Over Her Head (13 page)

“You think that girl meant to kill the other girl?”

“The victim’s name was Randi. Randi Peizer. And I can’t answer that right now. But I hope Kelci and her friends can help.”

But before he talked to Kelci, he was going to have a little talk with Anna Hale. Kyle Edgar and one or two of the others
had been very firm that she hadn’t been there that night. Vanessa had been equally firm that she had. Someone was lying, and
he could no longer afford to make stupid assumptions about whose word weighed more. Kyle, the mayor’s son? Vanessa, the waitress?
He didn’t care anymore.

The only thing he cared about was Randi, and finding out the truth. Because her mother’s eyes haunted him. If he could do
anything to dispel the darkness he saw there, he would.

For the sake of justice.

The sweetness of the blueberry pie was only a memory by the time he pulled up outside Colin and Laurie’s house in the older
part of Glendale. Someday he’d have a house like this, with pointed gables and stonework as solid as the love inside. He wasn’t
an envious kind of guy, but you’d have to be a saint not to want something like this for yourself. Of course, on a deputy
sheriff’s salary, either it would take twenty years to get there, or he’d have to get in the habit of buying lottery tickets.

Tim answered the door, and his face broke into a huge grin. “Nick!” He craned to look around him, then pushed past. “Did you
bring the cop car? Can I work the siren?”

Nick grabbed the kid’s sweatshirt just in time. “Not tonight, buddy. Rumor has it there’s a noise bylaw around here, and if
you turned it on I’d have to arrest you.”

“Aw, come on, Nick. Just once. I’ll just make it go
whoop
and turn it off.”

“Nope. Sorry. Your folks home?”

“Yeah. Mom!” he hollered in the direction of the living room as Nick stepped inside. “Nick’s here.”

For just a split second, he saw the same terror in Laurie’s eyes that he’d seen in the eyes of the mayor’s wife the other
night. The expression of a woman about to get bad news, and determined to do everything she could to stave it off.

“Nick, what a surprise,” she said, and gave him a hug, the same as she always did. She was the closest thing he had to a sister,
and he always associated the scent of vanilla and clean laundry with her. Her shoulders were stiff, though, and her hug a
little looser, less committed, than usual.

“Hey, Lor.” He braced himself to say what had to be said. “Is Anna around?”

The rosy color faded out of her cheeks. “Anna? You already talked to her. She didn’t know anything. Besides, she’s doing her
homework.”

“I know. But something has come up, and I just need to ask her about it.”

They stood in the warm entry hall. He waited for her to invite him into the living room, the way she had the other night,
but she didn’t. Instead, she swallowed and took a deep breath.

“I talked to Vanessa Platt this afternoon,” she said.

Uh-huh.
The neurons in his brain lined up and fired. “Did you tell her to talk to me?”

“Yes. Was that a mistake?”

“No. You did the right thing. Look, Lor, don’t panic about this. And don’t look like that, you’re killing me.” He took her
hand, which was icy cold.

“Look like what?” Colin came out of the living room, where the TV laughed at its own joke, and now the three of them stood
in an uneasy triangle the way strangers did at a cocktail party. Not like family at all.

Colin took one look at his wife’s face and turned toward Nick. “What’s going on?”

Just jump on in.
“I talked to Vanessa Platt tonight at the Split Rail. She says she saw Anna near the bridge when Randi Peizer went into the
water. And that Anna ran under the bridge right afterward.”

“Anna was asleep in—” Colin began.

“I just need to confirm that. Because even though you believe she was at home and asleep, at least two people place her at
the bridge at the time of Randi’s death. With this new information, she could be one of the last people to see Randi alive.
I need to find out what she did or saw under that bridge.”

“What do you mean,
did
?” Laurie’s tone was sharp with fear. “What are you saying?”

“Nothing more than that. Did she see Randi alive, did she try to pull her out, did she—”

“She wasn’t even there,” Laurie hissed. “Come on. We’ll go ask her.”

She turned on the ball of her foot and marched up the stairs. “Anna?” With Colin on his heels, Nick followed her up in time
to see her push Anna’s bedroom door open. She leaned in, flipped on the light, and paused. “She must be in the bathroom.”
It was at the end of the hall, and even Nick could see that the door stood open on an empty room. “Tim, is she in there with
you?” she called against his bedroom door.

