Finn opened his mouth and closed it. “I don’t know,” he muttered.
“Is that the best you can do?”
“I didn’t-I mean-I just liked to watch her. I was embarrassed.”
Stride nodded. “Is any of this story true, Finn?”
“What do you mean?”
“Your sister says you weren’t in the park at all that night.”
Finn shook his head. “Rikke doesn’t think I can fight my own battles. I’m still just a kid to her.”
“So she lied.”
“Hey, she said we were watching fireworks, right? Well, you were there that night. It stormed. There weren’t any fireworks.”
Stride remembered. Finn was right.
“Why would she say that?” Stride asked.
“To protect me.”
“Do you need protection?”
“Back then, yeah, I probably did.”
“Did you kill Laura?”
“No.”
“How do you know? You said you don’t remember a thing. You said Dada left without the bat, and the boy who attacked Laura was unconscious in the softball field. That leaves you and the bat, Finn. Maybe you picked it up. Maybe you did what you’d been doing all night. You followed Laura to the north beach.”
Finn squeezed his head with big hands. His fingernails were chewed and bloody. “No.”
“How do you know?” Stride repeated.
“Leave me alone,” Finn said. His yellowing skin burned crimson. He covered his eyes.
“I think Rikke lied for you because she thinks you killed Laura.”
“No.” His voice was muffled. Sweat dripped down his face like tears and spilled off his chin.
“How can you be sure?”
Finn clutched his fingers into fists and beat against his forehead. “I’m not sure! Does that make you happy? I don’t know! I don’t remember! For all I know, I took that fucking bat and beat her into a pulp. Okay? You try living with that. You try not knowing if you murdered a girl. See what that does to your life.”
He shoved his way past Stride and ran for his car.
As Stride watched Finn climb into his vehicle, he remembered talking to Rikke about geometry and realized he was seeing the parallel postulate at work again. He was watching two lines intersect.
Two lines he would have preferred remain parallel, never touching, so that the past didn’t infect the present.
Finn drove a silver RAV.
24
There was no escape from the heat.
Even on the Point, which usually enjoyed a cool breeze off the lake, the evening air was stifling. Stride parked in the mud near his cottage. Heat radiated off the dirt, and the leaves drooped in the trees around him. Serena wasn’t home. He didn’t bother going inside but instead climbed the shallow dune in order to watch the dusk descend on the lake. He and Serena kept two chairs in the sand at the crest of the hill, where they often sat to drink coffee in the mornings.
One of the chairs was occupied. It was Tish.
She didn’t look at him as he took a seat next to her. Her eyes were locked in the distance, watching sailboats on the water. She had a plastic bag in her lap, which she protected with both hands, as if it were a child that might squirm away and fall. They didn’t say anything. The lake was still, like pale blue china, and the line where the sky and the water met was lost in a sticky haze.
“I went to the wrong house,” she said finally.
Stride didn’t reply.
“It was the house where you and Cindy used to live. The people there told me how to find you.”
“I haven’t lived there in a long time.”
“I know,” Tish said, turning to study his face. “Cindy showed me a photograph of your house once. I never forgot it. I recognized it as soon as I saw it. I guess I never really thought about all the time that had passed. Somehow I thought you’d still be there. Cindy, too. I suppose that sounds crazy.”
“No, it happens to me, too,” Stride said. “But Cindy’s gone. So is Laura. So are their parents. It’s almost as if the whole family never existed.”
“Don’t say that.”
“It’s just the way it is.”
“I understand how you feel,” Tish said. “I lost my mother. I lost Laura. In a strange way, when Cindy died, I felt orphaned again. Like she was the last link to my past and my family. But I’m not comparing my loss to yours.”
Stride said nothing.
“There’s something I need to tell you about my book,” Tish said. “I’ve written the early chapters in Cindy’s voice. I tell the story through her eyes.”
Stride’s face tensed with dismay. “Why did you do that?”
“She was there. She was the witness.”
“You don’t have a free pass into her life,” he snapped, his voice getting louder. “Or mine.”
Tish looked flustered. “I’m sorry. She’s part of the story. So are you.”
“That doesn’t give you the right to walk on her grave.”
“I’m not doing that at all. I swear.”
Stride shrugged. There was a weight on his chest.
“I didn’t realize this would make you so uncomfortable,” she said.
“It’s not just that.”
“Then what is it?” she asked.
“Nothing. Forget it. This isn’t about you or your book.”
He wanted to say something more, but he didn’t. He wanted to tell her how angry he was that his grief came alive every time he saw her. He wanted to confess to someone that he felt guilty, because he had allowed Cindy to slip back into the daily beating of his heart, where Serena belonged now. Instead, he pushed away his emotions and changed the subject.
“After what happened to your car, I’d like to keep an officer outside your condo overnight,” he told her.
Tish blinked. He knew she could hear the sudden coolness in his voice. “So this time you don’t think it’s just kids.”
“I don’t know, but I’d rather not take any chances.”
“Okay, sure, whatever you want.”
Tish took the bag on her lap and passed it across to him silently. Stride looked inside and saw a white dress, neatly folded. “This is for you,” she said. “I’m not sure you’ll understand what I did. Or why I did it.”