The Silence of Murder (16 page)

I inhale clover and damp grass. The sky is cloudless, and the moon barely the tip of a fingernail, so the stars pop in the sky, crystals on black velvet. “Isn’t it the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?”

Chase eases himself onto his back and gazes up. “It is.”

“Look!” I point toward a row of trees, where lightning bugs flash on and off. “They’re signaling, looking for mates.”

“Seriously?”

“It’s the boy who flashes first. If the girl likes him, she flashes back.” I glance at his face, rich in shadows. He’s grinning up at me. “What are you smiling about?” I can just imagine what I look like after a hard shift and dish duty at the Colonial.

“I don’t know. I guess … I wish I’d gotten to know you when I first started coming to Grain. You and Jeremy. And T.J. Maybe I wouldn’t have been so lonely.”

“Right. You made more friends in Grain in three minutes than I have in three years.”

“And all they talk about is each other, or themselves.”

“Don’t you and your dad talk?”

“Dad? Dad’s not much of a talker. The first summer I was here, he hardly said two words to me. I’d gotten into some trouble at home, in Boston, mostly vandalism, petty stuff. Mom thought Dad could straighten me out, I guess. But he was so used to living by himself he had no idea what to say to another person in his house, especially a kid.”

“And then you got baseball,” I say, remembering what he told T.J. and me.

“And then we got baseball.”

We’re lying on our backs and staring up at a sky full of stars that seem close enough to touch. “Jeremy told me that a long time ago people believed stars were holes into heaven, peeks behind a black curtain.”

“Peeks into heaven,” Chase muses. “I like that. Jeremy told you that?”

“Wrote it,” I explain. But I can tell Chase still doesn’t understand. “You’re wondering how the same guy who writes amazing notes and knows what people used to believe about stars can fail half of his school classes and freak out if somebody tries to take one of his empty jars from him.”

Chase shrugs, but I know I’m right about what he’s thinking. “It’s okay,” I tell him. “Jer’s impossible to figure out. ‘A contradiction in human terms.’ That’s how the Asperger’s specialist described kids like Jeremy.”

We’re silent as the stars for a couple of minutes. Then Chase asks, “Where will you go from here, Hope?” It makes me think he’s been lying here thinking about me. I’m not used to that. “Where will you go to college? What do you want to study?”

I love that Chase assumes I’m going to college. Rita assumes I’m not. But I am. I will. “Maybe photography?”

“Cool. I’d like to see some of your pictures sometime.”

“I don’t have a camera,” I admit. “I’ve bought a few of those throwaways, but I don’t usually get the pictures developed.” That’s the trick of those instant cameras. Cheap camera, expensive developing.

We talk a little about photography and college. Chase knows a lot about lighting and shutter speeds. His mother’s
first husband after Sheriff Wells was a Walmart photographer who took pictures of families and portraits of kids.

“What about you?” I ask, suddenly aware that our shoulders are touching. I try to focus. “Where will you go to school? I’ll bet you could be anything you want.” I try to imagine what that would feel like.

“Princeton. Barry pulled quite a few strings to get me in. That’s where he went. I think Barry gives the school so much money they’d let his cat in if he asked.”

I have no trouble picturing Chase at an Ivy League school. “What will you study?”

“No idea.”

“You could always paint cars and repair scratches for a living. Maybe you could own your own car-repair garage and call it Chase Cars, or Car Chase, or—”

“Very funny.” Before I see what’s coming, he’s rolled over and pinned me to the ground. “Why don’t you laugh about it?” Without letting go of my wrists, he manages to tickle me.

I squirm and try to kick free, but he’s too strong. I can’t budge. Laughing, I shout, “I give! I take it back!”

For a second, Chase stops, but he doesn’t get off. Our bodies are millimeters apart, his thighs trapping mine. His face, brushed with moon shadows, is suspended above mine.

Then he eases off me and stares up at the stars. I hear his breathing, heavy and strained, and my own heart beating to his rhythm.

After a minute I point to the sky. “You can see Draco the Dragon right there. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the whole
constellation so clearly—all four stars of its head and that long tail.”

“Where?” Chase tilts his head closer to mine. “I can never see these things.”

