Now Lacy flung the dress around her shoulders like a shawl. “It’s cold in here.” She reached inside the chest again, this time tossing a red velvet dress at me.
“Probably because we are literally in the walls,” I said, accepting the garment as a kind of fancy blanket.
She came and sat next to me, and I put the phone on the ground, flashlight up. With the shadows our figures made on the walls, it looked like we were spirits waiting to descend.
“I overheard you and Anton talking in the Media Room.”
“You overheard? Do you mean you were eavesdropping?”
“PEE-CAN, peh-cahn,” I said, using the phrase we always used to signal that sometimes Lacy and I saw the world differently.
Lacy pulled her knees close to her chest, wrapping her arms around herself in a way that made her look more like her childhood self than the confident woman I knew.
“Anton was telling you not to tell the sheriff something,” I prompted. “What is it?”
Lacy looked into my eyes, and I could see that she was warring with herself, but I couldn’t figure out why. We’d always treated one another as a kind of confessional, spilling secretsthat ranged from crushes to silly white lies we’d told. Lacy tucked her head into her arms and muttered one sentence. “You don’t have to know everything.”
The words stung me like the bees I’d once so feared.Wow. Okay.
Either Lacy was in the kind of trouble that she didn’t feel she could trust even me with, or Anton was guilty as hell and she was trying to protect him.
SEVEN
“I didn’t mean it like that,” Lacy said, a hiccup in her voice as if she might cry.
“How did you mean it?”
Seconds passed as she looked at me, trying to find words that didn’t come.
“If you won’t tell me…” My voice trailed. I didn’t know how to finish the statement, so I decided to go a different route, throwing out something I’d noticed earlier to see if she’d meet me in the middle. “Joe called Brett a ‘son of a bitch’ when he served me a drink earlier.” A tiny flag, not quite red but blush-colored, started to rise in my mind. “Do you know if the two of them are—or were—still friends?”
“Sure, I guess,” Lacy answered.
“They were inseparable in high school,” I prompted.
Lacy thought for a minute, seeming to soften as we reached steadier conversational ground. “Yeah. If one of them played offense, so did the other. If one of them dated a girl, the other better find a friend.”
With a jolt I realized that even though Lacy likely hadn’t meant to imply it, this was probably the reason that Joe hadasked me on a handful of dates in high school. Out of pity, plain and simple.
“If one of them did a kegger, the other one held their ankles,” Lacy continued, sounding more like herself the longer she spoke.
“If one of them stole a goat and left it in the principal’s office,” I added, “the other took the blame.”
“I’d forgotten about that.” Lacy’s face relaxed only a second before the pinched look returned. “Gross. There were those tiny turds all down the senior hallway, remember?”
“All too well,” I answered, before trying one last time to break through whatever shell my friend had been hiding inside. I sighed. “I have to ask again—are you sure that you should listen to Anton?”
Lacy frowned. “About what?”
“About not speaking to Charlie. He’s…” I tried to find the words. “He’s good at his job, and any little detail could help.”
Lacy stared at me, reconsidering before something loosened inside of her. “Tonight at halftime, during the game, Brett spotted me when I was coming back from the restroom and pulled me under the bleachers.”
I made a yuck face.
“It wasn’t like that,” she said, heading off my concerns. “Well, not at first. He said he needed to ask me something. Then, he told me that he wanted a few shots of me flirting with him, said he wanted to create drama for his new reality show.”
“What? Why?”
