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“Ti—”
“You didn’t want to deal with it? With a dead child?”
“Nobody could do anything for her,” Cleve said, but the words were almost a whisper, and his gaze dropped.
“I’m calling the police,” Tiera said. She lurched away from the sofa, patting herself down for her phone. “That’s what I’m doing. I’m calling the police.”
Cleve’s head sank.
“You’re going to need to talk to them,” Theo said. “One thing you’re going to need to explain is why you decided to frame Dalton.”
Seconds thudded past. Auggie thought he could feel the force of each one being nailed into place. “I don’t know,” Cleve finally said. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I went crazy. At first, all I wanted to do was get away from the party, so I got Shaniyah into the car, and I drove. I didn’t even know where I was going except I couldn’t go home. I kept thinking about how Ti would react, about how we’d fight, and then I remembered that guy.”
“Who?”
“The theater guy. The teacher.”
“Did you know Dalton?”
“No. Shaniyah had been doing that detective stuff. She showed us her videos. Showed me, I guess. She didn’t like him, thought he’d done something funny with a boy. I thought—I thought if it was him, if people thought it was him…” He trailed off. His big hands hung empty at his sides, his chest rising and falling.
“You broke into the theater?” Auggie asked.
Cleve nodded. “She’d told me all about that place. I walked around for a while, trying to find the right spot. I just needed time. If I could hide her somewhere for a day or two…” But he didn’t finish that thought, and Auggie thought maybe there wasn’t an end to it; he knew how thoughts became fragmented when the brain was pushed to the extremes: fear, trauma, pain. Guilt.
“I thought you wanted people to believe Dalton did it,” Theo said.
“I did! By the time I got her down to that basement, I knew I’d screwed up. Someone had seen me at the party, I was sure of it. Or I’d be on a video—that’s all kids do these days is record themselves. And then it’d look like I’d done something wrong.”
“You did do something wrong,” Theo said. “You moved a body. You covered up a death.”
“Man, you know what I mean!”
“So,” Auggie asked, “what did you do?”
“I’d seen his sweater. The director guy’s. When I’d been walking around, trying to find the right spot. So, I took it. I got some of it under her nails. Then I drove over to his apartment.”
“Let me guess: Shaniyah had told you where he lived.”
Cleve shook his head. “You can look that stuff up online.”
In the background, Tiera was trying to explain the situation to a 911 dispatcher, but her sentences sounded choppy and uneven. More grief, Auggie thought. More guilt.
“I don’t understand,” he said. “Why didn’t you just leave her?”
“I went crazy,” Cleve mumbled, making himself smaller and refusing to look at them. “I just went crazy.”
26
They waited until a pair of uniformed officers arrived. Then they waited some more for Detective Palomo. They told her the chain of events that had brought them to the Johnsons’ home. She listened, said she’d have more questions down the road, and went inside. Before the door closed, Theo had a glimpse of the interior: Cleve still standing where they’d left him, arms wrapped around himself, hangdog. Tiera sat in the dining nook, tissues in one hand, a glass of wine on the table beside her.
Theo said, “Let’s go home.”
It wasn’t until Auggie was pulling into their driveway that Theo remembered the fire. It wasn’t that he’d forgotten it, exactly, but it had been pushed to the back of his mind. From the outside, the house looked fine. Untouched. But when he opened the car door and smelled the hot pavement and the mulch and the reek of old smoke, it came back to him. The madness of the fight, the slowly growing realization that even with Jem’s help, he was outmatched, his family in danger. He could feel it, his whole body tightening as his exhausted system tried, once again, to flood him with stress hormones. He tried to think about the house. In stories, a house was never a house. In stories, a house was always a symbol for something more.
“I forgot,” Auggie said. “Sorry, I was on autopilot.”
“No.” Theo pushed the door open the rest of the way. “This is good.”
