private there. I promise you can leave whenever you want. I’ll even drive you back in an unmarked car.”

  She’d been alone in this room for fifteen minutes now. The door to the windowless room opened, and she flinched at the sound. Detective Kirkhalter, now wearing a black sweater and gold badge hanging from a dark cord around his neck, carried a cardboard tray with two lidded paper cups.

  “This might take a while,” he said. “Milk and sugar, like you said. Can’t guarantee the quality of—”

  “Why am I here?” Cassie had to interrupt. This was like some terrible movie where everyone was trying to hide something and no one knew what the other one knew, but she was not the good guy—she knew that much, at least—and all she wanted was to have this be over, but it would never be over.

  She watched Kirkhalter put the coffee onto the pitted wooden table. He removed one cup and put it in front of her. A heater kicked on somewhere, whirring more stale air into the ugly room. Mumma will be so mad, the silly thought went through her mind.

  Kirkhalter pulled out the metal chair opposite her, and with a sigh, sat down.

  “I need your help,” he said.

  NOW

  CHAPTER 42

  LILY

  The tears came to Lily’s eyes now, she could not stop them. The words on the paper in front of her blurred, misting into a vague and unformed picture of the person who typed them, and where she was, and what she—Cassie—must have been thinking when she did. Cassie had touched this paper, too. She dug in her tote bag for a tissue, blinking fast to stop the tears. She’d wondered if this day would ever come, and now that it seemed imminent, her heart felt too full to believe it. Full of love. And fear. And uncertainty.

  “You’re saying she’s been in hiding for all these years. With help from law enforcement. And now, what, she wants out?” Lily sniffed, dabbed at her eyes. She looked at the words her sister—was it?—had typed. Watching her is not enough. Cassie had been watching her. Like she always said she would. And then, But I want to be me again. And I miss my little sister. Is it finally safe now?

  Let me know.

  “She must believe she’s not in danger anymore,” Greer said, more to Banning than to Lily. “That they’ve forgotten about her.”

  “Which is wrong,” Banning added. “They never forget.”

  “They who?” Lily wondered what she’d missed, what Banning could have discovered that she hadn’t. She still thought of him as Smith, which was unsettling. “I mean, I did all those DNA things, ancestry tracing, but there was never a match. Everything was a dead end. I guess I thought—if she wanted me, she could find me.”

  “This is about her, Lily. Not about you.” Greer’s admonition was gentle, a tentative therapist cautious with fragile emotions. “And about Banning, too, actually. He only found this because his father died. It’s difficult for everyone.”

  “I know, I know.” Lily felt the heat come to her face. Greer was right. Her sister—her sister—had spent all those years hiding something. That the whole story about her disappearance wasn’t true? “But the police made a big deal about searching for—”

  “Lily?” Banning interrupted. “You just told us your sister had attended Berwick for eighty-three days. That’s so specific. How did you know that?”

  Lily knew, exactly, how she’d calculated. The dates on Cassie’s calendar were etched in her memory. She told them the story of the black composition book and the hand-drawn calendar. The crossed-off days. How often she and her mother had examined them. Counted them. Tried to decipher what Cassie was looking forward to.

  Banning leaned across the table. Steepled his fingers to his lips. “Do you still have that calendar?”

  “No,” Lily said. “I think the police took it, in fact. Eventually. Your father, I guess.” She shrugged. “I suppose it was in those files.”

  “Well, it’s not there now. And your memory doesn’t prove anything. Still. Can you remember what day she marked first? The date?”

  Lily pictured it, its fading ink, its uncertain pencil lines. It looked as if Cassie had used a too-short ruler to make the grid, with each line falling off at the end. “November 10,
” she said. “We used to talk about that, why that day was so important to her. She was obviously waiting for something—but what? Was she planning to vanish, and counting the days until she’d never see us again?”

  Banning and Greer exchanged looks.

  “What?” Lily said.

  “Tell her,” Greer said. “Lil, you have to listen for a sec. Just let Banning talk.”

  “I—” Lily started to interrupt, then stopped. “Okay.”

