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“Badger didn’t like him, like I said. Ainsley and Sam thought I was different when he was around.”
“Different how?”
“I’m not sure,” said Maddie, sounding sad. “I didn’t understand it to be honest.”
“And what about Steph?”
“She told me that she was seeing someone older, from another town. A college student. But I found out that night that it wasn’t true.”
“It wasn’t?”
“She’d been sleeping with Evan. They were seeing each other—behind my back.”
“That must have hurt you.”
More soft crying from Maddie. “It broke my heart.”
Harley presses the pause button and comes to a stop in front of the big metal gate. He’d easily memorized the code he saw Chet punch in. Now he gets out of the car, and enters the numbers into the keypad, watches as the gates swing open.
Back in his Mustang, Harley pulls slowly up the drive, watching the gate swing closed behind him. He pressesPlayagain.
“But as you arrived at Evan’s house that night, you still had no idea. Is that right?” Detective Barnes asks teenage Maddie.
“Right,” said Maddie. “We were listening to music, an old classic rock playlist that Steph’s dad made us. She was playing it on her phone since the Scout didn’t have a working radio. It was just like it always was with us. Fun. Easy.”
“When did she tell you? About her and Evan?”
Harley presses stop; he’s heard it a hundred times. The house comes into view, tires crackle over the gravel as he creeps up.
Strange. There’s a light burning in the upstairs window. Did they leave it on earlier? As he steps out of the car, he hears the tinny strain of music on the air.
He feels a pulse of fear and considers getting back into the car and heading out. He is trespassing and doesn’t belong here. But that was another thing about Harley. Curiosity is his major driver. His father complained that he was a dog with a bone. Sometimes it was a compliment; sometimes it was criticism.
Harley used to try to satisfy this urge toknowin his fiction, diving deep into research, into characters to discover what made people who they were, to understand why they did what they did. He dug into the past, to understand the present story. He thought of himself as a spelunker, shimmying into the darkest regions of the human psyche. His fiction had been calleddense,complicated,slow,meandering,sacrificing plot momentum for character. Just like life. Life was all of those things. But in his nonfiction, that hunger for the truth, that deep insatiable curiosity about what really happened, served him. All the things that made his fiction plodding, made his nonfictionbrilliant,searing,unflinching. Of course, plenty of people hated his nonfiction books too. But at least they sold.
Harley started walking around the house. He was thinking about going live on Instagram when his phone vibrated in his pocket. A quick glance revealed that it was his mom. He pressed decline.
She wanted him to come home for Christmas, spend some time with his half-sisters. It was a big gathering, cousins, aunts, and uncles.Harley, please come. It will be so nice. I miss you. Lately, she’d been prone to long soliloquies about regret, wanted to make amends for her essential abandonment of him. They’d both been trying to get closer, but there was something there they couldn’t quite get past. Maybe he reminded her too much of his father. Even Harley saw the resemblance when he looked at old photos. He could be quiet, like his dad. Sometimes Harley drank too much. His mom felt brittle in his arms, withholding, as if the natural bond that should be there had somehow been broken. There were occasional moments of ease, but mainly there was an essential awkwardness, like he didn’t know how to be, what to say. It was painful for them both. He hadn’t given her an answer about Christmas dinner.I’m on deadline, he said.Is it okay if I let you know last minute?That was a month ago. It was officially last minute.
He moved around the side of the house and saw that the lights in the guest house were on as well. There was no car in the drive. So who was it? He could hardly knock on the door and find out. He wasn’t even supposed to be here. He was essentially breaking and entering. Though he liked to think of it as investigating.
Harley thought about leaving again. But no. If someone confronted him, he’d just talk his way out of it. He was good at that. Harley continued past the house and followed the path down to the river.
He pressed play on his phone, and Maddie’s voice came through his ear buds, which he had in almost all the time now.
“So what happened when you got to the party?” asked Detective Barnes.
In the news photographs of Detective Barnes, she was svelte and what his mother would call handsome, with a strong face and bright eyes, short, cropped straw hair. Hard. She wore pants suits and carried a leather tote. He imagined her sitting across from Maddie, stern, exhausted. But still he heard compassion in her voice.
“It was mobbed. Cars everywhere. It had snowed, so the road was a slushy mess. We didn’t recognize anyone at first. I wanted to leave. I knew it was a bad scene. The cops were definitely going to come—and that meant my dad.”
“But you stayed.”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Because I wanted to be with him.” Her voice cracks and she starts to cry. “If I’d just turned around and driven us away . . .”
