“Do you want me to come to Pullman?” he asks.

  “No,” I say. “No. I’ll be back tomorrow.”

  I edit myself from saying what first came to mind: “I’ll be back home tomorrow.” The use of the word home would only serve to underscore the weird feelings I have about Julian and me. Evan Cooper’s question—You really shacked up with Julian Chase?—has played on my brain like the bass drum I hear some college kid banging from the open window of a music room.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you safe, Nicole?”

  It feels as though he truly cares about me. But I’ve never been a good judge of that. Danny will always be Exhibit A proving that.

  “I’m fine,” I say. “Will call you if I find out anything.”

  I hang up, and while a couple of sorority girls roll up their pant legs and the bottoms of their tank tops to expose their flat stomachs to the sun for the first time of the year, I dial Stacy. I’m a big believer in keeping my enemies close. Even—and maybe especially—those who supposedly love me.

  “I thought I’d check in,” I say when she answers.

  “Where the hell are you? I thought you were coming over to help me with those stupid Swedish meatballs that Cy likes so much.”

  “I’m out of town until tomorrow.”

  “Where?” she asks, prying in that snide way she’s always been so expert at. “You and Mr. Chase in Cabo or something?”

  “No,” I say stiffly. “I’m just working the case.”

  My sister always puts me on the defensive. And I let her. Someday I will stop that record on repeat. Not today.

  “Okay,” she says. “Fine. You do that. I guess I’ll have to make these fucking meatballs without you. If Cy doesn’t like them then this whole thing is on you.” She’s in Drama Queen mode.

  “I’ll take full responsibility,” I tell her.

  But honestly, who can’t make a simple meatball?

  We hang up, and I return to my car and calculate whether I have time to get to Silver Falls and back before four thirty. I drive pretty fast. I can do it.

  Though not yet full-on spring, it feels like it. Skunk cabbage erupts from a ditch that runs the length of the turnoff from the highway. Ferns unfurl their spiral fronds. Trilliums flop toward the sunlight. It is quiet at Silver Falls. No one is in the parking lot. I walk over to the rocky edge where someone dumped Lisa’s body. I haven’t seen any crime-scene photographs, so I’m not sure exactly where she was found. The paper said she was near a swimming hole at the base of the falls. There is only one, some forty feet below me.

  It had to be right there.

  I don’t have enough detail to try to imagine what played out the night Lisa was dumped here. I can’t go to the police to see the case file. I can’t ask the prosecutor’s office. I can only ask the one person who was convicted what he thinks occurred. There’s a big problem with that, of course.

  He doesn’t remember anything.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  It’s the smallest one-bedroom apartment I’ve ever seen. I’ve been in studios that were more expansive. And yet, as I sit there nearly knee-to-knee with Tommy Roberts, I see that it’s all the space he needs. A small couch, a single chair, a barstool. Through the slit of the open bedroom door I see a mattress on the floor, made up with an extra blanket folded neatly at the foot. I wonder if the small space gives him comfort; if his years in prison made him used to a tight fit. A swaddled baby sleeps through the night. A man who’s spent almost all of his adult life in a nine-by-twelve-foot cell might feel lost if given too much room.

  Or it could be that he continues to punish himself for whatever it was he did or didn’t do.

  He offers me a diet cola, and I accept. He drinks one too.

  “I know you’re here about Kelsey Chase,” he says.

  My adrenaline pumps. I haven’t mentioned her name to him. “How do you know that?”

  “Google, Detective. I mean, former detective.”

  I nod. I’m glad he knows who I really am. I’ve never been a facile liar.

  “Right,” I say. “Google.”

  As he sips his cola, I notice a jagged scar along his forearm. Self-inflicted, or an injury? He sees where I’m looking.

  “I got cut up pretty bad,” he says. “That’s pretty much what happens when you’re branded a baby killer.”

  His eyes are unflinching. He is measuring my reaction. He wants to know if this uninvited stranger in his room is here to hurt him or help him.