  “So when Cassie was at Berwick,” Banning said, and his voice went low and patient as if he were about to tell a story to a restless child, “there was a lot going on at the school. Petty theft, some not so petty, the usual drunk kids, and a few emotional meltdowns. There were also—drugs.”

  With a quick motion, Banning pulled several manila file folders from the middle of the stack in front of him. Greer put her hand on top of the rest, stopping the ones underneath from slipping onto the carpeted floor.

  “My father worked those cases, too.”

  “Drugs?” Lily asked.

  “Diet pills. Ecstasy. Cocaine. Roofies. You know, it was the ’90s.”

  “She doesn’t,” Greer said. “She was seven.”

  “You’re telling me Cassie sold drugs.” Lily had to make them say it.

  Banning chose a red-labeled manila file from between the others. Opened it. And slid the open file across the table.

  “Lily? Read this.”

  He indicated a line midpoint on what was clearly a letter, two horizontal indentations showing it had once been folded into an envelope. The edges of the once-white stationery had yellowed, and someone had put a tiny black check mark in the upper right.

  Lily saw the stationery’s bright blue letterhead, the words District Attorney, the state seal of Pennsylvania. The capital letters: PLEA AGREEMENT. Lily read the two words by Banning’s forefinger.

  “Cooperating witness?” she said out loud.

  “You can read the rest,” Banning said. “But bottom line. This is a letter from the Berwick County district attorney confirming that someone—someone not named—had agreed to offer incriminating information about something.”

  “And you think that was my sister. This cooperating witness.” Lily touched the words on the letter. Playing out what they must mean. For Cassie. And, inevitably, for her. “That she was an informant. That your father put her into witness protection. Which means she was involved in the drug dealing. My sister.”

  “I’m afraid so,” Banning said. “That’s the only logical explanation.”

  “I know that’s awful for you, Lily.” Greer reached across the table. “Now I’m not sure how to keep it from the public. That’s why we wanted to talk to you.”

  Lily put her elbows on the table and covered her face with her palms, trying to shut everything out. Trying to replay the last two minutes of this disturbing conversation, trying to combine Banning’s words and this letter into an understandable story. And trying to understand why Greer and Banning seemed so in league. But more important—her sister, Cassie. Rowen’s Aunt Cassie—the person she’d trained Rowen to love and admire and see as a special person who lived far away—was a drug-dealing informant and possibly involved in a murder, who was in so deep she’d traded her freedom to avoid going to prison. How would she ever tell Rowen that? She was struggling to believe it herself.

  But maybe—she took her hands from her eyes, put them to her lips as if in prayer, and did what any good reporter would do. Looked for another explanation. And there was an easy one. One that was way more likely. She used one finger to tap on the words again, cooperating witness.

  “Wait. Cooperating. What does that even mean? It was the ’90s, like you say. Little fish, college kids, caught up in things, and zealous cops rounding up anyone who might be even peripherally involved. Ruining their lives.” Lily smoothed the letter from her sister over and over and over. Thought of all the times she’d searched strangers’ faces for Cassie’s. “Banning? Cooperating about what?”

  “A known drug dealer, a man named Jeremy Duggan, was found unresponsive in an off-campus apartment that day. Police later announced his death.”

  “That day? What day?”

  “November 10,” Greer said. “The date on your sister’s calendar. She wasn’t waiting for something to happen. She was marking the time since something happened. Since Duggan’s death.”

  Lily’s brain struggled to come up from underwater. She hadn’t seen anything about a death—or a murder—in her research. She would have noticed. But sometimes newspapers glossed over drug gang deaths as if the victims were not worthy of sympathy or column inches.

  “It’s awful, Lily,” Greer went on. “Your life has been so perfect. Up ’til now.”

  Lily felt her shoulders sink. Her sister was a criminal who’d made deals with the police and was in hiding. A nightmare. And not just for Cassie. Thank you for a perfect life, her letter had said. Her letter pleading with the now-dead Detective Kirkhalter to set her free.

  “You don’t think she killed…” Lily took a tentative step into that possibility. I’ve done a bad thing, her sister had told her. So bad that an apology would not be enough.

