“Quentin? He was there when she needed him.”
“That’s good. They had each other.”
Summer was still holding his hands. This was starting to feel like group therapy, and so she let go. Leaned back in her chair. “Quentin never knew, though,” Summer said. “He never knew about her running away.”
“She never told him?”
“No.”
“Wow.”
“Any idea where she may have gone for those few weeks?”
He nodded. “We had a second home,” he said. “A little cottage out east. We went there a lot when Katie was little, but maybe only once after Kimmy was born. After... what happened... Oh, I didn’t go out there for years. But once Katie left for good, I decided I should probably get it cleaned up so I could sell it. I found a whole bunch of Katie’s old clothes in there. Back from when she was fourteen years old.”
“So she was staying at your second home?”
He smiled a little. “Here I thought she was out on the streets somewhere. But she was at our place the whole time. She used to love going to that cottage when she was little. You wouldn’t think a little girl would be so crazy about the desert, but she was a strange kid.”
“The desert,” Summer said. “You said out east, I was picturing a cabin in Vermont.”
“Nah, it was driving distance,” he said. “Or I guess hitchhiking distance in Katie’s case. Little town on the Arizona border. Brittlebush it’s called.”
FOR SUMMER, LIFEso often seemed to move in loops. For instance, now. This drive. When Dean had called her with the news of Quentin’s death, she’d been on her way to Brittlebush, where she planned to see if she could track down information on Nicola Crane and Renee White, who had apparently lived there with a foster father by the name of Bill Grumley.
All that had been canceled, of course, along with the podcast. But a day and a half later, here she was, looping back, taking the same drive in search of the same information, the podcast alive again with possibility. She was wearing Quentin’s sunglasses, and she found herself talking to him in her mind, planning out questions as she drove, her arm resting against her open window, warm air blowing in, feeling more focused and tougher than she ever imagined she could feel. Looping back to her old self. Quentin at her side, or the spirit of him, anyway.
She’d asked Reg for the sunglasses, and he’d gladly given them to her, along with the address of his onetime second home and, since he apparently saved everything, some of the old clothes he’d found of Kate’s there. He’d given her something else he’d found at the cottage with the clothes—a fluffy pink stuffed dog that looked like something a toddler would own. “I swear this didn’t belong toeither of my girls,” Reg had said. “I don’t know what it was doing there.”
We’re gonna figure this out, she told Quentin in her mind.We’re gonna report the hell out of this, together.
Summer flipped on the radio. Aimee Mann’s version of an old song called “Baby Blue”—which, oddly enough, had been Gabriel LeRoy’s nickname for April Cooper. Summer knew that from her research, and she saw it as a sign.
Summer usually wasn’t one for magical thinking. But imagining signs from above and messages from the great beyond and speculating about divinely choreographed podcasts was easier than spending any time on the fact that before killing himself, her best friend had apparently gunned down a defenseless couple in their own home. It felt like fiction to her, less believable even than the existence of ghosts.
At least, that’s the way she wanted it to feel.
The very last conversation she’d had with Quentin had been at 11:30P.M.her time, the day before his death. He’d been up all night reading, he told her, and he’d thanked her for finally finding the book. “You kill someone,” he had said, “and you become a different person. There’s no lag time. No subtle transformation. In those few seconds it takes to end someone’s life, you go from being someone who has never killed, to a murderer.”
Summer had assumed he was talking about Cooper and LeRoy, and so she’d said, “Imagine how that feels if you’re just a kid.”
But he’d ignored the comment. “What I’m wondering, Summer, is this. How do you live your same life after you’ve become that other person? Because it seems impossible to me. It seems like, if you’re evil enough to kill someone, you probably shouldn’t live at all. Right?”
She shook the thought away, replacing that sad, tremulous voice with that of another Quentin, the imagined one in her passenger’s seat. The Quentin that she knew.Just focus on the story, said the imagined Quentin—smiling, strong, and unafraid. Her best friend, who would stay with her, always.We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us.
Thirty-Six
Robin
ROBIN WOKE UPto the smell of bacon and the sound of muffled laughter. With her eyes still closed, she lay in bed for a few moments, believing she was a kid again and it was Sunday morning, both her parents downstairs, her mother in her apron, freshly cooked bacon lined up on a stretched-out paper towel. In her mind, she saw Mom giving Dad a playful push as he tried to swipe a piece, and it felt real, as though adulthood had been a long, problematic dream she was finally waking up from.
But the feeling dissolved as soon as she opened her eyes. When she threw on her robe and headed downstairs, she saw that it was Nicola who was in the kitchen cooking the bacon, one of her mother’s aprons tied around jeans and a denim shirt. Mom stood beside her in her robe and pajamas, cracking an egg into a bowl. She was easing out of a recent bout of laughter, wiping a tear from her cheek. “Oh, Nikki, you’re just crazy,” she said. It was strange how Nicola affected Renee. She made her happy, clearly. But unnaturally happy, Robin thought, especially given the circumstances. It was starting to annoy her, which made her angry with herself.
Eric sat at her mother’s kitchen table in his work clothes, reading theNew York Post. Her parents subscribed to thePost, theTimes, theDaily News, and theWall Street Journal. On Sunday mornings,after breakfast, they’d go back to bed with all the papers and read them to each other. According to Mom, Dad secretly loved the gossip on Page 6 and would always try and guess the blind items... Robin swallowed hard. Tried to tune out her mother’s laughter, Nicola’s shrieks.Everyone grieves in her own way. You know this. Be kind.
Eric stood up. Took a last gulp of his coffee and grabbed his phone. “I gotta go to work,” he said. “See you tonight, Renee?”
“Only for as long as it takes you to pick up your bag,” Mom said. “You guys need to go home. I’m fine.”
