I lingered in my car for a long time once I parked. Will was just inside the building. I could go in there and ask him point-blank, face-to-face about what Sam had just told me. But I knew what he’d say. I had asked Will about that night a thousand times.
The only thing I could look for was whether or not he reacted to this new information. Which he would do only if he was lying. If he was the one who had actually killed Alex. I was about to shove my phone into the console and go inside when it rang. Tommy’s name and face filled the screen. I immediately reached out to answer it, my hand trembling.
“Hello?”
“Rose?” Tommy’s voice was frantic, and I gripped the steering wheel to steady myself.
“Tommy?” I managed to keep my voice easy. “What’s going on?”
There was silence on the other end of the line.Fuck. A silence was not good.
“Are you still in Miami?” Tommy asked, not answering the question.
“Yes.”
“Are you driving?”
Are you sitting down?Isn’t that what people say when they’re about to deliver bad news? Every ounce of hope I was holding on to sank in my chest, a cage forming around it. I felt like I couldn’t breathe.
“Rose?”
“No, I’m parked.” I closed my eyes, waiting for the information I knew was about to come through the phone. I needed to hear him say it. I needed to hear the words. A tear slipped through my closed eyelids, coating my eyelashes in the salty wetness.
Tommy’s voice broke as he said, “They found a body.”
21
After I hung up the phone, I sobbed so hard against the steering wheel that one of the correctional officers came over, banged on the window, and forced me out of the car. The officers wanted to call an ambulance, but I refused. I sat on the curb while they forced me to drink bottles of water to calm me down.
I stayed there with them for an hour, crying my eyes out, and begging them not to call 911.I’ll be okay, I assured them.I just found out my sister is dead.
Tommy had told me that Newbury had just called the house. They would bring in my parents to ID the body, but they wouldn’t have called without good reason to suspect it was Hazel.
The guilt felt like it was going to swallow me whole. I had spent the last few days tracking down Hazel’s movements, trying to figure out what she had known and who she had talked to. I had been so hopeful, so sure that everything I was doing would lead me to her, and now she was dead.
It was nearly five by the time I got home. I was emotionally spent. The street was still swarmed with reporters trying to take pictures. I barely even noticed them. The last few hours had been so exhausting that I couldn’t think of anything else.
My little sister is dead.
“Rose.” Detective Pullman caught me by the arm before I made it to the porch steps, darting out of a black sedan parked closest to the house.
“What are you doing here?” I asked. He was one of the last people I wanted to see. Not that I actually wanted to see anyone at all. I wanted to go inside, take a shower, and keep reading Hazel’s commentary inThe Smileys Next Door. If she really was dead, it was all I had left.
Pullman looked sheepish. Heavy sheets of rain were coming down so hard that we were both drenched from just a moment of standing outside. I moved forward a couple of steps, so we were at least covered by the overhang of the porch.
“I’m bringing your parents to the station.” He nodded toward the car in the driveway. Even through the rain, I could see my parents sitting in the back, silent.
“Oh.” A fresh wave of pain rolled over me. This wasn’t real. This couldn’t be happening.
“I’m sorry.” He pushed a chunk of wet hair out of his face. “I’m so sorry. I know we were all hoping for a different outcome.”
A different outcome. That didn’t cover the half of it. The pain of knowing that Hazel was dead was all-consuming.Gone. She would never ride a horse again. She would never DM me on Instagram again. I would never get a chance to make it up to her.
“If you need anything, please let me know,” Pullman said, and he actually looked sad. It enraged me. “I really am here to help.”
Help. I laughed out loud. What had any of them ever done for my family besides condemn us? It had been days and they had gotten no closer to figuring out what had happened to Hazel. A body was all they had, found in a canal, with no reasonable explanation for how it got there. I shuddered thinking of all the canals I’d passed in my life, and wondering which one it was. If I had ever driven past the dumping site for my sister’s body.
I rounded on him. “You want to help?” I asked. “Why don’t you find the person who killed Alexandria? Because that’s what Hazel was doing. Even a sixteen-year-old girl knew that none of this made any sense.” The shirt andjeans I wore clung tightly to me, heavy with rain and weighing me down, but I barely felt it.