“No girls allowed!” came the muffled reply.

“Mothers are always allowed.” Laurie did a quick visual check over her son’s protests, then closed the door and went back
into Anna’s room. “Anna!”

Silence.

Nick realized Colin was no longer behind him. In a moment he reappeared at the bottom of the stairs. “She’s not down here.”

“Did you check in the laundry room?”

“Why would she be in there?”

“If the perfect outfit isn’t perfectly clean, she has a meltdown. She knows how to work the washing machine. She’s probably
ironing something.” Laurie clattered down the stairs. “Anna?”

But she wasn’t in the laundry room. Or in the garage, the attic, or the backyard.

Nick, Laurie, and Colin met up back in the entryway. Now his cousin wasn’t just pale. Her face was blanched to the color of
old linen sheets.

“Houston, we have a problem,” somebody on the television said, and the laugh track cackled mindlessly, over and over.

L
aurie sat in
the dark in the reading chair in Anna’s bedroom. She’d wrapped a blanket around herself, not because the room was cold, but
because her body wouldn’t quit shaking. Little tremors started in her gut and tiptoed out to her fingers and toes. Big tremors
shook her shoulders like a sob . . . but no tears would come.

Not yet.

The cell phone in her right hand had become slick with perspiration. Colin and Nick had both taken their cars and divided
up Glendale in an organized search, but Tim couldn’t be left on his own in the house, so she’d stayed behind. She felt like
an assassin, waiting in the dark for her target to show up.

The noise in her head filled the silence as scenarios of what might be happening even as she sat there flickered on the screen
of her imagination. Anna walking the darkened streets of Glendale. Anna being followed by a dark shape, with no one around
to help.

No, even in her imagination, she had to be honest.

What she really saw was Anna running under that bridge. Randi, falling, falling . . . Anna in court, testifying about how
she tried to save her and couldn’t. Or didn’t try. What had happened under there? Had she been the last person to see Randi
alive, or not? Was Nick going to have to arrest his own cousin? Did they put fourteen-year-olds in jail?

She would not cry. She would not let those horrible doubts she’d had earlier, as she’d stood and gazed at that frozen footprint,
attack her. She would not sit here and dissolve into a gibbering wreck.

When Anna climbed back in that window, she’d find her mother cool, calm, and immovable—because no reason in the world would
justify behavior like this. No explanation would be good enough. And no punishment harsh enough. Maybe Laurie could threaten
her with being sent away to some kind of boot camp. They had those, didn’t they? Maybe then she’d—

In the silence, the thrum of the trellis against the wall was more a vibration under her feet than an actual sound. No wonder
the whole family had been clueless. Anna moved as quietly as a stalking cat.

How was it possible she had raised a girl with skills like that?

A shadow moved in front of the glass, and then the window slid up and her daughter’s slender form slipped through and dropped
soundlessly to the hardwood.

Laurie pressed a button on the cell phone. The twitter of the little unit dialing out stopped Anna dead in the middle of the
floor.

When Colin answered, his voice tight with anxiety, Laurie said quietly, “She’s home. Let Nick know, okay?”

“Thank you, Father,” he breathed. “See you in a few minutes.”

Laurie disconnected, then reached over and switched on the lamp on the nightstand.

Anna’s eyes widened and her breath came in pants as she recovered from her fright. Well, Laurie could tell her a thing or
two about being frightened. She’d learned whole chapters from
that
textbook tonight.

Without a word, Anna took off her ski jacket and her shoes, and unwound her scarf from around her neck. So she was going to
play it cool, was she? Laurie allowed her a few more seconds to speak, but she stayed as stubbornly silent as she had been
all along.

The time for silence was over. “I’m waiting,” Laurie said at last.

“For what?”

“Don’t play stupid with me. I am in no mood. Sit down and spill it.”

She sat. “I just went for a walk.”

“Most people go out the front door. Maybe they even say, ‘Hey, Mom, I’m going for a walk.’ Maybe they care enough about their
parents’ feelings to let them know when they’re going out. Do you know your dad and Nick have been driving around for an hour
looking for you?”

“Sorry.”

