“How can I help you?” she asks, pouring in sugar next.
“I’m looking for Detective Grange,” I say. “I’d like to speak with him. It’s... important.”
The woman still doesn’t look up at me. “He’s got a busy morning,” she says.
“I have information on a murder,” I blurt out, and she finally looks up from her coffee at me and clears her throat.
“Okay,” she says. “I’ll take you to his office.” I adjust the duffel bag on my shoulder and follow her back through the station, past police officers chatting and drinking their morning coffees. The woman knocks on the door of Grange’s office.
“Come in,” that deep, comforting voice calls from behind the door. She opens the door and ushers me in. Grange looks up at me with a flicker of surprise. “Miss Sawyer, it seems I don’t need to make the trip to Pembroke after all.”
“Hi,” I say, taking a seat in front of his desk. “I take it you were wanting to talk to me about last night?”
“And I take it you’re here to tell me about it?”
I take a deep breath. “I’m here because I’m being framed for murder.”
Chapter 24
“You are being framed for murder?” Grange repeats back to me.
“A few of them actually.” I fidget in my seat and nervously pick at my nails. He raises an eyebrow in question. “The eulogy you found on Ryan... it wasn’t the only one. There’s a journal full of them. Someone is killing the boys in the journal and leaving the pages.”
He doesn’t hesitate as he slides over a bag that was sitting on the end of the desk. I hadn’t even noticed it. Inside the bag is my journal page left at the gallery. It was taped over the painting above him, splattered red. I skim over the parts not covered in blood.
We are gathered here to remember Graham, which is coincidentally how much weed he smoked almost daily, who lived his life like his art: shitty and devoid of real human emotion. Imagine someone studying every inch of you, from the curve of your smile to the color of your bare skin. Now imagine them putting it all on a canvas and hanging it in a campus gallery like the Louvre but with nudes. Seriously, how was that even allowed—I feel like I need to speak with someone at the university about this? Anyways, never listen to a man who calls you his muse, or considers watching cartoons high all day part of the “creative process.” Graham, if you’re with us now, just know I burned your stupid painting and I hope you used the money we paid for it to buy yourself some real talent. Though I know you spent it on drugs. You may be gone, but your memory, much like that painting, will haunt me literally forever.
I stop reading, holding back a fresh sob.
“Yeah,” I breathe. “I wrote that.”
“I assume you have more of an explanation for me this time?”
“I do.”
Grange pulls out a pen, paper, and what looks like a recording device. “Let’s start at the beginning, then, shall we?”
I start with Jonah, and how he was the first journal entry death I ever wrote, but that he died in a car accident, and I never heard about a journal page being found anywhere on him. Then Ryan, which Grange already knows about, emphasizing that I still do not know how he got the page, but that I no longer think he accidentally fell off that balcony. I then tell him about Marco, and his restaurant burning down the night I was there and how his journal entry was under the windshield wiper of his car. I left out the part about the gas container being buried in the woods behind my parents’ house. The last thing I need is for police to show up there.
“And what did you do with the journal page you found there?”
“I threw it away...”
“You threw away evidence?”
It’s technically buried in a hole with the gas container. “Yes...”
“Okay,” he sighs. “Continue.”
I tell him how the news called it a gas leak, but I was suspicious because of the note, and that the only person that even knew about the journal was my ex-boyfriend and ex-professor Miles Holland. I swore I saw his car the morning that we left North Winwick, and he’s a professor now at Ivy Gate, where Ryan died, so it makes sense. Then I get to Bryce and how I basically stalked him trying to keep him safe. I thought I saw Miles’s Darth Vader costume on Halloween, and he had emailed me saying he would be out by Pembroke that weekend. I tell Grange how Bryce died from being stabbed with a sword on Halloween, the page stabbed through as well.
“I heard about that,” Grange says. “But I did not hear about any notes being found. Presumably because you took it?”
Technically Asher took it, but I won’t bring Asher into this. “Yes.”
I continue to tell him about how I went to Holland’s office hours to try to get a confession, and that’s where I found the gallery opening for Graham on his desk and I just knew it had to be him. So I went to the opening and saw Miles there. I spoke with him and he seemed to be confused about me calling him a murderer and stormed out.
“We left the gallery, went to get pizza, stopped at Graham’s place for my friends to change their clothes, got back to the hotel, and that’s when I found it,” I say.