  “Killed, witnessed, participated.” Banning sighed. “Doesn’t matter now, means to an end. Any cop will tell you that. Indisputably, though, she must have been involved.”

  “It might have been—a coincidence.” There must be an explanation, Lily thought. Cassie was smart. But eighteen. Vulnerable. Only a freshman in college.

  “I’m afraid not a coincidence,” Banning said. “She must have known about the drugs. And Jeremy Duggan’s death. She must have traded that information for her freedom. Or as much freedom as she could have.”

  “But why didn’t your father explain that to me when I came to see him?”

  “Witness protection—that’s not how it works, Lily. There are no goodbyes. He wouldn’t have been allowed to tell you.”

  Lily shook her head, eyes downcast, trying to understand. Her phone, screen up on the table beside her, pinged with a message from Petra. Going to pick up Rowen. At least something was working the way it should. Then, with a start, she sat up straight.

  “Wait. Wait, wait, wait.”

  “Wait what?” Greer said. “Who messaged? That’s Petra’s ping. Is it about Rowen?”

  Lily put up her palms as if waving away the space in front of her. “Not about that. About Cassie. So you’re saying she didn’t ‘disappear’? Or she did, but it was just a story? A police cover-up? And that’s why the files are missing? And your father, Banning, told everyone, told my mother—”

  “Don’t kill the messenger, Lily, I’m just trying to untangle—”

  “Told everyone.” Lily heard the tension in her own voice, the anger. “They put it in the newspaper, in big headlines, that Cassie had vanished, and the police were working oh so hard to solve the case, and it was awful, and her poor roommate was terrified…”

  “Lily, it’s all in the past now.” Greer had come around the table and sat down beside her, put one hand on her shoulder. “We only thought you’d want to know. And decide what to do. I know it’s devastating, but I’m here to help. Really. Banning, too.”

  Lily wrenched herself away. “People were gossiping. And whispering. And scared. My family’s life was ruined. My mother died over it. And it simply—wasn’t true?”

  BEFORE

  CHAPTER 43

  CASSIE

  “You need my help? Help with what?” Cassie curled her hands around the blue paper cup, the coffee inside warming her still-freezing fingertips. This detective’s statement—that he needed her help—was far from what she’d predicted. She’d expected him to grill her about Jem. About what happened after the explosion, and then in Jem’s apartment. Not to mention the hospital. What could she have that would help the police?

  “Tell me what happened with Jeremy Duggan,” Kirkhalter said.

  See, she knew it. She pressed her lips together, staring at the milk
y coffee as if it were the last thing she’d ever see. He didn’t mean help like help them solve something. He meant help like confess.

  And maybe he already knew what happened, maybe that guy, the super, had—oh, she had no idea and the whole thing was a mess and now she was in the police station, and all she wanted to do was cry and go home and then cry some more, but it wouldn’t undo anything.

  She was a good person, she was. She was eighteen, and her life was over. What happened wasn’t going to change, that was over and indelible. The only thing that could change was herself. Maybe she could prove she was good.

  She willed away her tears. She should tell the truth.

  “I went to see Professor Shaw at the hospital. Because I’m his student.”

  “Understandable.” The detective took a sip of his coffee. “By yourself?”

  “Uh-huh.” Cassie nodded.

  “Not with any other of Shaw’s girls?”

  “Girls?”

  “Oh, I apologize,” Kirkhalter said. “Police shorthand. Not girls. Women. The other women students who Professor Shaw—knew.”

  Cassie frowned, trying to understand. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “Did you have a special relationship with Professor Shaw?”

  Cassie felt herself blush, even now. Of course she didn’t, but thinking about it made her nervous. “No,” she whispered.

  “Go on,” the detective said.

  She told him about Jem’s arrival, and their discussion as the Wharton alarm bells rang, and how she’d seen him go back into the building to rescue their professor. Then that Friday at the hospital, how they’d met by chance, and he’d asked her to walk back to his dorm with him.

  “At least I thought it was his dorm. But it was an apartment, off campus.” She half laughed, rueful. “Well, you know that. So we went upstairs.” She watched for a look of disapproval, but there was none.