“Not good enough. Tell me why you feel you need to deceive us and sneak out of the house.”

“I was scared.”

Laurie stared at her. “Of what?”

Anna twisted the fringed end of the scarf between her fingers. “Of Nick.”

It took Laurie a second to confirm that she really had heard what she thought she’d heard. “You’re scared of your cousin?
Can I ask why?”

“Not Nick my cousin. Nick the cop.”

“Anna, he’s been a cop your whole life. And now you’re suddenly scared of him? He loves you to pieces. You have nothing to
be afraid of.”

“Yes, I do.”

Okay, she was going to do this the hard way, one word at a time. “Why?”

“He keeps coming over. One of these times he’s going to arrest me. So when I heard him come in, I went for a walk until I
thought he’d be gone.”

Laurie tried to tamp down the whirlwind of fear and guilt and speculation tearing her up inside. “Well, when he comes back
with your dad you’ll see he’s not going to arrest you, not now and not anytime soon. You haven’t broken any laws other than
lying to a police officer. It’s rules you’ve broken, and you can bet your dad and I will have something to say about that.”

“He’s coming back?” That bottomless look returned to her eyes, that look that said she was about to abandon all hope. “Tonight?”

“Who, Nick? Yes, of course. He wants to make sure you’re okay.”

“That’s not what he came over for in the first place, though, is it? He wanted to talk to me, didn’t he?”

“He had a couple more questions, but—”

“No.” She looked around wildly, and Laurie got out of the chair and went to sit on the windowsill, just in case she got any
ideas.

“Anna, what is going on? You have to tell me what’s wrong.”

“I don’t want to talk to him.” Her daughter toed off her shoes and, fully clothed, burrowed under her quilt. “He’ll make me
go to jail.”

“Of course he won’t.” Laurie sat on the edge of the bed and tried to hug her daughter’s folded-up body. “He talked to some
people who said they saw you by the bridge that night, and he wants the straight story. You may as well come clean. I know
tonight’s not the first time you’ve snuck out on us. Did you go out that night, too?”

“No.”

Disappointment crashed through Laurie’s chest at this new lie. Why did she persist in doing it? Was it some kind of mental
break brought on by trauma?

Most serious of all, how were they going to get her to stop lying and convince her it was safe to tell the truth?

“Anna. We know you did. Give it to me straight, okay?”

“It was an accident.”

A cold shadow moved across Laurie’s heart, and fresh panic fluttered under her breastbone. “What was?”

“We weren’t even supposed to go to the stupid bridge. I’m never going there again. Ever.”

Wait a minute.
“We? Who?”
Kelci? Kate? Rose?

Mumble.

“What was that? I didn’t hear you.”

“Me and my boyfriend.”

The mental tumblers spun in Laurie’s brain and clicked into place. “You’re sneaking out to see Kyle Edgar.”

Anna threw back the covers and pushed herself upright. “You said I couldn’t date until I was fifteen.”

“Obviously with good reason,” Laurie said with an admirable impression of calm.

“But we never get to see each other except at school, and hardly ever there because Rose is always hanging all over him, but
he doesn’t care about her. She’s always with Kate, and Kate’s going out with Brendan, and Brendan and Kyle are tight, and—”

“And you’re left out. So you see each other at night. Anna, did it ever occur to you that you could just invite him over here
like a normal person? And do homework and sit around and watch TV?”

She looked at her a little doubtfully. “You’d let him do that?”

“Why on earth not?” Did she think Colin was going to stand on the doorstep with a rifle and use Kyle for target practice?
“That’s not a date. That’s having your friend over.”

“But . . . you and his mom hate each other.”

Laurie’s mouth dropped open. “What?”

“That’s what Brendan said his mom told him. She said that you thought Mrs. Edgar was a social climber, and you were all bent
out of shape because at fund-raisers and stuff, the TV people wanted to talk to her when you were in the back doing all the
work.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake. Brendan O’Day needs to button his lip. Kyle’s mom and I are in the same Bible study group. We had
lunch together just today.”

Had it only been today? It felt like it had happened in another life. Before the doubts set in, chewing at her and jeopardizing
her ability to trust her own child. Before the guilt followed like sticky tar on her conscience, darkening her perceptions
and spoiling what she believed in.