Chapter 21
After I hung up the phone, I sobbed so hard against the steering wheel that one of the correctional officers came over, banged on the window, and forced me out of the car.
The officers wanted to call an ambulance, but I refused.
I sat on the curb while they forced me to drink bottles of water to calm me down.
Tommy had told me that Newbury had just called the house. They would bring in my parents to ID the body, but they wouldn’t have called without good reason to suspect it was Hazel.
The guilt felt like it was going to swallow me whole. I had spent the last few days tracking down Hazel’s movements, trying to figure out what she had known and who she had talked to. I had been so hopeful, so sure that everything I was doing would lead me to her, and now she was dead.
It was nearly five by the time I got home. I was emotionally spent. The street was still swarmed with reporters trying to take pictures. I barely even noticed them. The last few hours had been so exhausting that I couldn’t think of anything else.
My little sister is dead.
“Rose.” Detective Pullman caught me by the arm before I made it to the porch steps, darting out of a black sedan parked closest to the house.
“What are you doing here?” I asked. He was one of the last people I wanted to see. Not that I actually wanted to see anyone at all. I wanted to go inside, take a shower, and keep reading Hazel’s commentary in The Smileys Next Door. If she really was dead, it was all I had left.
Pullman looked sheepish. Heavy sheets of rain were coming down so hard that we were both drenched from just a moment of standing outside. I moved forward a couple of steps, so we were at least covered by the overhang of the porch.
“I’m bringing your parents to the station.” He nodded toward the car in the driveway. Even through the rain, I could see my parents sitting in the back, silent.
“Oh.” A fresh wave of pain rolled over me. This wasn’t real. This couldn’t be happening.
“I’m sorry.” He pushed a chunk of wet hair out of his face. “I’m so sorry. I know we were all hoping for a different outcome.”
A different outcome. That didn’t cover the half of it. The pain of knowing that Hazel was dead was all-consuming. Gone. She would never ride a horse again. She would never DM me on Instagram again. I would never get a chance to make it up to her.
“If you need anything, please let me know,” Pullman said, and he actually looked sad. It enraged me. “I really am here to help.”
Help. I laughed out loud. What had any of them ever done for my family besides condemn us?
It had been days and they had gotten no closer to figuring out what had happened to Hazel.
A body was all they had, found in a canal, with no reasonable explanation for how it got there.
I shuddered thinking of all the canals I’d passed in my life, and wondering which one it was.
If I had ever driven past the dumping site for my sister’s body.
I rounded on him. “You want to help?” I asked.
“Why don’t you find the person who killed Alexandria?
Because that’s what Hazel was doing. Even a sixteen-year-old girl knew that none of this made any sense.
” The shirt and jeans I wore clung tightly to me, heavy with rain and weighing me down, but I barely felt it.
“What are you talking about?” Pullman asked. He furrowed his brow. “If you know something, you should tell me.”
This was the same person who had laughed at me when I’d dared to share what had happened that summer. Any idea or suspect I had suggested had been met with incredulity and judgment. Pullman wasn’t here to help me at all. He thought I was demented.
Well, fuck him. Fuck Isaac. Fuck Sam and Victoria. Fuck everyone who had made it so that the name Dearling was synonymous with liar. And fuck whoever had taken my little sister from us.
“Hazel was looking into Alex’s murder before she died,” I seethed, the sound of rain nearly drowning me out.
“She spoke to Victoria and Sam Hopely and was tracking down leads all on her own. She even figured out that Alex was sleeping with Sam’s boyfriend at the time, Isaac Kelly, and ruled him out as a suspect.
Which was more than your incompetent police force ever did.
So maybe whoever killed her did it because she was asking the wrong fucking questions. ”
My voice was loud now. Pullman took a step back from me, like I was going to jump forward and shove him into the bushes. “You’re serious?” he asked.
“As a heart attack,” I snapped. “Maybe instead of interrogating my father, you should go figure out who the fuck really killed Alexandria Hopely, and now my sister too.”
I didn’t wait for an answer. I pushed past him, nearly ripping the front door off its hinges as I pulled it open. It slammed behind me, and I left puddles all over the entryway floor.
Only Tommy stood in the kitchen, staring at a plate of more cold sympathy casserole. He looked like hell.