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “There’s nothing for you to be sorry for,” he says. “Sorry is for losers, anyway. At least that’s what I need to believe. I’ve spent my entire life being sorry for something I didn’t do—at least I don’t think that I could have. Or would have. I’ve seen guys on the inside who could, who’ve done that and worse. They percolate hate from every pore in their bodies. It’s like the air they exhale is thick and dark. They’re bad to the marrow. I’ve never been like that. It’s not in me.”

  I wait to see if he’ll say more. I don’t want to push too hard because I can tell that despite his insistence that he has started over and is trying to put the past behind him, he hasn’t managed it yet.

  The past is who he is.

  “Look,” he tells me, “I don’t really know why you’re here. I said I’d talk to you only because you mentioned my mom’s name. You caught me off guard, Detective.”

  “Call me Nicole,” I say. He knows I’m no longer with Bellevue Police. “I wouldn’t be here if I thought that I could get the answers I’m looking for anywhere else.”

  “Right,” he says. “Though I know you can’t. No one in law enforcement around here would help you. Not just because you’ve been kicked off the force in Bellevue. Because no one wants to revisit my case. One of those network news magazines tried to get something going on my story, but they were completely stonewalled.”

  This interests me. “What was their angle?”

  “That I might have been wrongfully convicted. That’s what the producer told me. I had some hope on that, you know. But I’ve learned in the past twenty years that hope doesn’t get you very far.”

  Over the next two hours, we talk about his family. About his father, his stepmother. He opens a bag of tortilla chips and a jar of salsa. I offer to take him to dinner, but I’m glad that he says he’s not very hungry. I just want to talk. I don’t want any distractions. His story fascinates me. Finally, he tells me about the night that his mom left Lisa with him at the Sigma Chi chapter house. They watched TV and she played with her stuffed cat. One of the fraternity brothers from the house next-door offered him a beer, and he drank it. He might have had another, but he wasn’t sure about that.

  “I hadn’t eaten all day,” he tells me. “I just let the day get away from me. The party scene wasn’t my thing. I only joined Sigma Chi because my dad had been a member, and he insisted. So when everyone was going out, I didn’t mind staying with Lisa. I missed her.”

  Tommy stops, and I can see that his eyes have puddled. He turns away and wipes them, so swiftly he probably thinks I didn’t notice. He hopes I didn’t. As an inmate he’d had every bit of dignity stripped away from him, piece by piece, until there had been nothing left but the shell of what he’d been. His tears tell me that he’s fighting his way back to being who he was before Lisa vanished and was found at Silver Falls.

  “Your mom says the same thing,” I say, giving him a chance to breathe. “She says that you and Lisa were very close.”

  He takes a chip from the bowl, doing what smokers do: using that chip instead of a cigarette to buy some time to think. “Yeah,” he says, taking a bite, “we were.”

  I push gently. “What happened, Tommy? What do you remember?”

  He stays silent for what seems like a very long time.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  His story comes at me in a kind of stream—no, a river—of consciousness that I suspect flows directly from the night Lisa went missing. His words are heart-wrenching. Tommy consumes the rest of the chips and another diet cola as he touches on one thing after another.

  “Mom showed up. She had to shake me. It was morning. I could barely open my eyes. I felt so sick. The front of my shirt was wet. I’d puked on myself. I was disoriented. She had her hands on my shoulders and she was screaming at me. Over and over. She was yelling, ‘Where’s Lisa? I can’t find Lisa!’”

  Tommy says he could barely remember the night before. They’d played some games. He had a beer or two. And then they went to sleep.

  “I really do remember that,” he says, looking to see if I’m with him or not.

  I am.

  “It isn’t something that I made up later to make myself feel better. Lisa was sleeping on the sofa that folds out into a bed. She was safe when I passed out. I know that for sure because I saw her sleeping. I saw her. She didn’t wander off. She was taken.”

