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“Yeah, they probably do. They went to high school with him.”
“Have you talked to Brad? Brad would’ve been in high school then.”
“That was the year he was homeschooled,” Dad says. “Remember?”
Right. My brother was in a bad riding accident the week after school started his freshman year. Actually broke his back and couldn’t walk for nearly a year. Mom homeschooled him that year. After Mom’s laborious education and his doctors’ rigorous physical therapy, Brad went back to school the next year knowing more than any of his classmates and physically stronger than they were as well.
Damn. I’d forgotten all about that. Funny how the worst years of your life crawl into a corner in your mind and you ignore them. It happened to Brad, not me, but it was hell on all of us.
Will all of this someday be one of those memories that we never think about?
And is that part of the reason Dad and my uncles chose not to tell us about all the shit that went down twenty-five years ago?
“Okay,” I say. “Brad wasn’t in school at all that year. Pat Lamone left after what would’ve been Brad’s freshman year. So Brad wouldn’t know Pat at all.”
“No. Maybe he knew of him. It’s a small town. Oh…” Dad sighs.
“What?”
“Diana was a freshman that year as well. Maybe she knows him.”
Oh, God. Diana knows him all right. He freaking poisoned her, except she doesn’t know that. Only Callie and Rory know that, and they told me.
“I know of him,” I say quietly.
“How? They moved right after his junior year. You were still in middle school. Sure, you probably heard the name here and there, but how did he make any kind of impression on you at that age?”
He didn’t.
I only know because of Rory.
“You going to answer me sometime this century?” Dad raises his eyebrows, still watching the road.
I draw in a breath. This is my father. The man who I trust with my life.
Also the man who has been lying to me—even though it’s lying by omission—my whole life.
I love my father. I love him with everything I am.
But I can’t break Rory’s confidence.
No.
“Donny mentioned him,” I say. “Apparently Mrs. Mayer’s house, where he’s renting a room, was vandalized while she was out of town. He filed a report with Hardy Solomon, and Hardy told Donny.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, he named Jesse Pike and the rest of his band as the vandals, but all of them except Dragon had an alibi. So apparently Hardy dismissed it.”
“Maybe it was Dragon by himself,” Dad says.
“No. Lamone named four masked men.”
“If they were masked, why did he think it was Jesse and the band?”
“Because…” I swallow. “Because…”
God, I can’t do it.