“Oh, hey.” He sounded resigned. “Where have you been?”
“I was visiting Will.”
I had never made it inside, but it wasn’t as if I could tell him I had been at Sam’s. He wouldn’t understand. And it didn’t matter anymore. Nothing mattered.
Tommy looked suspicious. “The whole day?”
I didn’t answer him. Telling Pullman what I knew was bad enough. I didn’t need to involve Tommy.
I stared at my older brother, feeling an inexplicable amount of grief. It was just him and me now. Will was in prison. Hazel was dead. Yet I’d never felt less close to Tommy in my life.
It felt like whatever remained of our family unit had shattered. Hazel had been the glue holding us together and without her, we had no more hope.
“Do you think it’s really her?” I asked, leaning against the kitchen counter. I tried to hold back my tears as I uttered the words. Tommy was always the most rational one. I needed his reassurances. I needed a reason to believe none of this was real.
“I don’t know!” he replied. Tommy sounded irritated. Irritated with me.
“Why are you mad at me?” I asked, crossing my arms.
Tommy rolled his eyes. “How could I not be, Rose? Everyone has been through the ringer today, and you were nowhere to be found—”
“I was visiting, Will!” It wasn’t a total lie, but it felt like one now that I was using it in defense of my own actions.
“Exactly!” Tommy spat. “You’ve been wasting your time helping the sibling that doesn’t need you,” he continued, his eyebrows pulled tight in frustration.
“Hazel was missing, presumed dead now, and you weren’t here!
You were running off to hold Will’s hand, trying to solve a crime that’s already been solved! ”
I gritted my teeth. I had found out more in the past day about what happened to Alex than anyone, besides Hazel maybe, had in the last eleven years.
I opened my mouth to speak and then closed it.
I had been ready to argue, to list off all of the reasons that Will being innocent and Hazel being missing because of this made so much sense.
But that wasn’t going to land with Tommy.
Not today, not now. It would fall on deaf ears.
And I didn’t even know what I thought right now.
If what Sam said was true, what did that mean for Hazel?
But Tommy didn’t know what Sam had said to me. So where was his resentment coming from? I had always assumed Tommy’s constant contact with me had meant he and I were on the same page about Will.
I’d never considered that he also thought Will was guilty.
“You think Will killed Alex, don’t you?” My voice was tiny.
Tommy’s shoulders dropped. He lowered his head into his hands. He took a full minute of calming himself this way before he looked back up at me. His eyes were wet with tears.
“I love Will, I do,” he choked out. It sounded like an admission rather than a declaration.
“But I have to be reasonable, Rose. Alex died in our backyard just hours after Will found out she had cheated on him. Who else would have been angry enough to kill her? Who else would have that kind of access to our homes? Will had motive and opportunity.” He stopped, seeing the look on my face.
“He was so mad at her. So hurt. Then she turns up dead, raped, and he’s saying she’s an angel stolen from us too soon?
Why would he do that? Why has he not screamed his innocence from the rooftops at every chance he got?
He feels guilty, Rose. He loved Alex, and he killed her.
Will has to live with that, and so do we. ”
The floor gave out beneath me and I felt my knees go weak. “I need to shower.”
“Rose.”
“I need a minute to myself, Tommy.”
I waited until the door to the bathroom was locked and the shower was turned on full blast, the water hot enough to scald, before I broke down.
Standing naked in the steam, I held on to the tiled wall and cried.
They were long, desperate sobs. The kind that made me sit down on the cold floor of the tub.
I didn’t know how to reconcile any of this.
I tried to think about it objectively for a second.
Could Will’s intense love of Alex be the same emotion that caused him to react violently to her betrayal?
Could he have loved her so much that he killed her, believing that if he couldn’t be the one to have her, then no one could?
It was always the boyfriend. A cornerstone of true crime.
Could I believe that? I had never, even for a moment, considered the idea that Will was guilty.
Why? Because I loved my brother? Because I trusted him?
No. It was all of those things, but it ran deeper than that. The niggling feeling that pulled on my stomach whenever I tried to picture Will with his hands around Alex’s throat. This was the one irrefutable thing I knew: If Will had killed her, I had been the one to set it in motion.