  I ask Tommy about the time line. “Your mom testified in court that she didn’t come for Lisa until eight the next morning. That she’d spent the night at the sorority three doors down.”

  He nods.

  “I know that. I know she said that.”

  “But it wasn’t the truth.”

  “Look,” he says, “I don’t blame her. I don’t think she would have said that if my dad hadn’t used her for a punching bag. She’d have admitted where she’d really been, but she was more afraid of him than she wanted to help me. Didn’t she tell you about my dad?”

  I shake my head. “No, she didn’t.”

  “Figures,” he says. “That’s what we talked about after I went to prison. Whenever she came to visit, she told me how sorry she was and how she was going to make things right for me. I always told her that I was glad she was alive and that it didn’t matter anyway. They found my vomit on Lisa’s body. They had me with that. I pled guilty because it was the easy way . . . the way to spare Mom and me.”

  He excuses himself and slips into the bathroom, just a few steps away. He shuts the bathroom door, but I can hear the stream of his urine as it meets the water in the toilet bowl. I hear him flush and wash his hands. When he opens the door, I see what I’d expect to see—a perfectly folded hand towel next to the sink. Everything in his life is in order. Everything but what happened to him and his sister nearly two decades ago.

  “I want you to know that I still love my mom, and I forgive her,” he says. “She did something with some guy that made her feel young again or something. Maybe to feel loved or just wanted. I don’t know. She did something that night with a boy she’d never see again, and it cost her everything that mattered to her. She lost a whole lot more than I ever did. I lost my freedom. And while that seems huge—”

  “It is,” I say.

  “Maybe so. But I have that back now. My mom doesn’t have Lisa, and she never will.”

  There’s nothing I can say to that. He’s right, of course.

  “Do you have any idea what really happened to her?”

  “They said she was abducted and murdered. No rape. That’s all I know. That was the only saving grace in the whole nightmare. I was never labeled a child molester.”

  “Do you have any theories?” I ask, before stating the obvious. “You’ve had almost twenty years to ponder it.”

  He doesn’t bristle. Tommy just shrugs a little. “Ponder is hardly the word,” he says. “For the first ten years, it was all that I could think about. Day and night. Alone or with the other inmates. I expect that some of the other guys thought I was slow because sometimes they’d talk to me and have to repeat themselves to snap me out of my stupor.”

  “And what did you come up with?” I ask.

  He closes his eyes a beat. Remembering, I think.

  “Mom’s Weekend was crawling with people,” he says. “I have no idea who would have done such a thing. The police didn’t look for anyone once they matched my vomit to her body.”

  “Right,” I say. “That was a key piece of evidence tying you to your sister. It was on her body, right?”

  He shakes his head.

  “No. Not on her body. It was on the sheet that the killer wrapped her in before he dumped her into the water below the falls.”

  The tiny apartment shrinks to matchbox proportions. I now know why Truthsayer has sent me here.

  “Wrapped in a sheet?”

  “Yeah,” he says, catching the shock on my face. “Like that little girl in Bellevue. I thought that’s why you’re here. That you think there’s a copycat or something.”

  I stand up, bumping my knee against the little table that holds the bowls of chips and salsa. They fall to the floor. I frantically—too frantically, I imagine—start to help clean up. Tommy touches my hand.

  “I got this,” he says, trying to calm me. “It’s okay.”

  I want to speak, but I can’t. I can’t say anything. The bedsheet didn’t mean copycat. It meant signature. Whoever killed Kelsey might have done it nearly two decades before. The victims’ ages were close. The mothers were distracted. Angela was caught up in a relationship with Michael Bennett, and Meg was in the throes of a one-night stand with a college frat boy. While it was clear that both mothers differed in their devotion to their children, both were preoccupied enough to let something terrible happen. Neither child had been sexually assaulted. Both had been dumped in an area that was remote, but easy to get to. Out in nature.

  “If the same person killed both girls,” I finally say out loud, “why wait all these years to attack a second time?”

