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“I was worried that he’d get in trouble, but he didn’t care about things like that.”
“He was a rebel.”
“Yeah.”
“Not like you, right. You have always been a straight arrow—good grades, never in any trouble.”
“A nerd, yeah. A good girl.”
“So maybe you were drawn to that a little—the whole bad boy thing. The motorcycle.”
“I guess.”
“Who was going to the party, that you knew of?”
“I was going to drive Steph. Ainsley and Sam were planning to come after their parents went to bed,ifthey could manage to sneak out. Their parents wouldn’t have wanted them to go either.”
“And Badger?”
“No,” she said quietly. “He didn’t want to go. Didn’t want us to go. He hated Evan.”
“Why?”
“Like my dad, he thought Evan was a bad guy. And I thought he was a little jealous.”
“Why would that be?”
“He’d always been the only guy in our group.”
“Maybe he didn’t like the presence of another male? A kind of territorial thing?”
“Maybe.” Here Maddie issues a sigh. “Anyway, he said that there was no way he was going. And that we shouldn’t either. Rumor was that news of the party had spread to other schools and it was going to be wild.”
“But that didn’t stop you.”
A pause. A breath. “No.”
Harley had spent a lot of time thinking about Madeline Martin over the last few months. He had a whole file devoted to her—all the pictures from the news coverage, the crime scene photos, yearbook pictures, and images from social media. Small, wintery pale skin, dark eyes, the long, ink-black bob that hadn’t changed much in the last ten years. She still dressed the same, in oversized shirts or dresses and leggings, lace-up Doc Marten boots. She was prone to pulling beanies down to her brow line, and wearing bulky winter coats, bright red lipstick, dark eye shadow. The most notable change in her was that scar, long, faded some now but still a strong feature of her face. It ran brutally from the corner of her right eye to the right corner of her mouth.
Tonight, she nearly opened up to him. But he blew it. He dumped Mindy Lynn Handy’s delusional theories on her, hoping to ignite her rage, get her to open up. But Madeline Martin, the locked box, seized up tight again. Stuck in time. Forever seventeen, a near murder victim, can’t go forward, won’t go back. But maybe that wasn’t fair. She had her bookshop, seemed to be making a success of it. She was a functioning member of society. Thatwassomething, after all that she’d endured.
“So, you and Steph drove together,” said Samantha Barnes on the recording.
There’s a staticky silence. “Maddie,” says Barnes. “Please state your answer for the recording.”
“Yes. I had dinner with my dad, and he went off to work in his prowler. After he left, I took the Scout and picked up Steph at her house around eight, then we headed to Evan’s house.”
Now, nearly ten years later almost to the day Harley found himself on the exact same road, heading out of Little Valley to the Handy house.
“Would you say that Stephanie Cramer was your best friend?”
“I thought she was,” says Maddie. “Or one of them.”
“Thought she was?”
“We’d been drifting apart since I started seeing Evan. We hadn’t spent as much time together. In fact, that was true of all my friends.”
“Why was that?”
