Page 124

I should have considered him. I feel so stupid.

His father was the chief, and Ian himself had been close to Scofield. The connections had been there all along, and if they had pointed to anyone else, I would have followed them.

But Ian was my friend. Our friend. He exists in too many of my memories beside Casey—crammed into the back seat with us on the way home from school, stealing fries off her plate while she slapped his hand away, sitting cross-legged on my bedroom floor while the three of us argued over what movie to watch. He knew the sound of Casey's laugh. He knew which songs she hated and that she would always give you the red candy out of a bag because she didn't like it.

That history didn't just keep me from suspecting him. It made the possibility feel so fundamentally wrong that I never allowed myself to see it. Even now, sitting bound at his feet, I can't make the boy I knew fit inside the man standing over me. I can't understand how someone Casey trusted could be the reason she never made it out of that summer.

There is a connection here. I know there is. Something I've seen. Something someone said.

I close my eyes for half a second and force everything else out.

Start with facts, Serena.

Ian had been close to Scofield in high school. Close enough that no one thought twice about how much time they spent together; Scofield was his pastor, his mentor, one of his father's closest friends. His father, who had spent years protecting Scofield from the consequences of his own behavior.

The same father who was chief of police.

And then I think about the burglaries.

Was it Ian? Is that why his father wouldn't listen to me when I brought him the evidence? Why Ian wouldn't help me make him listen?

And if the chief was willing to hide that, to make Pastor Scofield’s drunk driving disappear, how much further would he have gone for his own son?

Would he have hidden a murder?

“Why?” I know he won’t answer, but I choke the question out anyway, carrying all the years of grief I never thought I’d get to put in front of the person responsible.

My pulse pounds against the injury at the back of my skull as the rest begins to assemble itself. Ian was there that night. Maybe Casey saw him. Maybe she didn't. But at some point, he found out what she'd recorded.

Casey disappeared after she caught Pastor Scofield driving drunk and his father covering it up. Whatever happened between the recording and her disappearance, Ian learned she had evidence that could hurt both of them.

The green duffel. His father's military history. The tape. The years of looking the other way.

It all leads back to the same place.

Every piece that has refused to fit suddenly does, and I hate how simple the picture becomes once I'm looking at it from the right direction.

Casey didn't stumble onto some sprawling conspiracy. She caught people she knew protecting one another, and one of them killed her for it. My hands fumble uselessly behind my back as Ian watches my face, his expression telling me he already knows exactly where my thoughts have gone. He can see me putting it together.

“You figured it out,” he says quietly.

I look at him, and the shock finally gives way to anger. Ian knew her. He knew Casey before she became a photograph on a missing-person poster, before the sum of her life was reduced to evidence and unanswered questions. He stood beside her, laughed with her, let her trust him—and then he took everything from her anyway.

Then, all I can see is Casey alive. Laughing at something silly, probably, completely unaware that someone she trusted would eventually become the reason she never got to grow up.

Seventeen years of wondering where she went. Seventeen years of imagining strangers and accidents and possibilities that became progressively worse the longer she stayed gone.

All that time, the answer had a face I knew.

My throat tightens, and when I speak, the words barely make it past it. “You killed her.”

Ian says nothing. He just looks at me, and the absence of denial lands harder than any confession could.

A lifetime of questions end in that silence.

27

CORROBORATING EVIDENCE