A: How is that any of your business?
Q: Can you please answer the question, Ms. Cohen? Would you like me to repeat it?
A: No.
Q: No, you did not engage in sexual activity?
A: No, I do not want you to repeat the question. It’s really intrusive. How is what I do in my private life—I don’t want to answer that.
Q: This is not a public proceeding.
A: Those jurors are people. They are the public and they’re sitting right there.
Q: Ms. Cohen, please answer the question. You’re under oath.
A: Yes, I engaged in sexual activity at the party that night. Not that it’s any of your business.
Q: Can you describe the nature of this sexual activity?
A: Is that a joke?
Q: Ms. Cohen, this is a homicide investigation. Please answer the question.
A: I gave some guy a blow job in a bedroom upstairs. Are you happy? This is really so mortifying. And it’s not—my husband and I don’t usually do this type of thing. There’s just something about that party, you know?
Q: No. I don’t know.
A: It makes you act crazy.
Q: Crazy?
A: I don’t mean in a bad way. I mean having fun. The kids are away. And we’ve all been parents for a long time. Been married for even longer. The Sleepaway Soiree at Maude and Sebe’s—it’s harmless. And no one talks about it after. It’s like it never even happened.
Q: Harmless?
A: You know what I mean.
Q: Did you see Amanda on the night of the party?
A: Only for a second, when we were leaving. She was coming in.
Q: What time was this?
A: Around 9:00 p.m., I think.
Q: Was she alone?
A: She was with a man. But I don’t know who he was. I’d never seen him before.
Amanda
FIVE DAYS BEFORE THE PARTY
The whole walk to the Gate for girls’ night out, Amanda thought she was being followed. The calls were one thing, but she’d never believed there was somebody actually there, in the flesh. And yet from the second she left the house, she swore she could feel someone lurking behind her in the quiet pockets of Park Slope darkness. Not someone:him. Yes, the neighborhood was safe, very safe. But a deserted block was a deserted block. Anything could happen, and no one would be there to stop it.
It didn’t help matters that Amanda had been on edge from the moment she woke up. It was that same stupid, awful dream about Case—running in the gown again, barefoot and covered in blood, the haunted diner, sirens wailing, warning her about her son. Carolyn even had a cameo at the beginning this time, before the dark and the running and her burning bare feet. Amanda and Carolyn were giggling and whispering, eating pizza cross-legged on her bed. Both of them in pastel tulle dresses now—Amanda’s peach, Carolyn’s seafoam blue. Why the dresses every time? Was it Amanda’s guilt about her ridiculously over-the-top wardrobe? Her sleeping mind did have a way of making everything menacing.
If only this—the dark block, him maybe there, behind her—were a dream. How had he even found her? Yes, Amanda was living closer now to St. Colomb Falls than she had since she left all those yearsago. But New York City was six long hours away by car. It wasn’t as if he could have spotted the moving van.