Hoping against hope that my hand isn’t shaking and my deodorant still works, I lift my arm and point. “See the Big Dipper there? Start at the tip and follow it over to—”

He clasps my wrist and holds it for a second, then slides his fingers down the length of my arm. Currents race through every inch of skin and bone. In one movement, he rolls onto his side. I feel his leg next to mine, pressing. His other hand reaches across so that he’s above me, his head touching mine. Our breath is one. His chest rises with mine. Slowly, so that I can see every move, he lowers his face.…

And he kisses me.

I don’t close my eyes. I always thought I would, if anybody ever kissed me. But I don’t. Why would I want to miss even a second of this? With my eyes open, I can see Chase’s skin, a shock of his hair that falls over my forehead. I can see stars above us, shining outside like I’m shining inside.

When he stops, when
we
stop, I whisper, “I’m not sure what to say now.” I can’t get over the tiny shivers in my arms and the way my heart shudders. “What do people say after they kiss?”

“Haven’t you kissed anyone before, Hope?” Chase winds a strand of my straight, straight hair and turns it into a blond curl around his index finger.

“Not like that.”

He grins. “You could have fooled me.”

“I wouldn’t want to.”

“You wouldn’t, would you?” He touches his forehead to mine for an instant, then pulls back. “You know, every other girl I’ve been with pretends to be more experienced than she really is. Don’t ask me why.”

“I won’t. But I can’t imagine why anybody would pretend that.”

“That’s because you don’t pretend. You’re real, Hope. Maybe the most real person I’ve ever known.”

I laugh a little, embarrassed. “You need to get to know my brother.”

“Tell me more about him.”

I gaze up at the stars, and I think of all the times Jeremy and I have stared at the sky. “Nobody sees things like Jeremy,” I begin. “I’ll bet he sees more sunrises than most people. But you’d think he’d never seen one before, if you sat with him during a sunrise.”

Chase laughs, but I can tell he’s not making fun, so I laugh a little too. “Jeremy says that every morning God says to the universe, ‘Do it again!’ ”

Chase is quiet for a spell. He stares at the sky. “There! I can see Draco the Dragon.”

“See? It was there all the time. You just never looked.”

He turns his gaze on me. “Like you.”

“Me?”

“I didn’t want to get involved in all this. Believe me. You have no idea. T.J. asked for that ride at the courthouse. Then, before I knew what hit me, there
you
were.” He kisses me softly on my forehead. “I better take you home, Hope.”

The ride to my house is too short. I’m thinking that tonight might have been the best night I’ve ever had. Only I feel guilty thinking that because Jeremy is locked up in a cell, where not even the moon can find him. “Will you be in court tomorrow?” I ask when we turn onto my street.

“Sure,” he answers, pulling over. “I’m your ride.”

“Good. And I want to start finding out everything we can about Caroline Johnson. We have to come up with something, some kind of evidence to give the jury reasonable doubt. So maybe we—”

“Hope?” Chase has stopped in front of my house. He’s staring up the sidewalk.

I turn to see T.J. sitting on my front step. “What’s he doing there?” I mutter.

“I’m not sure, but I don’t think he knows you guys are just friends. You better go.”

I’m already halfway out of the car. I can’t imagine why T.J. would be here at this hour.

Chase drives off. I turn to wave. He waves back. Then I walk up the sidewalk to my friend. “Hey, T.J.”

“Hey.” He waits until I sit on the step next to him. He takes off his glasses, then puts them on again. “I stopped by the Colonial to see if you needed a ride. You’d already left.”

“Thanks. Yeah. Bob closed early. Chase was driving by.”

T.J. glances at his watch, although I doubt he can see the time. It’s pretty dark on our street.

I know he’s wondering where we’ve been. “I ended up showing him where Jer and I go sometimes. Did you know he’d never seen Draco before? I don’t think I could stand
living in a city again.” I’m talking too much. Too fast. “So, what’s up?”

He shrugs. He still hasn’t looked at me. “I don’t know. I had an idea, about figuring out motive and opportunity, maybe proving … well, at least raising reasonable doubt, about the murder.”

“Great! Go on. I want to hear it.”

He fidgets for his notebook and takes it out. “I got the idea from a Raymond Chandler story we read in English. I want to build a model of the crime scene, exactly to scale. You know? It might help us visualize where Coach was, where the murderer was, if somebody could have sneaked up on him, or if it had to be somebody he trusted, like his wife. I’d build a model of the barn and put in stalls and everything.”

The hairs on the back of my neck are standing up.

