“She had a lot of questions. At the time, I thought we were having a casual, innocent conversation. Now, I’m not sure what to think.”
“What were her questions?”
“Audrey wanted to know about my last year of high school and the group of friends I hung out with back then. She said it was for a history assignment.”
“She went through Rosemary’s and Dustin’s yearbooks, and she told them the same thing. But I don’t believe there ever was a history assignment. I think she was trying to find out what happened to Anne Fontaine. Did she ask you about her?”
“I mean, you don’t think she was digging into the past and someone put a stop to it, do you?”
“That is exactly what I think.”
Wendy shook her head, mumbling, “I had no idea, or I wouldn’t have said anything. The last time I saw Audrey, she asked me if I’d ever met Anne. I said yes, I’d met her once. I didn’t think admitting it now, after all these years, was a big deal. The case is cold. No one is looking into it anymore.”
“They weren’t before, but they are now. What else did the two of you talk about?”
Wendy leaned back, thinking. “She asked me to tell her what I knew about Anne, which was minimal.”
“What did you say?”
“I told her I was with my girlfriends one night, and we’d stopped at a store to get some snacks before we met the boys at the beach to have a bonfire. They’d gone to the liquor store to try and talk someone into buying them some beer.”
“How did Anne fit into the equation?”
“She was in the store, standing by the freezer, looking lost. She asked the clerk a question about directions, then she turned and she saw us.”
“What did she say?”
“She was in town visiting her aunt, and she admitted she didn’t know anyone around her age. I thought it would be a good idea to invite her to the bonfire, so I asked, and she accepted.”
“How did Anne seem that night?”
“Excited to hang out with us, and grateful that we’d invited her along. She was nice and funny. I liked her. A couple of days later, rumors started going around town that Anne was missing. I guess she never made it back to her aunt’s house after the bonfire.”
“Which means you all were the last ones to see her.”
Wendy nodded. “When the paper ran an article about her disappearance, my stomach dropped. I wanted to believe she was fine, that what we were hearing were rumors or that she’d been found. But she hadn’t been.”
“And you didn’t go to the police.”
“No,” she said. “None of us did.”
“Why not?”
“We were young and stupid, and we knew we were the last ones to see her. We weren’t just worried about that. We were all drunk that night. I think we all were, at least. When we got together to talk about Anne, we were talking about what we remembered and about how the night ended, but no one had a specific recollection. We each had either no recollection or vague ones. Since none of us had anything to do with what happened to her, so we decided it was better not to talk to the police.”
“You’re assuming no one in your friend group had anything to do with what happened to Anne. In truth, one of them could be lying, keeping a secret for all these years.”
“Maybe you’re right, but we figured once the police started asking questions, they wouldn’t stop. There was a lot going on in our friend group at the time, things we didn’t want to be dragged into the open.”
“Secrets like the relationship between Tilly and Aiden.”
“How do you know about it?”
“It doesn’t matter, does it?”
She let out a heavy sigh and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, she said, “We convinced ourselves that maybe Anne didn’t have a happy home life, and when she got to Cambria to visit her aunt, she’d taken the opportunity to run away.”
“From what I can tell, she had a good home life, and what you all did was create a lie to ease your guilt. You had to know staying silent instead of going to the police was wrong.”
