“I’d like to think we tell each other everything. And the secret was safe with me … well, until now.”
Affairs happened all the time, so I found it strange that they had made a pact to keep it between themselves.
“Is there any part of the story that you’re leaving out?” I asked. “I don’t understand why they’d make an actual pact to keep something like that between themselves. I’m even more surprised that it seemed to have worked.”
“I haven’t told you the worst part yet. Tilly didn’t just admit the affair. She admitted she’d gotten pregnant but lost the baby before they could determine whether it was Aiden’s or Vaughn’s.”
Now that was a secret worth keeping.
Even if the affair had caused tension within the friend group, two of them had lost a child, and that shared loss fostered empathy.
“What happened after that night?” I asked.
“They all went their separate ways. He said a few of them hung around here and there, but that it was never the same.”
It was a lot to take in.
It felt like I was at a fork in the road, only this road had far more forks than one.
Turning to Rosemary, I said, “I think it’s clear that Audrey was the one to circle those faces. When she gave you back the yearbooks, did she say anything about them? Did she seem nervous after that?”
Rosemary looked up as if searching her memories. “I remember thinking she was a lot more restless than usual in those final weeks, and she wasn’t sleeping well. She kept checking her phone. I asked if she was okay, and she told me she was fine. I chalked it up to pre-college jitters.”
I thought of Sadie’s description of Audrey at the fast-food place.
The phone.
The tension.
Audrey was connected in some way to almost every person she had circled.
One of them had to be the killer.
“Did Audrey ever ask Dustin about his friend group?” I asked.
“Not to my knowledge.”
“Were all the classmates Audrey circled present the night of the bonfire?”
“I’m not sure. Why don’t I give Dustin a call, see if I can get him on the phone?”
She made the call, placing it on speaker when he answered. I filled him in on everything that had happened since I arrived at the house, and when I finished, I asked the question Rosemary had been unable to answer.
There was a long pause.
Too long.
“Dustin, are you there?” I asked.
“I, yeah. There was … ahh, one other person there. I’ve been standing here trying to figure out the best way to tell you. The thing is, I didn’t know.”
“What didn’t you know?”
“That Anne would be so central to your investigation. If I knew, I would have told you that Anne was with us that night.”
Rosemary gasped, looking at me and mouthing, “I didn’t know.”
It was the biggest break in the case so far, and for a moment, I sat there, riveted, not knowing what to say next, and then it came to me.