  “Maybe he was in prison and got out,” he says.

  He’s testing me.

  “I know you didn’t do this, Tommy.”

  Tommy makes a face and rolls his shoulder a little. Says, very quietly, “Thanks.”

  “Why did you plead guilty?” I finally ask. “It was the middle of the trial and you just stopped it all. You pled guilty when you knew you didn’t do it.”

  He leans back and closes his eyes as if he’s exhausted. I know he’s not tired, but is just going back to that time.

  “There was a part of me that thought that I might have done something, even though I knew that I never could. They told me over and over that if I pled guilty I’d be free one day. The reason was my mom. I didn’t want her to have to say what she’d been doing that night in open court. That was part of it. But not all. They told me that if I didn’t, I’d never see the light of day again. I’d probably get shanked and murdered in prison. Baby killer. I wanted to be free. I wanted a chance to live. Just like Lisa, I’m sure. Whoever killed her, ignored her cries. They just did what they wanted to do.”

  “You saw no other way out?”

  “They told me I’d serve eight to twenty years. I believed them.” He shakes his head darkly. “I’ll tell you one thing, that’s the last time I ever did that. I don’t believe anyone. My mom. My dad. No one.”

  “I want to make things right,” I say.

  He smiles. It’s a faint one, but I think it’s genuine. “I know.”

  Before I leave, Tommy tells me the one thing he says he’s never told anyone. His reason for holding it back is clear.

  “I don’t think it means anything,” he says. “And after what happened to me, I don’t ever want to turn someone’s life upside down by accusing them of anything.”

  My spine stiffens and I lean forward to the edge of the chair. “What is it, Tommy?”

  “It’s probably nothing,” he says again. “But I heard from a girl soon after I went to prison. She’d been at WSU when I was there. She sent a letter and said that she’d come to visit, but never did. I was excited at the time, but later, after I learned that being in the papers draws weirdos like flies to ripe banana, I discounted it.”

  I know he’s right about that. Whenever we started any case that grabbed some media coverage, we’d get deluged by crazies absolutely sure they knew who the perpetrator was. We were obligated to chase down every lead, of course, but honestly, using the police to gain attention or settle a score is a low blow.

  “What did she tell you?”

  “She said that she was a TA in the Fine Arts department and one of her duties was to empty out the trash from the darkrooms.”

  “Sounds like a custodial job.”

  Tommy nods. “Pretty much. She said she found something in the trash, and she needed to talk to me about it.”

  “What did she find?”

  “She didn’t say. Like I said, she told me that she was going to see me in person, but she never showed.”

  “Do you remember her name?”

  “Yeah. I had to put her on my visit list. It was Lauren Bradshaw. She’s still in town. Works at the university in the same department. I thought of paying her a visit, but I don’t know . . . I got this great job at the animal hospital here, and . . . well, I just thought it was water under the bridge.”

  More like a deluge, I think.

  “I’ll find her. I’ll let you know what she has to say.”

  Tommy shrugs again. “It’s all right. I stopped hoping a long time ago. I just want to live, remember?”

  That night the ice maker outside my motel room hums all night long. I listen as the ice drops into the chute, then into the receptacle. It’s going nonstop because I’m surrounded by a group of hunters who I’m absolutely sure are going to be unable to do much hunting the next day. It’s after 2:00 a.m., and they are still at it. I pound on the wall, but it only gets them going. If I still had my badge, I’d go over and knock on the door, flash it around, and I’m fairly certain they’d calm down for the night. Instead, I lay here looking at the ceiling.

  I scroll through text messages sent by Stacy and Julian while I was with Tommy. Neither had much to say other than they hoped I was okay. I am okay. I’m feeling better than I have in a long time. I feel like I’m getting somewhere.

  I just don’t know where that where is.

  And finally, when I can no longer bear another minute of the noise next-door, the raucous hunters settle down. It’s an opening of silence. I take it. I drift off to sleep. No dreams. Just slumber.