“What?” T.J. puts his notebook back into his pocket. “You think it’s a dumb idea.”

“No! T.J., it’s a great idea! A fantastic idea.”

“Yeah?”

“Only why do it with a model? Let’s re-create the crime scene, but for real.” I stand up, so psyched my knees are quivering. “T.J., let’s go to the barn. Right now. I want to see the crime scene.”

I take T.J.’s elbow
to pull him up, but he stays planted on the step. “You want to go to the barn? Now?” he asks.

“Now’s the perfect time!” I insist. “Nobody will be there. We can look around.”

“For what?”

I’m starting to get irritated. “Clues, evidence, whatever.”

“Hope, it’s been months. They don’t even keep horses there now. We’re not going to discover anything the police didn’t already find and take away.”

Of course he’s right. But something inside me is telling me that I have to go there. “Please, T.J.? I need more before I can bring Raymond in on all this. There’s got to be something everybody’s missing. Not a clue, maybe. But something.” I make myself picture the crime scene photos I saw at Raymond’s and at the sheriff’s house—Coach curled on the ground, shadowed in blood. But it doesn’t feel real, more like something I saw in a bad movie. “I have to see the real scene of the crime, and I need you to take me there.”

T.J. stares up at me, hard. “Me, not Chase?”

“You.” The truth is, Chase would probably say no. And even if he agreed to go, there’s his dad to think about. “Just you.”

A minute later we’re jostling in T.J.’s dad’s old Chevy on our way to the barn, my mind bouncing worse than the Chevy’s worn tires. “Wouldn’t it be great if we caught Mrs. Johnson running around out there when nobody’s looking? We should have a camera. ’Cause if she really is faking, don’t you think that would be enough for people to believe she
might
have gone to the barn that day? That she might have gotten angry enough at her husband to kill him, even if she hadn’t planned on it?”

“Maybe.” T.J. doesn’t sound convinced.

“What do you mean
maybe
? I told you how she blew up at the park that day. She’s got a temper. I’ll swear to that. If she’d had a gun that morning, I think she might have used it.”

“I’m not saying she doesn’t have a temper. I had her in class, remember? She could be scary.”

“So?” I know T.J. well enough to sense he’s still holding back on making Caroline Johnson our prime suspect. I know he thinks Jer did it.

He shrugs. “I don’t know. Her fingerprints weren’t on the bat, for one thing. Just Jeremy’s.”

“So …” I’m thinking out loud now. “Maybe she wore gloves.” Soon as I say it, something clicks in my brain. “That’s it! She wore gloves.”

“Okay.”

“Why hasn’t anybody talked about that? Maybe there
weren’t any fingerprints except Jeremy’s because the killer wore gloves.”

“It’s possible,” T.J. admits. “But aren’t we going for spur-of-the-moment? Like she lost her temper and struck him? So she wouldn’t have had her gloves with her.”

“What about Jeremy’s batting gloves? Why couldn’t she have grabbed those when she grabbed the bat?”

T.J. looks confused. “Did Jeremy have his gloves at the barn?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Jeremy carried that bat everywhere,” T.J. says, glancing in the rearview, “but I don’t remember him wearing his gloves that much.”

Once again, I feel this slim hope slipping away from me. “Okay. So I can’t swear he had the batting gloves at the barn, but I haven’t seen them around the house either. And I don’t remember the police taking them.”

“You could be right, Hope. But we can’t sound like we’re guessing. Keep it simple. Logical. Otherwise, you won’t even get past Jeremy’s lawyer. Like you said, he’s the first one we have to convince.” He takes a deep breath and lets it out. “Okay. How about this? Caroline Johnson may have murdered her husband. She’s not as sick as she lets on. She has a bad temper. She would have used Jeremy’s bat. She would have worn gloves—we don’t say which gloves because we don’t have to. That should be enough to plant doubt in the jury’s mind.” He turns to me. “So maybe we don’t need to see the crime scene?”

I don’t answer.

“Hope, do you have to put yourself through this?”

Do I?
Do I really want to see where Coach was murdered? I know how my mind works. My brain will soak in dozens of images I’ll never be able to erase. Part of me wants to tell T.J. to turn around. What could we get out of the crime scene so long after the crime anyway?

But another part of me knows I have to go there. Nothing will make sense until I do. “I have to see it for myself, T.J.”