“Sheriff Nillson made my friend Maureen do awful things before she died,” I blurted out. I knitted together courage, preparing to do the hardest thing I’d ever done, even harder than biking out to that cabin.
I was going to tell on my dad.
Agent Ryan tipped his head, glanced over his shoulder, and then stepped all the way into the room, quietly but firmly closing the door behind him. “What did Sheriff Nillson make her do?”
Even after everything I’d realized, I almost couldn’t go through with it.
We kept our secrets in Pantown.
But you wouldn’t believe what happened next. Maureen and Brenda joined us in that dingy room, Maureen with her fierce, take-no-shit attitude, Brenda with her steady strength. They showed up when I needed them the most. I couldn’t see them, couldn’t smell them, but Ifeltthem, the three of us growing up together, making music in Valhalla, laughing, forever connected. I touched my single earring, rubbed the mood ring Brenda had given me right before the only concert we’d ever play together. It was still a yellow-green color, but it didn’t matter because with them here, I could do this. I had to.
“Not just Sheriff Nillson. My dad, too,” I said, and it felt like I was walking through a sheet of ice, but there was no turning back. “They both made Maureen do terrible things, and she was only sixteen. She wasn’t the only one. I have pictures.”
Agent Ryan listened to my whole story, reaching over to pat my arm when I would start sobbing so hard I couldn’t speak. He’d wait, patient, his eyes sad, until I got back on track. Even better, he believed me. I could see it in his face.
When I was done, and a whisper of peace was settling into the hole my confession had left, I asked Agent Ryan if Ant had confessed. I’d seen the police take him away from the cabin in handcuffs, knew he was in this building somewhere.
Agent Ryan was sitting across from me, his hands clasped on the table as if in prayer. He took a deep breath, measuring something. Then he closed his eyes, held them closed for a beat, opened them. “Anton’s asked to speak with you.”
I tasted a shock in the back of my mouth, like I’d licked a nine-volt battery. “Why?”
But suddenly, I knew. Ant would want forgiveness. He’d be desperate for it.
Agent Ryan watched me. “You don’t have to do it,” he said. “If you decide to, it’ll be recorded. Anything he says, but also anything you say.”
I nodded. “Okay.”
When they guided me into the interrogation room, I almost turned and walked straight back out. Ant was the color of bone, his blue eyes stuck with their terror beams on, his left one that had always been smaller than his right now little more than a slit.
“Thanks for coming,” he said, his voice squeaky.
He sounded enough like my old friend Ant that I stayed, though I wouldn’t sit. I remained on my feet, arms crossed, five yards and different roads taken between us, roads you couldn’t ever walk back on. I’d slowed to save my people, the ones I could, on my open-field sprint from kid to grown-up. Ant, he’d gotten lost, confused the pack for the purpose.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Then he spilled it all, starting with how Maureen had died.
The night of our concert at the county fair, after he and Ed took me home and then Ricky drove Brenda home, Ed and Ricky met back up, then called Maureen to see if she was interested in a good time. Turns out back at the fair, she’d ducked into one of the trailers to smoke weed with the Abe Lincoln carny. When she came out to look for us, we’d already left. She’d gone home mad, thinking we’d all ditched her. Ricky convinced her it was a misunderstanding, and he and Ed picked her up.
Ant didn’t know exactly what they’d done to her next.
He just knew they’d killed her before dropping her body into the quarry.
I clutched myself and rocked while he spoke, his words coming rapid-fire, like he was reciting a play he’d practiced over and over. His voice dropped when he admitted it was him and Ricky who took Brenda. Hedidn’t know what came over him, he said, but he didn’t kill her, he just held her down before and helped change her clothes after.
Ed had kidnapped Beth all on his own. He’d given Maureen a pair of the gold ball earrings he’d stolen, and then did the same for Brenda even though he soon lost interest in her. He saved the final pair for Junie, who he’d lured out to the cabin with the promise of her first quarry party.
He’d used a police scanner to keep tabs on their surveillance of him.
Turns out Ed and Ricky hadn’t known what Maureen had done with Sheriff Nillson, my dad, and a deputy in Nillson’s basement that night. According to Ant, they targeted her because they knew her, and because Ricky liked her, and because she seemed like she’d be easy. When I asked why he and Ricky went after Brenda, after Ed was no longer interested in her, when she could have still survived, he lost it.
“I don’t know,” he kept saying, over and over again, in a child’s voice.
I didn’t have time for it. I was too scraped up inside to let himnot know.
“Why’d you and Ricky do it, Ant?” I repeated.
He stared at the glass behind me. Agent Ryan had said he’d be watching. Probably other officers were in there, too. Maybe Nillson. And a tape recorder, spinning slow like taffy, taking down every word.
