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After disconnecting the call, I lean my head between my knees, trying to make the world stop spinning.
THOUGH I’M STILL BADLY SHAKEN WHEN I DISEMBARK, I COME INTOthe terminal and find the restaurant easily enough. It’s a cavernous space with tiled, vaulted ceilings and rows of tables topped with red-and-white-checked tablecloths, about half of them full—and it’s vaguely familiar. I must have been here once years ago.
As Liam described, there’s a small bar area in the middle of the space, which is mostly empty except for a couple sitting side by side on one of the banquettes, maybe having a drink before heading back to the suburbs. I take a seat at a white table shaped like a toadstool and order a sparkling water.
The wait is almost unbearable. But finally, at close to eight thirty, Liam appears in the doorway. He spots me and strides in my direction, his expression stricken. In my panicky state at the house, I’d barely focused on him, and I finally take him in from head to toe. No wonder I’d thought he was European when I met him as James Tremlin. His style doesn’t feel quite American. But then he’s been living in Buenos Aires for years, at least supposedly.
“Thank you,” he says, dropping into the chair across from me. He signals immediately for a waiter and asks for a Dewar’s on the rocks.
“Was Chris at the party that night?” I demand as soon as the waiter’s moved off. “Is he the one who killed her?”
“Please, just let me catch my breath.”
“Tellme. Tell me now.”
He bites his lip, looking miserable.
“Chris wasn’t at the party.Iwas. I was working in Boston then, at a stock brokerage, and another broker in the firm invited a few of us—he had a desk next to a guy related to the girl having the party. I met your sister that night—and I’m the last person who saw her alive.”
I can’t believe it. After all these years, I’m staring at him, the guy Chloe was with, the guy with the sweater. A few days ago, we drank fucking cappuccinos together.
“Youkilled her?”
“No, I swear, I didn’t. Your sister fell into the ravine, totally by accident.”
“You’re a liar,” I say fiercely. I want nothing more than to fly across the table and pummel him with my hands or grab a knife from the table and stab him through the throat with it.
“No, please, you have to trust me. We were looking for a gazebo your sister heard about, and all of a sudden she was running ahead of me on the path. I told her to wait, to be careful, but she kept going. Finally, she stopped and turned around, told me to come on. She laughed and stepped backward—and then, God, the next thing I knew she was gone.”
He presses a fist to his lips, then pulls it away. “I scrambled far enough down with the flashlight on my phone to see she was dead. I know it was horrific to leave her behind, but I knew what it looked like. And that no one would believe me that it was an accident.”
I shake my head hard, disbelieving. “But she wasn’t wearing her top. Youassaultedher.”
“I promise you I didn’t,” he says, and sighs. “Though what I did was almost as bad. I eventually got down to where her body was, and I took off her top—because I started to think there might be traces of my DNA on it.”
I’m practically hyperventilating by now. Is this really all there is? And though I’m not entirely sure why—is it his demeanor, the remorse in his eyes?—I think he might be telling the truth.
The waiter appears with the scotch for Liam and silently sets it down on the table.
“I’m so sorry, Skyler,” he says, after the waiter’s drifted away. His eyes are watering with tears. “If it’s any consolation, I haven’t had amoment’s peace since that night. I left the country not long afterward and rarely come back here from Buenos Aires.”
“How is it the police never suspected you?” I say, forcing my breath to slow.
“I don’t think anyone ever noticed us together. I’d brought a date to the party with me, but she ended up getting smashed pretty quickly and was all over some other guy, so I went off by myself. I talked to your sister for a while outside, off to ourselves, and then circled back to her later, and that’s when we went into the woods. The police questioned me a couple of days later, but I said I’d been with my date, and she confirmed it. She’d been too drunk, I guess, to notice how long I was gone.”
With a jittery hand, I grab a glass and take a small sip of water.
“Something’s not making sense,” I tell him. “How... did you get all the way down the side of the ravine from the path? When I was there, it looked next to impossible.”
He lets out a long, wretched sigh. “I was checking the news all Saturday, and there was nothing about a missing college girl, so really early Sunday morning I drove back to Dover and entered the woods on the other side of the ravine and made my way down from there. It was light by then, but there wasn’t a soul around. I took the blouse—and a sweater of mine I’d gotten her from the car when she said she was cold.”
So that answers that.
But something about his last comment lifts a thought from the corner of my mind, though it quickly flutters just out of reach.
“What does Chris have to do with any of this?” I say finally.
“He came to Boston to check on me. I’d called my mother Saturday morning to say I was in deep shit, that I needed help. She couldn’t get the story out of me, so she sent C.J. up there. I was the problem son in those days, but also her favorite, and C.J. was used torunning rescue operations on my behalf. We were supposed to meet at some point Saturday night so I could tell him everything, but I panicked and didn’t show. But then just after dawn the next morning, I finally called him and blurted everything out. And thanks to some fucked-up plan of the universe—and totally unbeknownst to me at the time—you were there in the room with him.”
