Chapter 18
I sat with my father and Tommy for another half hour before we split up—my father to go to bed, even though it was barely seven thirty, and Tommy to go home to his kids.
I stayed on the couch, trying to make sense of everything I had learned that day.
I was more determined than ever to follow Hazel’s trail.
It wasn’t only her life at stake, but my father’s now too.
Cassandra still hadn’t answered my text from earlier in the day, so I sent her another.
Seriously, Cassandra? We NEED to talk.
I watched the three bubbles pop up this time. So she had seen it.
I don’t want to talk, Rose, she wrote. I have nothing to say to you.
I pushed down my irritation and answered her immediately, my thumbs flying across the screen.
It’s about Hazel. It’s serious, Cass, I wrote. She’s missing.
I know, Cassandra answered. I spoke to Victoria. And I’m sorry, but I haven’t heard from her. Hazel didn’t contact me, so please leave me alone.
Can I call you? I asked.
My last message sent but didn’t show delivered.
Frustrated, I clicked her contact and dialed.
It rang only once before it went straight to voicemail.
Had she turned her phone off? Or worse, blocked me?
I guessed it didn’t matter. If Hazel hadn’t spoken to her, then I didn’t need to either.
In my head, I crossed Speak to Cassandra off my to-do list.
Next, I perused some more old yearbooks on my phone, searching for the mystery Nick. If Hazel thought he was worth looking into, I was going to follow her lead.
While I searched, my phone rang with one of its special ringtones.
The prison. Will was calling. I knew I should answer, I never ignored his calls, but I was irritated with him for keeping his contact with Victoria a secret.
Especially from me. And a smaller part of me, the more rational part, didn’t want to have to tell him that we still had no updates about Hazel.
So, for the first time in a decade, I silenced his call.
It rang again thirty seconds later. Prisoners typically weren’t allowed a second call, so this had to be a favor from someone, and I felt a shot of guilt for ignoring the first call. I picked it up, wrestling with my annoyance and loyalty to my brother.
“Hello?”
“Rose? Any news?” Will sounded desperate.
“Not yet,” I told him, feeling the same kind of frustration I’d felt earlier when I told Kayleigh the same. “Well, not from the police anyway.”
There was silence on the other end of the phone as Will processed what I’d said. “What do you mean ‘from the police’?”
I’d been planning on visiting him tomorrow in person and then confronting him about the Victoria bombshell, but I decided I couldn’t wait. “I started following Hazel’s leads,” I said carefully. “And I spoke to her friend Kayleigh, who told me she had talked to Victoria.”
More silence. “Hazel spoke to Victoria?” Will asked tentatively. His voice was higher than usual, panicked almost.
“Uh-huh,” I said, coyly.
“And … um.” Will paused. “Did you talk to her?”
“I did.”
There was another painfully long silence. And it only fueled my frustration. He really wasn’t going to give this information up easily, was he?
“What did she say?”
“Are you asking because you’re wondering if I found out about your illicit love letters with your dead girlfriend’s sister?” I asked. “Because if so, the answer is yes. I did.”
Will took in a sharp breath. “Rose—”
“Why wouldn’t you tell me that?” I demanded, cutting him off. “How could you be writing letters to one of the Hopelys and not tell me, Will?”
“It didn’t seem important,” he said softly.
“She said she had doubts about your guilt, Will! How could that not be important? That’s something we could have used in appeals!”
“I didn’t think about it that way. It was just … nice to have someone to talk to.”
“Someone to commiserate with about how you think I shouldn’t have written the book?” I snapped, letting the accusation stick. Victoria’s claim tasted horrible coming out of my mouth.
Will was silent for a minute, an excruciatingly long minute in which I could hear only his breathing and the angry beating of my own heart.
“I wish she hadn’t told you that,” he said finally.
“Well, she did.” I could feel hot, angry tears forming in the corner of my eyes and I wiped at them, glad this was a phone call and my brother couldn’t see the reaction his words had caused.
“Do you have any idea what that was like to hear, Will? I’ve given up my entire life.
My name and my reputation. For you! For proving you didn’t commit this crime! ”
“I never asked you to do that, Rose.”
“You never turned down the fancy lawyers and appeals that it paid for though, did you?” I snapped. “Or the commissary deposits. Say the word, Will, and I’ll cut off the ‘blood money.’”
“Look,” Will said, his voice much calmer. “I don’t hate the book, Rose. Or the help you’ve provided over the years because of it. I’m grateful to you. You know that. You’re the only one who has stood by me. I could never forget that.”
I let him talk, still in complete disbelief.
“And I know why you wrote the book. I get it. The book made people pay attention. It paid for what I needed. And I’m sure it was cathartic.
What happened affected you almost as much as it did me.
I know you had a different perspective on the situation, but the reason I told Victoria I wish you hadn’t written the book is because of how it portrayed her. I was never okay with that.”
Her meaning Alex.
The thorn in our relationship. The thing we didn’t like to talk about. The biggest fight Will and I ever had occurred because of her, and still he wouldn’t allow me to hate her for it.
“I loved Alex,” he said. “She was the love of my life, and I have to live every day knowing that she isn’t here anymore.
