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I stare at her. I just can’t believe Willa cornered the feisty, slippery girl and got answers out of her. “Did sheadmitto something?”
Willa pokes a stirrer through the ice cubes in her water glass. “Greg was giving her money.” She looks at me uneasily, maybe thinking I’m going to have some kind of ballistic reaction. I just gape. “All in all, he gradually transferred about fifteen grand into a Venmo account in her name.”
“Fifteen thousand... are youkidding?” I splutter. A few guys at the bar look over. I hunch down in the booth, my head whirling. I feel hot, then cold, then dizzy. “Are you sure?”
Willa nods. “Positive. Raina scammed a guy in her hometown—some doctor. They had sex, she admitted to him she was underage, and got him to pay her. I have a feeling she tried to seduce Dad in a similar way, though she swore to me that it backfired. She turned to Greg next.” She crunches another fry. “Except he didn’t bite, either.”
“So why did he still give her money, then?”
Willa picks at her nails. “She said he took pity on her. He wanted to offer her a way out of a life as a scam artist. She said her true dream was to be a real student at Aldrich. She wasn’t even a matriculated student when she was Dad’s assistant, if you can believe it. She lied her way into that job so she could get close to him to milk him out of some cash.”
I stare up at the dusty, faux-Tiffany pendant lamp above us. How could my husband feel so much sympathy for someone he barely knew? He wasn’t a bleeding heart. Maybe I’m biased because of those sickening e-mails, but I feel there’s more to the story.
“I don’t buy he was doing it just to be nice,” I say.
“Yeah, I didn’t at first, either,” Willa says, shrugging. “No offense. But she seemed genuine—and believe me, I’ve interviewed enough liars. She even let me look at her bank accounts—the girlhas about twenty bucks to her name right now. Apparently, she paid the bursar right before Greg died. I called the bursar, too—Raina’s last payment, which isn’t registered on the hack, actually took place the day all the systems were down. She paid cash.”
“Do you think Greg paid her in cash, or she just withdrew cash from her bank account?”
“I don’t know, though I’m not sure it really matters. But if she’s telling the truth—and I think she is—if Greg was helping her pay for college, Raina has no reason to kill him. It explains why she was so upset about his death, too. You wouldn’t have wanted to see the town this girl was from, so I get why she’d do anything not to go back there. Aldrich is a ticket to something better.” Willa bites into another fry, then gives me another sheepish glance. “She also showed me empirical evidence that Sienna wasn’t anywhere near your house all night, too.”
I hitch forward in my chair. “Really?”
“The girls follow each other on Find My Friend. It’s a pretty common app—”
“I’ve heard of it,” I interrupt. “In fact, I’veusedit, with the girls. But I’ve become lax with it, lately. They’re good kids...”
Willa drums her fingers on the table. “Raina’s app has a history of where Sienna was that whole night—it’s a little square around campus, and that’s it. Though she did say that if I made public what I’d figured out about her, she’ll delete the evidence. I tried to bluff, saying Sienna’s alibi doesn’t matter, but Raina must know Sienna isn’t innocent in all this. Maybe Sienna slipped that she wrote the Lolita e-mails. Raina knew it was a good bargaining chip.”
“Shit,” I whisper. Then again, proof that Sienna wasn’t anywhere near the murder was good. Just in case the cops ever figure out she’s Lolita. Then I lean forward. “Did she say anything about why she lied to me about when she found out about Greg’s death?”
Willa frowns, confused, and I explain to her how Raina said she was right next to Sienna when she actually wasn’t. “That’s why I wassuspicious of her in the first place. I thought she was trying to cover up for having snuck to my house and killed him.”
Willa shrugs. “She showed me her own data for Find My Friend. She really was at that party. Same as Sienna. I guess they just were in different rooms or something.”
“Is there a way tofakeFind My Friend?” I ask.
“I mean, Iguess.” Willa takes another fry. “One of them could have planted their phone at the party, I suppose. But that requires quite a bit of forethought. Also, Raina’s data shows the phone moving around, like someone naturally would at a party.”
I settle back, trying to think this through. Maybe Raina was just confused, then. Or maybe she said she’d found out with Sienna because that’s how she wanted it to go down, even though it hadn’t. It was hard to know.
Willa twists her mouth. “How do you feel about all of this?”
“I don’t know,” I say, and it’s the truth. Getting the news about Sienna being Lolita was brutal enough. I still can’t wrap my mind around it, and I still don’t know if not saying anything to the police is the right move. A few times, I’ve peered at the card Ollie Apatrea gave me at the funeral, wondering if I should call him. Maybe he’d be a good sounding board. Maybe we could talk off the record. But then, he’s still a cop. It’s probably still too dangerous.
But now finding out Greg was paying a random girl to go to Aldrich? Couldn’t he have used that money for charity? Forus?
I shut my eyes, grief pounding down on me again. I can’t ask Greg why he did this. I’ll never really know. His absence is surprisingly staggering. It also makes me want to smash things, because this is a person I was supposed to know well, but maybe I didn’t know him at all.
I take a breath. “So now what?”
Willa stands and slings her purse over her shoulder. “I’ll let you know soon, but I have to go. I’m late for something.”
“You’re leaving?Why?”
“Just... a meeting.” Two red blotches form on Willa’s cheeks, almost like she’s embarrassed. “I’ll see you later, okay?”
She’s about to get up when her gaze lingers on something else on the TV screen.Aldrich Students Hint at Assault Allegations Post-Hack.The closed-captioning reads that a few e-mails have surfaced on the hack about things happening to girls at fraternity parties on Aldrich campus. Two girls have shared their stories on closed groups on Facebook, and the posts have quickly circulated.
