“Yeah. Yeah, that’s true.” Amie shook away her doubts, deciding she might as well lay everything out before completely writing the theory off as a stretch. “Okay, so, yeah. She would have always arrived too early for the propped door.Exceptfor the days that I didn’t help her look for the ring. Those days, she would have arrived during the window of time when the door was propped open, making it easy for her to surprise Benny.”
“Fascinating.” David dusted crumbs off his hands. “So it’s more likely she caught Benny cheating on the days when youdidn’tassist her with searching for her ring. Not sure what kind of message that sends to the kids, but it’s interesting all the same.”
“It also means that there were probably days shedidn’tcatch him cheating,” Amie said. “Days when she got to the building before the movers arrived and buzzed his apartment to be let in,warning him of her arrival. Which means that she wouldn’t have broken up with him, which means that she probably would have been with him that evening, which means that he probably wouldn’t have gone to murder Savannah.”
“That’s a lot of probablys,” David said doubtfully. “Hallie could have still figured out he’d just had someone over. If she smelled perfume, or spotted lipstick on a glass—”
“Sure, maybe,” Amie said, interrupting before David could come up with more examples. “But here’s the thing: That day I talked to Benny and gave him my pasta? That was the ‘wild day.’ It was the first time in a while I wasn’t there to help Hallie find the ring, and more importantly, it was the first time I didn’t help her since I started visiting you in the time loop.
“Up until that day, you’d always be napping from four thirty-ish to six thirty-ish. I never got an exact start and end time, didn’t want to disturb you. But on the wild day, you were up and about. You said you were woken up from your nap by someone yelling.”
If David had been intrigued before, now he was truly fascinated. “You think the yelling was Hallie breaking up with Benny.”
“At the time I wasn’t surewhatit meant. I knew it had to have been because of something I’d done—or didn’t do—but I’d done so many different things that day I wasn’t sure which caused the change. I never tried to have a day like that again, I was so freaked out afterward. Which was why I left my date with Ziya early that night, leading me to run into Benny when I got home. That was allthe same day. I think that any time your nap went uninterrupted, that meant Hallie didn’t catch the cheating and didn’t break up with Benny that day.”
David pondered that, then shook his head. “That doesn’t work, though. My nap went uninterrupted on Monday—thelastMonday, in your experience—but we know she broke up with him.”
“Correct,” Amie said, her words speeding up again as she approached the final stretch of her theory. “But I think she mighthave broken up with him after Monday. Wednesday morning, to be more exact.
“Elena heard someone yelling late Wednesday morning, and found Benny sitting in the Harlows’ apartment, looking upset. She said all she had been able to make out from the yelling was ‘You did it.’ Ominous, right?”
“Very.”
“But,” Amie continued, “Elena also admitted that her hearing isn’t very good. Maybe she misheard it as ‘you did it’ from the start, or maybe her brain filled in the blank once she’d seen Benny in the Harlows’ apartment, making her suspicious of him.”
“What else could it have been?” David asked.
“When you were complai—talking about being woken from your nap—”
“I’m sure I was complaining, I don’t take offense to that.”
“You said the person yelling called the other person a dipshit.” Amie nodded, reassuring herself. “I remember, because after that I started using the word when that guy on the bus would listen to his podcast on full blast. In my head, of course.”
David had rested his elbows on the table, templing his fingers in front of his face. “Dipshit … did it …”
Leaning back in her chair, Amie covered her mouth with both hands. “You dipshit,” she said, her voice muffled. “Youdipshit.”
“Okay, enough, I’m sensitive.” David scraped his teeth along his bottom lip, thinking. “Sure,” he finally said. “I hear it. And like you said, if Elena already had her suspicions about Benny, ‘you did it’ is a lot juicier than ‘you dipshit.’ ”
“So I think the yelling on Wednesday was the same breakup that would wake you up from your nap when I didn’t help Hallie look for the ring on Monday,” Amie said. “Only delayed a couple of days.”
“Okay,” David said. After a pause, he added, “Is that all?”
Amie frowned. “Yeah. Why? You don’t buy it?”
“I can definitely buy it.” David grimaced. “But I’m still not sure if it exonerates Benny from having possibly killed Savannah.”
Amie’s shoulders slumped with disappointment. “Why?”
“You’re saying that on the last day of the time loop, Hallie didn’t catch Benny cheating, didn’t break up with him, and was with him all evening, if not all night. But you don’tknowthat. He could have still ducked out to kill Savannah. You’d have to talk to Hallie to get a firm alibi for Benny.”
“I guess I could try to do that …” Amie pressed her hands on the table. “But, wait. Why would he kill Savannah Monday night if his girlfriend hadn’t broken up with him yet?”
“Because she wasblackmailinghim?” David suggested. “It’s possible he didn’t want to wait around for his girlfriend to discover the cheating before exacting revenge on the woman who was extorting him.”
“If he’d already been broken up with, why did it matter if he got the photos back or not?”Ziya’s words popped into Amie’s head, which wasn’t really helping her efforts to distract herself from thinking about Ziya. She moved her thoughts away from the speaker and focused on the words.
“We thought Benny was searching for the photos because if the police found out Savannah was blackmailing him, that would make him a suspect,” Amie said. “But … imagine he wasn’t smart enough to actually realize that.”