I don’t wish that on anyone. Whenever I’m feeling sorry for myself about being stuck in here, I remember that she doesn’t get to feel sorry for herself.
She doesn’t get to feel anything at all anymore because she’s dead.
Someone took her from me and her family, and there’s nothing worse than that.
Even people thinking I did it. I just want her to be able to rest, Rose. Peacefully.”
I let his words sit in the air, not knowing what to say. I could understand where he was coming from, but it didn’t mean I regretted writing my book either. I still stood by it and everything that had come after.
“I love you, Rosie,” Will said. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about writing to Victoria, but it didn’t seem important. It was just nice to have someone else to talk to, especially about Alex. It’s not as if you ever want to reminisce about the good things she did.”
He was right about that at least.
“But Victoria?” I stressed, my voice lighter now. “She was always the worst of them.”
“Beggars can’t be choosers.”
“I guess.”
“So now that we’ve moved past the letter thing,” Will said, entirely glossing over the last minute of our conversation, “what else did Victoria tell you? Where are you looking next?”
I spent the next five minutes telling him what Victoria and Kayleigh had told me, and what I’d learned since.
Ten minutes after that, Will had to end the call and I went back to reading my book, to Hazel’s annotations.
I dove into chapter 30, “The Party,” reading through Hazel’s scathing commentary of Alex.
SO SHE WAS A CHEATER? Hazel had scribbled. UGHHHH!!!
Farther down the page, Hazel had underlined my description of the man Alex was with and added: Blonde? Sailboat tattoo? Check Isaac description pg 129.
My entire body froze as I read her words. Check Isaac’s description? Why?
I flipped back to the page she was referencing and my blood went cold as I read his description again, the words jumping back out at me: “frosted tips,” “the slightest edge of a tattoo.”
Holy fuck.
I hadn’t ever seen Issac’s tattoo. He’d been wearing a polo shirt the one time I met him, only the faintest lines of it curving out of the sleeve, but what if it was a sailboat?
I’d been so shocked and horrified when I’d caught Alex that I’d just assumed the mystery boy was a partygoer.
Someone from the senior class. Maybe even Nick.
I’d been young and drunk and scared, and I hadn’t been thinking clearly.
I’d never considered that it could be Isaac.
How did I not see it? I’d written the fucking thing.
Had I been too close to it? Too distracted by the tension between Victoria and Alex that night to consider who the guy was? Between him and Nick, I was sure there had been others too. On some subconscious level, I must have had suspicions. I’d described the two of them similarly.
Could Hazel, with her fresh unbiased eyes, have caught what I was too involved with to see? I flipped back to her commentary. Her next note was direct.
Find pictures of Isaac’s tattoos.
I opened my laptop without hesitating, going to Facebook. I opened Sam’s page and searched her connections and found four Isaacs. Even from just the profile pictures, I quickly found the one I recognized: Isaac Kelly.
He hadn’t changed much in the last eleven years.
He looked older, his hair cut shorter and settling into a darker, almost dirty blonde color.
His face was still easily recognizable though.
He had become some kind of financial planner and married a curly-haired woman who seemed to run a cottage-themed lifestyle blog.
I scrolled through pictures of the two of them eating lavish homemade meals and on trips with their two toddlers.
In all of them, Isaac was fully clothed, arm tattoo hidden.
There wasn’t a single shirtless picture of him, even though it seemed like they spent a lot of time outdoors, even on boats.
Was this on purpose? Had Isaac read his description in my book and purposefully avoided being photographed shirtless?
It took hours of stalking people close to him—family, friends and coworkers—before I found one.
A photo from one of his cousins where Isaac sat on a boat, in the very back of the frame, shirt off.
I zoomed in. The cousin had captioned it: Nothing I love more than the sea!
It was basically a selfie, no one else was even tagged in it, but it had happened to catch Isaac in the back, holding his daughter to his chest. His arm was wrapped around the little girl, showcasing the tattoo on his bicep.
A sailboat. The same one I remembered from that night. The one I had written about in the book.
Oh my fucking god.
Hazel had been right. Tree Boy was Isaac. Alex had slept with Sam’s boyfriend.
My mind was racing. Was Hazel the only one to do this? Did she ever tell anyone?
I had a thousand questions. Questions I now needed to ask Sam first thing in the morning.
Showing up at Victoria’s door had worked surprisingly well, so I decided I’d use the same strategy for the eldest Hopely.
Sam’s Instagram told me she was living in Miami, and a follow-up search of the voter database gave me an address.
It was only half an hour away from Will’s prison, so I’d be able to confront Sam first. Then I could visit Will and pick his brain about Victoria Hopely and find out what else he might be hiding from me.
I felt a renewed frenzy. If Isaac had been sleeping with Alex, did that mean he had a reason to kill her too?
He was now at the top of my mental suspect list, but then I had a chilling realization.
If Sam had known her little sister was fucking her boyfriend, it wasn’t just Isaac who was suspicious.
Sam may have been mad enough to kill her sister.
And if Hazel had come around asking questions about it … I stopped breathing for a second.
It would give Sam motivation to kill me too.